A Regimental Surgeon Read online

  Anxiously I leant upon the stone wall of the village overlooking the silent river, now wrapped in its cloud of morning mist. A single rifle shot, the hammer of a German machine gun, and I knew the battalion was at the river's bank. Soon the machine-gun fire became almost continuous and rapid fire rolled up and down the river banks; and I did not need anyone to tell me that the regiment was in a most desperate engagement. Going back into the village to see Croker, the medical officer of the West Kents, then established in an excellent temporary hospital of his own, I arranged to get on down to the river, if I could possibly manage it. He would take charge of all the wounded K.O.S.B.'s whom I might send back. Croker then was able to get into touch with the 13th Field Ambulance; and I would look after his regiment now engaged with the K.O.S.B.'s in the perilous crossing. My Maltese cart was ready; the old black horse, that had dragged it all the way in the Retreat from Mons, was plainly disgusted with the early hours and a miserable feed of hay in a strange stable. The stretcher bearers fell in and we set off down the sloping lane towards the river. In the lee of a wall we were in shelter from machine-gun and rifle fire; but the high explosive shells were tearing up the road before us, and we had to take to the fields to seek the cover of some haystacks. The open meadows were swept with rifle and machine-gun fire; there were no sheltering hedges or ditches; and it was clear that the Maltese cart could come no farther. Leaving Sergeant Thompson to make the best of his way back to the village, the stretcher bearers and I, in very open order, ran for it across the open to the ditch that crossed the field some 200 yards away. The ploughland was very heavy going; but we got there, hot and triumphant, and very much afraid. We were badly wanted, that I felt sure; and we could not wait very long. Still another wide open field had to be crossed before we could gain the shelter of a bank and a row of big poplars near the river edge. Another sprint, and we were under cover again behind the bank. In this spot was the Major commanding the field company of Engineers, cool and most collected, disdaining the shelter the bank gave us, and he doubted whether I could get across. The temporary pontoon bridge the Engineers had put up, further down the river, had just been blown up by a shell, and the only way for me was the canvas raft that, by chance, might still be intact. The two battalions were across, he told me; there had been very many casualties he was sure; there was no doctor across the river; and he wished me luck. Telling the stretcher bearers to keep open order and take good cover, I found a practicable ditch that led to the rushes by the river bank, and gained the friendly shelter of the reeds; outwardly calm, for one of my men had plumped down near and was watching me; but inwardly trembling. A hail across the river; a subaltern of the Engineers answered me and said that the canvas raft was sinking, and would I go to the pillars of the ruined bridge; there I might shout to the Sergeant-Major, who would ferry me across. This meant a run of 50 yards along the tow-path, and a glance showed me the danger. For, beside a long heap of white stones, there lay four of our men; and they were very still—for the snipers had got their range well against that white background. But the snipers failed this time; and, from the shelter of the twisted steel girders of the bridge, I hailed the Sergeant-Major of the Engineers. A machine gun was posted close behind him, and it took me some time before I heard that this boat was sunk and my only hope of crossing la}^ in the canvas raft, if it could be persuaded to float. Then a loud shout behind me, and from a cottage in the shelter of the road embankment I saw a soldier waving. This could only mean that wounded men were in that cottage, and I crawled along the embankment to see what I could do. Across the path was the body of one of our Cyclists, a Seaforth Highlander by his identity disc, who had carried his reconnaissance a little too far the previous evening. In the cottage were several wounded; these I dressed and gave the morphia they were in such need of. That night they would be carried to La Sermoise. Then I learnt that another Cyclist lay wounded in the toll-gate house, on the bridge head itself, and that no one had been to see him since he had dragged himself inside the previous afternoon. Now, the road was enfiladed badly; a well-timed run and I was through the window. Here lay my man with a fractured spine; in no pain, for he had not felt his legs from the time he was tumbled from his bicycle beside the door. He was in urgent need of relief to one of his abdominal organs; this done, I made him comfortable, gave him some cigarettes, left him reading the regulations for wheeled vehicles crossing the bridge, and told him I would return-again that night. He was a Lancashire Fusilier and he could not read French; but I left him quite happy and at ease. Dropping down the bank again, there was still that fifty yards of the path to be covered. How I hated those white stones! But the sniper was late again, and I was beside my stretcher bearer in the friendly rushes. Another conversation shouted above the tumult, and the Sapper officer consented to try the crossing to ferry me across. Now, this raft was constructed of green canvas, stuffed with hay, attached by a guy rope to a wire that spanned the river. But the raft had already done yeoman service in ferrying men and officers of the two battalions across, and was waterlogged. Anxiously I watched him, balancing precariously, as he worked the clumsy thing ashore. But, for this fellow, the bullets flicked the surface of the stream in vain. I looked round and, of all my sixteen stretcher bearers, only one was beside me. Gingerly we stepped upon this submerged craft and pulled ourselves across, and I was with the reserve company of my battalion. Now this Sapper officer's name was Johnston; afterwards he got the V.C. but was killed at Ypres in December. I shall not easily forget what an everyday affair this crossing might have seemed; so splendidly indifferent he was. A climb up the bank; a rush across the road; a swift tumble down the other side, and we were in the wood; a wood that seemed alive with death. How thankful I was that we had come in time; for there were wounded men everywhere and one didn't know where to begin. Then a corporal spoke to me and I turned aside to a little hollow; and there lay young Amos, one of our junior subalterns. Only the day before I had spoken to him as we lay lazily listening to the overhead shelling in the woods behind La Sermoise. He had behaved most gallantly at Mons, bringing in a wounded man of his platoon under a very heavy fire at a range of less than fifty yards. I remember I told him that he must have had a very watchful Guardian Angel. Now again had his Guardian Angel come to him; but with a wreath. He must have died very swiftly, for the aorta had been severed. He was the most promising of our junior subalterns, just from Sandhurst; yet he had become, already, a capable officer. But life was very short for all the officers in this battalion; and if death had not come now, it would surely have overtaken him in the next three months.

