“Extraordinary, most extraordinary,” murmured Sir Alfred Keogh. And this report he carried back to the General Medical Council. “Incredible as it may seem, gentlemen,” he announced gravely, “it seems to be so.”
“It appears then,” brusquely decided Kitchener, “that these women surgeons are too good to be wasted on France.” And promptly their country and the War Office invited them to London. It was England’s crack regiment after the great drive on the Somme that was tucked under the covers for repairs at Endell Street. The issue was no longer in doubt. “Major” Anderson and the Women’s Hospital Corps held the fort for the professional woman’s cause in England.
WINNING ON THE FRENCH FRONT
Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangan, fascinating little French feminist, meanwhile was executing a brilliant coup in demonstration to her government. France, it was true, had seen that British women could be military doctors and surgeons. But the French woman doctor, oh, every one was sure that the French woman doctor’s place was the home. And if ever there was a woman whom God made just to be “protected,” you’d say positively it was Nicole Gerard-Mangin.
She stood before me as she came from her operating room, curling tendrils of bright brown hair escaping from the surgeon’s white cap set firmly on her pretty head, a surgeon’s white apron tied closely back over her hips accentuating all their loveliness of line. She is soft and round and dainty and charming. She has small shapely hands, as exquisitely done as if modelled by a sculptor. I looked at her hands in the most amazement, the hands that have had men’s lives in their keeping, little hands that by the sure swift skill of them have brought thousands of men back from death’s door. You’d easily think of her as belonging in a pink satin boudoir or leading a cotillion with a King of France. And she’s been at the war front instead. “Madame la petite Major” she is lovingly known to the soldiers of France. She too has that rank. You will notice on one of the sleeves of her uniform the gold stripe that denotes a wound and on her right pink cheek you will see the scar of it. On her other coat sleeve are the gold bars for three years of military service.
This was the way it happened. In August, 1914, Dr. Gerard-Mangin was in charge of the tuberculosis sanitarium, Hôpital Beaugou, in Paris. When the call came for volunteers for army doctors, she signed and sent in an application, carefully omitting however to write her first name. The War Office, hurrying down the lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard-Mangin as any other man. One night at twelve o’clock her concierge stood before her door with a government command ordering the doctor to report at once at the Vosges front. The next morning with a suit case in one hand and a surgeon’s kit in the other, she was on her way. The astonished military medecin-en-chef, before whom she arrived, threw up his hands: “A woman surgeon for the French army! It could not be.”
She held out her government order: “N’est ce pas?” He examined it more closely. “But yet,” he insisted, “it must be a mistake.”
“En ce moment,” as they say in France, a thousand wounded soldiers were practically laid at the commander’s feet—and he had only five doctors at hand. He turned with a whimsical smile to the toy of a woman before him. After all there was an alertness, an independent defiance of her femininity that straightened at attention to duty now every curving line of the little figure. His glance swept the wounded men: “Take off your hat and stay a while,” he said in desperation. “But,” he added, “I shall have to report this to the War Office. There must be an investigation.”
Three months later when the Inspector General of the French army arrived to make it, he learned that Dr. Gerard-Mangin had performed six hundred operations without losing a single patient. “You’ll do even though you are not a man,” he hazarded.
A little later she was ordered to Verdun to organise a hastily improvised epidemic hospital. For the first week she had no doctors and no nurses. There was no equipment but a barracks and the beds. As fast as these could be set up, a patient was put in. There were no utensils of any kind but the tin cans which she picked up outside where they had been cast away by the commissary department when emptied of meat. There was no heat. There was no water in which to bathe her patients except that which she melted from the ice over an oil lamp. For six weeks she worked without once having her clothing off. One of her feet froze and she had to limp about in one shoe. Eventually medical aid arrived and she had a staff of twenty-five men under her direction. There were eight hundred beds. For seventeen months the hospital was under shell fire. There were officers in the beds who went mad. Three hundred and twenty-nine panes of glass were shattered one day. A man next the little doctor fell dead. A piece of shell struck her but she had only time to staunch the flow of blood with her handkerchief. Outside the American ambulance men were coming on in their steady lines. They delivered to Nicole Gerard-Mangin 18,000 wounded in four days, whom she in turn gave first aid and passed on to interior hospitals. Later when 150,000 French soldiers were coming back from the army infected with tuberculosis, the Government required its greatest expert for the diagnosis of such cases. And Dr. Gerard-Mangin in the fall of 1916 was recalled from the front to be made medecin-en-chef of the new Hôpital Militaire Edith Cavell in the Rue Desnouettes, Paris. It is a group of low white buildings with red roofs. The white walls inside are ornamented above the patients’ beds with garlands of red and blue and yellow flowers. And the commanding officer’s own gay little office has curtains of pink flowered calico. Grey haired French scientists in the laboratories here are taking their orders from Madame la petite Major. Soldiers in the corridors are giving her the military salute. One day there came a celebrated French general: “When I heard about you at Verdun,” he said, “I could not believe it. I insisted, she cannot be a surgeon. She is only a nurse. I have made the journey all the way to Paris,” he smiled in candour, “to find out if you are real.”