With the B. E. F. In France: From a Surgeon's Journal. Iii
Friday, June 15, 1917, CAMIERS A CONVOY early this morning — as usual, about 1 A.M. Fitz handled them well. It’s been very hot — a good thing we have no thermometer. Fortunately the nights are better. It’s also very dry. Young Captain Ingram has just been here from his present quarters at No. 26 General, near Étaples. He’s been in since Mons, where he got hit — now has a shortened arm and wears a D. S. O. ribbon. Wanted to see the flowers he’d planted in the border of the drainage ditch encircling his — now my — conical tent.
There is quite a showing of bright blossoms which he calls Virginia stock, among them some little blue nemophilas. Just behind these a few patches of scarlet Linum, if that’s the way to spell it, and a few ditto of dwarf (very) nasturtiums. Then come (D. V.) a line of scarlet godetias, a few Shirley poppies, a thin line of mignonette, and at each corner some sweet peas now about eight inches high, but which (he assures me) are to be very wonderful — Queen Alexandra, Duke of Westminster, Lord Nelson in flesh tints, and some other lord or lady I disremember. All this from a circular mound of clay a foot wide around the tent.
We Americans are too new at soldiering to see the importance of such things, and poor Ingram looked sadly at the little market garden beside the mess hut which has not been weeded since we took over, and where parsnips, radishes, and carrots about two inches high are concealed by weeds of six. This is the way races overgrow one another, — the more undesirable, the deeper they root, — and I wonder what will happen here at the end of this blooming war. Talk of our American melting pot! For here are Annamites and Egyptians, Zulus and Kaffir laborers (these last in a barbed-wire compound adjoining ours), Chinese coolies, Algerians and Indians — at least there once were. The labor battalions must far outnumber the male natives, — certainly the breeding natives, — and the women, it seems, are none too moral or fastidious. Well! I ’d rather think of Ingram and his flowers. Scarlet pimpernels grow everywhere hereabouts. They, at least, breed true.
Sunday P. M., and stifling hot. The larks like it, however, and they are singing madly. Been tacking some oilcloth, which Harry Lyman has procured, on my packing-box washstand and dresser. Very fine. The Boston tins, too, are well adapted for compartments in one’s dresser. Butler, my batman, seems to take an interest, though just why I do not know, except that these Britishers of the lower classes make extraordinarily good servants. He came out with the Second Army in 1915, was wounded at Loos, in hospital eight months with a badly shattered arm — fortunately left. Now he is P. B., which, opened out, means ‘ Permanent Base ’ — in other words, unfit for other duties than at the base. He might have been T. B. or even P. I. or dead. So Butler, after all, is lucky — so am I.
Our neighbors at No. 22 under Hugh Cabot are a festive lot, and, having unoccupied territory in their environ, play baseball vigorously once or twice a week — an open challenge. Yesterday some gunners from the training camp (infantry) at Hardelot, between here and Boulogne, accepted the challenge and were sadly beaten.
Monday, June 18
Disciplinary court session — wards — operating. Private Fordham and his brain abscess. Much about delayed tetanus, of which we have four cases. Some of the boys skeptical. Colonel Lister, the eye specialist, to tea. Says there are an immense number (2000?) totally blind among the Italian troops — shells dropping on hard rock send off myriads of fine particles. Sand bags, of course, have same effect everywhere. Sand blown right through lids — and the globes are burst.
Wednesday, the 20th
Difficulties with the electric current, which we can only use by courtesy of No. 18. It went off duty just as I had a nail in Fordham’s abscess and was about to connect with the magnet.
Thursday, the 21st
Succeeded in getting the piece of shell three inches deep in Fordham’s brain. Hope the principle of ‘fixing’ the abscess cavity a possible one. Rose Bradford here in P.M., which cheered the internists greatly. This old encampment is infested with rats. Accordingly the gunners — they seem to be the most resourceful people hereabouts — appear with three yellow ferrets, a sheep dog, and many clubs. One rat secured, I believe. The British soldier dotes on a sporting event.
Friday, the 22nd
One of the many things I have to learn is how to get out of a tightly buttoned-up bell tent when the ropes are soggy and shrunken after a night’s rain. I can manage the underwear, but the outer layer from inside beats me after one’s batman has buttoned and laced it up securely from outside during the storm. Ligation of vertebral artery for traumatic aneurysm.
