Then in the Y. M. C. A. huts there are frequent forms of entertainment, not only for the convalescent patients but for the staff. A “concert” usually means a kind of variety show. All kinds of pretty good troupes are sent out to go the rounds of the various hospitals, and then, too, each hospital has its own band, which is trained or run by the Y. M. C. A. people. We here have some very unusual Y. M. C. A. people. A Prof. B., his wife, and son are living here and giving their whole time to this work. They are from Cambridge, both father and son. I am told that the father is a professor of theology, and the son of archæology. They are very talented people, quite eccentric geniuses, all of them, I should judge. The father leads the band, the son plays the little organ in our chapel, the mother hovers around, and all the time some one of them is in attendance at the Y. M. C. A. hut to help the boys play and to manage the many concerts and lectures that take place there all the time. The first time I met Mrs. B. was the first night I arrived. The first thing she said to me was, “Good gracious, how funereal you look!” I was in my dark uniform and it was after dark in the evening and I did look like a crow, but then! She was very cordial afterward and has been very charming to us all. She gave a big tea for us in the hut one Sunday afternoon and had many officers, Y. M. C. A. workers, and nurses there to meet us. Everybody here is devoted to the B.’s and they add much to the community life. Both father and son are tall, thin, stooped, spectacled souls. The son is more or less of an invalid, it seems.
We have just heard a piece of news that delights us very much and that is that Miss G. is to come over to be “Matron-in-chief for France” as the corresponding official is called for the other nursing forces. I had already written, as had the Chief Nurses of some of the other Units, asking Miss N. to send us some one to advise us, and make uniform regulations for us all and standardize our actions and customs. Now, each Chief Nurse is entirely responsible, under her Commanding Officer, who leaves all the details to her, for every little thing. And the consequence is that there are as many ideas about discipline, uniforms, hours of duty, social usages, etc. as there are Chief Nurses. Miss G. will be ideal for this position. Dr. Alexander Lambert was here last evening and he told us that she was coming. It may be that she has only been sent for, but I hope it means that she is to come. We have received word that five American nurses are to be added to our force here soon. We don’t know where they are to come from or anything about them. It was an official notice that we had yesterday that 33 were to arrive at Havre, five of whom are to be sent to us. We shall be glad to see them whoever they are. Five of our V. A. D.’s are to be taken when the Americans come.
Two of my people heard me say the other day that I wished I had my violin here, so yesterday they went down to Rouen and bought me one. I wish you could hear the accounts of how they did it, for neither of them has any French or knows anything about violins. But it was a violin all right that they brought out to me wrapped up in a newspaper, and last night it played perfectly good tunes in the mess hall. One of the V. A. D.’s plays the piano very well, so we had a fine time trying out the instrument. To-day I have some bad blisters on the ends of the fingers of my left hand, which makes it almost impossible to write on the typewriter. We have not much music here, but a few popular dance airs.
Loads of love.
Julia.
July 25, 1917.
I do not know how to write about our doings of the past few days, for I cannot write numbers, and it is only numbers that would give you any idea at all of what we have been doing. I wrote in my last letter, I think it was, that we were not working hard, well, we have begun our hard work, and for our own sakes we are glad of it. In the past 24 hours we have admitted more patients than the total capacity of the Barnes and Children’s Hospital, not the average number of patients, but the total capacity. And all these patients have been bathed, fed, and had their wounds dressed. Some of course were able to walk and could go to the bath house and the mess tents, but most of them to-day are stretcher cases, and oh, so dirty, hungry, and miserable. The mere (I say mere, but it is really the most important part of the whole thing) proper recording of the names, numbers, ranks, nearest relatives etc., is in itself a huge task. Of course the nurses don’t have all that to do, but they have a lot of it. The boys who are stretcher bearers must be so lame, they can hardly move, for just consider what it means to lift down out of ambulances as many patients as that, and then afterwards carry them as far sometimes as a city block, for we filled our farthest tents to-day. It is most remarkable how things have gone. There are many aching backs to-night, for all the beds are very low and the stooping is terrific, but every one has been a brick. Many of the nurses have worked 14 straight hours to-day, and many of the doctors had only two or three hours’ sleep last night, and were working all day. The difficulty to-day was, that we had to put patients into rows of tents that have not been used for some time and were not equipped, and our warning was not long enough to prepare. We had the beds ready, but little else. To-night things have straightened out a lot, but it is going to be a busy night as we are to send out a convoy, and get another in. Three additional night nurses are on to-night, taken from the day force that has to stretch itself a little thinner.
