A Regimental Surgeon Read online

  A REGIMENTAL SURGEON

  IN WAR AND PRISON

  CAPTAIN ROBERT V. DOLBEY

  M.B., M.S. (Lond,) F.R.C.S. (Eng.),

  Royal Army Medical Corps.

  PREFACE

  These recollections of the fighting in France from August to November, 1914, do not pretend, in any way, to be an authentic history of the Campaign. They are merely the record of the work and wanderings of a regimental medical officer in part of the Retreat, the Advance, at the Marne, the Aisne, and the righting at and near La Bassée. There they come to an abrupt conclusion, for, in the grey dawn of a foggy October morning, I was taken prisoner and, with my wounded, my orderlies and stretcher bearers, conducted through our long and eventful pilgrimage into Germany. From the moment the miracle of the Marne occurred we had little doubt that nothing would stop our victorious progress to the Rhine. Little did I think that the invasion of Germany, on my part, would take place in so ignominious a fashion. When I say that the regiment to which I had the honour of being attached was the 2nd Battalion the King's Own Scottish Borderers, of the 13th Brigade and that ours was the Fifth Division, I may plead ample justification for these pages.

  In this Division there were three Brigades, the 13th, 14th and 15th. None of the four battalions of the 13th Brigade, the Scottish Borderers, the West Kents, the Yorkshire Light Infantry, and the West Riding Regiment needs words of mine to sustain its honour; that lives in the official records of this Campaign. To this day in France they speak of "La Cinquieme Division qui etait d Mons.” If these pages seem only to be concerned with the doings of this battalion, I may plead that a regimental doctor has no time for other regiments. To us the Retreat and the Advance were epitomised in the roads we took, the fights we fought, the billets that gave our battalion the few precarious hours of sleep that we can remember. If the recollections of these days seem to be at variance with official records, one can only say that in the fog of war we saw only one small sector of the line—our part; only one road from Le Cateau—the road we took. All else is merely the remembrance of fatigue beyond expression, of swollen and painful feet beyond the appreciation of pain; of sleep that kept men swaying on the march; of companies of men that fell over one another at the halts and lay in the roads to sleep, from sheer exhaustion, until they were kicked into grumbling life again.

  The chapters of this book which tell the tale of Germany as a prisoner saw it, of the prisoners' camps at Crefeld, Minden, Senne-lager and Güetersloh, of the nightmare that was the winter of 1914-1915, are officially correct. The recollections of those days were engraved, so indelibly, on the brains of all who experienced them that no lapse of time can change the well-remembered records of that period.

  CHAPTER I

  THE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

  IN THE RETREAT

  I had left British Columbia at the end of the second week in July 1914, for a very brief visit home. As our ship, delayed by fog and the southward-bound icebergs in the Atlantic, passed the northern coast of Ireland, we heard of the trouble in Dublin: news came to us that the Scottish Borderers, on their return to barracks from an attempt to stop Nationalist gun-running, had fired upon the mob. All Roman Catholic Ireland was said to be ablaze. Irishmen on board our ship—who were in touch with the political condition of their island—predicted that Ireland would be in the grip of civil war within the next month. In the chancelleries of Europe all was peace, except for the smouldering flame in the Balkans, where Austria was trying to fix on Serbia responsibility for the crime of Serajevo. The political atmosphere was full of troublous Ireland. None dreamt that the difficulties of that island would so soon be overwhelmed in the European catastrophe so swiftly approaching.

  The Congress of Surgeons of North America, of which I am a member, was holding a meeting in London from July 26th to July 29th: all the stars of the surgical firmament of Europe were in England. The first night of the meeting the big Austrian surgeons read their papers and withdrew. The next day the German stars departed. Then, while all were wondering, the great French professor admitted that mobilisation orders tore him unwillingly, and with misgivings, from the London he was beginning to know.

  The Medical Department of the War Office accepted readily, for service in the Base Hospitals of the Expeditionary Force, men who had seen service before. My unit was to mobilise at Woolwich on August 15th, for immediate embarkation. In a few days we were off, in all secrecy at night, to Southampton. In a line, the transports, column after column of ships, following the careful and tortuous route across the Channel, made their way to Havre. No ships of war to be seen; but all the time, we were conscious of the watchful guard of the Navy that allowed so many ships to pass without misfortune. At Havre we received the enthusiastic welcome of a population that had been, until lately, full of misgivings as to the material value of the Entente Cordiale. The nation was much relieved by our presence. The cloud of doubt and panic was now lifted. England, always given far greater credit for political influence in continental affairs than her military strength ever justified, had now come to the rescue.