Wednesday, June 27, 6 P.M.
Hot. S. I. T.1 Major Goodwill here to-day in a large motor car talking copiously of ‘reconstruction’ — must organize our American medical forces on the basis of reconstruction — going home Saturday to see Gorgas about it before he gets organized on some other basis. G. is a fine chap, though visionary. He came down to earth for a moment, in order to enter the slit in my palatial abode. In this process he observed that my garden needed weeding, and, stooping casually, pulled three varieties of weeds. I have long known it needed weeding, but as I could n’t tell the dwarf nasturtiums from French weeds (though I am studying ‘French self-taught with phonetic pronunciation’ while I shave in the morning) I did n’t dare try any reconstruction business on my own hook. This is bad, too, because Ingram cycles over twice a week from Étaples to see how ‘they’ are getting on, and looks rather sad.
I therefore surreptitiously preserved the three samples of G.’s weeding and put them away where ‘P. B.’ Butler could n’t find them. With the aid of these specimens, I have just weeded my southeast quadrant and it’s quite wonderful. To-morrow for the northcast, and I hope Ingram will come over in the evening. I shall pretend that it was the first opportunity I have had to do any redding up. There’s nothing but clay southwest and northwest — not even weeds.
We have a new D. O. R. E. in our district — Colonel Kitto. The R. E. is easy, — viz., Royal Engineers, — but D. O. beats me as yet. Anyhow, he is an important person to cultivate, particularly when you want to get the roof of the mess hut retarred, some linoleum on the floor, another electric light, and the kitchen made dustand water-tight.
To No. 26 with Ingram — a fine new layout all in huts! A special ward with a laboratory — heavy accent on the first o, please — in charge of Bashford. Great opportunity for work. B. doing some interesting things with CarrelDakin fluid on pollywogs. Very simple way of determining the relative bactericidal powers of different fluids.
Sunday, July 1
Much rain the past few days, leaving us in a sea of mud, which possibly accounts for my state of mind. We have learned from the Canadians that we have been given the poorest place for a hospital in France. So bad it was even two years ago that the McGill Unit, who were then here, refused to ‘carry on’ and were removed to the heights above Boulogne. It has since had a hand-to-mouth existence and become much deteriorated. It was offered to the Engineers, who said it might do for a hospital, but not for them. We’ve been at it a month now, and, aside from the C. O.’s justifiable grumbles about the water and milk and sump pits and sanitation in general, I’ve heard no complaints.
We were organized by the Red Cross for a 500-bed base hospital. We at this date have 1876 patients in our marquees, and during the month 3000 have passed through our hands. Our equipment has never been received and we’ve just learned that it was sent off to Halifax after the disaster there, rather than to us. We have to borrow a motor ambulance to do our marketing.
All this has been taken in the day’s work, but it seems time now to find out what we are to look forward to — either remaining here with the B. E. F. for ‘duration’ and spending our company fund to make the place habitable, or carrying on as best we can ‘as is,’ with the expectation of being transferred to the A. E. F. Meanwhile our flags so movingly consecrated by Bishop Lawrence have scarcely been out of their rubber cases since we left Fort Totten. I wish the nurses and men were equally well protected from the cold and wet.
July 4
Vive l’Amérique! An historic day to have arrived in Paris — though a bad one for my particular quest on this very account. After a real bath at the Crillon, I met the Strongs hustling about — must go immediately to Les Invalides — they have tickets — special seats — Pershing — American troops — Fourth of July — punctually at nine — great doings, and so forth. So, breakfastless, I joined them and we rushed off in a decrepit taxi, but soon became so mixed up in the crowd we never got to our seats — merely saw between people’s heads the bayonets of our boys squared up in the inner court. The corridors were jammed with poilus and others, frantically cheering while Pershing received two banners from the descendants of men who had fought with Lafayette.
I escaped back to breakfast and was just opening an egg when they came marching across the Place de la Concorde — about a battalion, I should think, of not especially well-set-up or well-drilled troops — newly enlisted men of the 16th Infantry, I believe — marching in squads.
I left the egg and joined the excited populace, which was fairly mobbing the men, covering them with flowers — quite thrilling. In the midst of it all a daring aviator swooped into the square — down, it seemed, almost to the people’s heads, certainly below the level of the obelisk — turned corners standing on one wing, then on the other — rose again, dived down and up once more — looped the loop once or twice — then climbed and was away to the south. A most dare-devil, Gallic performance. Guynemer, they said it was — an ace — many German planes to his credit — in a new Hispano-Suiza machine capable of 200 kilos an hour. Sounds fast — especially the Suiza.
