A Regimental Surgeon Read online

  In Coulommiers, a town of picturesque old houses and many bridges crossing clear streams, the inhabitants welcomed us very gladly. For the Germans had only just left, and every wine-shop and café were in ruins. Time alone had saved this town from systematic sacking. The heat was intense as we marched out toward Doue but later in the afternoon rain fell and added to our discomfort. We bivouacked that night in a farm at Doue, so hastily deserted by the Germans that their food lay untasted on the tables in the courtyard and nothing but wine had been consumed. Nor had there been any stint in that, for the farmyard and outbuildings were full of empty bottles. German officers, fearing a surprise, always dined in the courtyard of the farms; the tables neatly laid with tablecloths looted from the linen chests. From the number of wine glasses, lying broken on the ground, it was clear that after each drink the glass had been thrown on the ground in sheer wanton waste and a spirit of destruction. But their preparations had been in vain, for we came in for the feast while the food was yet warm. In the houses chaos and destruction reigned. Clocks lay broken, crockery smashed, chests of drawers emptied of their contents, linen and clothes lying knee deep on the floor all stained with mud from German boots. All but the religious pictures were destroyed; and from this we deduced that the division we were following was probably Bavarian or Würtemburgian. When a German soldier snatched a few moments' rest in the beds he lay on the clean sheets with his filthy boots and took no trouble to avoid soiling even the most delicate bed linen. Nor was this all, for in nearly every house these men had left filthy evidences of their bestial habits behind them. They certainly succeeded in rendering the beds and bedrooms uninhabitable for any of us who might wish to sleep.

  There were a few German prisoners, slightly wounded and exhausted men picked up in woods and barns and outhouses. They were tired and very hungry, but impudently self-assured. At Coulommiers station that morning we had seen about 150 German wounded being carried by our men to the ambulance train that was lying there. Fat and smiling Germans were being carried on the shoulders of our orderlies to the train; here in clean linen on swing cots with English nurses and doctors to attend them they were going to make their way in comfort to St. Nazaire. But what of our prisoners in Belgium? No ambulance trains, nurses or doctors for them; nothing but the filth of the floor of a horse box, exhibited at each station to a jeering crowd of Red Cross orderlies, nurses and soldiers. And when they called for food or water, nothing but a shower of stones and abuse for the "Englander gefangener." It was, perhaps, lucky for these German wounded that we were unconscious of what our comrades suffered.

  From Doue next morning we marched through St.Cyr toward La Ferte-sous-Jouarre. At the station of La Ferte I found that some juvenile German soldiers had spent a few idle moments, before destroying the station, in punching all the tickets in the ticket office: these were lying strewn about the floor. I kept one as a souvenir. All night and all next day our guns and the French thundered, shelling the German transport in its retreat along the hilly roads and steep ravines of this wooded country. Apparently the whole of our artillery and the French artillery on our right had collected near together; far into the night they blazed away, shooting on the map, shelling the roads to hinder the German transport hurrying to the Marne. At St.Cyr the kindly people came to give us bread and jam; crowding round us with evidences of heartfelt relief at our approach. One young woman complained of unspeakable treatment at the hands of their late visitors. In those days, no word of the systematic outrages on French and Belgian women had reached our ears. We had been far too tired and far too hungry up to that time to pay much attention to any possible outrage on the civilian population. We saw little evidence of physical cruelty, only of a mad spirit of destruction; houses fired in drunken orgies. We rather thought that most looting had been carried out by the transport drivers, the commissariat and other details that accompany the German transport. Had the German infantry been half as tired as we were, we felt sure that they had in the weight of their packs alone more than they could carry as it was; nor would they have been inclined to carry off even minted gold, if they had found it.

  These good inhabitants of St.Cyr were soon to be compensated for their misfortunes by the sight of about seventy prisoners whom we passed as they were being marched into the town with an escort. A very patchy lot of men they were; some huge, some very small and puny; but all with the hulking, loose kneed, shambling walk that is so characteristic of the German. One can always tell German infantry by their gait, even if it is not possible to see them clearly or to recognise the spike upon the helmet. A German soldier in full regimentals crouches as he walks; that is, provided he is not marching to attention. All soldiers crouch and lean, to a certain extent, from the weight of their packs, but the German more than others, as his pack is higher up upon his shoulders. With bent knee, all loose jointed, I have recognised them at night silhouetted against a lighter background. All these German prisoners at St.Cyr were hungry-looking and tired, but they were not cowed; rather there was an impudent curiosity about them. For they had made the great discovery, and for once German High Headquarters were wrong; the English did not kill all prisoners. Only as we passed a group of Frenchwomen did they lose their composure; for, in those days, the women in this part of France were smarting under the sense of many injuries.