  A rest camp for us on the heights above the harbour. All day the splendid, regular regiments marching down—to the station and the train that carried them east towards the Belgian frontier.

  There was even now work for us to do, for the heavy marching, in full kits, under a blazing August sky, found the weak spots in the reservists. Some of our men were coming back by train to Havre; and all of them reservists. They were the men who had just been called up to the Colours; there had been no time to get them hardened, and new boots had blistered soft, civilian feet. The warm fireside and the sheltered life told their story, in the heart that could not bear the burden of the pack; the well compensated valvular or muscular weakness, that was sufficient to perform the functions of everyday civilian life, now showed its lack of power to accommodate itself to strain. The tubercular focus in the lung, that, unsuspected, had not prevented the performance of civilian work, was now exposed by the searching test of long marching, cold nights and fatigue undreamt of. Exhaustion, flat feet, varicose veins, rotten teeth that could not bite the biscuits; and we saw what the wastage of war could be.

  Days of restlessness in Havre followed; anxiety lest the war should be over before we could take our part. Then came the fighting in Belgium near Mons, and the wounded arrived on the night of the 23rd August and the succeeding days. How glad we were to get some work to do!

  At St. Nazaire the chance we longed for came, and five of us left the hospital, of which we were already sick to death, and boarded the train for Le Mans to get further orders. At Le Mans, no orders; nobody knew anything. So we took the responsibility on our own shoulders, climbed on the first train that left in the direction of Paris, saw some of the motor transport of the Fifth Division at a wayside station, stopped the train, got out, and after many wanderings, reached the famous division on its retreat. We were a scratch lot for regimental medical officers; one of us on leave from India, where he was doctor to an Indian Railway; another, one of the most distinguished of the younger heart specialists in London, a man for whom "Auricular fibrillation" had no terrors; two of us, of much general medical knowledge but no special leanings; and myself, by way of being a bit of a surgeon. We were badly wanted; for the casualties among medical officers had been great. Regimental medical officers, with their advanced dressing posts in good position when fighting commenced, too busy with their wounded to notice the retirement of the righting lines in front, had awakened to find themselves in the forefront of the battle. They were faced with the choice of waiting by their wounded, of dodging the German infantryman, for whom the Red Cross brassard meant less than nothing, or flight. Many of them, to their credit, stayed with
their wounded, and paid the penalty of duty with their lives or with many months in a German prison. One of us was detailed to the Manchesters, one to the Norfolks, the third to the East Surreys, the fourth to the West Ridings, while it fell to the lot of the 2nd Battalion the King's Own Scottish Borderers to have me for their surgeon.