I walked back to the Crillon wondering about my egg, when I encountered some American Ambulance people — a Mr. Williams, an Auxiliaire named Mrs. Rhodes, and a newly arrived Mr. Turnbull of New York — who insisted that I go with them to the ceremony at the Picpus. The cemetery where Lafayette is buried is in a remote part of Paris, and we reached there some half hour before the battalion arrived. Though allowed in the churchyard, we were held up at the small enclosure where is Lafayette’s tomb, among others, surrounded by an old crumbling wall about ten feet high.
We waited while many pundits were shown through the gate; and, having had our offer to go through in company with them politely refused once or twice, we stood wondering what to do. Others, many of them in fact, were in the same boat, and we kept encountering folks like Major Parsons of the Engineers and his wife who shared in our ambition. At this juncture various kinds of people — newspaper photographers, some blessés (not very blessé) and some French people of neither military age nor military sex — began to scale the wall with the aid of a ladder procured from somewhere.
A Frenchwoman, well astride, beckoned to Mrs. Rhodes that there was room beside her, and up she went without a moment’s hesitation. So I followed and straddled the wall between a Moroccan petit-officier covered with medals and an oldish man who said he was a Belgian from Dixmude. This was a Humpty-Dumpty performance, but we had the best possible view of the ceremonies below us and hope we were not in range of the movie cameras going off like a barrage on all sides.
Many dignitaries were grouped about the tomb, Grandpapa Joffre among them, and I may add that he had to be pushed forward into the front row, for, though he has been kicked upstairs by an unappreciative government, the people still adore him. Mr. Sharp spoke at length. Brand Whitlock read at still greater length many pages about civilization and humanity — very immaculate, in eyeglasses with a heavy black braid and in spats, both the speech and B. W. Then Colonel Stanton, U. S. A., brief and to the point. Then le Général Pershing s’avance à la tribune ‘without the intention of speaking’; but he did, briefly — a fine-looking man with a square chin and proper shoulders. He may have said, ‘Lafayette, nous voici,’ but if so we did n’t hear it on the wall. Then followed more in French by M. Painlevé, Minister of War, concerning ‘les deux peuples unis par le même idéal’; and finally the Mayor of Puy wound up with an hommage or something of the sort to Lafayette. Thereupon we climbed down, or rather fell off, into the cabbage garden on the side we had ascended, and took our way to the Crillon, seeing the flower-bedecked battalion pass by with their escort of French cavalry.
Then lunch and to business — my two Paris quests being (1) to find out what, if anything, the U. S. Army Medical Corps has in store for us, and (2) to secure a motor car of whatsoever sort for the use of Base Hospital No. 5. On way to Quest 1, met Robert Bacon by chance. Long talk with him about the general situation on our way to the temporary U. S. A. headquarters; but 27 Rue de Constantine proves no place for a major — crowd there already — everyone trying to get something he wants — most of them outranking me.
Quiet dinner with the Blisses. They have had a strenuous time these past two years. It’s fortunate two people so popular and so conversant with French should have been at the Embassy. R. B. tells an interesting story of the two Wilson notes of last December. The first of them transmitted the German proposal for peace, and, the Ambassador being away, R. B. had to present it himself. A few days later came W. W.’s famous communication to both combatants asking what they meant by the war anyway and what their objectives were — so far as he could see they were very much alike on both sides — or something of this sort. So it at least sounded to most of us at home.
Mrs. B. had been at the Chambre des Députés in the afternoon to hear the discussion regarding the German proposals, and the statement had been made there that the Allies would transmit their terms on the following day to the Central Powers through Mr. Wilson. This news she promptly telephoned to the Embassy, where they were in process of decoding Wilson’s second note, which threw an entirely different light on the matter. Consequently R. B. thought it was absolutely essential — as soon as they got the drift of the note late in the afternoon — that the fact of its reception and general tenor should promptly be made known to the Foreign Office. In the Ambassador’s absence he had to make this decision himself, and so he took it to Cambon. Cambon was quite thunderstruck and called in Briand. Both of them purple in the face — simply furious. Wilson on the side of the Germans — playing into their hands from the outset — Wilson a mufle. The only way they could be pacified was to explain that, while the message had not as yet been fully decoded, it seemed necessary that they should be made aware of its having been received. All told, a very trying time, and truly we had no friends anywhere.
