Complete Text (Part 1)

-L. IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL Notes of a Nurse BY M. eydoux-dI:mians TRANSLATED BY BETTY YEOMANS LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD. ADELPHI TERRACE ^'i>y Copyright, 1915, by Plon-Nourrit & Company Copyright, 1915, by Duffield & Company All rights reserved Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York TO MY FIVE BROTHERS WOUNDED IN THE SERVICE OF FRANCE NOTE The only merit of these notes is their profound sin- cerity. They give only impressions of things actually seen and heard, reveal only the wonderful courage and devotion that exist to-day in a French provincial hos- pital. CONTENTS PAGE Our Patients i Sister Gabrielle 8 One Night 15 From One to Another 20 Our Orderlies 25 When They Talk 30 How They Love in War Time .... 36 Their Pride 38 The Death of a Soldier 40 The Funeral 46 A Just Reflection 49 A Simple Story 51 Comrades 53 Engaged 60 Seen at the Railway Station .... 67 A First Communion 71 Conversation As It Is To-day .... 74 A Soldier's Compliment and Song ... 78 Always Suffering 83 Young Recruits and Territorials ... 84 iz X CONTENTS PAOB Under Martial Law * . 87 Our Priests 88 The Little Frenchmen 91 What We Receive from the Front . . 92 Correspondence in War Time .... 93 A Little Refugee loi A Modest Little Soldier 106 Officers and Men 109 Sister Gabrielle's Office 112 The Company of the Audacious . . .114 Memories 118 News from the Mechins 139 A Lament 142 Some Letters 143 Sister Gabrielle's Christmas Tree . . .159 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL OUR PATIENTS On October sixth, last, I received a mes- sage from the directress of the Hospital of Saint Dominic, reading as follows: "A large number of wounded have just arrived. We can't take care of any more ourselves, and the moment has come to call for volunteers. I shall expect your help." One hour later, as you can easily imagine, I was at Saint Dominic. This specially privileged hospital is under the gentle man- agement of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. Several years ago some of its de- voted trustees made one effort after another on its behalf in Paris, and, after overcoming many difficulties, reestablished the Sisters of Charity amongst us once again. They had not a doubt even then that they were work- 2 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL ing in the interests of France's soldiers, those same soldiers whose faces light up now with such a special joy when they lie on their painful stretchers, and catch sight, near the large entrance porch, of the good white cor- nettes of the Sisters waiting for them. With my heart beating fast I entered the room to which I had been assigned. There they all were before me, these lads that had undergone that terrible and fierce adventur- ing into war. I remember how they went away in our wonderful mobilisation trains, those make-shift, flower-bedecked trains that sped all of them to the same destination, the same region of glory and bloodshed. One long war cry seemed to rise up from them over all our land. Our young soldiers who went away in them had acquired an en- tirely new way of shouting "Vive la France." It was no longer as if they were on parade, notwithstanding all the flowers that people tossed to them: it was already the cry of men who were to lead in war's IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL 3 assaults, and make the supreme sacrifice of their lives. I remember one little infantry- man of twenty years, standing erect with folded arms in the back of his compartment, his eyes flashing, and all the muscles of his pale face taut. He kept repeating threat- eningly, "Vive la France — ^vive la France," without a look toward any one; saying it just to himself and for his country. And I felt that it was as if he said: "We shall get them: we must get them, no matter what it costs. As for me, well, you see, to begin with, my life doesn't count any more." This very fellow is the one, perhaps, who has come back now and sleeps here in this first cot, where a face both energetic and in- fantile shows in the midst of the blood- stained linen. Sister Gabrielle made a tour with me of all the patients. The memory of certain of them particularly is fixed in my mind. There is number 3, here, who got a bullet wound in the region of the liver, and has 4 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL to lie absolutely still, lest an internal hemor- rhage may occur at any moment. A war- rior of twenty-three he is, with cheeks as rosy as a girl's, and clear blue eyes. He fought like a lion, they say, but here noth- ing could be gentler. His appreciation for the least thing that is done for him is touch- ing. Number 8, little eight, as they call him, a volunteer, who seems about fifteen, and who has to live week after week propped on his right side, on a hard hospital bed, on account of an abscess following his wound. Number 12, an infantr3mQan, who got a bul- let in the left temple; it was extracted from his right maxillary, and in passing cut his tongue in two. "Everything has been put back," said the Sister, "but he can't talk yet, and he'll have to learn to talk all over again, like a little child. In taking care of him you must come every once in a while and see if you can guess what he wants." Number 17, a brave among the braves, who, under the enemy's fire, crawled ten kilo- IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL 5 metres on his hands and knees, dragging his twice wounded foot behind him, to deliver an order that he had been charged with. His wounds