The room in which I found myself contained eight beds, three of which were occupied by wounded German officers. The other rooms, I imagined, had about the same number of beds as mine. There were no Red Cross nurses in attendance, just orderlies, for this was only an emergency hospital and too near the firing-line for nurses. The orderlies were not old men nor very young boys, as I expected to find, but young men in the prime of life, who evidently had been medical students. One or two of them, I discovered, were able to speak English, but for some reason they would not talk. Perhaps they were forbidden by the officer in charge to do so.
In addition to the bullet wound in my mouth, I had a swelling from my forehead to the back of my head almost as big as my shoe—and that is saying considerable. I couldn't move an inch without suffering intense pain, and when the doctor told me that I had no bones broken I wondered how a fellow would feel who had.
German officers visited me that morning and told me that my machine went down in a spinning nose dive from a height of between eight and nine thousand feet, and they had the surprise of their lives when they discovered that I had not been dashed to pieces. They had to cut me out of my machine, which was riddled with shots and shattered to bits.
A German doctor removed the bullet from my throat, and the first thing he said to me when I came to was, "You are an American!"
There was no use denying it, because the metal identification disk on my wrist bore the inscription, "Pat O'Brien, U. S. A. Royal Flying Corps."
Although I was suffering intense agony, the doctor, who spoke perfect English, insisted upon conversing with me.
"You may be all right as a sportsman," he declared, "but you are a damned murderer just the same for being here. You Americans who got into this thing before America came into the war are no better than common murderers and you ought to be treated the same way!"
The wound in my mouth made it impossible for me to answer him, and I was suffering too much pain to be hurt very much by anything he could say.
THE IDENTIFICATION DISK WORN BY LIEUTENANT O'BRIEN WHEN HE WAS CAPTURED BY THE HUNS. IT REVEALED TO THEM THAT HE WAS AN AMERICAN