A Regimental Surgeon Read online

  This retreat was worse conducted than our own from Le Cateau; for there we got our transport well away ahead, so that the roads were not blocked for infantry and artillery. Here the Germans had kept their transport back too late, and every road was indescribably jumbled with guns, infantry, motorcars, and wagons. This was by far the most satisfactory day the Expeditionary Force had seen since war began, and compensated in a large measure for our retreat from Mons.

  Still on and on we pressed, the cavalry and horse gunners, just ahead of us, on the next rise of this rolling country; guns unlimbering on the reverse slopes and shelling the enemy over the ridges. All seemed to be done in parade order. Here, in a field near by, we saw German guns, buried up to the hubs, and abandoned in a morass they had encountered when, tempted by a promising stubble field,, the artillery had left the crowded road to get away in the open. All along the roads were bicycles by the hundred; at first most carefully run over by transport wheels, their tyres removed. Later, when time pressed, and they could not remove the tyres, the cyclists merely cut the rubber in long slits,, with their knives. As the day progressed, bicycles, intact, were lying abandoned in the-ditches. The Cyclist Corps had evidently been left as rearguard; but finding the roads all blocked in front of them and, being unable to ride across country, they had left their wheels and struck out across the fields on foot. But there was order in disorder. The abandoned motors told the story of the flight; at first we found them with tyres removed and sparking plugs taken away;: engines smashed. Farther on the tyres were cut; the machinery hastily broken with-hammers. Still farther, cars were abandoned, uninjured, as they had run out of petrol— German staff cars these, with divisional flags-flying beside the lamps in front. And all along the roads in ditches, by haystacks, were German dead and wounded; victims, for the most part, of the shrapnel that hurried their flight. Infantry, clothed in field grey, Jaegers in green, troopers with skulls and cross bones and other badges on the front of their high kepis. The wounded were collected in groups by sheltering haystacks, in the charge of one of our wounded or dismounted troopers. And very proud the escort was, pretending, as I came up, to a stern discipline that Woodbine cigarettes, in German lips, belied. The wounded had not been attended to, and my orderlies and I were kept busy, putting on first field dressings, making them comfortable in hay, giving morphia and leaving instructions to await the field ambulances. Very grateful were these Germans for small attentions; they used to call me "lieber Doktor," I remember, and try to give me their identity discs with messages to transmit. But there was no time to wait, and my German was too deficient to be of use to them; for we had to catch up with the Column again. At one place, by the side of the road, was a small disused quarry, all grass-covered. Here, as I passed, were six wounded German troopers, and a horse gunner of ours, with his right arm in a sling, to guard them. As I rode up they seemed to be in extremis, cold, sweaty, pale and groaning. "They aren't hurt much," volunteered their guard; "it's only the Lancers pricked them with their lances." But, seeing their tunics red and bloody, we ripped up the cloth and found, even as our trooper had said, that each man had been merely pricked in the muscles of the back— tiny punctured wounds barely half-an-inch deep. What meant, then, all these evidences of distress? Two of them were coughing and spitting into their hands and examining what they coughed up. Then came to me the explanation. These troopers on foundered horses had been overtaken by the 5th Lancers, who, in a most merciful way, had just touched them with the point of the lance as they passed by. The Uhlans, glancing back in terror at the advancing point, felt the stab, shrieked and fell from their saddles. Then the logical German mind told them that this lance-thrust had probably penetrated their lungs; so they spat into their hands to see the blood come up. But of blood there was not so much as one speck, so shallow were their wounds. Then their introspective, literal minds added still further to their terror; for they concluded that they must have internal haemorrhage. Hence their state of mental distress. When I reassured them of the trifling nature of their wounds, they smiled and soon were borrowing cigarettes from their generous escort. Now I have spoken with many cavalry medical officers of great experience in lance wounds in this war, and they all agree that, never to their knowledge, has any German trooper held his hand and failed to take the ultimate advantage with a lance. Our troopers, when dismounted and at the mercy of Uhlans, have been most mercilessly lanced; and lance wounds are the most terrible in war. Seldom have I heard so splendid an instance of a kindly spirit of forbearance as that which filled those troopers of the 5 th, the Royal Irish Lancers.

  German prisoners there were, in fives and tens and fifties; and in the village of Chanzy six hundred; all sitting by the roadside quite contented, without arms or ammunition. These they had hidden in the woods before they gave themselves up. Guarded by single troopers or wounded artillerymen, hungry and exhausted, they seemed glad that it was over. I wondered at the time why, in that wooded country, especially when we were advancing far too quickly to make an examination of woods possible, they had come down from cover to the roadside to surrender. When the Army settled down before the Aisne it was not uncommon for men of the A.S.C. and other details in the rear to return from their daily bathe with starving German prisoners. When our men were safely stripped and in the water these wretched men would come to the river bank to surrender.