  Leaving St.Cyr behind us, we made the last heights before the long gradual descent to the Marne. There was much intermittent shelling, and once the battalion was in action, advancing in a very perilous manner across some open fields, under shrapnel fire. But the brunt of the fighting was borne by the Third Division on our left. Saacy was our destination, and it was our object to cut off as much German personnel and transport as possible before it could cross the fine bridge there. Apparently there were only two bridges in this part of the Marne which were intact, the one at La Ferte-sous-Jouarre and ours at Saacy. The whole of that lovely September afternoon the 13th Brigade lay on the slopes within a couple of miles of the bridge and watched the contest for the wooded heights above the river, through their glasses. For the woods which rose sharply from the river were very strongly held, especially by two batteries of artillery; ten guns in all, particularly well screened from view. But our Divisional cavalry and horse artillery were well up and across the river; and the Germans, stampeded for once out of their usual methodical ways, omitted to blow up the bridge. They trusted to artillery fire to dispute our passage. A beautiful sight it was to see our mounted men and guns work up the slopes in front of us; they seemed to take the steep ascent at a gallop, unmindful of the fleecy clouds of cotton wool that were the enemy shrapnel. The gunners unlimbered at the edge of a wood and in a cornfield that bounded the fringe of trees on the south side. We could clearly see them running to bring sheaves of corn to screen the guns from view. Then the red tongues of flame stabbed the green background of the wood, as they shelled the German transport on the reverse slopes of the hill. But the cavalry suffered from the shrapnel fire; and, often, we could see little groups of riderless horses tearing down the slope of open ground to the river below; and the tiny figures of dismounted men trying to head them back. All that afternoon we lay in the sun, regardless of the fact that we were well in range of the German guns, had they not been otherwise employed. About five o'clock came the order for our regiment to advance to support the 14th and 15th Brigades, who had made the crossing safely and were now in action in the depths of the woods away to the left of our cavalry. The 15th Brigade consisted of the Cheshires, Dorsets, Norfolks and Bedfords, and it yielded nothing in excellence to the 14th. The latter was made up of Manchesters, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, East Surreys, and Suffolks.

  Through the winding streets of Saacy we marched on to the handsome stone bridge that crossed the river. This town appears to be a favourite summer resort; for all along the river banks were tied launches and skiffs and houseboats. Across the bridge w T e passed the undamaged château and gained the steep road in the shelter of the woods. It was a blazing
hot afternoon. All the way this narrow road was blocked with light transport of the 14th and 15th Brigades, ammunition waggons and water carts: the crush was great and we could hardly get past. A constant stream of wounded men flowed by, walking or carried on stretchers to the field ambulance below. Many of these stretcher cases, mostly men of the Cornwalls, did not need the red labels pinned to their tunics that spoke of dangerous wounds. That was written on their faces, in the grey pallor, the closed eyes, the restlessness and the beads of cold sweat upon their foreheads. Being the forward doctor, I had to see these men and, assuring myself that haemorrhage was stopped, to transmit them to the rear. And in the woods were wounded men, too; these we collected and brought to the edge of the road as we advanced. A first field dressing and half a grain of morphia on the tongue; and my orderly and I were off again. It was shrapnel in this wood that was taking the toll of these men's lives. How the transport of these two brigades escaped destruction, with ourselves, in the narrow winding road we shall never know; if the range of the shrapnel, now bursting beyond us, had been shortened we should have been in a bad way indeed. There was no going back here; the batteries of artillery could not possibly have turned; the wood was impassable; and, had the transport managed to turn, so steep was the road that the maddened horses would have plunged the whole of us in destruction on their way. Then came a call—by this time we were well up in support of the 14th Brigade —for a doctor to go to the Corn walls. The commanding officer was wounded, the doctor was dead and things were looking badly. I spoke to Coke and went off through the woods with my orderly, only to find that they did not want me; the medical officer from the reserve battalion had the dressing station well in hand.

  There had been quite a lot of casualties among the regimental medical officers in our Division during the Retreat and the Advance. My regiment had lost two; one, Gibbon, wounded at Mons; another, Bell, killed on his way to fill the vacancy from the Field Ambulance. The West Ridings, too, had lost their doctor. Only the Yorkshire Light Infantry and the West Kents had their original medical officers left. Our brigade was short of doctors.

  On my way back I had an excellent view, from a sheltered corner of the wood, of our aeroplanes flying very low and trying to locate the enemy guns. But all day long they searched without success, and we were held up. The guns were so well dug in and screened that our observers could not spot the flashes. Not until nightfall did one German gunner elevate his gun to take the tempting chance our aeroplane was giving. This flash was at once observed, and our guns plastered the wood with shell, while two companies of the Yorkshire Light Infantry stormed the slope and took the batteries undamaged. I remember that we were very thankful that the task of storming this uninviting hill did not fall to our lot. But those guns had done their work; for they had held up the Fifth Division the whole of that afternoon.

