A Regimental Surgeon Read online

  All day long from one dressing post to another I made my way. We must have been the despair of the snipers; they had got five of our signallers on their way with messages, and the pipe-major was lying in the ditch, very badly wounded, but sufficiently alive to be more worried about his pipes than his wound that we dared not properly dress. Two pellets of morphia on his tongue was the best that one could do. That day, "D" Company lost both its officers; Caird, the " C" Company Commander, badly wounded in the early morning advance, lay out for twelve hours before we could get to him: Macrae, the sole surviving officer of yesterday's engagement, was hit in the head, and died later in the ambulance. And the Dorsets on our left were in worse trouble than we, for they had advanced in force against Givenchy. All day long the machine guns hammered and shrapnel swept that unhappy regiment. By evening they had 400 casualties, including sixteen officers. So light was the field of fire—the brewery behind them was ablaze— that the Dorset doctor could not get to all his wounded, and they lay out that night. When morning broke and the fire died down only the slightly wounded were alive; the cold rain and exposure effectually robbed the rest of their chance of life. Here, then, was an instance of the value of warmth, tea and a sheltered dressing station. Of one thing one can be certain, that severely wounded men will not stand the exposure of night on the field and survive. Wounds associated with much shock, compound fracture of the hip and shoulder joints, and fracture of the thigh, chest wounds, will often do quite well, and rapidly recover from the initial shock when the soldier is kept warm, and morphia given.

  Late that night the ambulance came to Cambrin and evacuated the majority of the wounded; but the others were on my hands all night. About midnight the Presbyterian Padre, who always kept a kindly eye on this, the only Scottish regiment of the Brigade, came out to bury Major Allan, Woollcombe, and the rank and file. In the early hours the Pioneers, under Sergeant Pike, brought in the dead and buried them in the orchard behind a little farm.

  Next day the fight continued, but we had learnt our lesson and knew that Guinchy was far too strong to storm. No more expensive onslaughts. But the enemy were not inclined to let us rest, and attacked the cemetery and the barricade, happily without success. That morning our machine gun under Anthony Dering was in action close to the advanced dressing station. My work over, I went across the road to Connell. At that moment the machine-gun corporal was hit in the chest. As he sank down, I well remember that our feeling was not one of horror, as one might expect, but of surprise and wonder that so much dust could rise from his tunic. Later on, I took some stretcher bearers out to empty the advanced dressing station of wounded, and on the way conducted the reserve half-company led by Robertson, one of our newly-arrived subalterns, up to reinforce "B" Company. I knew the road well, but, just as we arrived at the lane that led up to "B" Company's trenches, a tremendous cheer rose from the whole line of German trenches. A furious burst of machine-gun fire followed and the whole German line rising to the attack charged down upon us. Particularly in the direction of "D" Company, now in command of Ferguson, did the main attack appear to be coming; and that company had been sadly depleted during the previous two days. Robertson's half-company was caught in the open and the position was critical, but there was no hesitation about this young officer. Ordering his men to double he ran them rapidly up into the trench in front. If the enemy had burst through we were all done. On either flank we were cut off. But "D" Company held fast and the attack fizzled out before our trenches were reached. Ferguson told me that though 2,000 at least had cheered, only 200 Germans had charged and our rapid rifle fire stopped them, the rest turned tail and fled. The scare over, we set to work to collect our wounded, now increased by Dorsets, Yorkshire Light Infantry, and some Belgian soldiers. The latter were very brave and insisted on being allowed to bring their rifles with them to the ambulances. Why they were so keen to keep them, when they were all more or less severely wounded, I could never discover. Among the K.O.Y.L.I, was a machine-gun corporal, afterwards known to fame as the " Bermondsey V.C." He was a very gallant fellow, and, though severely wounded in both thighs was very anxious to tell me that he had just that day been awarded the "Medaille Militaire" by the French, for conspicuous service at Le Cateau. Holmes, that is his name, retiring with the remains of his section, had come across one of our field guns, the leading horses and all the gunners laid out by a burst of shrapnel. Cutting out the leaders and putting a Bombardier, the only survivor, on the limber, he mounted the wheels and brought the gun out of action into safety. But the pace was hot and he did not tarry in his headlong flight, so the poor Bombardier was jerked off the limber, and was never heard of again.

