After the Archbishop had gone, Mlle. Waxin told me that the vacant bed in my room was to be occupied by a British officer. This turned out to be Wilkinson in the Manchester Regiment. The manner of his arrival next morning was somewhat peculiar. The door opened slowly, and a large, very tall man, dressed like a nigger minstrel in black-and-white striped pyjamas, and covered with bandages, hopped across the room on the left leg; with three vigorous hops he was sitting on the bed. His right foot was bandaged, also one of his hands. Nothing could be seen of his face but a nose and one eye.
"Thank goodness there is some one to talk to," was what the strange figure said. Then followed the necessary mutual explanations.
The only method of movement possible to Wilkinson was hopping, at which he had become quite an expert. Shrapnel bullets had lodged themselves all over his body, fortunately avoiding vital spots. The worst of his wounds was a fractured jaw, which gave him a great deal of pain, and made chewing of food impossible.
When Mlle. Waxin came in to dress my wound, some of the other nurses sometimes came out of curiosity, as the working of the brain was quite visible. The pushing in of long pieces of lint and the removal of splinters, which took place every morning, was quite painless, and only took a few minutes. But it usually took the two nurses half an hour to dress the various wounds of the new arrival, and on the first morning Dr Debu extracted a bullet from just under the skin below the small of the patient's back.
Shortly after Wilkinson's arrival a most tragic event took place in the adjoining ward.
In some mysterious manner the electric bells ceased to ring every evening about nine o'clock. This was a very serious matter, especially as the night nurse that particular week—Mme. Z—was very slack about her duties, and never went round the hospital during the night to see if all was well. The disturbance started about eleven o'clock, with a dull thud as of a body falling, followed by shouting and rattling of the iron tables on the floor of the ward. The noise, heard through closed doors, was sufficient to wake Wilkinson. The shouting ceased for a moment, only to start afresh with new vigour. Wilkinson took two hops across the room and opened the door; the tables still rattled, and the calls for help continued. A French soldier, with one arm in a sling, clothed in nothing but a nightshirt, came walking gingerly down the corridor in his bare feet. When he saw our door open, he came in to tell us all about it. A soldier who was badly wounded in the head had suddenly become delirious, torn off his bandages, and fallen out of bed. There was no one in the ward able to help the poor fellow, who lay moaning on the floor in a state too awful for description. The bells did not ring, and there was nothing to be done except shout. The French soldier went along the corridor to the head of the staircase to call for the night watcher. After quite a long time some one downstairs woke up to the fact that there was something wrong. The night nurse appeared, followed by the night porter. They lifted the dying man on to the bed, bandaged up his poor head, and gave him a strong injection of morphia. One of the French soldiers told me some time after that the poor fellow died quite noiselessly in the middle of the night, but I knew early that morning when a stretcher passed the glass door that the tragedy was over.
Mlle. Waxin used often to tell me about the different cases under her charge.
I was never able to get the name of one of her favourites whom she called her "petit anglais." This was a young Irish boy badly shot in the stomach. Dr Debu told me that he might live for several months, but that there was no hope of recovery. The dressing of his wounds was nearly always done by Mlle. Waxin, under whose gentle hand he never complained of the awful agony from which morphia was the only relief. Although the ward in which he lay was on the ground floor, we could sometimes hear the screams of agony upstairs, screams which no one but Mlle. Waxin could silence. "C'est mon petit anglais qui m'appelle," she used to say.
It is remarkable that no matter how badly a soldier is wounded, even when he can neither eat nor drink, he will be soothed by a cigarette. The Frenchman above mentioned, unable to eat, unable to speak, and scarcely conscious, his brain bleeding from a great hole in the skull, was yet able the day before he died to smoke a cigarette. "Le petit anglais," who was never free from pain, found his greatest joy in the few cigarettes that Mlle. Waxin, in spite of the shortage of tobacco, brought to his beside every morning. It was very hard to get any tobacco in Cambrai until late in October, when the Germans allowed it to be imported from Belgium.
One of the nurses who was able to speak English used sometimes to come and see me, and one day she brought me the following note from a soldier in my own regiment who was in one of the wards downstairs:—