Anything one might say of Nursing-Sisters in France must seem inadequate. The wounded Tommy who has fallen into their hands is making their qualities known. They work harder than any M.O., and M.O.'s are hard-worked. Indeed, I defy a man to bear indefinitely the kind of work they do indefinitely—its nervous strain and its long hours. The M.O.'s do their examinations and their dressings and pass on; they are the merest visitors. The Sisters stay on and fight for the man without cessation, and then see him die. Five and six deaths in the ward in a night is horribly hard on the Sister in charge of it. No one but a Sister could do the work she does, in a ward or in the operating-theatre. It is nonsense to speak of abolishing women from the medical service; it would be inadequate without them. But their work will leave its mark upon them for ever. They have not a man's faculty of detachment.
Because they are so absorbed by their work—-as well as for other feminine reasons—they see the ethics of the struggle less clearly than a man.
Sisters on service are more prone to depression out of working hours than are men; which is not amazing. They are more the subjects of their moods, which is but temperamental too. But in the reaction of elation after depression they are more gay than any man—even in his most festive mood after evening mess. They smoke a good deal (and they deserve it), but not as heavily as their civilian sisters in general, though in isolated cases they smoke more heavily than any civilian woman. But no one blames the fair fiends, however false this form of consolation may be.
CHAPTER VI
ARRAS AFTER THE PUSH
The traffic on the cobbled road to Arras raises a dust—although it is cobbled. The spring green of the elms that line it is overcast with the pallor of a man under the anæsthetic. The fresh breeze raises a dust that sometimes stops a motor cyclist; sometimes it is the multiplicity of traffic that stops him. His face and hair are as dust-pallid as the trees.
The push is over. The traffic in and out is as heavy as it could be. There is no intermission in it. It files past the road control in a procession in which there are no intervals.
The ingoing traffic is not all military. Incongruously among the lorries lumber civilian carts stuffed with all the chattels of returning refugees. One knows not whether it is more pathetic to see these forlorn French families returning to the desolation of their homes or flying from it. They will lumber down the flagged streets lined with houses, rent and torn and overthrown, that were once the homes of their friends and the shops of their dealers. Here at one time they promenaded in the quiet Sabbath afternoon sunshine. Now the pavement is torn with shell-holes and the street is ditched with them and defaced with half-wrecked barriers. The Grand Place, where once they congregated for chat in the summer twilight, or sunned themselves in the winter, is choked with supplies and sweating troops. The troops are billeted in the half-wrecked houses of every street. The refugees will drive through to the place of their old homes and see the spring greening the trenches which zigzag through their old gardens, and clothing the splintered trees in their old orchards. This is worse than fleeing from the wrath of shell to come. But they love their town so intensely that they rattle through the city gate with an aspect of melancholy satisfaction.