The Luck of Thirteen Part 19

It was far into the night when we arrived at our hospital burdened with our two bags and the copper tray.

The night nurse, a kitten, and a round woolly puppy welcomed us.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XIV

MAINLY RETROSPECTIVE

Hospital work again. How strange we felt. A sad-faced little Serbian lady, widowed through typhus, was interpreting for the out-patients while Jo was away; but she was alone in the world and did not want to go--so Jo, homesick for her beloved out-patients, had to make the best of it and do other work. The Serbian youth who had been put on the staff as secretary, was dangerously ill with typhoid fever, which he had picked up at Kragujevatz. The typhus barrack was a children's hospital, containing little waifs chosen from the out-patients, and a few women.

In the early days when we had first arrived at Vrntze there were several overfilled Serbian and one Greek hospital. They were only cafes and large villas, unsanitary, stuffy, and overworked. The windows were never open, and through the huge sheets of plate gla.s.s could be dimly seen in the thick blue tobacco smoke a higgledy-piggledy crowd of beds. Often two men lay in one bed covered with their dirty great coats, while typhus patients and wounded men slept together. One man lay unconscious for several days in the window, his feet in his dinner-plate. At last he died, his feet still in the dinner. Mr. Berry took on a hydropathic establishment which had been completed just before the first Balkan War.

This was used as the central hospital, where the staff lodged, and the most serious surgical cases were nursed. In the bas.e.m.e.nt an operating-room was rigged up, there were bathrooms, disinfecting-rooms, a laundry, and an engine-house, where gimcrack German machinery in fits and starts provided us with electric light and hot water. The village school on the hill opposite was annexed and cleaned by a sculptor, a singer, a painter, and a judge of the Royal Horse Show. This was run as a convalescent home, and was the cause of many a muddy sit down, as it lay on the top of a greasy hill.

Other large buildings were gradually added, sulphured, and cleaned until we had six hospitals, one of which was run for some time in connection with the Red Cross unit.

Typhus had not stricken the village badly, but the old barracks were full of cases which developed several days after each batch of wounded came.

The Red Cross unit took on the typhus barracks. Mr. Berry, seeing that surgery was for the moment a secondary thing, and having received a batch of Austrian prisoners riddled with typhus, built some barracks not far from the school. Gla.s.s was un.o.btainable, so thin muslin was used for the windows.

The first precaution against bad air that Mr. Berry took in preparing his chief surgical ward was to smash all top panes of the windows with a broom, thus earning the name of the Window Breaker. Whenever the wind blew through the draughty corridors and gla.s.s rattled down from the sashes, word went round that "Mr. Berry has been at it again."

Our unit and the Red Cross ran a quarantine hospital together. It was originally the state cafe and lay in the park of the watering-place.

Near by were the sulphur baths. We ripped out the stuffy little wooden dressing-rooms, to the joy of the bath attendant, who possessed the facsimile of Tolstoi's face, and with the _debris_ we built a large shed outside for the reception of the wounded.

In the early days they came in large batches from other hospitals, pathetic septic cases, their lives ruined for want of proper care. We put their clothes in bags for future disinfecting, and the men, mildly perplexed, were bathed, shaved, and sent to the "clearing-house," as it was called. Those who developed typhus went to the barracks, and the rest were drafted to the various hospitals in the village.

The clothes were first sulphurized to kill the lice, and then, until Dr.

Boyle's disinfector appeared, boiled. This was important, as typhus is propagated by infected lice. Even forty-eight hours of sulphur did not destroy the nits. One day the sulphur-room was opened after twenty-four hours. Live lice were discovered congregated round the tops of the bags.

Jan put some in a bottle. They immediately fought each other, tooth and nail, rolling and scrambling in a ma.s.s just like a rugby-football scrum, and continued the fight for twelve hours at least, thus proving that the scientific writer who says that the louse is a delicate creature and only lives a few hours off the body can know little of the Serbian breed.