  At the edge of the wood, in a line with the shallow shelter trenches that our men had thrown up, was an old stone barn; clearly the one place in all that wood for my dressing station. Established there, the wounded were brought to me, dressed, and such crude surgery as was possible attempted. We had only the small surgical haversack, but it did good work that day. All day long the firing was incessant; and our two companies, spread out along the fringe of the wood, were badly enfiladed. Steadily the stream of wounded poured in until, in the shelter of that wall, there were soon over 150 wounded and dying. But our morphia never gave out, and my orderly was a very great help. All the time the rifle bullets cracked like whips above us. Then an enfilading machine gun worked steadily round our right flank, and the wounded, behind the wall, were in danger. Out we went and fetched them into the narrowing angle of shelter that was left; still the angle of safety narrowed, until I thought we should never keep our wounded whole. Then Pennyman was brought in, all limp and grey and cold; there was blood on his shirt in front, and my orderly, seeing the position of the wound, said, too loudly, that he was gone. This roused him, and I knew that the age of miracles was not past and that the bullet had just missed the big vessels at the base of the heart. Then an officer of the West Rents, Willoughby-Bell by name, was rushed to me in haste by the men of his platoon; he was bleeding furiously from a wound high up in the neck, and his carotid artery was divided. Fo
rtunately I had a bandage and scissors in my hand, and I plugged that severed vessel against the bone of the hard palate. Very seldom is it that a surgeon has the satisfaction of knowing that he has most surely snatched a soul from death; but this satisfaction was mine, for I sent him safely back to the Field Ambulance four days later. Coke and Dering and all our officers were splendid on that dreadful day, walking all along the line, encouraging the men, giving me a good word and, all the time, supremely contemptuous of the death that rustled through the undergrowth. The German snipers were posted up the trees in the rising ground on the right flank and took a steady toll of our men: it was they who got Amos in the open, and Pennyman serving his machine gun. One felt that one was very glad to be so close up and to be so helpful, and yet one felt so strangely helpless. There was so much to be done, and so many for whom surgery could do so little—the abdominal cases that died so soon; the brain cases that took so long to die. And of all the dreadful wounds in war the lacerating brain wound is the most harrowing; restless, noisy, delirious, the unhappy victims struggle with the men who would restrain them, babbling of private matters, of domestic things, crying for water and yet spitting it out when brought. Morphia is useless, chloroform alone prevails to still that brain to sleep, for an hour or two, until the morphia acts. But we were never short of morphia or of chloroform; for that we can be grateful.

