Heroism of the Doctors
As heroic a story as anything in all this history of the last four weeks is that of the medical officers, nurses, orderlies, and ambulance men belonging to these casualty clearing stations, who were not far behind the fighting lines when the battle began on March 21.
And then in a few hours they were on the very edge of the enemy's advancing tide, so that they were almost caught by it and had to make brave efforts to rescue the wounded, save their equipment, and get away to a place where for a little while again they could go on with their noble work until the red edge of war swept up with its fire again and they had to retreat still further.
I used to pass very often the outer ring of those casualty clearing stations on the right of the British line beyond Bapaume, in the Cambrai salient, and away toward St. Quentin.
They were almost caught on that day of March 21 when the infernal bombardment was flung over a wide belt of the British lines, and the enemy stormed the defenses and the British fought back in heroic rearguard actions. It became a question of only a few hours, sometimes of the last quarter of an hour, when these brave medical officers with the nurses and orderlies could get away.
It is always the rule of patients first, and at Ham there were 1,200 wounded, and many others in other places. The railways were choked with military transport or destroyed by shellfire. On the roads refugees were mixed up with the transport and guns and troops. It was a frightful problem, but the medical staffs did not lose their nerve, and set about the business of removal with fine skill and discipline.
Caring for the Wounded
What wounded could walk were gathered together and sent on to the roads to make their way back as far as their strength would carry them. The badly wounded were packed into all the available ambulances and sent away. The equipment had sometimes to be put on any train, regardless of its destination. It was gathered in afterward from whatever place it went to.
A casualty clearing station of 1,000 beds needs 100 lorries to move it, but nine lorries take a full kit for 200 beds, and always nine lorries moved off first after the wounded to take up a new station further back and carry on. The medical officers looked after the surgical instruments and trundled them along the roads on wheeled stretchers. One officer went twenty-five miles this way and another seventeen miles. The sisters, after the wounded had left, were put on any vehicle going back from the battleline.
During these days I saw them squeezed between drivers and men on motor lorries, sitting among the Tommies in transport wagons, one at least on a gun limber, and others perched on top of forage, still merry and bright in spite of all the tragedy about them, because that is their training and their faith.