cause him cruel suffering, and yet he seems illuminated as with some strange inward joy. Number 24, nicknamed the little sieve, because of his fifteen wounds. Number 32, who suffers like a real martyr. His leg was literally shattered by the frag- ments of a shell. It was a question whether it could be saved at all, but following the directions of the war surgeon, we are keep- ing up the attempt. Antiseptic injections are made twice a day as deep as the bone. Number 30, who has lost an eye and has two open fractures in his right arm. When I said to him : "You have given a good deal for France," he answered, "It's the least I could do." And he added, laughing, "I was so clumsy with my hands. This will teach me to be clever even with my left one." Eloquent pens write every day of the hero- ism shown by our wounded soldiers, but 6 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL shall we ever grow tired of hearing this ever recurring leit motifs which in everything that touches on the tragic developments of 1914, sounds its incomparable song in praise of the moral qualities of France? One can- not repeat too often or too admiringly, "Our wounded." Our wounded, that is to say, those men who have come back from that hell, "whose horrors," they say themselves, "are indescribable" ; those who have marched beneath "that terrible, moving curtain of iron," to which an officer compared the mass of balls and shells in battle, a mass so com- pact that it obscured the very daylight on the firing line. Our wounded I Those, in a word, who have brought back in their very flesh the frightful scars of the enemy's iron, those who have cemented with their own blood the human wall that is now our frontier. They have come back, not with their courage drained, broken down, horror- stricken, stunned — not at all. They forget themselves to talk smilingly of the great IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL 7 hope in which we all share. They are touched, deeply touched, by the few hours of fatigue we undergo for them each day — for them who have given almost their lives. My tasks were laid out for me, and I be- gan work at once, thanked by the soldiers almost in advance for my trouble. "It's a bit too much to see you work like this for us." "All the same, no one has ever been served like this." They are not a bit difficult, but pleased with everything, these men who suffer so much, who have such a right to every care. Alas, there are too many of them (this hos- pital alone has as many as a thousand) to permit of all the little comforting things that we should like to do for them without stint. The Sister who cooks is sorely driven, and even the prescribed dishes that she sends up for the sickest ones are often far from appe- tising. For instance, I have just taken Num- ber 13, who is consumed by a lingering 8 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL fever (a bullet passed through his lung), a milk soup that smelt badly burned, and in which pieces of half-cooked rice floated round. I sighed a little about it as I put the napkin on the bed. Did he understand what worried me? In any case, he shows no distaste, and a quarter of an hour later, when I pass by him, he motions to me, and says gently, "It was delicious, madame." That's the way they all are — all of them. SISTER GABRIELLE I STUDY with emotion the admirable vi- sion of the human soul which the Sister of Charity and the wounded soldier set before me. It is a vision which has intervened al- ways, as with an element of the supernatural, in our war-time pictures, and, behold, now we find it again, almost miraculously, in the supreme struggle of 1914. Sister Gabrielle, who has charge of my room, her identity quite hidden as it is by IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL Q her archangel's name, is the daughter of a general, as I know. She has three brothers that have served beneath the colours. The oldest, a quite young captain, has just met his death on the field of honour. I happen to have learned the circumstances : how, cov- ered with blood already flowing from three different wounds. Captain X nevertheless struggled on bravely at the head of his men, and after several hours of conflict was struck by a bullet full in the breast. He fell, cry- ing: "Don't fall back! That's my last order !" Sister Gabrielle was told only last week of the glorious grief that had been thrust upon her, but no one around her would have guessed her sorrow. Possibly her smile for the patients that day was a little more com- passionate and tender than usual, when she thought of her brother enduring his moment of supreme agony alone down there in the forests of the Vosges. But no matter how compassionate Sister Gabrielle may be, she 10 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL never carries it to the point of feebleness or softness. Her bearing with the soldiers is an indefinable mingling of something an- gelic, maternal and virile, all at once. These men brought in from all points of the im- mense and terrible battlefield become at once her children (and never was a mother more watchfully solicitous and devoted), but never does she forget their sacred title of soldier. She must not stir up their feelings, she knows. She sets herself, on the con- trary, the essential, secret task of keeping up their moral strength, of helping them, after the enemy's fire, to meet the ordeal of the operating room, the wearing suffering, per- haps at last even death; for death is always watching for its prey in this room of the twenty-four beds reserved for the most se- verely