Mrs. B. a trump — will help us get our needed transportation in the shape of a Ford ambulance with French trimmings — in fact, has already taken steps in this direction; and if she succeeds we had better be prepared to motor it back to Camiers instanter, before someone else gets hold of it.
[On July 22, Dr. Cushing, with a surgical team, was detached from his unit and sent forward to work in a British Casualty Clearing Station at a place known as ‘Mendinghem,’2 near Poperinghe. Here he remained during the long-drawn-out attack (JulyOctober) on the Passchendaele ridges.]
Tuesday, July 31
The third battle of Ypres opened today— zero hour at 3.50 A.M. After a week of good weather came the deluge.
Wednesday, 1.30 A. M.
One of the disadvantages of our picturesque camp came home to me as I felt my way to this soggy red tent. Pitch black, pouring rain, and has been, I believe, nearly all this fearful day — two ambulance trains of the new variety, about a mile long, vestibuled so you can’t climb under or over the couplings, standing between the officers’ quarters and the hospital encampment — your electric torch burned out — trying to stick to slippery duckboards about a foot wide. Depressing for a well man, but imagine what these poor wounded devils have had to go through to-day, and what those still lying out are enduring. The pre-operative hut is still packed with untouched cases, so caked in wet mud that it’s often a task to strip them and find out what they’ve got.
Thursday, August 2, 2.30A. M.
Pouring cats and dogs all day — also pouring cold and shivering wounded, covered with mud and blood. Some G. S. W.’s3 of the head, when the mud is scraped off, prove to be trifles — others of unsuspected gravity. The pre-operation room is still crowded — one can’t possibly keep up with them; and the unsystematic way things are run drives one frantic. The news, too, is very bad. The greatest battle of history is floundering up to its middle in a morass, and the guns have sunk even deeper than that. Gott mit uns was certainly true for the enemy this time.
Operating from 8.30 A.M. one day till 2.00 A.M. the next; standing in a pair of rubber boots, and periodically full of tea as a stimulant, is not healthy. It’s an awful business, probably the worst possible training in surgery for a young man, and ruinous for the carefully acquired technique of an oldster. Something over 2000 wounded have passed, so far, through this one C. C. S. There are fifteen similar stations behind this battle front.
10.30 P.M. We’re about through now with this particular episode. Around 30,000 casualties, I believe — a small advance here and there, and that’s about all. Doubtless there are many prisoners— we ’ ve seen a lot of wounded ones, big husky Hun boys. But I do not believe it has been other than a disappointment.
Operating again all day, and finished up at 9.00 P.M. with an extraction of a large piece of shell from a man’s badly infected ventricle with the magnet — then dinner, and now to bed. It still rains. A lot of wounded must have drowned in the mud. One of to-day’s cases was a fine young Scot having frequent Jacksonian attacks from a glancing sniper’s ball through his tin hat, a piece of which was driven into the brain. He had lain, he said, in the protection of a shell hole with one or two others — the water up to his waist — for twelve hours before they were found. But there has been scant time to talk to wounded, to prisoners, or to ‘brass hats,’ and I know little of what has gone on.
Friday, August 3
It is still pouring for the fourth consecutive day. Expected to have an easy time to-day and to catch up on dressings, notes of cases, and statistics. The morning went somewhere. The D. G. M. S.,4 Sir Arthur Sloggett, at the mess for lunch, together with Sir William Somebody, head of the British Red Cross and a friend of T. R.’s. I was half an hour late, which is not the thing — properly chided by the C. O.
In the early afternoon a large batch of wounded were unexpectedly brought in — mostly heads — men who have been lying out for four days in craters in the rain, without food. It is amazing what the human animal can endure. Some of them had maggots in their wounds. Then a long operation on a sergeant with things in his brain and ventricle like the man of last night — the magnet again useful — George Derby ditto. He has been helping me lately, while Towne makes records, and Johnnie Morton, with George Denny as his anæsthetist, is at another table. Many muddy bystanders from the adjacent hospitals looking on and fairly sitting on the instrument stands.
