C.C.S.
The ——th C.C.S. claims to be the hospital farthest advanced on the Somme. The claim is justified. Its grounds are lit at night by the gun-flashes. The discharge of our own heavies rattles the bottles in its dispensary and makes its canvas tremble. Sleep is sometimes driven from the eyes of its patients, not by pain, but by the thunder of bombardment. Convoys from the dressing stations have but a short run. The wounded arrive with the trench-mud wet upon them. Clearing them up is quick, if filthy, work, and in clearing them up is engaged a small battalion of orderlies.
The whole hospital is under canvas, except the operating-theatre, which is a hut, hermetically sealed, as it were, and heated to a working temperature—and, incidentally, an even temperature—by some ingenious device. Surgery cannot get done with numbed hands. Yes—and the officers' ward is a hut, to deepen the great gulf fixed between Tommy and his officer, even when they both are in mortal pain. The difference in the degrees of comfort between a marquee and a hut, in the Somme winter, is incredible. Unhappily, too, in these winter months there is a horrible shortage of coal and paraffin. This tells again in favour of the hut. The officers' hut is as warm as your civilian sitting-room, and wellnigh as comfortably furnished. No ingenuity could make it possible to say this of a marquee.
But it is only the wounded officers who are comfortable. The Medical Officers freeze and soak in bell-tents. You'll see the batmen drying their blankets nightly at the mess-fire before their "bosses" go to rest. No artificial heating is possible in these tents, because there is no fuel available for those who are well. M.O.'s retire after an all-night bout in the theatre to their clammy beds, and sleep from exhaustion; and for no other reason. They wake, and shiver into dewy clothes. They shiver through their meals in the biting mess-tent, and they plod through the sea of slush that surrounds the wards incessantly, now that the winter has set in. For the ground is never dry. When it's not raining (which is seldom) it's snowing—and snowing good and hard, as a rule, in fat flakes as big as carnations.
But they're a cheerful mess, with work enough to save them from dwelling overmuch on the discomforts of the Somme winter. There are twenty of them. The Colonel is a Regular, with long years of Indian service behind him, whose favourite table topics are big-game and economic problems—particularly those hypothetical economic difficulties which are likely to confront us after this war. His customary opponent is Padré Thomas, the Roman Catholic Chaplain, who took a double-first at Oxford and was one time an Eton master. He receives weekly from a favourite nephew, reading for matriculation, Latin prose exercises, the merits of which he discusses with those members of the mess whose classical scholarship war has not quite obliterated.
There is Wallace, the X-ray expert, whose chief topic is the shortage of paraffin, lacking which his apparatus cannot carry-on. He's a Scotchman who once graduated in Arts. He is chief consulting specialist with the Chaplain on the merits of his nephew's prose composition.
The Anglican padré is a raw-boned Scot (six-feet four) who has lived mostly in Russia and Germany. He talks a great deal of vodka and the hoggishness of German manners. "What a treat it would be," he says, "to march into Berlin with the pipes playing, go through to meet the Russians on the other side, and have a foregathering! That night I should cast away all my ecclesiastical badges!"
He preaches to the camp of German prisoners close by with a grace that is not altogether good. He cannot abide Germans. One envisages him as delivering them fire-and-brimstone discourses and calling them weekly to repentance.
The quietest members of the mess are the surgical specialists, P—— and R——. They are also the hardest worked and the most irregular at meals. It is rarely that they are taking their soup before the others have finished. This is perhaps a good thing, in the light of their frank physiological discussion at table of cases just disposed of in the theatre. On taking-in day they frequently do not come to table at all. I doubt whether they eat; if they do, it is a snack between cases in the abattoir. The hospital takes in and evacuates on alternate days. Theatre cases must be done at once, for it may be necessary to evacuate them to the base on the following day; it is, in fact, necessary, unless they are unable to bear transportation, and many are too critical for that—head cases, spinal cases, and the like. Cases that suffer greatly are visited with the merciful hypodermic before they start on their jolting journey in the ambulance-train. Not that A.T.'s are rough: they're amazingly smooth. But however smooth, they are agonising to the man whose nerves are lacerated and exposed, or into whose tissue the scalpel has cut deep.
The A.T. draws into an improvised siding adjacent to the wards. There is no question of mechanical transport to the train. It is the practice to establish C.C.S.'s beside a railway, where evacuation during a push can be facile and expeditious.