Our nurses don’t need any “Hate Lecture” after what we have seen in the past few days. We have been receiving patients that have been gassed, and burned in a most mysterious way. Their clothing is not burned at all, but they have bad burns on their bodies, on parts that are covered by clothing. The doctors think it has been done by some chemical that gets its full action on the skin after it is moist, and when the men sweat, it is in these places that are the most moist that the burns are the worst. The Germans have been using a kind of oil in bombs, the men say it is oil of mustard. These bombs explode and the men’s eyes, noses, and throats are so irritated they do not detect the poison gas fumes that come from the bombs that follow these oil ones, and so they either inhale it and die like flies, or have a delayed action and are affected by it terribly several hours later. We have had a lot of these delayed-action gassed men, who cough and cough continuously, like children with whooping cough. We had a very bad case the other night who had not slept one hour for four nights or days, and whose coughing paroxysms came every minute and a half by the clock. When finally the nurses got him to sleep, after rigging up a croup tent over him so that he could breathe steam from a croupkettle over a little stove that literally had to be held in the hands to make it burn properly, they said they were ready to get down on their knees in gratitude, his anguish had been so terrible to watch. They said they could not wish the Germans any greater unhappiness than to have them have to witness the sufferings of a man like that and know that they had been the cause of it. It is diabolical the things they do, simply fiendish, and like the things that would be expected from precocious degenerates.
I cannot imagine what kind of change is going to take place in our minds before we get home. There are so many changes coming over our ideas every day. They are not new ideas, for many people have had them before, since the beginning of this war, but they are new to us. Human life seems so insignificant, and individuals are so unimportant. No one over here thinks in any numbers less than 50 or 100, and what can the serious condition of Private John Brown of something or other, Something Street, Birmingham, matter? One’s mind is torn between the extremes of such feelings, for when a nurse takes the pulse of a wounded sleeping man and he wakes just enough to say “Mother,” she goes to pieces in her heart, just as though he weren’t only one of the hundreds of wounded men in just this one hospital.
This morning when the big rush was on, I was in the receiving tent when the last three men were unloaded: One had his head and eyes all bandaged up and seemed in very bad condition, so I went with the stretcher bearers to see if I could help get him into bed. The eye specialist was sent for at once, and got there in a few minutes. We untied the big triangular bandage that was keeping the wads of cotton on his head and eyes, and found his eyes in a terrible condition from being bandaged for over 24 hours without attention. We soaked off the dressings with some boric solution that I had procured from the Operating Hut. There was not even a single basin in the tent to which the man had been brought, not to mention a nurse or medicines. After a while we got the eyes open a tiny bit so that they could be examined and washed out a little, and then the doctor blew out: “It’s a perfect crime to send a man down here in this condition, look at this puncture wound of this eye, and see what a terrible condition his eyes are in. A whole lifetime of blindness will probably be the result.” The patient was delirious and quite incapable of understanding. Just then an older officer came along and heard the remark and said: “Crime! my dear boy, you’ve got absolutely the wrong point of view. How could they keep a man like this up there at the front, from which they have sent him? Don’t you realize that at a place like that every wounded man is simply a hindrance and must be gotten out of the way? Just stop and think how well they are doing to get so many of them to us in any decent shape at all.” Then the other one said: “Oh, I suppose so. War’s the thing now, all right.” After he was dressed, and things had been straightened out a bit, this patient was transferred to one of the lines that is better equipped to take care of such serious cases. He was put on the “Dangerously Ill,” and word was sent to his mother! His head injury is bad, so maybe he wont live to be blind. (Later. He is much better now and will get well and probably have the sight of one eye.)