Saturday, August 4 (really 3.30 A. M. on the 5th)
Another night helping Johnnie and Blake as long as I could stand up. I think the teams do better work by night than by day, and it is noticeable that the night shifts are composed of the emergency teams. Urgent operations on more rotting men. One case I did had a gross gas infection of the brain. My particular grouse lies in the fact that no one protests against locking tight every door of a twenty-car ambulance train between the hospital and our camp. There are two alternatives — to feel your way around in a sea of mud or to crawl under. I crawled under to-night and nearly cracked my head. I ’ll feel less peevish later.
Sunday, August 5, 8.30 A.M.
I do. Except for the fact that my ragged batman, Ashford by name, says there are orders not to provide us with our customary inch of bath water — that we must henceforth go to the bathing tent. This structure lies in the hospital grounds on the other side of the barricaded track. ‘Zink,’ who is a joyful American attached here, said at breakfast that he had thought it out fully and told his particular batman to bring him some weak tea. He says it makes a fine lather.
Three years ago to-day England declared war against Germany. About four months ago we did.
7.30 P.M.
Lieutenant Zinkhan, who is here as a casual M. O., is not only joyful but venturesome — a typical Texan. He enjoys Mutt and Jeff, and quotes them often. The Britishers laugh, but don’t entirely understand.
On Sunday last — it seems a year ago — among others a Scots Guard came down with a head wound, and on his No. 24 Field Ambulance card was the name ‘Lt. Zinkhan, U. S. A.’ We naturally supposed that our Zink had in some mysterious fashion found his way up to an F. A. and sent this man down. But not at all. When confronted with the fact later in the day he denied having been farther than Proven. When shown the card he exclaimed: ‘Good God! That’s my brother. I’ve been looking for him for three months.‘
Late Monday evening there was delivered here in a large limousine our Zinkhan. He had been to see his brother — had started about noon on foot to Poperinghe and been given a lift in a lorry — again on foot toward Ypres until he hopped another lorry. He finally got wind of where F. A. No. 24 roughly was situated and was put down at a point where it grows too hot for motor transport. At a remount station he wangled a horse, which he rode for two miles, until a 5.9 blew up a donkey engine near by — it simply disappeared in the air. At this juncture Zink dismounted and walked — a concealed naval gun nearly blew his head off — he got across the canal and up into the Ypres sector. There he somehow found his long-lost brother in a dugout near Hellfire Corner. His brother said: ‘Zink, I’m scared to death.’ Said Zink: ‘So am I.’
He stayed ten minutes and got back as fast as he could. No one questioned his going or coming. People were too busy getting under cover for themselves and staying there. He made his way back to the Poperinghe road this side of Ypres. There he encountered some stuff officers, one of them evidently an American, who wanted to know what he was doing up there. It turned out to be Pershing with General Gough! He dined with them, and was sent home in the General’s car. That, he says, was the most trying part of his expedition, for, unaccustomed to a limousine, he was n’t sure whether it was proper to loll back or sit forward upright. He decided to loll back. One essential difference between an American and a Britisher is that the former can hold up his trousers with a belt; the latter has to wear braces. Zink is an American. But turning up in a general’s car was about all that saved him from a court-martial for going A. W. O. L.
To-day Zink’s brother was here to tea — out for two days’ rest — very shaky, and well he might be. Browsing around Hellfire Corner and Hooge for four days looking for wounded under heavy fire, in his triangle between the railroad and the Menin Road. His battalion had missed their barrage and only got ahead a very short distance. He finally got ninety bearers, mostly oldish men. On their first trip twelve of them were killed. The next time there were volunteers — some N. C. O.’s and others — and they succeeded in getting in a batch of Devons who were in shell holes, wounded. It took twelve bearers to carry a two-man stretcher — eight at a time and four in reserve — often sinking in above their knees in this impossible mud. This was on the fourth day, and the wounded men had been without food all this time — they had to leave four of them behind, as they could not get back to them.
Some tank officers here also for tea. One of the tanks practically disappeared in the mud and they had to escape through the roof. There are two or three inches of pasty mud between us and C. C. S. No. 64, where the bearers have been carrying some of our overflow wounded — it is enough to suck off your rubber boots unless you curl up your toes. What another ten inches would be like can be imagined. It would take off everything below your waist, if you could pull yourself out at all. Perhaps that’s why the Britishers all wear braces.
