A Regimental Surgeon Read online

  Returning to the hospital we found some tea ready, but I was not without grave misgivings, so intense was the machine-gun fire and so unusual these strange explosions on our own front and over all the way to Violaines. The stretcher-bearers were so exhausted that we should have to keep for the night any wounded that might come in. In their dug-out behind the hospital they lay down to sleep. All was quiet, save for the restless groaning of the wounded just brought in, but I was uneasy and could not sleep. The sense of impending disaster oppressed me, and though we were accustomed to sleep through anything in perfect security behind our infantry, there was an ominous sound in the rising machine-gun fire. More of the big booming; the big shells were falling near the hospital now. Another visit to headquarters. The Divisional Staff were there in the trenches and a retirement was more than probable.

  Half-way back the machine-gun fire rose in a crescendo; a German cheer, and something moving on our right against the red glare that was Violaines on fire. There was no mistaking the spiked helmets. If I did not run for it I should be cut off from the hospital. It was 2 a.m., and the enemy were through and behind and around the hospital. I barred and bolted the door and turned to wake Thompson.

  Our only chance in the world was to get out by the back, but the wounded were awake and frightened, and our job was to stay with them. A glance through the back windows showed us the foldyard full of Germans firing through the windows, charging round the house.

  All men, in moments of great mental tension, instinctively and unconsciously, give vocal expression to the strain; some cheer, some shout, a few, only a very few, are silent, and they for want of breath; but the Germans grunted like pigs. The fear of death was on us all; the sense of impending dissolution, but all the time one was influenced by the extraordinary grunting noise the enemy made. Then I realised in a flash that we had no Red Cross flag; nothing to show that we were a hospital. But still they hesitated; they feared an ambuscade. They came close to the windows that were on both sides of the main room where our wounded lay, and fired point blank inside. It is curious that when the muzzle of a rifle is fired close to a window, not a single pane, but the whole sash falls inside. I dimly wondered at the cause of this; fear alone does not drive completely away the capacity of one's brain for receiving fresh impressions, and none could have been more frightened than we. But the glass fell on the wounded and there remained but the shelter of the cellar for us all. Down the steps we dragged them and blocked the foot with empty barrels. Then they burst in; still quite dark. How could they know we were a hospital? One could not have blamed them if they had bayoneted us. Again they feared an ambush and would only come to the top of the cellar steps, firing at us through the barrels. This, I thought, is the finish! But contenting themselves with placing a guard on the top of the cellar steps and over the cellar window that opened to the grass outside, they left us. Then came the dawn and they saw the bloodstained dressings, the medical equipment, the surgical panniers. It was clearly only a hospital. They quieted down and I essayed a journey up the steps to make our surrender. As I advanced, the sentry fired; I was very quickly back and resolved to try the window.

  If fear of death proclaims the coward, then ail men are cowards; but fearing death as they do, there are yet many men who fear more to appear afraid. Only in the imagination of the lady novelist or the war correspondent or those who fight their battles at the Base, does the man exist who knows no fear.

  I next tried my luck with the sentry over the cellar window, Thompson pushing me through. My friend the sentry was calm, and waved to me to come forward. I did not even have to put up my hands. But Thompson was less lucky, for another soldier came round the corner of the house and his bayonet went through Thompson's tunic. The unteroffizier, a tall man with a very decent face and a large goitre, spoke to me in French; told me he had got the stretcher-bearers too. He made me responsible for any attempt at escape. Beyond that, I was free to attend to the wounded and to keep the stove alight. But he must trouble me for my field glasses, my camera. No! German soldiers do not loot cigarette cases or money from prisoners.

  Again, he must ask me to be good enough to precede his search party, to make sure the barns and lofts were not hiding armed British soldiers. Yes! I would please go in front; I would also please observe the bayonets behind me. And I took no risks, calling loudly in every barn so that, if any wounded or stragglers (and men in a bout like this will creep in anywhere) were hiding, he should put up his hands at once. Fortunately the barns and lofts were free, and I could descend to the stove where my servant was making tea.