  All day long we followed this, the VII. German Army Corps (if we may safely judge by the description on their abandoned transport) until we arrived at the village of Chanzy. There were 600 German prisoners corralled in the foldyard of a farm. On the outskirts of this village we bivouacked for the night, in a stubble field, and slept with the sheaves of corn for beds. And in the far distant darkness we could just see tiny points of flame that were the German camp fires. Our cavalry were all done; and there was nothing for us but to remain here for the night and push on again tomorrow.

  That evening I learnt, from the signal officer, of a curious incident that illustrates the resource the Germans displayed, even in so disordered a retreat as this. I have made mention, a few pages back, of a group of German wounded collected round a haystack. One of them, badly hit by shell in the left side, appeared to me to have had an injury to the spleen and to be suffering from internal haemorrhage. He it was who called me 'lieber Doktor,' and tried to press his Identity disc upon me. I had noticed, in the casual way one notices these things in the stress of so much work, that one of our field telephone cables was suspended from the eaves of the stack. This cable was laid from the cavalry advance guard to divisional headquarters in our rear. Later in the day, when we had passed on, it became necessary for the signallers to lift this cable upon their shepherd-crooks to allow our heavy "cow-gun"battery to pass along the road without damage to the wire. The signaller tried to get in some slack in order to lift his cable, but found it firmly attached to the haystack. Impatiently he pulled when, to his vast surprise, the side of the stack fell outward and exposed a German soldier, unarmed, sitting in a little recess in the heart of the stack; a broad grin on his face and the earpiece of a telephone attached to two wires that tapped our cable. This intrepid fellow had learnt all the orders that divisional headquarters had sent to the advance guard; and it was clearly his intention to slip away that night and rejoin his army by passing through our lines. We agreed that it required a considerable amount of pluck to stay behind on such an errand as this in the midst of our advancing army. In fact, though the German retreat was hurried and, in a measure, disorderly, the transport especially showing all the evidence of a panic stricken retreat, it was not entirely disorganised. There was order and efficiency in the way the abandoned equipment was destroyed, and the unwounded prisoners, who came in to give themselves up to us, had carefully buried or destroyed their arms and ammunition. And in many cases the distinguishing marks of their regiments had been removed.

  That night our second reinforcements arrived in charge of Ferguson and Gillespie; the latter, fresh from Oxford, with the makings o
f a most excellent officer in him, showed no sign in his confident, smiling face of the fate that awaited him. He was shot through the head, in our attack on La Bassée, died in my farm-house dressing station, and was buried beneath the pear tree just behind the buildings. Ferguson, an old officer of the 1st Battalion, had come to rejoin from the Malay States, where he had been rubber-planting for the last eight years. Strange to say, he was in the half battalion of which I was in medical charge in South Africa; we held Naawpoort Nek, a baldheaded kopje, half way between Krugersdorp and Oliphants Nek in the Megaliesberg.

  The new draft settled down for the night; the moon was at the full; and the night was very cold. Smith and I slept, very close together, in the straw, but the early morning cold soon waked us. Smith went to his company, I to see the morning sick drawn up in the half light beside my Maltese cart. Successfully I parried the many requests of the more sorry than sick to be allowed to ride, for part of this day's march, upon the transport wagons. Then, glowing with an inward consciousness of the stern sense of duty that condemned many a poor, footsore devil to slog along the long day's march that lay before us, I presently returned to the ashes of last night's fire. There Sergeant Robertson was already filling the morning air with the delicious fragrance of ration bacon. Thus do we earn our breakfasts. But I must absolve regimental medical officers, as a clan, from any want of real sympathy with blistered feet. I had been a regimental doctor before, and I well knew that had I been complaisant in this matter, before noon we should have had half the battalion on the transport. The moral effect of a weak medical is very bad for any battalion; and Tommy, or Jock, as I should say in this case, much though I love him, requires some firm treatment in the matter of easy rides, in a position of elegant leisure, upon the already overburdened transport.