The town, when we arrived, was a bouquet of a.s.sorted and nasty smells, of which the authorities seemed proud. We cleaned up the streets by running a little artificial river down the gutter. Mr. Berry had the chief of the police sacked and inst.i.tuted a sort of sanitary vigilance committee. We took over the local but very primitive sewage works--a field into which all the filth of the town was drained.

The slaughter-house was discovered. It was an old wooden shed built over the lower end of the stream which washed the village from end to end, draining successively the typhus barracks, the baths, and all the hospitals. The shed itself was old and worm-eaten. The walls were caked with the blood of years, yet the meat was always hung against them after having been well soused in the filthy water. Mr. Berry decided to build a new one: some of the money was subscribed through Mr. Blease by the Liverpool Liberal Club; the rest Mr. Berry paid himself. At once the state began to quarrel with the commune as to the ownership of the proposed treasure. So the smells disappeared and the town engineer was furious, saying he would "Put all right" when we left.

Luckily one of the chief men in the town had lived in America and knew the value of cleanliness. Mr. Berry was offered an honorary Colonelcy; but he refused, saying he would prefer to be made sanitary officer for the town.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN-PATIENTS.]

The spring came, bringing with it no fighting. A great offensive was expected, had been ordered, in fact, but we heard later that the army refused to advance. The work was very much lighter. Very few men were entirely helpless. The hospitals, which were still emptying themselves and whose men were coming to us, sent the survival of the fittest. Most of the beds were carried out under the trees after the morning dressings were done, and the men lay gossiping and smoking when they could get tobacco. Outside visitors were rare. The Serbian ladies do not go round the hospitals with cigarettes and sweets, and to find a Serbian woman nursing is an anomaly.

Report says that many flung themselves into it with energy during the first Balkan War, but that four years of it, ending with typhus, had dulled their enthusiasm. It is not fair to blame them. To nurse from morning till night in a putrid Serbian hospital with all windows closed requires more than devotion and complete indifference to life. Three Serbian ladies came to sew pillow cases and sheets every afternoon, and one of them gave up still more time to teach the patients reading and writing.

But the town was full, in the summer, of smartly dressed women, and the village priest never once visited our hospitals. Hearing of the English missions and their work, peasants began to come from the mountains around, and the out-patient department became, under Dr. Helen Boyle, a matter for strenuous mornings.

Many of these poor things had never seen a doctor in their lives. Serbia even in peace-time had not produced many medical men, and those who existed had no time to attend the poor gratis.

The percentage of consumptives was enormous. Every family shuts its windows and doors for the winter and proceeds industriously to spit, and so the disease spreads.

Diphtheria patients rode and walked often for ten hours and waited in the courtyard, and people far gone with typhus staggered along in the blazing spring sun.

One jolly old ragatops with typhus arrived in the afternoon with a violent temperature, and Jo settled him comfortably in the courtyard with his head on a sink until Mrs. Berry should come in to see about taking him into the barracks. He seemed quite happy about himself, but very worried about his blind beggar brother and his two half-blind children, whose sight had been ruined by smallpox.

For the latter nothing could be done.

Another time she kept two boys waiting to see if Mrs. Berry could take them into her typhus barracks. One had scarlet fever, and the other was a young starving clerk in a galloping consumption, thirty-six hours from his home.

Afraid to raise their hopes, and not knowing if there would be room for them, Jo told them that they were to have some very strong medicine that could only be administered two hours after a dose of hot milk and biscuit (the medicine was only bovril). By this time Mrs. Berry arrived and managed to squeeze the boys in.

However, we were told to clear the hospitals, for the wounded were expected.

"What could be done with the scarlet fever boy?" At last an idea came: "The Mortuary," built by the Horse Show Judge with such joy. The mortuary that we had all gone to admire as a work of art.

But the scarlet fever boy did not seem to see it that way, for in the night he escaped, and we have never seen him since.

Diphtheria was so prevalent that the Red Cross on receiving a patient, gathered in the whole family for a few days, inoculated, washed, and gargled it. They also toured the villages around, digging out typhus and other infectious cases, thus stopping the spread of infection. They had a most energetic matron, Miss Caldwell, who had already nursed in Cettinje during the Balkan Wars, and we have already told how she managed the Montenegrins.

