A Labrador Doctor Part 24

"I did get an M.C.," he answered.

"I congratulate you," I replied.

"It was a confinement to barracks. A bullet had smashed to pieces a little wrist watch which the captain always carried. It was quite valueless, and I had kept the remnants as a memento of a man whom every one loved. But a comrade got back at me by reporting it to headquarters, and they had to punish me, they said."

It is true, "strafing" was at a low ebb at the time that I arrived in France; but even I was not a bit prepared for the amount of leisure time that our duties allowed us. There were in France hundreds of sick and wounded for every one in the lonely North; but in Labrador you are always on the go, being often the only available doctor. Our Unit had at the time only some five hundred beds and a very strong staff, both of doctors and nurses. In spite of lending one of our colonels and several of our staff to other hospitals, we still had not enough beds to keep us fully occupied. It gave me ample time to help out occasionally in Y.M.C.A. activities, and to do some visiting among the poor French families and refugees in Boulogne, close to which city our hospital was located. I could also visit other Units, and give lantern shows, which had, I thought, special value when psychic treatment was badly needed. Sh.e.l.l-shock was but very imperfectly understood at the beginning of the war. The football matches and athletic sports did not need the a.s.set of being an antidote to sh.e.l.l-shock to attract my patronage. Never in my life had I realized quite so keenly what a saving trait the sporting instinct is in the Anglo-Saxon--a strain of it in the Teuton might have even averted this war.

My stay in France enabled me to enjoy that which life on the Labrador largely denies one--the contact with many educated minds. It was the custom, if an officer needed a lift along the road, to hail any pa.s.sing motor. While walking one day, I took advantage of this privilege, and found myself driving with Sir Bertrand Dawson, the King's physician, with whom I thus renewed a most valued acquaintanceship. On another occasion our host or guest might be Sir Almroth Wright, the famous pathologist, or Sir Robert Jones would pay us a visit, or Sir Frederick Treves. In fact, we had chances to meet many of the great leaders of our profession. Sir Arthur Lawley, the head of our Red Cross in France, gave me some delightful evenings.

Unquestionably there is an intense pleasure in hearing and seeing personally the men who are doing things.

Food grew perceptibly scarcer in Boulogne even during my stay. The _pet.i.ts gateaux_ got smaller, the hours during which officers might enter restaurants for afternoon tea became painfully shorter. But they were not a whit less enjoyable, reminding one as they did of the dear old days, long before the war was thought of, and before the war of life had taken me to Labrador. If one had hoped that a life in the wilds had succeeded in eradicating natural desires, those relapses in the midst of war-time completely destroyed any such delusion. Every day was full of excitement. Bombs fell on the city only twice while I was there, and, moreover, we were bitterly disappointed that we did not know it till we read the news in the morning paper. But every day flying machines of all sorts sailed overhead. My interest never failed to respond to the buzzing of some hurrying airship, or the sight of a seaplane dropping out of heaven into the water and swimming calmly ash.o.r.e, waddling up the beach into its pen exactly like a great duck.

One day it was the excitement of watching trawlers from the cliffs firing-up mines; another, hunting along the beach among the silent evidences of some tragedy at sea, or riding convalescent horses that needed exercise, flying along the sands to see some special sight, such as the carca.s.s of a leviathan wrecked by b.u.t.ting into mine-fields.

Close to us was a large Canadian Unit. They were changing their location, and for three months had been in the sorry company of those who have no work to do. The matron, however, told me that she found plenty to occupy her time--in such a beehive of officers, with seventy-five nurses to look after.

When at the close of the period for which I had volunteered I had to decide whether to sign on again, my whole inclination was to stay just another term; but as my commandant, Colonel David Cheever, informed me that he and a number of the busier men felt that duty called them home, and that there were plenty of volunteers to take our places, my judgment convinced me that I was more needed in Labrador.