wounded. Sister Gabrielle would like to save them all. What a task ! What a struggle ! She is on her feet night and day. The orderlies are told to call her at the least disturbing IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL 11 symptom, and when they do, with true motherly enthusiasm, she who is always helping others to bear their heavy burdens, herself awakens, tireless, to her own sad duties. In the semi-darkness of the room she prepares hastily the serum that may pro- long a life; she utters the sweet words that are dear to souls who suffer thus at night. It may be one o'clock, two o'clock in the morning, but when four o'clock sounds her night is over. Lost in the long line of white cornettes, she takes her way to the chapel, and there stores up for another twen- ty-four hours the strength to go on with this superhuman mode of living. Behold in her "a soul that is truly the mistress of the body which it animates." She is thin and frail — ^mortally ill herself, they say; she was quite ill one month ago. But if you speak to her of her health she interrupts you a little impatiently: "We have given ourselves, body and soul, according to our vows. To last a little 12 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL longer or a little less doesn't matter. The main thing is to fulfil our tasks. Besides," she adds, indicating her patients, "they have given their lives for France. It is quite right, if it must be so, that our lives be sacri- ficed to save them." And, in truth, from living in this atmos- phere one comes to think this mutual hero- ism the natural thing. These two kinds of heroes, the French soldier and the Sister of Charity, need make no explanations, coin no phrases to understand each other. There really exists between them, over and above the differences in class and lives, a real and touching intimacy of the soul. When Sister Gabrielle goes quietly and rapidly past the long rows of beds where they suffer so un- complainingly, they know perfectly well that she hasn't time to stop before each one of them. She has not time to say the words which suffering seems so easily to call forth, but which may make it worse and cause it to be less nobly borne. They know, too, IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL I3 that she will be there if her presence is nec- essary, and that if, in secret, her woman's heart weeps over them, weeps incessantly, in their presence her French woman's heart beats with pride. To us, when they can't hear, she talks about "her children" freely, quite full of admiration and pity for them: "Ah, if you knew how full of courage they are," she says. "You must be with them night and day, like me, to do them justice; to see them coming into the operat- ing room so bravely, a smile on their lips, as they lie on their stretchers. You must see them die, too." Sister Gabrielle's eyes filled with tears at the thought of so many young lives that have gone out — of so many yet to pass out, in her arms. This woman, young and frail as she is, truly must have some supernatural source of energy in herself, thus to bear up and never falter under the terrible weight of suffering that crushes her silent heart, this 14 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL suffering that tortures her soldiers in the flesh incessantly all about her. The wounded soldiers are not clever at expressing their appreciation. But they know quite well that Sister Gabrielle can guess what they feel for her, just from the timid way in which they say, "Thank you," so many times, or the confiding way in which they give her their letters, or tell the news they've had from their families, or from the fervour with which they try to do a thousand little services for her as soon as they begin to get better; and especially from the respect, a very touching kind of respect, surprisingly full of delicacy, which they invariably show for her, even in the midst of their cruellest suffering. In speaking to Sister Gabrielle they never use the trite phrases that they use to the other nurses, such as, "You'll tire yourself out; you're doing too much." No, Sister Gabrielle is an immaterial being, to whom they don't dare attribute the IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL 1^ common feebleness of humanity. But watching her passing by, her clear eyes deeply ringed with fatigue, her step tired, but her bearing invariably gentle, I often hear them murmur, "She deserves a decora- tion." ONE NIGHT Better than all the newspapers and of- ficial communications on the war, the hos- pital keeps one in touch with matters at the front. In the lot of wounded that were sent in yesterday, forty came to Sister Gabrielle directly from the Aisne. They arrived to- ward the close of the day, and I shall never forget the spectacle of that room. One stretcher succeeded another, all borne slowly by the litter-men and set down near the hast- ily prepared beds. Here and there you caught a cry of pain that could not be kept in, though there were no complaints, no con- tinued groanings. Yet now, when you lean over those glorious and lamentable blue bon- i6 IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL nets, cut as they are by bullets and stained with the mud of the trenches, when you take off the caps that have grown stiff with the dampness of the long rains, you perceive their suffering by the glittering look in their fevered eyes, their poor, worn faces and ravaged features, sunken and hollow with suffering. Then, all at once, at the least word, the old gallantry that we know so well reasserts itself. For example, they ask