  The history of the K.O.S.B. is the story of Mons. Thrown out in front of the Canal, on the 23rd, they sustained the attack all day. One Company, under Major Chandos Leigh, advanced through potato fields to drive out the enemy from the wood that enfiladed them. The skirmishers in the wood turned out to be a division of German troops, and the remnants of this Company had to take what shelter they could in the ridge and furrow of the potato field. Their Company Officer stayed behind to see to some wounded, and was never heard of again. Some gained safety; others, many of them wounded, found temporary security among the sheltering potato tops. The wounded prisoners were taken to Boussu to a Belgian hospital; thence to the prisoners' camp at Sennelager, near Paderborn, in Westphalia. During the night of the 23rd the banks of the canal were held by each of the opposing forces, sniping, in the dark, at one another across the water. Then came the retreat, easterly and a little southerly to Bavai and Le Cateau. The Scottish imagination was, I fear, far too matter-of-fact to harbour any such beautiful delusion as the story of the Angels of Mons. All were much too tired, too exhausted, too thirsty; their thoughts were only of the interminable road, the halt that never seemed to come, the tea that was so badly wanted. A more imaginative regiment, no doubt, might conceive the story of the Angels; the ground was ready for such a seed. What illusion more likely in the fatigue of a disordered, subconscious mind? But the Scottish people, though they may have no time for fancies, are not untouched by history; for the regiment passed the monument to the great Marlborough near the field of Mal-plaquet, and wondered what the spirit of the Great Captain would have said, to see British troops in such retreat before the foe. At Le Cateau the regiment acted as rear guard to the rest of the Brigade; and suffered much in consequence. Far too tired to march any farther, on the night of the 25th they had only strength to dig themselves in, and fight all day long on the 26th. Then, refreshed by what was, to them, so precious a rest after the forced marches of the preceding days, they joined the battered remnants of the Fifth Division in St. Quentin. At this point the Fifth and Third Divisions were inextricably mixed. Here, a subaltern and 100 men, and they imagined that they were the last survivors of their regiment; there, another subaltern, with his little group of men—also the last survivors of their battalion. The whole Brigade was, for the moment, broken up into fragments. All Scottish soldiers would attach themselves to Scottish officers of any battalion; and other soldiers to other officers. A Scots Fusilier officer meeting a K.O.S.B. officer would exchange the men who had been attracted by the similarity of the bonnets, and, after a few inquiries as to their transport, get on again. The transport was a great rallying point. So it came about that within three days of Le Cateau all this heterogeneous mass of men belonging to the Third and Fifth Divisions had separated itself out into its proper constituent elements, and the Army was an Army again. Staff Officers would stop at cross roads to direct these scattered units to their proper divisions. The transport hurried on ahead so that the roads might be clear for infantry. The A.S.C. left piles of bread and biscuit and bully beef at each cross road. Every man would take what he could carry, and hurry on again. Blind instinct led them towards Paris; some without caps, some with stockinged night-caps on their heads; their rifles and ammunition and water bottles their only kit. Packs had long since been discarded, or safety would never have been reached. The Guards alone retained their full marching equipment and paid the penalty of the strict law of discipline. Guardsmen might fall out by the roadside or drop dead from exhaustion, but their packs would still be in place. This absolute discipline might strain a damaged heart beyond its breaking point, but the stern rules of peace training were inexorable. A Guardsman never loses anything; he has always got his entrenching tool, his emergency ration is never broached. But even the most broken man would cling to his rifle and ammunition. That he never discarded. Duty dragged us on in front. This kept all men going who would otherwise have followed the dictates of faint heart and sore feet. The Division was disorganised for the first three days after Le Cateau; but we were never an undisciplined mob. The unconscious sense of discipline and order, that comes from years of the barrack square, kept this Division of ours together. On the third day not one could have told that the Army had been in such a retirement. The regiments were only at half strength; but they were regiments again. Tried by hardship, of an endurance splendid, were the men who faced around at the Marne. Our regiment that had left Dublin 1,100 strong, a bare fortnight before, by this time numbered just over 500 officers, N.C.O's and men. But now there was nothing that they could not face; morale unequalled; driven but undefeated still. In a dream we marched, unconscious of the towns we passed, the villages we slept in; fatigued almost beyond endurance; dropping to sleep at the five-minute halt that was the reward of each four miles covered. Whole companies, dozing as they marched, fell forward drunkenly on each other at the halts. Sleeping men lay, as they had halted, in the roads, and were kicked uncomplainingly into wakefulness again. Officers alone, from a sense of duty and responsibility, remained standing, lest the sleep that drugged their footsteps might find them wanting when the order came to fall in and march again. Once more forward, with feet that hurt like a hundred knives, as new surfaces of frayed sock rubbed over fresh blisters, with legs that were no longer conscious of the sensation of pain. None but a Regular Army could have done it; and after the war we shall worship the gods of spit-and-polish and barrack square again. If ever a war has shown the value of discipline and training, it is this.

  At Crepy-en-Valois the K.O.S.B. and the West Kents fought a rearguard action, with a spirit as unimpaired, a courage as undaunted, as that with which they had faced the oncoming host in the shallow field trenches at Le Cateau. This fight gave the rest of the Brigade time to get on and out of the closing net.