I shall not say much of the Y.M.C.A. They need no encomium of mine, but I am prepared to stand by them to the last ditch. They were doing, not talking, and were wise enough to use even those agents whom they knew to be imperfect, as G.o.d Himself does when He uses us. The folly of judging for all cases by one standard is common and human, but it is not G.o.d's way. This conviction was brought home to me in a very odd manner. I had gone to lecture at an English Y.M.C.A. hut at the invitation of the efficient director, who knew me only for a "medical missionary." On my arrival he most hospitably took me to the cupboard which he called "his rooms." It was a raw, cold night, and among other efforts to show his grat.i.tude for my help, to my amazement he offered me "a drop of Scotch." Astonishment so outran good-breeding that I unwittingly let him perceive it. "I am not a regular 'Y' man, Major,"

he explained. "I'm an Australian, and was living on my little pile when the war began. They turned me down each place I volunteered on account of my age. But I was crazy to do my bit, and I offered to work with the Y.M.C.A. as a stopgap. The War Office has commandeered so many of their men that they had to take me to 'carry on.' I'm afraid I'm a poor apology, but I'm doing my best."

The freedom from convention lent another peculiar charm to the life in France. The mess sergeant of a headquarters where I was dining one night, close behind the lines, presented the colonel with a beautifully ill.u.s.trated monograph on a certain unmentionable and unwelcome member of war camps and trench life. The beautiful work and the evidences of scientific training led me to ask who the mess sergeant might have been in civil life. "Professor of Biology at the University of ----," was the reply.

The most inspiring fact about the Channel ports at that time was the regularity with which steamers arrived, crowded with soldiers, and returned with wounded. We could see England on clear days from our quarters, and could follow the boats almost across. The number of trawlers at work all the year round, even in heavy gales that almost blew us off the cliffs, was enough to tell how vigilant a watch was being kept all the while. One morning only we woke to find a large stray steamer, that had entered the roads overnight, sunk across the harbour mouth, her decks awash at low water--torpedoed, we supposed.

Another day a small patrol, literally cut in half by a mine, was towed in. But though both in the air and under the sea all the ingenuity of the enemy from as near by as Ostend was unceasingly directed against that living stream, not one single disaster happened the whole winter that I was out. Our mine-fields were constantly being changed. The different courses the traffic took from day to day suggested that. But who did it, and when, no one ever knew. The noise of occasional bomb-firing, once a mine rolling up on the sh.o.r.e, exploding and throwing some incredibly big fragments onto the golf links, the incessant tramp of endless soldiers in the street, the ever-present but silent motors hurrying to and fro, and the nightly arrival of convoys of wounded, were all that reminded us that any war was in progress. Had it been permitted, the beach would have been crowded as usual with invalids, nursemaids, and perambulators.

The second marvel was that in spite of the enormous numbers of people coming and going, no secrets leaked out. We gave up looking for news almost as completely as in winter in Labrador. We seemed to be shut off entirely in an eddy of the stream, as we are in our Northern wastes.

The spirit of humour in the wounded Briton was as invaluable as the love of sport when he is well. On one occasion a small party were going to relieve a section of the line. The Boches had the range of a piece of the road over which they had to pa.s.s, and the men made dashes singly or in small numbers across it. A lad, a well-known athlete, was caught by a sh.e.l.l and blown over a hedge into a field. When they reached him, his leg was gone and one arm badly smashed. He was sitting up smoking a cigarette, and all he said was, "Well, I fancy that's the end of my football days." One very undeveloped man, who had somehow leaked into Kitchener's Army, told me, "Well, you see, Major, I was a bit too weak for a labouring man, so I joined the army. I thought it might do my 'ealth good!" One of the English papers reported that when a small Gospel was sent by post to a prisoner in Germany the Teuton official stamped every page, "Pa.s.sed by the Censor."