  The German soldiers struck me as quiet, stolid fellows who were quite fresh. The guard trooped into the kitchen, easily unshipped their packs on to the floor, took off their helmets and put on the flat forage caps. They were Prussians of the 27th and 120th Regiments, and they were from the Magdeburg district. A noise of many feet attracted me, and I looked to see a machine gun carried up to the loft above; while twenty-five snipers went to the tobacco storeroom that overlooked the deep ditches into which our battalion had retired close to Lorgies. A few tiles knocked out of the roof and the machine gun and snipers were hard at it. Most businesslike I thought them. Then our own cow guns opened on the farm and blew away two of its wings. Now, we had been shelled for weeks on the enemy side of the farm, and the east wing and gateway had been destroyed; but our own lyddite was far the worse. Where a German shell would blow in the whole of one wall of the farm, our own lyddite shell from the 60-pounder would blow in both. Standing in the doorway looking into the foldyard and pretending to be quite calm, I saw the machine-gun party and the snipers drawn up inside the inner wall of the west wing. The shelling had driven them from the roof. Then came a shell; both walls were blown in and the Germans hurled across the foldyard. Soon the hospital was filled with German wounded; among them, to my regret, the unteroffizier who never stole money from prisoners. His was a bad brain wound and he was only just alive. Then the shelling grew worse, and we were forced to the cellar, wounded and guard together. But Sergeant Thompson and I disdained the cellar and adopted what we hoped would appear a nonchalant air. As a matter of fact we were safer under the groined ceiling. Soon there was nothing left of our farm but the hospital main room and the cellar; these survived owing to the massive stone walls and wooden beams. Then the shelling stopped and the wounded were brought up again; the stove relighted. The wounded Germans were very good. They relied so implicitly on us and were very grateful. Repeatedly one of them said, in French, that he had every confidence in us. But soon this was for a time altered, for two brain cases began to cry out and struggle and call for water and babble of home and domestic things. Why was not I doing something for them? demanded the new unteroffizier, who was now in charge. In vain I said, "It is delirium, they do not really feel pain." " Then why do they cry out? " said my very literal inquisitor. And all the guard looked very ugly indeed. My French was not sufficient to enter into detail about the subjective sensations of pain. " See now,"I exclaimed;" this one calls for water, I give it and he spits it out. Regard the morphia I have injected. Yes! there is one other thing; chloroform; but the danger is great in such a case; see the brains already upon the floor!'

  There was only one thing to do with that threatening circle round us; chloroform we gave, and prayed they would not stop breathing. One of them did, but only for a while. When we had succeeded in sending them to sleep, the morphia did the rest. Then bandages were reapplied, and we were restored to favour.

  The German soldiers again upset the cherished opinion of a lifetime; under stress they were not all phlegmatic; when wounded they were not always brave and quiet and stolid. One of them, busy firing in the trench quite close, suddenly screamed out loud, threw down his rifle and ran for the hospital and me, with his hands to his face. A bullet had passed under his chin, through his tongue and out by the open mouth. A reassuring examination, my confident opinion that he was not about to die, that the wound was not serious, a little morphia, and
I was " lieber Doktor " again. But one thing they do not do—they do not crave a stimulant, as our men do and make tea on every occasion; they munched their bread and cheese and did not even as much as ask for our tea. This may be partly due to the fact that they suffer less strain, for they did only twelve hours in the trenches and twelve hours in billets in La Bassée, while our men were all their time in the trenches, and we had no supports.

  That afternoon a young German officer was brought in with a compound fracture of the thigh. He was very open and pleasant, and for a moment I wondered at the courage that allowed the application of the splint without a groan. Then I tested and found that his sciatic nerve was severed, and the absence of pain thereby explained. Three times we had to drag him to the cellar when our guns shelled us again. He also had confidence and good faith in all that we did, and he said so too.

  Three months later while in a prison camp, a German officer rode past me on the road, returned my salute, looked hard at my face and drew up. "Do you remember," he said, "that officer you looked after at La Bassée?" "Yes," I answered, "perfectly!" "Well! you will be sorry to hear that he died of tetanus three weeks after he left you." But my feelings towards Germans had changed, and I did not feel the least bit sorry; though, I omitted to say so at the time, as far as I remember.

  That evening our battalion counterattacked, and for a moment so close did their advance progress that we thought we were saved. Unable to conceal our delight we were hustled to the cellar and threatened with death should we even attempt to make a signal. But it was not to be, and the fire died down. At ten o'clock it was considered safe to get us out of the farm-house and escort us back to La Bassée. The stretcher-bearers carried some wounded, but the Germans in a most callous manner forced their own men to march; even those with head and thigh wounds, such as we ourselves would always carry save in great emergencies. The escort was very jumpy and anxious to get away, and my protests were disregarded.

  I have mentioned the first unteroffizier who held command of our detachment. He was a nice fellow with a goitre in his neck; he had been under chloroform more or less all day to still the ravings of his damaged brain. I shall not forget that before the shell laid him out, he came to see me, after he had seen the way we looked after the first dozen of their wounded, giving me back my camera and field glasses and thanking us for our work.

  No sooner, however, did we reach La Bassée than an officer halted me and our escort and ordered me to be stripped of every bit of my kit; this chivalrous fellow strung my glasses round his shoulder and contemptuously gave the rest to be divided among the escort. Had my watch, money and other treasures not been hidden inside my riding breeches I should have lost them all.