  At last, rearguard fights were no longer pressed by the enemy. An action, conceived as defensive, automatically became an offensive. It was then that we knew that the Miracle of the Marne had come about. We had no idea why we turned; we supposed, in a dull, uncomprehending fashion, that the baited trap had now been sprung, and that we were, at last, to turn and rend our quarry. Never could we understand why the Germans did not take Paris. We felt that we could have done nothing to stop them, if they had wished to occupy it. French officers themselves have christened it the "Miracle of the Marne"; so incomprehensible it was. Later on, one came to talk over matters with Russian officers, and heard how they had driven the civilian population of East Prussia headlong into Berlin. Then came the certain conviction that it was the sacrifice of Russia; the offering of the Warsaw Army Corps, all unready, upon the altar of the Treaty with France, that had saved a threatened Paris from the invader. For once the German General Staff had panicked; and recalled many divisions from France to stay the terror that filled Unter den Linden with groups of starving refugees from East Prussia.

  How does a regimental medical officer do his work and what is his equipment? This I was curious to know; for I had not been a surgeon to a battalion in the field for thirteen years. In the South African War we had been provided with a Cape cart, for the medical panniers, and an ambulance for the wounded. Now, all that was changed and for the better. No more regimental ambulances. Regular trained N.C.O's and men of the R.A.M.C. instead of the willing, but only partially instructed, regimental orderlies. The doctor to each regiment is now-provided with a light, two-wheeled Maltese cart, that carries the medical and surgical panniers. These contain a comprehensive selection of medical and surgical instruments, medicines, condensed milk, and beef extract; all as complete as it is compact. Lacking only rubber gloves and sterilisable surgical gowns, there is hardly an operation, of an urgent character, that an ad
aptable surgeon cannot do in an emergency. Given a house, a stove and a regimental doctor's equipment, his trained N.C.O., and he will have all the essentials of a temporary hospital. Two water carts, each with its orderly, trained to the cleaning of filters and the chlorination of water, complete the regimental equipment for which the surgeon is responsible. The source of the water supply is his job. He has to see that sentries are posted over the doubtful wells and the ponds that collect the farmyard drainage. With the Pioneer sergeant and his men the doctor goes, at each bivouac, to choose the sites for latrines; see that all holes are rilled and refuse cleaned up when the regiment leaves its billet. His staff also comprises sixteen stretcher bearers, equally at home with the heavy stretchers as with the band instruments that find them occupation in times of peace.

  CHAPTER II

  THE MIRACLE OF THE MARNE

  The Retreat was over. The last rearguard action fought by the 13th Brigade, to cover the retreat of the Fifth Division, south-west of Lagny, had been successfully conducted at Crepy-en-Valois by the 2nd Battalion King's Own Scottish Borderers and the Royal West Kent Regiment. The Expeditionary Force halted, dressed, collected its scattered transport and turned again in a northeasterly direction, through Coulommiers to the Marne. Of the K.O.S.B. 600 turned again to the Advance; the rest were scattered. Some of the wounded, the lucky ones, were in England; others less fortunate, lay in hospitals, schools, churches and convents, in improvised houses and barns, all along the line of the Retreat from Mons and Le Cateau to Crepy. Most fortunate were those who were given shelter in the Belgian convents near Mons: far less fortunate were their brothers in arms who only found a painful lodging on the straw of French churches and schools. Most miserable of all were those who lay in manure on the floor of cattle trucks that had brought German cavalry horses to Belgium. For in those early days our wounded were often without surgical dressings, food, water, or any medical attention whatever. One of the brightest features of the retreat was the gallant and unselfish way in which regimental medical officers, Field Ambulances and other medical units stayed behind with their wounded on the way. They had seen their poor fellows bayoneted on the field, after Mons; and rumour, credibly it seemed, brought stories of German brutality, of stretcher bearers with their hands cut off and eyes gouged out. Yet these devoted people stayed behind; some with fifty, others with three hundred, hastily collected in improvised hospitals by the way. The story of these medical officers and orderlies without food, or dressings, or any comforts for the wounded, facing insults and cruelties from the advancing Germans, makes an epic in itself. After Mons the lightly wounded and some of the severely wounded were removed by train and arrived safely at Havre. After Le Cateau, with very few exceptions, only those who could walk to the trains or get precarious shelter in the transport waggons or in the Field Ambulances ever quitted the field. All severely wounded had to be left behind to the tender mercies of the foe.