Often the patients came in ox-carts. Too ill to be lifted out, they had to be examined and treated in the carts. Dr. Boyle acquired a special nimbleness in jumping in and out of these contrivances armed with stethescope, spoons, bowls, and dressings. We acc.u.mulated a congregation of "regulars," who came to be dressed every day--gathered feet, suppurating glands, eczema, etc.

One old mother with a bad leg was bandaged up with boracic ointment and told to come back in two days. She came. Jo undid the bandage. All the old lady's fleas had swarmed to the boracic till it looked like a fly-paper. After which we used Vermigeli.

All wore brightly woven belts, sometimes two or three, each a yard and a half long, tightly wound round their bodies, thus making their waists wider than their hips. One girl was black and blue with the pattern showing on her skin, and many men were suffering from the evils of tight lacing.

The village priest received belts as fees from the peasants when he married them. He sent us a message to say he had some for sale, so we went in a body to his house, were received by his daughter, who looked like a cow-girl, turned over a basketful of belts, and bought largely.

After which he put up the price.

Jo went on night duty for the first time.

A queer experience this, starting the day's work at half-past seven in the evening and finishing at seven in the morning--breakfasting when other people are dining; hearing their contented laughter as they go off to bed; and then a queer loneliness and the ugly ticking of a clock. One creeps round the big ward. What a noisy thing breathing is. Some one groans, "Sestra, I cannot sleep." This man has not been ordered morphia.

Silence once more broken only by the sound of the breathing, distant howling of dogs from the darkness or the hoot of an owl. The old frostbite man coughs; he coughs again insistently. Both say "Yes" to hot milk. So down to the big kitchen, some mice scatter by, the puppy wakes up and thinks it is time for a game. A woman's voice calls loudly, "Sestra." Taking the milk off, Sestra hurries across the courtyard and along the corridor to the little rooms with the puppy tugging at her skirt. The woman wants water; she has wakened the other women--they want water. When silence again comes back into the ward, one notes instinctively the vivid colouring of the two big blue windows at the far end, the long lines of beds disappearing into the darkness, the dim light of the lantern on the table showing up the cheap clock and a few flowers. The intensity of light upon this clock is only equalled by the intensity of one's thoughts upon the clock. The minute-hand drags on as though it were weary with the day's work. A groan ticks off the quarters and cries for water or milk the half-hours. At last one o'clock. Time for a midnight meal. Eggs and cocoa hurriedly eaten without appet.i.te in the kitchen, but breaking the monotony. Back to the ward again, one of the patients very restless, in great pain. Poor fellow, he has had a long and hard time of it, fifteen months in bed and all due to early neglect.

"Sestra," he says, "sestra," and holds out a handkerchief heavy with coin. "Tell the doctor to take me down to the operating-room and cure me or not let me wake up."

Between four and five there is more movement in the ward. Groans give way to yawns. In the windows the blue is paling to grey. c.o.c.ks are crowing now quite close, now faintly, like an echo. Suddenly the world is filled with work, "washings, brushings, combings, cleanings, temperatures, breakfasts, medicines, some beds to make, reports, all fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, until at last the day-sisters come and relieve, and yawning at the daylight one eats warmed-up dinner while the others are having breakfast."

After a seven weeks' absence one was bound to miss many old friends in the ward. Some had gone home, others were back in the army. Old Number 13, the king of the ward, was still there. He had a dark brown face and white hair, and was furious if any dared to call him a gipsy.

"I am a respectable farmer," he said, "and I own seventeen pigs, a horse, and five sheep, a wife, and two children."

He loved to tell of his wedding. It was done in the correct old Serbian style. He went with his mother and a gun to the chosen one's house, where she was waiting alone, her parents tactfully keeping out of the way. They abducted the lady, who was treated with great honour as a visitor in her future father-in-law's house.

"Father" turned up next morning. Rakia was served, and father divulged ceremoniously how many pigs he could spare to them for keeping his daughter.

Number 13 wanted to know everything: how old was Jo, how much she was paid?