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Page 35
This devotion of the nurses--how can one ever say enough of it! I recall
the wrath of a medical officer in charge of a large hospital at Rouen.
"Why don't they give more Red Crosses to the _working nurses_? They don't
get half enough recognition. I have a nurse here who has been twelve
months in the operating theatre. She ought to have a V.C.!--It's worth
it."
And here is a dark-eyed young officer who had come from a distant colony
to fight for England. I find him in an officer's hospital, established not
long after the war broke out, in a former Casino, where the huge
baccarat-room has been turned into two large and splendid wards. He is
courteously ready to talk about his wound, but much more ready to talk
about his Sister.
"It's simply _wonderful_ what they do for us!" he says, all his face
lighting up. "When I was worst there wasn't an hour in the day or night my
Sister wasn't ready to try anything in the world to help me. But they're
all like that."
Let me here gratefully recall, also, the hospitals organised by the
Universities of Chicago and Harvard, entirely staffed by American Sisters
and Doctors, each of them providing 34 doctors and 80 nurses, and dealing
with 1,040 patients. Harvard has maintained a general hospital with the
British Force in France since July, 1915. The first passages and uniforms
were paid for by the British Government, but the University has itself
paid all passages, and provided all uniforms since the start; and it is
proposed, I am told, to carry on this generous help indefinitely.
Twenty thousand wounded!--while every day the ambulance trains come and go
from the front, or to other bases--there to fill up one or other of the
splendid hospital ships that take our brave fellows back to England, and
home, and rest. And this city of hospitals, under its hard-pressed
medical chief, with all its wealth of scientific invention, and painsaving
device, and unremitting care, with its wonderful health and recovery
statistics, has been the growth of just twelve months. The mind wavers
between the two opposing images it suggests: war and its havoc on the one
hand--the power of the human brain and the goodness of the human heart on
the other.
II
It was late on the 29th of February that we reached our next
resting-place, to find a kind greeting from another Base Commandant and
final directions for our journey of the morrow. We put up at one of the
old commercial inns of the town (it is not easy to find hotel quarters of
any kind just now, when every building at all suitable has been pressed
into the hospital service) and I found delight in watching the various
types of French officers, naval and military, who came in to the _table
d'h�te_, plunging as soon as they had thrown off their caps and cloaks,
and while they waited for their consomm�, into the papers with the latest
news of Verdun. But we were too tired to try and talk! The morning came
quickly, and with it our escort from G.H.Q. We said good-bye to Colonel
S., who had guided our journey so smoothly through all the fierce
drawbacks of the weather, and made friends at once with our new guide,
the staff-officer who deals with the guests of G.H.Q. Never shall I
forget that morning's journey! I find in my notes: "A beautiful drive--far
more beautiful than I had expected--over undulating country, with distant
views of interlocking downs, and along typical French roads, tree or
forest bordered, running straight as a line up-hill and down-hill,
over upland and plain. One exquisite point of view especially comes
back to me, where a road to the coast--that coast which the Germans
so nearly reached!--diverged upon our left, and all the lowlands
westward came into sight. It was pure Turner, the soft sunlight of
the day, with its blue shadows, and pale-blue sky; the yellow chalk
hills, still marked with streaks of snow; the woods, purple and madder
brown, the distances ethereally blue; and the villages, bare and unlovely
compared with the villages of Kent and Sussex, but expressing a strong
old historic life, sprung from the soil, and one with it. The first
distant glimpse, as we turned a hill-corner, of the old town which was
our destination--extraordinarily fine!--its ancient church a towered
mass of luminous grey under the sunshine, gathering the tiled roofs
into one harmonious whole."
But we avoided the town itself and found ourselves presently descending an
avenue of trees to the eighteenth-century ch�teau, which is used by G.H.Q.
as a hostel for its guests--allied and neutral correspondents, military
attach�s, special missions, and the like. In a few minutes I found myself
standing bewildered by the strangeness and the interest of it all, in a
charming Louis-Quinze room, plain and simple in the true manner of the
genuine French country house, but with graceful panelled walls, an old
_armoire_ of the date, windows wide open to the spring sun, and a
half-wild garden outside. A _femme de m�nage_, much surprised to be
waiting on two ladies, comes to look after us. And this is France!--and we
are only thirty miles from that fighting line, which has drawn our English
hearts to it all these days.
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