With a polite wish for my speedy recovery the General intimated that the parade was at an end. The Staff clicked its heels and saluted—even Meyer had to swallow his hate and follow the example of the senior officers.
Outside the corridor, Mme. la Directrice and some of the nurses were standing at the foot of the stairs ready to accompany the officers round the hospital, but the General passed by and went out into the court without taking any notice.
The inspection was over.
A lady who lives near Caudry came to see me. She told me that the graves of the British soldiers, both in the churchyard and in the fields around the village, are well cared for by the villagers, and that a large number of identity discs had, with the consent of the German authorities, been locked up at the Mairie. Near the little wood between Audencourt and Caudry, on the spot where we had dug our trenches on the morning of the 26th August, there are buried seventeen soldiers and three officers.
About the middle of December the Médecin Chef was taken away to Germany.
A number of causes now contributed to make life at the 106 wholly unendurable. An entire absence of discipline among the hospital orderlies and the constant squabbling of the nurses had been points which the doctor and I used often to discuss and deplore. Now that the restraining influence of the doctor's age and rank was no longer with us, the evils of disorganisation became every day more apparent. The "Directrice," or head matron of the hospital, was wholly incapable, and by her tactless mismanagement set the whole hospital by the ears. The orderlies grew noisier and more slovenly every day. Youths who had no occupation in the hospital, and only appeared at meal-times, were allowed to air their opinions in endless discussion. Noisy, chattering visitors strolled in at all hours of the day, and there was no corner of the hospital safe from invasion. Quarrels among the nurses reached such a stage of bitterness that many were not on speaking terms. Friends whose kind visits I had always welcomed now came rarely or not at all. It was evident that such a state of affairs portended something more serious than tactlessness or mismanagement. The gossips of Cambrai were busy with many stories to the discredit of Mme. la Directrice, but it seemed to me unreasonable that the voice of scandal should be concerned with a plain-looking woman the wrong side of forty. The whole affair may have been merely foolishness and vanity, but it was certainly an indiscretion on the part of Mme. la Directrice to receive in the courtyard of the 106 Hospital, from the hand of a German orderly, bouquets of white chrysanthemums presented with the compliments of a German officer.
Every morning at 11 o'clock I paid a visit to the Salle cinq. Many of the older inhabitants had gone, some to Germany, others now rested in what Picard calls le dernier costume. No. 6 still complained unceasingly from his corner bed. No. 3, the Chasseur Alpin with a bullet through the chest, had recovered from various complications and was now able to sit up in a chair. Among the newcomers were three English soldiers. Ben Steele, a reservist from Manchester, had one bullet through his arm and one through his leg. Both wounds were healed, but the leg remained stiff, swollen, paralysed, and the pain was ceaseless.
The story of his wound is one of those ugly tales of atrocities committed by individual German soldiers, for which the German Army, with its perfect discipline, cannot escape responsibility. Ben was badly wounded in the arm, and was left lying in the trenches when his company retired. "I got that in fair fighting," said Ben, pointing to his wounded arm. He told me the rest of the story briefly, and did not care to refer to it again. "When the Germans came along they shouted 'Hands up.' I was lying in the bottom of the trench. I lifted my left hand, but a German soldier, jumping over the trench, fired down at me point-blank, and the bullet, which went through my right thigh, knocked me unconscious." Ben was sent back to England a few months later, and will probably be crippled for life.
On December 5th a party of convalescent British soldiers arrived from the Civil Hospital, among them R. Anderson, a reservist from my own battalion, L.-Cpl. M'Donald, Royal Irish, and James Prime, Rifle Brigade.
I can never forget the four days these men spent with me at the 106—first, because they were such good companions, and second, because two of these men subsequently met death at German hands under circumstances of revolting inhumanity.