The practice of listening to the yarns of the wounded was much discouraged, chiefly for one's own sake, for their knowledge was less accurate than our own, while sh.e.l.l-shock led them to imagine more. The censor had always good yarns to tell. The men showed generally much good-humour and a universal light-heartedness. Our wounded hardly ever "groused." They hid their troubles and cheered their families, seldom or never by pious sentiments. One man writing from a regimental camp close to Boulogne, after a painfully uneventful Channel crossing, announced, "Here we are in the enemies' country right under the muzzles of the guns. We got over quite safely, though three submarines chased us and sh.e.l.led us all the way. Food here is very short. I haven't looked at a bun for weeks. A bit more of that cake of yours would do nicely, not to talk o' smokes. Your loving husband." Another letter was quoted in the "Daily Mail." It ran: "Dear Mother--This comes hoping that it may find you as it leaves me at present. I have a broken leg, and a bullet in my left lung. Your affectionate son."

Yet the men were far from fatalists, and the psychic stimulus of being able to tell your patient that he was ordered to "Blighty" was demonstrable on his history chart. One poor fellow whose right arm was infected with gas bacillus was so anxious to save it that we left it on too long and general blood poisoning set in. He was on the dying list. The Government under these circ.u.mstances would pay the expenses of a wife or mother to come over and say the last good-bye. After the message went, it seemed that our friend could not last till their arrival, and the colonel decided as a last chance to try intra-venous injections of Eusol, the powerful antiseptic in use at that time in all the hospitals. On entering the ward the next morning the nurse told me with a smiling face, "B. is ever so much better. I think that he will pull through all right." "Then the Eusol injection has done good, I suppose?" "His wife and mother came last night and sat up with him"--and I saw a twinkle in the corner of her eye. Eusol injections are now considered inert.

With so many patients who only remained so short a time, there was an inevitable tendency to relapse into treating men as "cases," not as brothers. To get through their exterior needed tact and experience.

But if love is a force stronger than bayonets and guns, it certainly has its place in modern--and all time--surgery. I have a shrewd suspicion that it is better worth exhibiting than quite a number of the drugs still on the world's pharmacopoeias. Many of the nurses kept visitors' books, and in these their patients were asked to write their names or anything they liked. The little fact made them feel more at home, as if some person really cared for them. One could not help noticing how many of them broke out into verse, though most of them were labouring men at home. Although some was not original, it showed that they liked poetry. Some was extempore, as the following:

"Good-bye, dear mother, sister, brother, Drive away those bitter tears.

For England's in no danger While there are bomb throwers in the Tenth Royal Fusiliers."

The following effusion I think was doubtless evolved gradually. It runs:

"There's a little dug-out in a trench, Which the rainstorms continually drench.

With the sky overhead, and a stone for a bed, And another that acts for a bench.

"It's hard bread and cold bully we chew; It is months since we've tasted a stew; And the Jack Johnsons flare through the cold wintry air, O'er my little wet home in the trench.

"So hurrah for the mud and the clay, Which leads to 'der Tag,' that's the day When we enter Berlin, that city of sin, And make the fat Berliners pay."

I have never been in any sense what is generally understood by the term "faith healer," but I am certain that you can make a new man out of an old one, can save a man who is losing ground, and turn the balance and help him to win out through psychic agencies when all our chemical stimulants are only doing harm. That seemed especially true in those put _hors de combat_ by the almost superhuman horrors of this war. It seemed to me to pay especially to get the confidence of one's patients. Thus one man would be drawn out by the gift of a few flowers, a little fruit, cigarettes, as so many of the kindly visitors discovered. One man with shrapnel splinters in his abdomen expressed a craving for Worcester sauce. It appeared to him so un.o.btainable in a hospital in France. From the point of view of his recovery I am convinced that the bottle which we procured in Boulogne was a good investment.

