P—— and R——, the men of few words, but of great and bloody deeds, have operated in some degree or other on wellnigh every case that boards the ambulance-train.
Added to the shortages in fuel which hit the wounded so hard is that other present hardship: the congestion on railways. As soon as an A.T. is wired as having left the Army garage at ——, such preparations must be made as will ensure that the wounded will be ready to board her immediately on her arrival. They must be waiting in the evacuation tents by the siding before the minimum time of her arrival. But notwithstanding regulations which provide that A.T.'s shall take precedence over all other railway-traffic whatsoever, that requisitioned is frequently four or five hours late—such is the present state of the roads. That means four hours of frozen agony in the evacuation tents. Fuel cannot be spared for warming them, when it is more than the wards can do to get warmed. A shivering padré moves round amongst them administering comfort which makes no pretence at being spiritual, except in a punning sense. That's one thing very few padrés in the war-zone have been obtuse enough not to learn: that attempts at spiritual consolation may sometimes be inopportune. Every padré knows the full war-value of creature-comforts—even for his spiritual ends. So he moves about the evacuation tent ministering to the body rather than to the soul.
The surgical specialists have long since ceased to have connection with this stage of their patients' movements basewards. They are in the theatre making ready more for the journey down.
The mess harbours the O.C. of a mobile laboratory. He moves between the hospitals within the Army testing serums. He wears the peering aspect of a man accustomed to microscopic examination. All his table conversation is of an inquiring nature—better, an investigatory nature—into matters that are quite impersonal. During a whole meal he will talk of nothing but the Northern Territory of Australia or the structure of the Great Barrier Reef on the Queensland coast. If he's talking of the Reef he deals in a series of questions and in an examination of your answers thereto, until he has built up for himself—with the aid of diagrams contrived with table implements and slabs of bread—an accurate notion of the surface structure. He's as much interested in modern history as in science. One evening he edified the mess, by arrangement, with an hour's discourse on the causes leading up to the American Civil War. For this he prepared with academic care. It was curious to see how he could, for an hour, sustain the interest of the mess in so remote and comparatively insignificant a struggle, when that mess was stationed in the heart of the Somme at the height of the push.... His laboratory walls were decorated with pictures by no means scientific, and yet physiological. They are extracted from La Vie Parisienne, a French weekly illustrated journal of extraordinary frankness. But in this man there is nothing lewd. But he has an unusual appreciation of French cleverness; and that is a faculty alarmingly wanting in the normal English officer. French drawings, which the English call lewd are by no means lewd: merely intensely clever. They convey no notion of lewdness to the French mind. But the English, except in the case of isolated representatives of that race, will never understand the French—in other matters than that of art. So great is the gulf of miscomprehension fixed between the French and English that it becomes a daily deepening mystery how they could ever have found themselves Allies. Still more mysterious is it that they should continue so....
These are the men who impress you most in the mess. There's Wallace, the Scotchman who never says more than he's obliged, but has the tender heart with his patients. He always trembles when giving the anæsthetic in critical cases. He calls himself weak-kneed for it, and reviles himself unmercifully for a womanish fellow (he's intensely masculine); but he can't help it.
There's Thompson, another Scotchman (the mess is fairly infested with Scots) who is dental surgeon. His gift is disconcerting repartee, with which he occasionally routs the C.O.
These are the officers. But what of the Sisters? There are eight of them. When you have said they are entirely unselfish, you have included most attributes. That includes an irrepressible spirit that no continuity of labour can break. It includes gentleness which familiarity with pain in others does not quench. And it includes a contempt of personal comfort that must sometimes amaze even themselves if they ever find time to grow either introspective or retrospective. They sleep in tents; they lack fuel; they shiver by the hour in damp beds unless exhaustion drives them to sleep; and they rise in the murky morning to don sodden garments. They work hard and without intermission for twelve to sixteen hours—and indefinitely when a "stunt" has brought the convoys from the line. But none of these things beats them down.
The theatre Sisters deserve immortalisation. All the qualities of patience and gentleness, endurance and cheerfulness, seem intensified in them. They have not the smallest objection to your watching them work in the theatre; nor have the surgeons. Rather, they encourage you, and get you to help in a minor way when the place is busy.
It is rarely on receiving-day that four "tables" are not in use simultaneously. This makes it inevitable that the victims, as they are brought in and laid out for the anæsthetic, see within six feet sights not calculated to fortify them. Some smile in hardy fashion; some smile in a fashion that is not hardy. The abject terror of those wretches out of whom pain has long since beaten all the fortitude is horrible to see. What must be the state of that man, made helpless by unassuaged suffering, who sees the scalpel at work upon a fellow beside him—the gaping incision; the merciless pruning of the shattered limb; the hideous bloodiness of the steaming stump at amputation—and hears the stertorous breathing of the subject and his agonised subconscious moaning, which has all the infection of terror that actual suffering would convey?