  About six the firing died down; and we could withdraw our furthest company and entrench ourselves in safer shelters in the wood. Poor "D" Company again had got it badly; flung right out on our right, it had suffered the worst from sniper and machine gun. When it was safe to cross the road again and explore for a suitable shelter for the night I found, by lucky chance, the very place for my purpose. A semi-modern house built on the foundations of a twelfth-century farm-house, in a high-walled garden; four huge rooms and two big fireplaces placed in the stout cellars of the building. Great, groined ceilings that would withstand almost any shelling; stone walls of unimagined thickness; glass doors that opened to the gardens. Soon the floors were swept and garnished; large fires lit, clean straw from a neighbouring wheatfield laid down, and all was ready. It was clear that no ambulance could reach us that night. On mattresses and blankets, robbed from the rooms above, the chosen few of all our wounded were to lie. But it was getting dark and there was much to be done. The boat repaired and an old punt discovered, soon the lightly wounded were ferried across the river and sent back, with good guides, to the food and tea and warmth that I knew Croker had waiting for them in his hospital at La Sermoise. Then I hurried back to the wood and the hardest work began; but I had left them a little too long and the morphia had begun to wear off. The wood was full of groans; of cries of men who thought they had been forgotten; of stertorous snores of unconscious brain cases. Never could one forget such a night as this: pitiless rain; no lights we dared to show for fear of bringing upon us the machine guns that were so near; no stretchers. Hastily improvising from waterproof sheets and blankets, stretched on saplings, we gradually got the wounded to our hospital. There tea was ready and grateful warmth and more morphia and soft straw. The stretcher bearers now across the river, worked like the good fellows they were and toiled up the slippery clay banks with their painful freight all through the night. But it was hard to find the wounded in the dark and some were very still; and those that lay far out in the wood kept silent, when help was so close, for fear we were an enemy patrol that had come searching through the wood. Wounded men, like wounded birds, creep into ditches and bushes to hide. Wounded men in a wood at night. The recollection yields nothing in horror to Dante's "Inferno" itself. Not until 3 a.m. did we cease to hunt and find and bring them in; and then we left some out. For next morning they reported three men lying out; two were dead, they would have died anyhow. But one was very much alive; and though we tried to make amends, by giving him the hottest and most frowsty corner by the fire in the hospital, he recovered sufficiently to complain of our careless search, and still complaining, but otherwise fairly well, was carried off by the ambulance four days later.

  Now the 13th Field Ambulance could not send their wagons to Missy to take away the wounded; for the roads had been heavily shelled to incommode our wheeled transport; and the groping searchlights from Conde Fort and Chivres Hill were ever on the lookout for ration wagons. For three days our regimental headquarters tried to move Brigade headquarters to order the ambulances to help us out; but ambulances were precious and we were left with all the wounded on our hands. Over 150 of them, K.O.S.B. and West Kents, lay on the straw in hospital; but my Maltese cart had crept down from La Sermoise to the river and brought the medical and surgical panniers, beef tea and condensed milk. The feeding of the wounded was most difficult; but my requisitions to the Field Ambulance were never disregarded and, every night, the orderlies would come back loaded with tins of beef tea, milk, and dressings and morphia.

  But wounded men cannot, especially if they be British, live on beef tea and ration biscuits alone. So I cast about for fresh sources of supply. In a fine, moated house, a mile away along the river, might lie the food we wanted. Every evening, as the mist of dusk gave shelter from the ever vigilant snipers on Chivres Hill, I went out with an orderly to loot what I could. But the farmhouse was occupied by a farmer and his wife who had been left in charge by the owner. The proprietor of this house and farm was, strange to say, an Englishman, who had married the lady of this house many years ago. The place itself, a most beautiful example of fourteenth century building, had been partly wrecked by German shelling. At first it was not easy to establish satisfactory relations. All the way through France this quixotic army of ours had paid its way. No! Madame had no chickens: the Germans had taken all! And if she had, they had no eggs; did not Monsieur le Majeur know that this was not the season for eggs? And even if there were eggs, they were all under hens and in the process of being hatched. But "les pauvres pauvres blesses," I urged softly; and Madame's heart melted. Jean would get me eggs! Monsieur need not go to the hen roost with him. Milk? How would Monsieur expect milk when the German shells had so terrified the cows? Butter? Perhaps a very little portion for a wounded officer! Nevertheless, we always left laden with good things; and I came to look upon my evening walk as the most pleasant part of the day, the only exercise I ever got. Nor were these little trips quite free from excitement; for the Engineers were building a new pontoon bridge and the Germans knew it. By day the watchful aeroplane hunted for this, the only means of crossing the river, and the ranging shells searched the river morning and night. Nor were the snipers altogether asleep. But luck was with us; and the pontoon bridge suffered little damage. The chief harm was done to the fish; for the exploding shells sent them floating down the stream in hundreds, belly upward, much to the delight of "A" Company that lay entrenched by the river; they pulled them out with improvised landing nets.

  But our position was a perilous one from a military sense. Two regiments of the Brigade, thrown across the river and occupying the main road and the village of Missy, three-quarters of a mile in advance, were thrust, like a wedge, into the German position on Chivres Hill. The West Kents were entrenched along the road, their headquarters in dugouts burrowed under the high bank. We held the woods by the river and detached "C" Company, under Connell, our second in command, to hold Missy in conjunction with the East Surreys from the 14th Brigade. The latter held the line from the Bridge of Venizel to Missy. Later on, the West Ridings took over Missy village and endured a dangerous and exciting fortnight under constant shell fire. There the reserve companies of that regiment lived an underground life, in cellars, with all who were left of the obstinate French inhabitants; nothing would persuade these men and women to leave their homes. But our flanks were both in the air; and we had no line of retreat save by the damaged pontoon bridge. Why we were not rushed, we could never understand. We came to the conclusion that our salvation lay in the fact that the Germans were probably as much afraid of us as we were of them.