We eagerly awaited the ill.u.s.trated papers each week for the same reason. But personal interest shown in themselves, by the time spared for chatting, was far the most appreciated. We had been very rightly warned against listening to the wounded men. It was with them in the base hospitals that the story of the angels of Mons originated. I never met any one personally who saw anything nearer the supernatural than that marvellous fight itself--the pluck and endurance of our "contemptible little army." But some claimed to have seen a spirit but visible army, such as Elijah at Dothan showed to his servant, or Castor and Pollux at Lake Regillus, fighting in front of our lines. A Canadian in command of the C.A.M.C. contingent, who treated thousands of the wounded as they came back from the front, told me that early in the day he heard the rumour, and ordered his men to ask as many as possible if they had seen any such phenomenon. Not one claimed to have done so. Yet a few days later from the base he heard a great many of these same men had declared that they had seen the "angels." He considered that the whole matter arose originally through some hysterical woman, and then was augmented by the suggestion of the question which he himself had put to them, made to men sh.e.l.l-shocked and in abnormal mental conditions.

Among other deductions from voluminous notes I judged that the Saxons really did not want to fight, the impression coming from so many different sources. Some said that they let us know, shouting across "No Man's Land," that they did not wish to fight, that they were Christians, had wives and children of their own, that they did not want to kill any one, and would fire in the air when forced to fire, were keen to renew the Christmas "pour-parlers." Our men claimed that it was comparative peace when the Saxons were in the trenches opposite, and they made friendly overtures as often as they dared.

They were capable of attributing honour to others, and those who came over into our lines a.s.serted that hundreds were anxious to do so, only they were so watched from behind. Moreover, the outrages committed by the Prussians under flags of truce had made it impossible for our men to allow any one to approach. To sit opposite a Saxon regiment for a month and not exchange shots appeared to be not uncommon. One man told me that they poked up a notice on their bayonets saying, "We are not going to fight"; and another said that once when "strafing" somehow commenced, they shouted from the opposite trenches: "Save your bullets. You'll need them to-night when the Prussian Guard relieves us"--which proved perfectly true. One day an elderly man crawled out of their trench, came to our barbed wire, and called out for bread. We threw him a loaf. He wrapped up something in his cap and threw it over. We tossed it back with more bread, but when he went back he left the watch behind.

After an especially brutal piece of treachery, our men were too maddened to give quarter, and one said, "A Saxon might have had a chance with us even then, but a Prussian would have had about as little as a beetle at a woodp.e.c.k.e.r's prayer meeting!" The Saxons, on the other hand, displayed the individual courage of the Anglo-Saxon that helped to lessen our losses by enabling us to attack in open formation. Every animal will fight when forced to do so. The cowardly wolf will attack only in packs; and one of the main reasons for the wholesale holocausts of ma.s.s attacks seems to have been that same lack of real courage in the boastful and militarist element. He dare not advance alone.

A colonel in command at the first battle of the Aisne described to me an incident that I at least did not hear elsewhere. He said that the Germans opposite him came on sixteen abreast, arm in arm, rifles at the trail or held anyhow. They were singing wildly, and literally jumping up and down, as if dancing. Fire was reserved till they came within a few hundred yards, when machine guns started to mow them down. Hay-pooks, or rather man-pooks, were immediately formed, and the advancing column, instead of coming straight on, went round and round the ever-increasing stacks. He believed that they had been filled with too much dope or too much doctored grog of some kind.

It was my great desire before returning from France to see the conditions at the front. I was told that members of American Units were discouraged from visiting the trenches. Dr. Carrel had twice most kindly invited me to Compiegne to see his new work on wounds, but permission to accept had been denied me. Being a British subject and wearing a British decoration on an American uniform only seemed to worry the authorities. I had almost abandoned hope, when one day an automobile stopped at our headquarters, just at the close of my term of service, and a colonel, a distinguished scientist, jumped out. He told me if I could get to Medical Headquarters, then at St. Omer, he could arrange for me to visit each of the four armies I wished to see.

I had no permission to leave the base, though my term of service expired the next day. I had no pa.s.ses, and our British commandant would not on his own responsibility either give me leave or lend me the necessary outfit. He would only agree to look the other way if I went.

