"It's an ugly word.... Doctor, that man over there," the speaker indicated a pair of hollow eyes staring hungrily over a huge iodine-smeared gauze muffler, "wants to know if we can save his lower jaw? Not that there's much left of it. His pal, who interprets for him, says a wounded German officer shot him in the face with his revolver, 'cos he went to give the blankety blank a drink out of his water-bottle. One of the Gunners—and not long married, according to the pal."
"All right, tell him! Name him for one of my beds," Saxham said brusquely, and nodded to the owner of the desperate eyes, saying, as they flared back their gratitude: "Even if it had been 1821 in the cattle-truck, we're in the Twentieth Century here. Warn Burland," he named the anæsthetist, "for duty at once. Gaynor Gaynes and Frost to be ready with the X Ray on Flat I. Mr. Whitchett and Mr. Pridd to act as Assistant Surgeons. We'll take the worst cases straight away——"
"But, my God, sir! most of these men are beyond Surgery," groaned Ironside, cracking his finger-joints. "Broken and mashed and rent as they are, what they need is to be re-created! ... If Christ were to look in here just now," the Medical Resident cried in his bitterness, "there'd be plenty of work in His line. New tissues to make, bony structures to re-build. Organs to replace where organs have been destroyed. He'd have done it by mixing earth with His saliva and anointing. We might as well spit on twenty per cent. of these fellows—for all the good we can do!"
"Give them liquid nourishment—brandy where necessary, and send those I've tagged up to the theatre. No waiting to wash—in their cases. And remember my Gunner gets the first look-in!"
Saxham turned and ran at speed, making for the nearest elevator, found it just going up full of stretcher-cases lying close packed as sardines, turned and shot up the stone staircase three steps at a time to the first floor, glittering with white enamel, polished oak, brass fittings and cleanliness, under the discreet radiance of shaded electric lights. The centre space was occupied by the tribune engirdling the domed Sanctuary of the Chapel. Short corridors tastefully adorned with red-enamelled buckets, blue glass bombs of chemical fire-extinguisher, and snaky coils of brass-fitted hose, led to long wards running east, west, north, and south.
"Eh, Doctor!"
A fair-faced, gentle-eyed Sister of Mercy, in the wide-winged starched linen cap and guimpe, and white twill nursing-habit with the black Cross, stood near the lift, talking to a tall, raw-boned, white-haired Surgeon-General of the R.A.M.C. She greeted Saxham's appearance with a little womanly cry:
"Eh, Doctor! Never it rains buddit pours." There was a hint of Lancashire in her dialect. "The R.A.M.C. have sent us ten more cases. Dear, dear!—but we'll have our hands full."
"Then you'll be happy, Sister-Superintendent. I've never known you so beamingly contented as when you were regularly run off your feet, and hadn't a minute to say your Rosary. Anything specially interesting, Sir Duncan?"
"Aweel!" The broad Scots tongue of Taggart droned the bagpipe-note as of old. "Aweel! There's an abdawminal or twa I'd like ye to throw your 'ee over—an' a G.P. that ye will find in your line. Fracture o' the lumbar vairtebra from shrapnel—received ten o'clock yesterday morr'ning!—an' some cases o' shellitis, wi' intermittent accesses o' raging mania an' intervals o' mild delusions—an' ane will gar you draw on the Medical Officer's Emergency List o' Abbreviated Observations I supplied ye wi' a guid few years agone."