Friday, August 10, 11 P,M.
My young friend the pilot, Turberville by name, just walked back with me from the aerodrome which lies the other side of Proven. He is scornful of searchlights, which are merely to encourage the populace. If a searchlight should catch you, which is most unlikely, when you are up at night, the thing to do is to fly down the beam and turn on your Vickers. This puts it out.
After nearly two weeks of either atrocious or unsettled weather, to-day has been perfect and it looks as though the bad spell might have passed — a favorable day for photography, and therefore ideal for the eyes of the Army. After working all day on our statistics for the past few weeks I could not bear, after tea, to go back to the clerks’ hut — the panorama of aerial activity was too alluring. So I hied me across lots — this in Flanders means jumping ditches and circumnavigating turnip fields and hop entanglements — to the aerodrome a mile away.
It was about half after six, and from this field one gets an unbroken view of the long line of observation balloons, and above and beyond them the sky full of planes and clusters of shrapnel bursts — black ones from the Archies of the enemy, white ones from our own. Turberville was in, having had his two flights earlier in the day. I must stay to dinner, and so to his tent while he shaves, and strops his razor on the palm of his hand, and talks. One begins to learn by banking to the left, and subsequently always finds that easier — viz., one climbs in a right-handed spiral,which would certainly have interested the first of their clan, Leonardo da Vinci. The infantry officer knows only his bit of trench; the flying men know the whole field of operation and what everyone is doing on both sides.
I dined with them, as I say — together with an officer of the Scots Guards. Fifty in the squadron, though only forty-seven to-night — one away and two killed yesterday in a collision in a cloud. Cheerful boys, yet they know full well the seriousness, responsibilities, and risks of their job. Extraordinary tales passed about — of the number of aircraft over this particular sector (one of them said he counted forty planes while he was over the line and got tired of it), of meeting high in the air Boche howitzer shells en route for some point in our rear; we occasionally hear them whistle over us toward Hazebrouck, which, I may add, has been heavily shelled of late. But that one could see them pass by, head-on in the air! Well, I m not doubting anything the Flying Corps tells me.
Sunday, August 12
Very busy operating all day. Horrax and Forbes from our Base appear in the afternoon, and Generals Skinner, Wallace, and Davidson here to tea. Extraordinary aerial activity. Four Boche planes over during the day, which was perfect for playing hide and seek in white clouds. Archies going all the morning and afternoon. One Boche plane brought down by two opponents in sight of our camp. Zink has been out exploring and saw a Fritz make a direct hit on an observation balloon and the two observers come down safely in their parachutes.
Monday, August 13
Just two weeks ago to-night the final preparations for the third battle of Ypres were at their height, and the expectation in the minds of many was that the enemy would be blown out of his diggings from the sea to the Lys and driven back into open warfare. After a long spell of unusually fine weather the thirtieth was overcast and showery, and by noon of zero day — Tuesday, the thirty-first — Jupiter Pluvius had decided the matter by bogging the artillery and infantry and blinding the aeroplanes. Such papers as I have chanced to pick up make much of ‘substantially obtaining all the objectives laid down,’but this, I am sure, is not the way people feel about it up here.
Thursday, August 14, 7.00 P.M.
Orders to evacuate and a succession of ‘ brass hats ’ and consulting surgeons indicate that events are impending. Rather discouraged, as we have been having a streak of bad luck — infections, and so on.
Walked over to the Scots Guards camp to pay my party call. The Padre had just returned from ‘Pop’5 and had seen a Boche plane fall out of the clouds and attack a row of balloons. The observers tumbled out of them in their parachutes, and Fritz was in turn dropped on by three of ours and driven to earth. He adds that it is a favorite trick to try and machine-gun the officers in the air as they are descending. This is war, I presume, but it seems particularly unsportsmanlike.
Find on my return that No. 46 is ‘ taking in,’ and we are preparing to do two cases regardless of dinner and a concert by the Coldstream Guards’ military band. This won’t be much anyway, as it’s raining hard again. I am driven to distraction by the local dilatoriness, the everlasting stopping for meals. Someone is eating all day long — orderlies, sisters, noncoms, officers. As a result there is only about an hour between any two meals — breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, late supper — when the team as a whole can work together. In the other operating room they stop also for broth and biscuits at 11 A.M. AS most of these men breakfast at nine, this means quite a gastronomic day, and most of them eat more meals than they operate on patients. I shall try to drive our American team into eight head cases a day or bust.