Pa.s.sing the sentries was not difficult, but once arrived in St. Omer, it was essential to have permission from Headquarters before one could enter any house or hotel. I was accordingly dumped in the dark streets of a strange town and told to be at that exact spot again in two hours, waiting my sponsor's return. Nor did he say where he was going, in case we failed to meet, for no one was allowed to mention the whereabouts of the G.H.Q. After two hours were over, I was at the appointed spot with that pleasurable sense of excitement that seldom comes after one has settled down in life. I could then understand better how a spy must feel. The town naturally was unlit for fear of aircraft, and yet there was a queer feeling that every one was looking at you as you walked up and down in the dark. My colonel friend was at the rendezvous with all the precision of a soldier, not only with the necessary papers and arrangements for the tour of inspection, but also a genial invitation to dine at Headquarters. General Sir Arthur Sloggett and his exceedingly able staff opened my eyes very considerably before the evening was out as to the methods of the R.A.M.C. in war-time. It was such a revelation to me that I felt it would be an infinite comfort to those with loved ones in the trenches to realize how marvellously efficient the provision for the care of the soldier's health had become. The main impression on my mind was the extraordinary developments since the days of the Lady of the Lamp.

Formerly, so long as he was fit to fight, the soldier was always looked after. Now the soldier unfit to fight had exactly the same rights, just as after the war let us trust that the broken soldier will be "seen through" back into civil life. I was honestly surprised that he no longer depended on voluntary gifts to a charitable society for a bandage when he lay wounded or for a nurse if sickness overtook him. The marvellous system of the medical intelligence department, even the separate medical secret service, worked so efficiently that in spite of the awful conditions the health of the men in the line was twice as good as that when at home in civil life. Even disease approaching from the enemy's side was "spied," and as far as possible forestalled. All sanitary arrangements, all water supplies, and all public health matters from the North Sea to the Swiss border were handled by regular army officers. For the first time in history the medicals were considered so intimate a part of the fighting force that doctors held the same rank as executive officers. I was a major--no longer a surgeon major or just a sanitary official. Those in command were even trusted in advance with information as to what would likely be required of them on any part of the front by some manoeuvre or attack, though I do not think that even the general of the R.A.M.C.

was admitted to the council of war.

The chart-room of the G.H.Q. was another revelation. The walls from ceiling to floor were occupied with the usual large-scale maps, with flags on pins; while long, weird, crooked lines of all colours made elaborate tracings over the charts, like those used in hospitals.

These flags and lines indicated the surgical and medical front, where battles with typhoid, trench feet, and wounds were being waged by the immense army of workers under General Sloggett's direction.

Laboratories in motor cars, special surgeons and ambulances were racing here and there, new hospitals for emergencies were being pushed in different directions, so that though within range of the enemies'

guns, men wounded in the chest or abdomen could be treated in time to give them a chance for their lives. Typhoid recurring in any section of the line might mean the reprimand of the medical officer there; trench feet became a misdemeanour, so excellent were the precautions devised and carried out by the N.C.O.'s.

I ventured at table to say quite truthfully that I, a surgeon from a base hospital, where we saw endless Red Cross motor ambulances, and received so many kindnesses in supplies, and especially luxuries for our wounded from the Red Cross officials, had been under the impression that the R.A.M.C. was a sort of small tail to a very large Red Cross kite, owing to our little army and general unpreparedness when the war broke out. I could see that to my surprised hosts I appeared to be mentally deficient, but I was able to a.s.sure them that there were tens of thousands who knew even less than that, and thought that the chances still were that if their loved ones were hurt, they might be left to die because some one had not given their annual contribution to a society. It seemed a very serious omission that the public had not the information that would carry so much consolation with it. The British Red Cross has every one's love and support, but its function in war, as one officer said, must increasingly become, in relation to the R.A.M.C., that of a Sunday-school treat to the staff of the school.