  Late that night we were relieved by the French, and the Colonel of the battalion, with some of his officers, came to sup with us at Headquarters—minced bully beef and eggs was the feast. The Colonel told us that as a lad he had fought in the war of '70. Most businesslike they were as they led their battalion to relieve us, bringing their telephone, and creeping in silence along the grass by the side of the road up to our trenches. But our men, asleep from sheer exhaustion, grumbled loudly at being wakened and set up a loud chorus of " Where's ma entrenching tool," etc.: all flavoured with the British soldier's favourite adjectives, as if there were no such things as German machine guns within 200 yards. When they were finally persuaded to leave their trenches, they chattered so loudly down the road that our French friends were positively aghast at such indifference to the risks of war. But we were always like that.

  That night, as the ambulances had not yet arrived, I stayed behind at the main dressing station in Cambrin and slept on the floor of the best bedroom of the Mairie. Next morning a little procession, headed by the Maltese cart, pursued the battalion back through Annequin and Beuvry to Richebourg l'Avoue, where we halted. The Germans had evacuated the town, leaving evidences of their late occupation in a number of dead horses that smelt to heaven, and many graves. Among them officers' graves, begar-landed with evergreens, and each surmounted by the dead man's helmet. It says a great deal for the respect our soldiers paid to these graves that weeks after the helmets were still in place. The retreating German doctor had left a message pinned on to the door of a house for the English doctor who, he knew, would be following: it was to the effect that there was a child in the house, sick of meningitis, and that it should not be disturbed. The room was hot and crowded with men and women, Belgian refugees, but the German doctor was right, and the child was gravely ill. Medicine was given and full directions for treatment left, together with a supply of beef tea and condensed milk.

  Weeks later when I was a prisoner, I met that German doctor in La Bassée, but he laughed as he asked me about the child. " What soldiers you English are," he said. " Did it not strike you that that child had

  H no less than two mothers and four fathers in the house? If you had during your halt also searched the attics you would have found six of our telegraph signallers left behind. You did not even cut our telephone cable and we got the most accurate information of the strength of your Brigade as you passed through."

  It was all so true. We never did suspect anxious relatives of being spies or search the half-ruined houses, or even cut the fine insulated copper wire that lay so abundantly along the roadside: though we often remarked on the careless and extravagant way the German engineers left their wire behind them. We shall never become masters of spying or intrigue. The art of bribery, even, we do not understand, as this war has so abundantly demonstrated. We learned at last: but at what a cost! Can we wonder that during the early months of war every move of ours seemed to be anticipated, and every important Brigade order known to the enemy as soon as to the battalions themselves?

  In the street at Richebourg I noticed a curious freak. A lime tree, not more than 6 inches in diameter, had been perforated by a 3-inch shell; a round hole was cleanly driven through it, yet the tree was otherwise intact and still standing. That night we bivouacked at the distillery west of Lorgies, and knew that
La Bassée, four miles away, was our new objective.

  In the night we went along the main chaussée, the important highway towards La Bassée, to the crossroads at Lorgies. There we woke up Headquarters of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, then sleeping in the soft straw on the floor of an inn. We were to relieve them before dawn and I naturally wanted to find a good house for my dressing station; as sheltered as possible, and yet reasonably near to the front trenches. A regimental doctor who is not up with the Companies is no good. To expect wounded men to be brought half a mile or so to the rear to a dressing station, is to ask too much of stretcher bearers; to require a wounded man to cover the dangerous half-mile behind the trenches, helped along slowly by his pal, is to provide the sniper with a mark of which he well knows how to take advantage. Often and often, times without number, have unwounded men been sacrificed in bringing back a wounded man to the doctor.

  Coke, the most careful of commanding officers, would only be satisfied if he himself inspected the trenches which his battalion was expected to occupy, and if he personally got into touch with the battalion on either side. In the prisoners' camps in Germany you will meet one or two companies of many of the regiments of the British Army, captured at one swoop after desperate resistance. The enfilading machine gun, that is pushed up at night into the gap between two battalions and dominates both lines of trenches at dawn; therein often lies the key to these captures on a large scale. To get into touch, to keep in touch and to keep on keeping in touch; that saves a battalion from disaster.

  Back again to our billets, and before dawn we were all safely in position. My dressing station was chosen in a most suitable walled farm-house, built in a square, with a central fold yard, pigsties and cowhouse all round; granaries and tobacco-drying kiln on top. It lay just behind the line of trenches, and a sheltered way for wounded ran behind the hedge of the tobacco field. Headquarters were established in the cellar of the house to my left front. On our right lay the Cheshires strung out in trenches to the town of Violaines with its sugar factory, with its dominating chimney. Violaines itself was occupied by the Cheshires and the Dorsets. On our left the Manchesters held trenches to lilies.

