There weren’t even cots. And there was only herself with one other woman to assist her in doing all that must be done for these one hundred and fifty helpless men.
The first that she remembers, a surgeon was calling out orders to her like a pistol exploding at her head. She got him a basin of water and some absorbent cotton and she managed to find the ether. Oh, his shining instruments were flashing horribly in the light from the window. He was going to cut off a man’s leg. “But, Doctor,” she exclaimed, “I never had that in my Red Cross training. I don’t know how.” She went so white that he looked at her and he hesitated. “Go out in the garden outside,” he commanded, “and walk in the air.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll give you just three minutes. Come back then and we’ll do this job.”
They did this job, the Viscountess D’Azy holding the patient’s leg while they did it. “After that,” she has told me, “I was never nervous. I was never afraid. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.”
And there wasn’t anything she didn’t do. There were always the one hundred and fifty men to be cared for: as fast as a cot was vacated for the grave, it was filled again from the battle-line. For six weeks the Viscountess was on her feet for seventeen hours out of every twenty-four, carrying water, preparing food, dressing wounds, closing the eyes of dying men. It took from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon just to do the dressings alone. Twelve men on an average died every night and they wrapped them in white sheets for the burial, the Viscountess D’Azy did, daughter of one of the proudest houses of France.
One day the message came that the Germans, sweeping through the nearby village of St. Dié, had denuded the hospital there of all supplies. Would the Viscountess with her influence, the commandant begged, carry a report of their need to Paris. She went to Paris and brought back a truck-load of supplies. She and the driver were three days on the return journey. German shells were again falling on the road to St. Dié as they approached. The chauffeur stopped in terror. “Go on!” commanded the Viscountess. “Go on!” As the car shot forward by her order, a bomb dropped behind them, tearing up in a cloud of dust the exact spot in the road where the car had halted.
Word reached military headquarters of Elizabeth D’Azy’s skill in nursing, of her unflinching coolness in the face of all danger. It was decided that the war department had need of her at Dunkirk. The town was under heavy bombardment, receiving between three hundred and four hundred bombs daily. At the barracks hospital, arranged at the railway station, there were cots for two hundred wounded. Sometimes a thousand men were laid out on the floors. One night there were three thousand. And there was only the Viscountess, who was the commandant, one trained nurse, and some voluntary untrained assistants. For a protection against the Zeppelins it was necessary that there should be only the dimmest candle light even for the performing of operations. As rapidly as possible patients were evacuated to base hospitals. The commandant one night was tenderly supervising the lifting into an American ambulance of an officer whose wounds she had just bandaged. She leaned over the wheel to admonish “Drive slowly or he cannot live.” And as she touched the driver’s arm there was an exclamation of mutual surprise. The driver was A. Piatt Andrews, under secretary of the treasury in President Taft’s administration. And the last time he had seen the Viscountess D’Azy he had taken her in to dinner at the White House in Washington when her husband was an attaché there of the French Embassy. How long ago was all the gaiety of diplomatic social life at Washington! A siren sounded shrilly now the cry of danger and death in an approaching taube raid. And the greeting ended hastily, the hospital commandant and the ambulance driver hurrying in the darkness to their respective posts of duty.
The Viscountess has been in charge of a number of hospitals, having been transferred from place to place at the front. When I saw her, she was temporarily in command for a few weeks at the hospital which had been opened at Claridge’s Hotel in Les Champs Elysées in Paris. She didn’t care about her medals or her own magnificent record. It wasn’t even the achievements of her husband, the Viscount D’Azy, in command of the naval battleship Jauré-guiberry , of which she spoke most often. The Viscountess D’Azy’s one theme is her boy. Before the war he was her little son. Now he is a tall and handsome officer in uniform, at the age of nineteen, Sub-lieutenant Charles Benoit D’Azy.
He wanted to enlist when she did. But she insisted that he remain at school until he had finished his examinations in the spring of 1915. He got into action in time for the great push on the Somme. Here at the hospital in Les Champs Elysées the Viscountess shows me his photograph, snapshots that she has taken with her kodak. Last night she walked unattended and alone three miles through the streets of Paris at midnight after seeing him off at the Gare de l’Est. He had started again for the front after his furlough at home. Her one request to the war department is to be detailed to hospital duty where she may be near her boy’s regiment. Her pride in the boy is beautiful. When she speaks his name that look of experience is gone for the moment, and in the eyes of Elizabeth D’Azy there is only the soft luminous mother-love, even as it may be reflected in your eyes that have never yet seen bloodshed.
LADY RALPH PAGET OF ENGLAND
Descendant of American forefathers. She is a war heroine worshipped by the entire Serbian nation for her consecrated devotion to their people.