Wednesday, August 15
We nearly ‘busted’ on six cases in the twenty-four hours since yesterday’s note. We began at 8 P.M. on ’L/Cpl. Wiseman 392332; 1/9 Londons S. W. Frac. Skull,’ which interpreted means that a lance corporal of the 9th Londons had a shell wound. It went through his helmet in the parietal region, with indriven fragments to the ventricle. These cases take a long time to do carefully enough to forestall infection, and it was eleven o’clock before we got to ‘Sgt. Chave, C. 25912. M. G. C. 167 — S. W. head and S. W. back — penet.,’ according to his Field Ambulance card. This sergeant of the Machine Gunners had almost the whole of his right frontal lobe blown out, with a lodged piece of shell almost an inch square, and extensive radiating fractures, which meant taking off most of his frontal bone, including the frontal sinuses — an enormous operation done under local anæsthesia. We crawled home for some eggs in the mess and to bed at 2.30 A.M. — six hours for these two cases.
This man Chave — queer name — roused from his semiconsciousness and made it known that he had some precious false teeth. They were removed, somewhat more easily than was his broken frontal bone. They must have been on his mind, for I remember when rongeuring out fragments of his skull he kept muttering that I was breaking his teeth. He was evidently familiar with this somewhat similar sound. Though he pulled out his Carrel-Dakin tubes, he seems to be all right to-day, and is wearing his teeth.
This morning a man named Ward, rifleman of the 10th Brigade, was ticketed for us in the Resuscitation Ward — hard to tell whether he or we were more unfit for the operation. We began at 9 A.M. — an hour earlier than we had ever succeeded in getting started before, for there is a lot of trouble in getting boiling water, owing to the scarcity of Primus stoves, socalled. A penetrating wound of the occiput, with complete central blindness, and lodgment of the missile in the right frontal lobe. Also with novocaine, lasting another three hours, with extraction of fragments driven into the ventricle. Then really a bad one — another rifleman, Saunders, with a mid-vertex wound, rigid extremities, unconscious, and two foreign bodies with many fragments of deeply imbedded bone showing in the X-ray. This carried Morton and me up to 2.30 — too late for lunch. I got what might be called a high tea, and Horrax, who had been recording cases and doing dressings, took Morton’s place and we did two more penetrating cases, and then our more serious dressings, and managed to get to the mess for dinner nearly on time.
They shove the more serious cases on to us, which is what we want, but I’m beginning to be a little doubtful about eight a day if they are all of this size.
This has been an ordinary slack time with a ‘ take in ’ of only 200 cases in rotation with our neighbors Nos. 64 and 12. The rush has not come yet — another postponement; perhaps due to the heavy rains to-day.
Thursday, August 16 (ready 2.15 A. M. on Friday)
They tell me that heavy firing, aeroplane raids, and some French naval guns to the north of us made much ado last night after three o’clock. I heard none of it. The zero hour, long deferred, came at 5 A.M. Walking wounded began to come in in a few hours, to Nos. 12 and 64, and to us at ten o’clock. We began operating at twelve noon and had done seven cases, one better than yesterday, by midnight. Have our system running, with lunch and tea in the operating room instead of coming way over here to the mess. Two cases always waiting, so that we can go from case to case without delay. We ought to manage eight to-morrow — that is, to-day, which is Friday. Clear, cool, cloudless. No very startling news. Langemarck taken (?), possibly Poelkapelle, and the ridge beyond — the objective. The Boches are using an entirely new gas, which gives bad gastro-intestinal symptoms. They also are dotted about in concrete machine-gun emplacements and can enfilade the oncoming attack. Hence more bullet than shell wounds, they say, are to be expected.
Friday, August 17
We beat our record to-day with eight cases — all serious ones. A prompt start at 9 A.M. with two cases always in waiting — notes made, Xrayed, and heads shaved. It’s amusing to think that I used to regard, at home, a single major cranial operation a day’s work. These eight averaged two hours apiece — one or two very interesting ones. One in particular — a sergeant, unconscious, with a small wound of entrance in the vertex and a foreign body just beside the sella turcica. We have learned a new way of doing these things — viz., to encircle the penetrating wound in the skull with Montenovesi forceps, and to take the fractured area with the depressed bone fragments out in one piece — then to catheterize the tract and to wash it out with a Carrel syringe through the tube. In doing so the suction of the bulb is enough occasionally to bring out a small bone fragment clinging to the eye of the catheter. Indeed, one can usually detect fragments by the feel of the catheter; they are often driven in two or three inches.