  We had been lent temporarily to the 15th Brigade, and we did not like it a little bit. At length came the expected order to attack, and very gallantly over the open, through fields of the eternal sugar beet, went " A" Company. The cow-guns behind us and 18-pounders had plastered the enemy trenches with lyddite and storms of shrapnel swept the parapets, but although the German trenches were well constructed and timbered, most of the enemy took shelter behind the big sugar factory in front of which they had dug their trenches. Now, an evening reconnaissance had been previously made, and the presence of six machine gun emplacements determined; this was reported to Brigade. So when "A" Company, very much attenuated by this time, advanced to the attack these machine guns opened out and proved the accuracy of the reconnaissance. There was nothing for it but to take what cover could be had, and to withdraw at night; Lindsay and Holme, who led the attack, escaped unhurt, but the company lost about 50 per cent, of its strength. There are times when men apparently go mad and nothing will restrain them. Such a case happened here; for Sergeant Stewart and some men would not take cover, but dashed off over the open stubble, six men to storm the whole of La Bassée. There they fell, and there they lie to this day, as far as I know. Stewart had done his twenty-one years and had just got an excellent job as timekeeper in a factory in Scotland. He had been ill at Wallun, and I had seen much of him. The attack that "A" Company made disclosed one curious fact, that in the front German trenches, not more than 300 yards away, a light field gun was mounted, firing point-blank shrapnel on our forward trenches. One of our sergeants coming back with a message was hit by an unexploded shrapnel shell: his pack was torn clean away as well as his tunic, but beyond intense shock and a grazed shoulder he was intact.

  For two weeks we lay in front of La Bassée, until we knew every church tower and the windows of the sugar factory by heart. All went well with the medical arrangements; and though a constant stream of wounded kept me constantly busy, we always got our wounded in before daylight. Night after night we beat the roots in front of the trenches and searched the ditches. But once we were at fault. Two men of "A" Company, friends, as every individual soldier has a pal with whom he shares everything, were hit in front of the trenches and we couldn't find them. They had mistaken our stealthy search for the approach of an enemy patrol and kept quite still when help was once very close at hand. One had a fractured spine —the other a shot through the shoulder. The man with the fractured spine was in no pain, and with the privileges that attend friendship, cursed his comrade for not bringing him in. But his friend could do no more than drag him to a ditch. They quarrelled all night; and still quarrelling we found them next day. In the morning a pitiful little flag was seen waving; a very dirty handkerchief tied to a stick.

  From the roof of the farm hospital the whole line of trenches was easily in view, and I noticed how extraordinarily conspicuous the flat caps of our soldiers were. They never blend into any landscape, and the most carefully concealed trenches are given away by the even circles that are so foreign to any natural background. No wonder that the Taube, that quartered the ground, could direct so accurate a shrapnel fire upon our trenches. There is, in fact, no compensating advantage in the flat cap; there must be a break in the contour of any form of headgear to make it unnoticeable. The feather the Queenslanders wear, the drooping plumes of the Bersaglieri mask an otherwise conspicuous hat. The German helmet, were it not for the tell-tale spike, is as good as any. Here, one day, Gillespie, one of the most promising and responsible of all our subalterns, was brought in with the type of brain wound for which surgery, that can often do so much, could do nothing at all. We buried him the next day under the pear tree behind the farm-house.

  One of our subalterns, Cox, was to the casual observer not the least the type of man for the stern reality of war. A perfect knowledge of French and a fondness for the intellectual life marked him as a most un-English soldier, but in that aesthetic body lived a most splendid spirit. When some men of his Company had their heads down behind a parapet and were at the mercy of the German attacking party that had their heads up and covered every inch of our parapet with rifle fire, Cox rallied his men and got their heads up to see where they were shooting, in spite of machine-gun fire that sprayed along the trench and flicked dust from the parapet. Ready wit came to his aid, and calling out, " You are not afraid of a pack of blooming German waiters, are you? " he pulled up his platoon. The wound in his neck that was the fine he paid did not prevent him sticking to his job all day long; only at night, when all was quiet, did he come to me for dressing, and then insisted on going straight back in spite of the strongest objections I could make. He was killed at Hill 60. The ambulance wagons used to come to Lorgies, to the cross roads, but the regimental stretcher-bearers have to carry the wounded the long distance from the hospital to the crossroads. The position of these crossroads on the map coincided with the " L " of Lorgies; hence, when special messages were sent to the field ambulance, the place of meeting was always designated by its map position in relation to one of the letters of the printed word. So much has this map reading and map designation become the feature of the Service that it is told of one private soldier addressing his chum, " Where shall I meet you, Bill," " At the second ' o' in bloody," was his reply. One morning, gazing idly in the direction of the German trenches with my glasses, I noticed a soldier get out of the trench and run back to pick up something, and then return to the trench again. He had his pack and helmet on, and I knew that he would not be carrying his equipment for pleasure. Luncheon, it so happened, was served that day in a dug-out, substituted on account of increased shelling for the village house, where we were before. When I told Coke of what I had seen, I found that he had already gauged the seriousness of the situation and realised even without my piece of evidence that we might well have to meet an att
ack in force. It was wonderful luck that we moved that morning, for the house was blown to pieces after we had had breakfast.