  That night we held the ground the other brigades had made. Lying well out, beyond the wood, we were the advance, and to us fell the duty of picketing the roads and paths and providing the patrols. Then came the rain, steady and persistent, and, hot though the day had been, the night was cold. Headquarters, comprised of Coke, Dering and myself, soon had a good fire burning. Sergeant Robertson, the most excellent of all men cooks, fried our bacon and soaked biscuits in the gravy. The company officers, one by one, appeared from the darkness and we sat down on the wet ground to the best meal of the day. To me this scene will always be very memorable; for this was one of the few occasions that our officers all messed together. Dirty and begrimed, our chins unshaven for two weeks, we were yet a very merry party in spite of the rain. Sitting there in the red reflection of the fire, I thought they were a collection of the best and finest looking fellows any regiment could show. The meal over, the officers returned to sleep with their respective companies in the wood. Now we were going very light; our transport with the men's and officers' kits was miles away across the Marne; and if one man in five had a waterproof sheet he was very lucky. All packs had been discarded in the Retreat; there was not a greatcoat in the regiment; only a very few officers had Burberrys. But all these good fellows went back to their companies, hollowed out places in the dead leaves to lie upon and slept in the rain without covering all that night. Our officers showed that they could bear exposure just as willingly, uncomplainingly and well as did their men.

  After a damp and wakeful night, the battalion snatched a hasty breakfast at the first light of day, paraded and started north in column of route. We were the leading regiment of the brigade on that most eventful day, which followed the passage of the Marne, and, as ours was the leading brigade of the Division, we were immediately behind the cavalry and horse artillery. The forward position of our regiment left to me the responsibility of first attention to all wounded on the line of march. The cavalry doctors were far too spread out in the open country to keep in touch with the field ambulances, now far behind us. All around in the fields were evidences of yesterday's fighting, pathetic brown bundles lying on the ploughland and stubble as they had lain all night; here singly, there in little groups they lay as they had fallen the evening before. The fighting-had gone on far into the night, so the medical officers and their stretcher bearers had been unable to find the wounded. One fears that the cold and exposure of that rainy night had helped, only too surely, the final dissolution of many seriously wounded men. It is not necessary to say with what care these missing men had been searched for. It is ever a point of honour with regimental doctors to get their wounded under cover the first night. Very difficult it is to see a crumpled khaki figure on ploughland. My duty it was to ride off the line of march to see that these were really dead and beyond all help; to scan with the help of my keen-eyed orderly the hedges and ditches before I hurried back to join the regiment on the road. Here, issuing from a farm-house, was a little group of wounded men who had lain all night in shelter but had seen us on the march; there, in a little wood, were others who had stayed beside a wounded comrade. After their immediate needs had been attended to, I left them by the roadside to await the coming of the field ambulance. At first all the bodies, lying in the fields, were clothed in khaki; later on, grey figures were to be seen and, as the pursuit continued, these grey bundles became more frequent. When, later in the day, we found our dead, it was always a trooper of our cavalry who, greatly daring, had gone too far ahead in the pursuit and thereby paid the last penalty for his rashness. In fields close by were dead cows, victims of the searching shrapnel, and tiny calves standing so patiently beside their unresponsive mothers. The story of the German retreat was written all along the road. They discarded from weakness as a man does from his hand at bridge. First, were innumerable wine bottles, all empty; then full bottles lying smashed in the ditches by the roadside, and boxes of cigars. Pictures, some cut from their frames others intact, leant drunkenly against the hedges. Stationery half buried in the roadside vegetation. The transport was hard pushed to have to abandon the loot of many French châteaux; and officers' loot withal. Then curious specimens of plunder appeared, hanging on the roadside hedges, trampled in the mud—the loot the marching infantry alone could take by reason of its lightness, women's gear, soft frilly things, which the simple German soldier was taking home to his wife, so light to carry and so eminently French. Then transport horses, shot and methodically stripped of saddlery and shoes; later, we came upon poor beasts, dead, but with shoes intact; then horses, still methodically shot, so as to rob us of any possible future use of them, but with saddlery left on—merely cut from the traces. The pursuit was growing fiercer, and the plight of the wheeled transport was, at every mile, more urgent. Farther on, by the roadside, with hanging heads and bent trembling knees, were abandoned horses which there had been no time to shoot or strip; some standing, others too foundered to rise. The dead animals blocked the pursuit, their bellies so swollen with gas that their legs stuck out at an angle with their bodies. Then came the abandoned wagons themselves. Flour, a bright yellow pea flour for making the universal soup, was lying
in bright ochreous patches all along the line of retreat; harness, sausage machines, cutlery, cooks' gear—all abandoned. Evidence of the thorough work of the German regimental butchers was here; first, whole carcasses, carefully skinned, had been thrown away; later, as the pace grew hotter, quarters of meat methodically and neatly jointed.

  So frantic was their haste, that, when we would come to the narrow stone bridges that crossed the streams at the foot of little valleys, we could see where three transport wagons had raced to get first to the bridge. They had met and jammed between the parapets and blocked the road. Then we saw where they had been lifted over the parapets and thrown into the stream below; drowned horses and upturned wagons in the water.