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Night Raids from the Air: English

In E--there were half a dozen large hospitals. The wounded, chiefly English, were coming in faster than the hospital corps could handle them. They needed our help, not only in registering the men--very few of whom understood any French--but in feeding and giving water.

I got to the hospital the next day and worked steadily till eight thirty. Then an ambulance driver gave me a lift as far as the canteen, and I managed to get a cold supper at our mess.

Dispensing hospitality to worn-out officers.

I was hardly in my office before I heard a knock at the door, which, as I was alone in the house, I always locked at night as soon as I entered. In response to my "Who's there?" a voice, guided by my English, replied, "I am an English officer." I threw open the door without a second's hesitation. A young officer, weary, white-faced, stood there, beginning to apologize as he saw my uniform and white veil. He was simply "done," he said--and he looked it. He had found every hotel was full, and, seeing a few gleams of light behind the shutters, he had knocked in the hope of finding shelter for the night. I knew that the woman at the canteen who would go off duty at midnight was scheduled to go immediately to the hospital to work until seven in the morning and that I could occupy her bed after I came back from the hospital, and I offered my apartment to the officer for the night. He was most grateful, and I rushed over to the canteen to get him a pitcher of hot water and a cup of chocolate. But there I found a group of French officers, who said they had neither sleep nor rest for three days and nights, pleading for some place to lie down. As there was a comfortable leather couch in my office, besides a wide soft couch over which I had laid my steamer rug, and, in addition, an exceedingly soft double bed in my room which I thought the tired Englishman ought to be willing to share with an equally tired man, I proffered my hospitality, which was gratefully accepted. I piloted them across to the office, and returned to the canteen, hoping to find an American ambulance boy who would run me over to the hospital.

A new raid begins.

Directing men to shelter.

Help from American boys.

I sighted a group of the familiar uniforms, and was heading for it when, bang! went a falling bomb, without any warning alerte. The next instant all lights were out, and the French soldiers were swarming through the door. As all the other women in the canteen had set duties to perform--putting out fires, locking up money and food--and I, not being on duty, had none, I stationed myself at the door, calling out to the soldiers where they would find shelter. Being transients, they did not know where to find refuge. But long before the canteen was empty, the machine-gun bullets were sweeping the street and the shrapnel was raining down. Two American boys came up in the darkness, and one said in the quietest tone of authority, "Get between us, lady!" They backed me up against the side of the canteen, close under the shelter of the eaves, and stood one on each side of me. I had no trench-helmet, so one of them took his sheepskin driving coat, folded it, and put it over his head and mine. As soon as a lull in the firing permitted, we ran across the street to the abris. The Germans went back several times for more ammunition and continued the bombing for nearly two hours.

The nurses stay with the wounded.

One of our workers, who was at the hospital, told me that her first impulse was to run for an abris as we would do at the canteen, but when she looked about her and saw everybody composedly going on with duty, she gathered herself together and did the same--"Although," she added, "my teeth just rattled at first." Some of the wounded were terrified and begged not to be left; and that called out the mother instinct in the women, so that they forgot to be afraid.

The Germans swept the hospital with their machine guns and did their best to bomb it, but fortunately made no hits. It was finally necessary to put out all lights and to cease work. It was a most trying ordeal, because the buildings were of pine, close together, and a direct hit probably would have started a fire which would have burned the wounded as they lay. The sound of battle draws near.

About half past one I went up to our mess and crawled into an empty bed. The next morning when I awakened it was to the sound of distant cannon. This meant that the battle was drawing nearer.

A ride on an ambulance.

An especially hard day kept me on the strain from 8 a. m. to 7 p. m. and when I returned to the mess I found no dinner and no servants. Our directrice, anticipating evacuation, had dismissed them. Only a little Belgian refugee, a sort of "slavey," hung on, because she had no other place to go. Tired out, I managed to make an omelet and a cup of tea, and to fry some griddle cakes to replace the bread which was conspicuous by its absence. Then I stationed myself in front of the canteen hoping to flag a passing ambulance. An American driver stopped his car, and a Frenchman, who was beside him on the front seat, jumped down to help me up. This man had a bandage around his throat, and when I asked him if he was wounded, he made a hissing sound in reply. The American driver explained that he could not speak because he had a bullet through his windpipe. There were six badly wounded men on the stretchers inside, but we heard not a sound from them.