  Soon we were off again. The West Kents took the lead of the brigade; but this time we left the line of the German retreat and our eyes were not gladdened again by the sight of abandoned equipment and dead or dying Germans. The day was vile; cold and very wet. Our only consolation was the fact that the German prisoners we were bringing with us were also without overcoats; and the distant prospect that we might find billets at Hartennes. One of our prisoners, a fat Red Cross orderly, had, round his shoulders, one of the excellent German ground sheets and I dearly wanted to rob him of it. But Divisional Orders against looting were not lightly to be broken. All day long his fat face shone from beneath the shelter of this sheet; while my hands froze and the rain wetted me to the skin. The German ground or waterproof sheet is another instance of the excellence of the enemy's equipment. Fitted with rings and buckles, it serves the purpose both of a ground sheet or a tent, while either end may be converted into a hood for rainy days. Another feature of their equipment was the method they had of hooking water bottles and haversacks on to their belts. In some of our men's equipment the water bottle was at the back; so situated that the whole kit had to be taken off for the man to get a drink. It was excellent in one way, that it did not encourage excessive drinking; but it is only fair to the designers of our equipment to say that this purpose never entered their view. Haversacks of cow hide, with the hair on, are both light and very dry; the direction of the hairs, being downward, ensured excellent drainage for rain. The German pack is carried on the shoulders higher up than ours, hooks on more easily, and, with the greatcoat encircling it above, makes a very compact kit. The entrenching tool is a small spade carried at the side; and not the combination pick that our men carry hanging from the equipment behind. Another neat contrivance about the German uniform is the use made of the two buttons, on either side of the slit in the tail of the tunic, as hooks to support the belt. This allows an even disposition of the weight of the equipment, both behind and at the sides above the hips. The uniform cloth is softer and more smooth-faced than our rough serge, and, though perhaps of not such good material, yet seems to be quite as serviceable. The German field grey, when wet with rain, shades off very well into a background of wet, dark earth. In moorland and in heather this field grey is infinitely superior in colour to our khaki; for the green shade of our cloth makes a most marked contrast to the black, dead winter heather. But, on plough-land or against hedges or green woodland, nothing can compare with khaki. To this I, who have had so many searches for wounded in ditches and on ploughland, can only too surely testify. But against yellow stubble, in the afterglow of a September evening, the dry German field grey is positively blue, in absolute contrast. In the morning or evening mists, however, it is not so wonderfully invisible as the new French horizon blue. Late that evening we approached Hartennes; and an increasing fear rilled us that there would be no billets left, and that we should have to face this driving rain in open bivouac. But it was not to be; for Lindsay, our billet officer, had got excellent quarters in the farm for the men, and in the château for us. On such a day as this there is little of ' Tommy's irrepressible gaiety" to be observed; all of us were sick and miserable, cold and wet. Most of the battalion had a mild form of dysentery as well. But straw, and fire and tea, roused their drooping spirits; and the loud chatter of contented men filled the billets, while the guard shared their rations with the prisoners. Soon the guard, by the use of the wonderful lingua franca with which Tommy holds converse with all the world, were soon in deep conversation with their prisoners. The château gave us shelter; but it was cold and damp and the fires would not burn. The German soldiers who had inhabited the house the previous evening had pillaged and plundered everywhere; lamps and crockery all broken; linen chests and clothes-cupboards capsized upon the floors of every room. They had taken care to render the bedrooms uninhabitable for us by a lavish use of the filthy measures they employ to defile the beds and bedrooms they had occupied last night. We agreed that the German was an obscene and filthy beast; and lay upon the floor of a room downstairs to snatch what sleep the cold and the condition of our wet clothes would allow. It was part of my duty, on arrival in billets, to arrange for the disposal of Sergeant Thompson, the orderlies and stretcher bearers. They were always housed near me at Headquarters, so that I might keep an eye on the water carts, and be close to the medical equipment on the Maltese cart. But our water carts were almost useless; both of them had got in the way of shrapnel at Le Cateau. The filters were out of order and the jolting of the rough roads dislodged the packing with which we hoped to stop the leaks. When once the filters were rendered useless, we had to rely upon bleaching powders to chlorinate the water. The epidemic of dysentery and diarrhoea was a great anxiety to me; for, if it spread, it would most seriously interfere with the efficiency of the battalion. But what could one do; there were French women with water and wine in every town and every billet. Unripe fruit abounded; and it seemed hopeless to correct things, no matter how one tried or how rigid were the rules with regard to water and fruit. Nor can one pretend that biscuit and bully is an ideal diet for such a complaint. Next morning, thoroughly warmed and fed, we went upon our way still north and east in the direction of Soissons. In the distance we had heard, all day and night too, it seemed, the thunder of the French heavy artillery on our left. Soon we were upon the high tableland that forms the southern barrier of the valley of the Aisne. We were cheerfully confident that nothing but the Rhine would stop our advance. As we approached Serches, lying in its cup-shaped hollow among the woods, we could see the shrapnel bursting in the air far to our left. On the far horizon the French guns were making excellent practice against the heights above the Aisne, then strongly held by the enemy. All that day the weather had been particularly vile, and we were all looking forward to shelter and warm food in some kind of billets. Judge then of our disappointment, when we got orders to parade and ascend the steep hill again. Wet and miserable we struggled on, nearer to Ciry and the Aisne, and passing, on the way, the West Kents lying in improvised trenches overlooking the town. Down the steep hill we went, through the winding streets and on to La Sermoise. At the cross roads we halted just behind the Cavalry Brigade; then turned into a walled farm-hou
se, woke the occupants, lit fires and prepared the •evening tea and bully beef. Hardly three hours' rest, and no sooner, it seemed, had we comfortably established ourselves for sleep •on the stone floor of the kitchen than urgent orders came from the Cavalry Brigadier to get out and back to Serches again. The cavalry reconnaissance in the dark had got into touch with the enemy, in force, at Missy Bridge. The bridge was blown up; and our position, so far advanced, had become perilous in view of the possibility of a counterattack in force. The companies were roused, grumbling, from lofts and stables; transport horses harnessed up and, in pelting rain, at 2 a.m., we faced the climb up Ciry Hill and the four mile trek back to Serches. But there were two men for whom the cold and exposure had proved too much; these I had to leave behind, in the care of the Fifth Lancers, until such time as the ambulance would pick them up. In the morning we hoped that the Brigade would continue its advance. If the Cavalry had to retire, these men, both incipient cases of pneumonia, would be faced with the job of finding their way back as best they could. But they cared for none of these things; all the Germans on the Aisne would not have moved them, at that moment, from the warmth of borrowed French blankets.