The officialdom of Germany and even of France had always contrasted very unfavourably in my mind with our English methods. I was surprised in America that so many hospitals were Government inst.i.tutions, and yet worked so well.

At Melville we turned aside to inspect what was apparently a second Valley of Hinnom. It was a series of furnaces, built out of clay and old cans, efficiently disposing of the garbage of a town and a large section of the line. At West Outre an officer found time to show us his ingenious improvised laundry. His share was to fight the enemy by keeping our boys decently clean; and for this purpose he collected their dirty linen into huge piles. He had diverted the only available brook so as to put a portable building over it. His battalion consisted of the whole female strength of the country-side, and had to be prepared to advance or retire _pari pa.s.su_ with the other fighters. The chattering, shouting crowd, almost invisible in the fog of steam as we walked through, made me realize how difficult a command this regiment of washerwomen const.i.tuted. The triumph was that they all appeared to be contented and fraternal.

As every one knows one of the worst problems of the trenches was vermin. We entered a huge building used in peace-time for the purposes of dyeing. A Jack Johnson had only just exploded in the moat that brought the water to the tanks, but provision was made for trifles of this kind. When we peered over the edge of a steaming vat, it was to discover a platoon of Tommies enjoying the "time of their lives,"

before they joined the line of naked beings, each scrubbing the now happy man ahead. An endless stream of garments advanced through electric superheaters in parallel columns. There seemed as much excitement about the chance of every man getting his own clothing back as there is in the bran pie at a children's Christmas party.

While visiting the mud and squalor of a front trench in Flanders, only a few yards from the enemy's lines, the cheery occupants offered to brew some tea, exactly as we "boil our kettle" and have a good time in the safety of our Northern backwoods. One day I picked up some bright blue crystals. They proved to be "blue-stone," or sulphate of copper.

When my pilot noticed that its presence puzzled me, he remarked casually, "There was a regimental dressing-station there a day or so ago. Probably that is the remains of it."

On a siding at Calais station a veritable pyramid of filth met my eyes. On inspection it proved to be odd old boots dug from the mud of the battle-fields, and, sorted out from the other endless piles of debris, brought back as salvage. To attack one pair of such boots is depressing. Melancholia alone befitted the pile. Yet I saw close at hand, through a series of sheds, this polluted current entering and coming out at the other end new boots, at the rate of a thousand pairs a day--the talisman not being a Henry Ford of boot-making, but just a smiling English colonel in the sporting trousers of a mounted officer.

The ground was still under snow, and we drove over much ice and through much slush as we returned to our base at Boulogne. My colleagues had gone back to America and it was a terribly lonely journey to London, though both steamer and train were crowded. The war was not yet won, and I could not help feeling an intense desire to remain and see it through with the brave, generous-hearted men who were giving their lives for our sakes. Loneliness scarcely describes my sensations; it felt more like desertion. One road to despair would be the awful realization that one is not wanted. The work looming ahead was the only comforting element, with the knowledge that the best of wives and partners was waiting in London to help me out.

CHAPTER XXV

FORWARD STEPS

My return to the work after serving in France was embittered by a violent attack made upon me in a St. John's paper. It was called forth by a report of a lecture in Montreal where I had addressed the Canadian Club. The meeting was organized by Newfoundlanders at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, and the fact that a large number from the Colony were present and moved the vote of thanks at the end should have been sufficient guarantee of the _bona fides_ of my statements. But the over-enthusiastic account of a reporter who unfortunately was not present gave my critics the chance for which they were looking. It was at a time when any criticism whatever of a country that was responding so generously to the homeland's call for help would have been impolitic, even if true. It subsequently proved one factor, however, in obtaining the commission of inquiry from the Government, and so far was really a blessing to our work. In retrospect it is easy to see that all things work together for good, but at the time, oddly enough, even if such reports are absolutely false, they hurt more than the point of a good steel knife. Anonymous letters, on the contrary, with which form of correspondence I have a bowing acquaintance, only disturb the waste-paper basket.