  Just after luncheon an urgent call came from the Cheshires; their CO. had been wounded and their doctor could not get to him, would I go? Of course I would, and did. We got him safely to a cottage, with a hot stove, dressed his wound and gave morphia, not only to relieve pain, but also to still the lung movement as far as possible, and thus attempt to stop the haemorrhage into the chest cavity which follows these wounds of the chest. But Mahony was an old West African Officer, and the shock was great. Officers and men of long tropical service stand severe wounds very badly. Though I got him safely back to ambulance that night, I heard that he died later. Our return from this cottage was barred by an enemy machine gun making such excellent practice on the door that it was madness to try to get out. When I had finished with Mahony, I went up to the top attic. And as I looked the enemy attack developed and the German infantry left their trenches. To me it was in many ways the most interesting sight I had seen; for, from this point of vantage we could watch the whole attack from the beginning.

  Now we were always told, and up to now it had been our experience, that German soldiers had no initiative, that they were automata; that they charged in swarms, because the individual advance was impossible to such men drilled so thoroughly by the machine that they were incapable of separate independent action. But these Germans broke all these rules as they had so often done in other ways before. They poured out of the ends of the trenches, spread out into most perfect open order and advanced at the double; nor was any officer visible. Some ran and dropped, so that I thought the whole line had been wiped out by our fire, but these men were foxing; and those who fell face downward soon got up to run forward again. Not so with the killed or wounded, they lay on their sides or, spinning round in the air, they fell supported by their packs, in a half reclining position. They were sitting with their backs to our trenches, their heads dropped forward, and they looked as if they were asleep. We saw that that was the sleep that knows no waking; for they stayed like this, quite still, all the afternoon. Taking the cover of every natural object, they got behind trees or wagons or mounds of earth; so they advanced up to within 100 yards of our position, and our field of fire not being good, there they found shelter. The unteroffizier was especially gallant, for he ran to a mount of light soil, laid his glass on the top and closely examined our trenches, with elbows spread upon the top. From time to time he would turn his head to speak to two orderlies who crouched beside him like spaniels. The Cheshires fired a number of rounds, but owing to the intervening leaves and branches, they could not get him. I knew him for an unteroffizier by the shape of his helmet and the sword that hung by his side. During a lull we brought Capt. Mahony to the hospital and found much to do that had arisen in my absence. Later on at headquarters we heard that the enemy had occupied some cottages, known as " Les trois maisons." Sounds of a cold chisel on brick came plainly to us, and we knew quite well what that foreboded, for it is the pet practice of the enemy to knock hunks out of a house wall to enable them to poke through the nose of a machine gun and enfilade our trenches. Something had to be done. It meant a bayonet attack at night with all the attendant horrors of night attacks; for in these operations men get confused by the darkness; they bayonet one another as well as the enemy, they lose their way, they lose their sense of direction and wander on to enemy trenches. This would mean much work for me later, so the hospital was cleared and the wounded handed over to the Manchesters' doctor in Lorgies. The empty hospital was cleaned, fresh straw laid on bloody mattresses, and all was soon ready for the casualties we expected. But the situation was not comfortable. As night fell the fighting at Violaines increased in intensity, big high-explosive shells burst with a boom of a thousand thunders in the village. This strange boom, I learnt soon after, was the shell-burst of the 38-centimetre gun that had just arrived behind La Bassée from Antwerp. The Cheshires were very weak—none of us had supports—and if the line gave on our right, our flank would be turned. An officer patrol returned with the news that the enemy was in such force that our proposed bayonet attack was off. " C" Company then fell back into the tobacco field that lay in their rear.