A night of horrors.

I shall not soon forget that night. I had steeled myself to meet horrors, and knew that I must not let them affect me. Yet in spite of terrible wounds, there was little sound of suffering. The place was wonderfully quiet. Bringing up food for the wounded.

When I got inside of the receiving room, a group of our women who had been at work all afternoon were still moving about, white and hollow-eyed with fatigue. A french doctor asked if I could not bring some food there from the canteen. It was Thursday. Some of the men had been wounded on Tuesday, and had had no food and little water.

I found an English girl with an empty ambulance, who risked a reprimand for leaving without orders, and we flashed back to the canteen, and loaded up with twenty gallons of hot chocolate, bread, about three hundred hard boiled eggs, some kilos of chocolate, and raw eggs and sugar. We flew back to the hospital; but there was a big convoy of ambulances just in, so that we could not get up to the main buildings. We scouted around in the dark to find a place to deposit our stuff and open a temporary kitchen, and, returning to the ambulance, we came across a wounded boy who had sunk on a bench. The ambulance driver had passed him, making his way on foot, but being full-up, she was unable to give him a lift. He was wounded in the chest, was exhausted, and had no great-coat. It was absolutely necessary to get him under cover and to give him warmth and nourishment. We put our arms around him and tried to help him along, but soon it was apparent that he had not the strength to make the reception ward.

Holding up a boy too weak to stand.

The English girl said, "You hold him up while I get a stretcher"; so I jammed myself up against the side of a building and put my arms about the boy while his weight grew heavier and heavier against me. I could not let him slip, because the roadway was narrow and a long string of ambulances, without lights, was passing. He never uttered a sound, but his arms moved convulsively. As he felt himself growing weaker, he put them around my neck, and clung to me precisely as a frightened child would. It seemed an age while I waited there, warning off ambulances that were about to shave us too closely. I could not help wondering where that boy's mother was, what she was doing, or if he had a mother. And I thought some terrible thoughts about war and some wicked ones about Germans.

Dispensing food to the wounded.

The girl came with her stretcher at last, and we got the boy on it. Then we went about setting up our feeding station. Hungry men limped in, bandaged mostly about the head, and how they consumed hard boiled eggs and drank hot chocolate! I left the English girl dispensing food and drink, while I took to the badly wounded a mixture of beaten egg, hot milk and sugar. Here and there men asked for a piece of chocolate or bread, but most of the wounded wanted only the liquid food. They would say with their awful English cockney accent, "Ah! that's good!" or "Prime stuff!" or "Could you spare a little more, sister?" In spite of dreadful wounds, they were full of pluck. Great numbers of wounded in stretchers.

For the next two hours I gave water and egg mixture to all sorts and conditions of men--English, French, Canadians, Moroccans, Senegalese. The doctor asked if I knew enough to administer morphine hypodermics, and I regretfully admitted that I did not, while I registered a vow to learn. Then some American Red Cross men appeared, and some English doctors. Before midnight three or four long Red Cross trains had been filled with wounded, and sent out. Yet at that hour more than five hundred wounded men still lay on their stretchers on the grass outside. And all the while, as I worked, I thought of how, as soon as the moon came up, we should hear the familiar roar and rattle of the bombs, and of how the shrapnel and machine gun bullets would rain down on those upturned faces.

The hospital floors are crowded.

But, grace to heaven, the Germans did not come that night! At midnight I went into Ward 4, where some of the worst wounded had been placed. Stretchers had been laid on top of the beds and flat on the floor on both sides of the central aisle, till one could hardly move. Most of the wounded seemed to sleep. Only here and there one begged for water, and these men were usually wounded in the abdomen where not even water could be given. We could moisten their lips and wipe off the hot feverish faces, and that was all. Every-thing possible has been done.

By one o'clock it was evident that the most of what could be done had been done. Another section of our women had arrived with more food, and I went out to the covered way between the receiving room and the operating room, to steal a ride home on the driver's seat of some departing ambulance. An English boy, who had been gassed, asked me hoarsely if I could get him a blanket, and I did so. Another man was there, on whose eyelashes and eyebrows something that looked like ice seemed to hang. I think it was an application to soothe gas-burns.