"Good-by, sister," he shouted. "I'll see you again, the next time I'm wounded."
The sister returned his good-by. Then she turned to me, and said: "That man was on the hospital train that left Antwerp the day the Germans shelled it in 1914. When he came in the other night I didn't recognize him, but he remembered me."
While I waited for my turn the sister told me that she had been in the first batch of nurses to cross the Channel at the beginning of the war. She had been in the hospitals in Belgium that were shelled by the Germans. At eight o'clock in the morning she had left Antwerp on the last hospital train, and at nine o'clock the Germans occupied the town. She had been on different hospital ships and trains ever since. Once only had she had a rest. That was some time in the summer of 1915. She expected a week off in London at Christmas, when the ship she was now attached to laid up for repairs. The boat I was on, she said, carried ordinarily seven hundred and fifty wounded. At present she carried nine hundred. They generally arrived in Suvla Bay in the morning, and left that night, filled with wounded. At the time of the first landing at Anzac an hour after the assault began they left with twelve hundred wounded Australians. The sisters were sent out from a central depot in England, and went to the various fronts. When the stretcher bearers came to take me away, the sister gathered up my belongings in a little bag, tied it to the stretcher, put a pillow under my head, and nodded a bright good-by.
Photo. by Underwood & Underwood, N.Y.
Where troops landed in Dardanelles showing Fort Sed-ne-behi battered to pieces by Allied Fleet[ToList]
The stretcher bearers, two stalwart Australians, took me to the elevator, across the deck, and out onto the pier. It was now getting toward evening. A lady stopped the stretcher between the pier and the ambulance, and handed one of the bearers a little white packet containing a towel, soap, tooth-brush and tooth-powder. Without waiting to be thanked she went on to intercept another stretcher. The stretcher bearer put the package under my pillow. "Ready, Bill," said one of the bearers with the nasal twang of the Bushman. "Lift away," said Bill, and they lifted the stretcher up on the top tier of the ambulance wagon, without stepping up from the ground. They did it with the same motion as when two men swing a bag of grain. But it was not in the least uncomfortable for me. These Australian stretcher bearers who meet the incoming hospital ships are amazingly strong. There is an easy gracefulness in the way they swing along with a stretcher that makes you trust them. I was the last man to go in that ambulance wagon, and in a few minutes we were whirling smoothly along good roads amid the familiar smells of Egyptian bazaars. This ambulance drive was a good deal different from the one on the Peninsula just after I had been wounded. After about half an hour the ambulance swerved off the smooth asphalt road onto a gravel road, slowed down, and ran into a yard. The Australians reappeared, opened the flaps, and began unloading. We were in the square of a large hospital. All around us were buildings. A fine-looking, bronzed man, with the uniform of a colonel, was directing some Sikhs who were carrying the stretchers from the ambulances into the different buildings. All the stretchers were lying on the ground in a long row. As soon as each one was inspected by the colonel, he told the stretcher bearers where to take it. When he came to mine, he said, "Dangerously wounded, Ward three." Then, to the stretcher bearers, "Careful, very careful."
Ward three was a long ward with stone floor and plaster walls; it contained about fifty beds. More than half of the beds had little "cradles" at the foot; when I came to know hospitals, I learned that these were to prevent the bedclothes from irritating wounded legs. In a few minutes a doctor came around, gave orders, and the night sister began bandaging up the wounds of the men who had come in. The sister who arranged my bandages was Scotch, and the burr of her speech was pleasant in my ears. She came back about ten o'clock and gave me a sleeping potion. The change from the hospital ship must have been too much excitement for me, because I could not get asleep that night. But I did not feel as I had felt on the hospital ship. I have very seldom experienced such joy as I did that night when I found that I could move my head. I did it very slowly, and with great pain, and rested a long time before I tried to turn it back again. The door was right opposite my bed. I could see the sand shining white in the moonlight in the square, and right ahead of me a large marquee where, I found out later, some of the convalescent men slept. A man about four beds away from mine was dying. When I had first come in he had been groaning at intervals, but now he was silent. About one or two o'clock an orderly came running softly in rubber-soled shoes to tell the sister that the man had died. Half an hour later two men with a particularly long stretcher, appeared in the ward. They stepped quietly, trying not to disturb the sleepers. I saw them walk along to the bed of the dead man, and go in behind the screen. After a little while the ward orderly moved the screens back, and the stretcher bearers reappeared. Over the burden on the stretcher was draped a Union Jack. Often after that while I was in Ward three I saw the same soft-stepping men come in at night and depart silently with the flag-draped stretcher. Many of the wounded left the ward in that way, but their places were soon filled by incoming wounded.
The first morning I was in Ward three the doctor ordered me to be X-rayed. The X-ray apparatus was in another building. To get to it I had to pass through the square. The sun was too hot in the morning for us to cross the square. We therefore skirted it under the shade of the long portico that runs along the outside of nearly all buildings in Egypt. In beds outside the building were men with dysentery. At the corner of the square a plank gangway led to the quarters of the enteric patients. Just before I reached the X-ray room, a man hailed me from one of the beds. It was Tom Smythe, a boy I had known since I was able to walk. All the time I had been on the Peninsula I had not seen him, nor had I heard any news of him. On the way back from the X-ray room, the stretcher bearers stopped near his bed while I talked with him. He had been in the hospital about two weeks, he said, and hoped to get to England on the next boat. He promised to come to see me in my ward as soon as he was allowed up. The next day he came, although he was not supposed to be up, and brought with him a chap named Varney. Varney had been in the section next mine at Stob's Camp in Scotland, he told me. Smythe and Varney vied with each other after that in trying to make me comfortable. To me that has always been the most remarkable thing about our regiment: their loyalty to a comrade in trouble. I have known Newfoundlanders to fight with each other, using every weapon from profanity to tent mallets while in camp; on the Peninsula I have seen these same men carrying each other's packs, digging dugouts, and taking the other man's fatigue work. Varney was very much distressed to see the condition I was in. He knew I was fond of reading, and searched all over the place for books and magazines. Once he brought me three American magazines, one Saturday Evening Post and two Munsey's. They were nearly two years old, but I read them as eagerly as if they had just been published.