  Although I say it, who shouldn't, the German soldier receives very inferior treatment at the hands of his own regimental medical officer to that which our rank and file receives. I was soon to meet only too many of their regimental doctors. Clad in their becoming long blue coats, very similar to the combatant officer's uniform, they appear to be possessed of the desire of appearing to be more the soldier than the doctor. When well out of danger, they discard at every opportunity the huge 8-inch red cross their regulations prescribe. With high shining black boots of a splendour unimagined in wartime, spurs, sword and revolver, they are quite prepared to meet the brutal and licentious soldiers of Britain. But, as for attention to their wounded, they do nothing and seem to care nothing, merely giving their orders to dressing orderlies. To soil their hands with blood would be to imperil the snowy whiteness of their stiff linen cuffs. Now, I want to make it quite clear that I refer to the regimental medical officer, and not to the doctors of the field ambulance, who were of very different stuff.

  These German regimental doctors, as far as I could see, and from their own admissions, were never within two miles of a firing line, unless all was perfectly safe. They never went out to collect their wounded, but left it all to their armed stretcher-bearers. These latter took their turn with their rifles all day in the trenches, adorned with the Red Cross, and at night went out to look for wounded, still heavily armed. Now this is an indisputable fact, and is borne out by the evidence of very many of our wounded prisoners. That such stretcher-bearers as these would only find the wounded that lay close to hand and in sheltered positions, goes almost without saying. Indeed, I know from my own experience with them at La Bassée that their wounded were for hours often out at night, and they had, on an average, to wait at least twelve hours longer for their morphia than our own. When I speak of morphia with regard to wounded men, I do not wish to convey the impression that our wounded got, save in the rarest exceptions, any morphia from the Germans; that was far too precious for "Schweinhund Englander."

  Most important is it that a responsible person, though medical officer himself, should go where his stretcher-bearers do; for there are good and bad stretcher-bearers. And if the search for wounded is not systematically laid out by the doctor, he may be certain that some will be left out all night.

  CHAPTER IV

  IN GERMAN HANDS

  In La Bassée I was separated from my wounded and my orderlies and taken to the dressing station of the 120th regiment, installed in a café in the main street of the town. But there was no sign of camaraderie on the part of my German confreres to me. This puzzled me at first; for in medicine and surgery there are supposed to be no frontiers, no international boundaries; later on, of course, I got to know that the German doctors and nurses behaved most vilely towards our wounded and prisoners.

  I was hungry, and I did not mind telling them so. A small steak of horseflesh was eventually brought to me and some beer, and I was graciously permitted to occupy a corner of a table, over the rest of which a wounded German major sprawled. He finished his meal in silence, rapped his empty beer mug on the table, and said in excellent English, "I am wounded, you see, and by a dum-dum bullet; what swine you English are! "This I denied with heat, and soon we had an excited audience. Each of them kept repeating stories of his personal knowledge of dumdum bullets being discovered on English prisoners; and of the wounds which they all were certain were made by explosive bullets. Out they rushed me to some houses to see the wounds caused by explosive bullets, the existence of which I had denied. They showed me five or six men with big lacerated exit wounds. "Show me my own wounded," I said, "and I can show you the counterpart of every wound like this in them." So to a dirty house we went; and, sure enough, there were our English wounded lying on the bare floor, and by great good fortune exhibiting just as bad wounds as those existing among the Germans. Our men were frightened, but were comforted by seeing me. To those who were in dire need, and they were many, I gave the last of my morphia. When I suggested that they might, at least, have mattresses, the senior German doctor said, decidedly, No!—they were lucky to be alive after all their countrymen had done. Back in the café the argument was renewed. I told the wounded major, the only reasonable one among them (the less militant and non-combatant branches of the German service are always the most savage), the reason of all this talk of dum-dum bullets. All this misunderstanding about explosive ammunition, I said, lay in the pointed Spitz bullet that we had copied from the Germans themselves. We had no dum-dums; they could believe it or not, as they liked. I had seen hundreds of rounds of ammunition poured out on the floor of very many dressing stations. That was the order with the English; no ammunition in hospitals or ambulances. To do the major justice, he did not believe it, and said so without ceremony. The whole trouble, I went on, lay in the fact that we are using a most unstable bullet; instead of, as in the Boer war, using a cylindrical bullet with its centre of gravity in the centre, we were using a cone-shaped bullet with its centre of gravity at the base. Contrary to all laws of mechanics this bullet was forced to travel point foremost when the base should have gone first, so, when any surface was struck obliquely, the bullet turned and went through sideways. Hence the small entry and the huge lacerated exit wound. The worst offender was the German, as it was the sma
llest—this they denied with many oaths; the best, the French bullet that was so big. There were, of course, in all armies, men who might mutilate a bullet in the savage anger that follows the death of a friend. Yes, in all armies, they assented, except the great and noble army of the Fatherland!