Part 41 (2/2)

Men die in transit, and, dying, hark back to early days. They call for their mothers, for their wives. They dictate messages that no one can take down. Unloaded at railway stations, the dead are separated from the living and piled in tiers on trucks. The wounded lie about on stretchers on the station floor. Sometimes they are operated on there, by the light of a candle, it may be, or of a smoking lamp. When it is a well-equipped station there is the mercy of chloroform, the blessed release of morphia, but more times than I care to think of at night, there has been no chloroform and no morphia.

France has sixty hospital trains, England twelve, Belgium not so many.

I have seen trains drawing in with their burden of wounded men. They travel slowly, come to a gradual stop, without jolting or jarring; but instead of the rush of pa.s.sengers to alight, which usually follows the arrival of a train, there is silence, infinite quiet. Then, somewhere, a door is unhurriedly opened. Maybe a priest alights and looks about him. Perhaps it is a nurse who steps down and takes a comprehensive survey of conditions. There is no talking, no uproar. A few men may come up to a.s.sist in lifting out the stretchers, an ambulance driver who salutes and indicates with a gesture where his car is stationed.

There are no onlookers. This is business, the grim business of war.

The line of stretchers on the station platform grows. The men lie on them, impa.s.sive. They have waited so long. They have lain on the battlefield, in the trench, behind the line at the dressing shed, waiting, always waiting. What is a little time more or less, now?

The patience of the injured! I have been in many hospitals. I have seen pneumonia and typhoid patients lying in the fearful apathy of disease. They are very sad to see, very tragic, but their patience is the lethargy of half consciousness. Their fixed eyes see visions. The patience of the wounded is the resignation of alert faculties.

Once I saw a boy dying. He was a dark-haired, brown-eyed lad of eighteen. He had had a leg shattered the day before, and he had lain for hours unattended on the battlefield. The leg had been amputated, and he was dying of loss of blood.

He lay alone, in a small room of what had once been a girls' school.

He had asked to be propped up with pillows, so that he could breathe.

His face was grey, and only his eyes were alive. They burned like coals. He was alone. The hospital was crowded, and there were others who could be saved. So he lay there, propped high, alone, and as conscious as I am now, and waited. The nurse came back at last, and his eyes greeted her.

There seemed to be nothing that I could do. Before his conscious eyes I was an intruder, gazing at him in his extremity. I went away. And now and then, when I hear this talk of national honour, and am carried away with a hot flame of resentment so that I, too, would cry for war, I seem to see that dying boy's eyes, looking through the mists that are vengeance and hatred and affronted pride, to war as it is--the end of hope, the gate of despair and agony and death.

After my return I received these letters. The woman who wrote them will, I know, forgive me for publis.h.i.+ng extracts from them. She is a Belgian, married to an American. More clearly than any words of mine, they show where falls the burden of war:

”I have just learned that my youngest brother has been killed in action in Flanders. King Albert decorated him for conspicuous bravery on April 22d, and my poor boy went to his reward on April 26th. In my leaden heart, through my whirling brain, your words keep repeating themselves: 'For King and Country!' Yes, he died for them, and died a hero! I know only that his regiment, the Grenadiers, was decimated. My poor little boy! G.o.d pity us all, and save martyred Belgium!”

In a second letter:

”I enclose my dear little boy's obituary notice. He died at the head of his company and five hundred and seventy-four of his Grenadiers went down with him. Their regiment effectively checked the German advance, and in recognition General Joffre pinned the Cross of the Legion of Honour to his regimental colours. But we are left to mourn--though I do no begrudge my share of sorrow. The pain is awful, and I pray that by the grace of G.o.d you may never know what it means.”

For King and Country!

The only leaven in this black picture of war as have seen it, as it has touched me, has been the scarlet of the Red Cross. To a faith that the terrible scene at the front had almost destroyed, came every now and then again the flash of the emblem of mercy Hope, then, was not dead. There were hands to soothe and labour, as well as hands to kill.

There was still brotherly love in the world. There was a courage that was not of hate. There was a patience that was not a lying in wait.

There was a flag that was not of one nation, but of all the world; a flag that needed no recruiting station, for the ranks it led were always full to overflowing; a flag that stood between the wounded soldier and death; that knew no defeat but surrender to the will of the G.o.d of Battles.

And that flag I followed. To the front, to the field hospitals behind the trenches, to railway stations, to hospital trains and s.h.i.+ps, to great base hospitals. I watched its ambulances on sh.e.l.led roads. I followed its bra.s.sards as their wearers, walking gently, carried stretchers with their groaning burdens. And, whatever may have failed in this war--treaties, ammunition, elaborate strategies, even some of the humanities--the Red Cross as a symbol of service has never failed.

I was a critical observer. I am a graduate of a hospital training-school, and more or less for years I have been in touch with hospitals. I myself was enrolled under the Red Cross banner. I was prepared for efficiency. What I was not prepared for was the absolute self-sacrifice, the indifference to cost in effort, in very life itself, of a great army of men and women. I saw English aristocrats scrubbing floors; I found American surgeons working day and night under the very roar and rattle of guns. I found cultured women of every nation performing the most menial tasks. I found an army where all are equal--priests, surgeons, scholars, chauffeurs, poets, women of the stage, young girls who until now have been s.h.i.+elded from the very name of death--all enrolled under the red badge of mercy.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

IN TERMS OF LIFE AND DEATH

One of the first hospitals I saw was in Calais. We entered a muddy courtyard through a gate, and the building loomed before us. It had been a girls' convent school, and was now a military hospital for both the French and British armies, one half the building being used by each. It was the first war hospital I had seen, and I was taken through the building by Major S----, of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

It was morning, and the corridors and stairs still bore the mud of the night, when the ambulances drive into the courtyard and the stretchers are carried up the stairs. It had been rather a quiet night, said Major S----. The operations were already over, and now the work of cleaning up was going on.

He opened a door, and we entered a long ward.

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