In this particular man, however, after the tract was washed clear of blood and disorganized brain, the nail was inserted its full six inches and I tried twice unsuccessfully to draw out the fragment with the magnet. On the third attempt I found to my disgust that the current was switched off. There was nothing to do but make the best of it, and a small stomach tube was procured, cut off, boiled, inserted in the six-inch tract, suction put on, and a deformed shrapnel ball (not the expected piece of steel shell) was removed on the first trial — of course a non-magnetizable object.
To-night while operating on a Boche prisoner with a G. S. W. of the head, about 11 P.M., — our seventh case, — some Fritz planes came over on a bombing raid, as they do almost every night nowadays — nowanights (which is it?). Of course all our lights were switched off, and we had to finish with candles. If we did n’t do a very good job, it was Fritz’s fault, not entirely ours.
The Boche prisoner, I may add, was a big fellow with a square head, badly punctured though it was. The case in waiting was a little eighteen-year-old Tommy from East London — scared, peaked, underfed, underdeveloped. He had been in training six months and was in the trenches for the first time during the present show — just ten minutes when he was hit.
Sunday, August 19
Morning. — My prize patient, Baker, with the shrapnel ball removed from near his sella, after doing well for three days suddenly shot up a temperature to 104 last night about midnight. I took him to the operating theatre, reopened the perfectly healed external wound, and found to my dismay a massive gas infection of the brain. I bribed two orderlies to stay up with him in the operating room, where he could have constant thorough irrigation over the brain and through the track of the missile. No lights except candles were permitted last night. We fortunately are not taking in, and I was dressing him this morning — for he still lives — when someone leaning out of the window cried out: ‘There’s a falling plane!’
Nose down, spinning, wings laid back, like a dead bird. He fell just beyond No. 64, and the familiar, irresistible impulse made everyone run toward the spot — I too as soon as I could leave. I got across the track, past the post-mortem tent, as far as the rapidly growing cemetery on the other side of No. 64. Here were about a hundred grinning Chinese coolies, in their blue tunics, — though some were stripped to the waist, — digging two fresh ditches, about six by twenty feet. The Far East digging in the upstart West with its boasted civilization! This held me up, and I refrained from crossing the road to see the mangled machine and the dead thing under it.
Afternoon. — Welpley has had the grass cut on the tennis court and the lines freshly marked out. He has arranged, too, for a tournament — mixed doubles. We are to have tea served there. I am contributing a wonderful five-pound box of Page and Shaw’s chocolates from the usual source of home comforts and delicacies.
Nighty 11 P.M. — A baby crying in the operating theatre with a badly wounded arm; its mother on the next table with several small wounds and badly shocked. An unusual sight for a C. C. S. There had been the usual raid — one comes every evening. It’s about our turn, and not a light is permitted. Rumor has it that these are reprisals — that one of our big naval guns fired into Roulers and hit a German hospital. Consequently Rémy has had it, also Brandhoek, and yesterday Dosinghem, where there were many casualties, I believe — one of Brewer’s American nurses was slightly wounded, and some M. O.’s also.
At ten or thereabouts he came — a clear, cloudless, dark night with no moon — just right for him. We could get some idea of where he was by the focusing of the searchlights and where the Archies were bursting as they tried to pick him up. Twenty or more shafts, and in addition the two huge beams — from naval searchlights in Dunkerque, ’t is said — which simply poured shafts of light down in this direction. Once we saw him picked up with all the shafts for miles around focusing on him, but he dodged away. This was to the east of us, then Archies to the south in three places, so that possibly there was more than one raider; then after a time to the north, — Bandagehem way, apparently, — where he dropped eight bombs. The big French searchlights got at him and one heard machine-gun fire — perhaps from Fritz himself. Finally we could hear his engine as he passed over us, then two more explosions, and the searchlights began to blink off. He’d gone.
Then the baby and its mother, a poilu, and an excited Belgian, in the reception hut. Weird sight it was — candlelight, bearers and M. O.’s in their tin hats — a wounded woman and her baby — the fruit of the raid.
(To be concluded)