  All the way back I marched with Pennyman, our senior subaltern and machine-gun officer, and gathered much information as to the distinguished record of the regiment to which I was attached. As dawn was breaking we got into billets in the vaults of the old church, converted in the time of the Revolution into a barn; here we had more tea and bacon and slept on the boards. Hardly, it seemed, had we dropped to sleep before the companies were paraded and we were off again. The day was beautiful, clear and blue; and we could admire the beauty of the autumn tints on Ciry woods as we descended the hill again. As we expected to be in action soon, and as the guns of Conde Fort were searching the wooded slopes, the heavy transport was left behind with Murray, our Quartermaster, and the battalion Sergeant-Major McWhinney. Down through Ciry again we went; the light transport carrying rations, the machine-gun section, ammunition mules, and last, but not least, my precious Maltese cart with Sergeant Thompson imperturbably in charge. The West Kents, the leading regiment of the brigade, preceded us and occupied the fine old town of La Sermoise, lying on the edge of the plateau just above the Aisne, and, at that moment, heavily shelled by high explosive and shrapnel. We halted for the morning on the edge of a cornfield among the woods of a cup-shaped hollow behind La Sermoise. Here, screened from enemy aeroplanes, we lay and made up for the lost sleep of many nights. All the morning our cow-gun battery of 60-pounders, on the high ridge behind us, shelled Conde Fort, while the big German howitzers vigorously responded. For all the world it seemed as if invisible trains were continually passing on some celestial railway above our heads. Late in the afternoon we were off again along the road to La Sermoise, halting dangerously at times, in column of route by the wayside. Fortune favoured us in that no searching Taube found us before we gained the shelter of the substantial houses of the town. In the gathering dusk the battalion marched down the wooded roads to Gombeen Wood, where they bivouacked for the night; while I established a dressing station in the shelter of the high walls of a little farm in the main street. Looking back I cannot help wondering that I chose so hazardous a position. At that moment it was safe; but in less than ten days the German guns began the systematic shelling of La Sermoise and all its buildings. As night fell the West Kents were heavily in action at Missy Bridge; and late into the darkness the machine guns kept up a continuous fire, like the hammering of a pneumatic rivetter upon steel construction work. Rapid rifle fire burst from both banks of the river. When the firing had ceased we made our way to the battalion to see Dering and get orders for the morrow. Silently the battalion lay, in the trenches, on either side of the road commanding the wrecked bridge. Stealthily we approached, and in whispers, for the river was barely fifty yards away. We learnt that the attack was for dawn and that we were to force the passage of the Aisne. Penny-man and I returned to La Sermoise and spent a restless night lying on the tarpaulin that covered my Maltese cart. At 4 a.m. Thompson came out with two fried eggs, the only eggs in the little town; then Pennyman left me and with his machine-gun section started for what, we all knew, was going to be the most difficult task we had yet embarked upon.