B00D2VJZ4G EBOK (36 page)

All this must have taken place in a matter of a few minutes, for when I was able to get out of this ghastly hut (by the way, why did we all crowd into it?) things outside were still appallingly confused. I gathered from quick questioning that the aeroplane must have been one captured by the Germans, and that a bomb had been dropped, the hole which it had made being just inside the barrack gate. The terrible nature of the damage to everything in the neighbourhood of the explosion was due to the impact of flying fragments of road-metal. The vagaries of explosives were illustrated in this case by the fact that our colonel was standing within a few yards of the spot where the bomb went off, and though a French interpreter just beside him was stone dead, he was not touched or affected in any way by the concussion.

Piteous sight after sight met my eyes as I got more into the centre of the holocaust; more than fifty non-combatants were dead, dying, or wounded. One face haunts me to this day: a fine young American medical officer lay in the hut at the foot of the row, his expression the most horrible and soul-searing I ever saw. He was half-sitting up, waiting for his turn for attention, both legs bending, not at the natural place at the knees, but half-way up the thighs, and he was praying for morphia to ease his agony. All the wounded seemed to suffer more than any I had seen before, owing probably to the awful bruising and smashing power of these lumps of road-metal. Just where I had been sleeping a few minutes before, the greatest damage was apparent. The two foremost ambulances were completely wrecked, two men had been hideously mangled on the front seat of one of them, and along the bank one could see the ground furrowed by the flying stones, many pieces of which were almost as big as one’s clenched fist.

I found the strain of helplessly watching so much suffering while waiting for dressings and drugs to be unpacked so insupportable that I asked the colonel if I could go down to a casualty clearing station for liquid morphia and perhaps some help. My memory here is somewhat blurred, but somehow I got hold of a car and managed to find the clearing station or stationary hospital – I cannot remember which it was – with great difficulty, as the place seemed deserted. I found a nursing sister – her face of sorrow is another painful memory. I blurted out to her, ‘We’ve had an awful catastrophe with a bomb – thirty or forty men crying for morphia. Can you give me some?’ Her sad face hardly changed its expression. Then she made me understand why. ‘Come this way,’ she said, and led me to the largest marquee. I stepped inside and recoiled, aghast… Row upon row upon row of silent forms on stretchers – nothing else.

‘There are several hundred stretcher cases here who still have their first field dressings on.’ The sister sighed. ‘And we are leaving very soon!’ She had reached the limit of unavailing regret, and I felt quite ashamed of mentioning such a trifling matter as thirty or forty wounded!

When I returned to the blood-stained barrack yard, order of a kind had been restored, but another row of forms, alas, still for ever, lay side by side in the evening sunshine. The less seriously wounded were being got away somewhere in our available transport, baggage was being cleared from wagons to make room for them, and the obviously dying were in the biggest hut. We survivors could barely raise our voices to speak. I was detailed to take a certain number of men to dig a grave near the abandoned hospital.

A beautiful chestnut mare stood patiently tethered to a tree, bleeding slowly to death from a small wound in the belly, through which a flying fragment had passed; the blood dripped steadily on, and one could not think of the poor animal’s final and tedious death; as I had at one time been a combatant officer I was beseeched to put an end to its misery with a rifle which was produced from somewhere. All that I can say about this is – that I did it…but it is another haunting memory.

Then followed the burial of twenty-nine officers and men. The grave took several hours to dig. The service and filling in of the grave took a couple of hours more, and then, in darkness, began the crowning agony of that awful day. Twelve miles to march with exhausted men to a destination which never seemed to come nearer; every halt a torture – thinking of starting again; whipping in stragglers whom one pitied from the bottom of one’s heart, while cursing them for their bad discipline; trying to be cheerful, when we were all in the darkest depths. What a night! It ended by our arrival at a place called Lassigny, which had once been a village, and where the main body of our ambulance had crept into a muddy field and erected tents. I at last could lie on my face on the ground and moan to myself, ‘My heels!… Oh! my heels!’ until someone – perhaps my servant, perhaps my friend Captain Barton – came to help me off with my boots…

Dr. F. O. Taylor served in France in the R.F.A. and the R.A.M.C
.

In April 1918 I volunteered to go to France in response to the urgent call for more surgeons. For twenty years I had been in general practice in a suburb, and did a fair amount of surgery among patients and at the local hospitals. I had also had some war experience as one of the surgeons at the British Red Cross Hospital, Netley, in the first six months of the War, but I had no experience of cases fresh from the battlefield, and the surgical technique which had recently been adopted in dealing with them.

I had been longing throughout the War to get to the Front, and I set out full of enthusiasm and with no little pride and satisfaction to my family and myself.

It was a great disappointment, after a wait of four days in Boulogne, to find that I was posted to a large Base hospital at Trouville. Here I remained till the beginning of July, not at all happy, and hampered at every turn by red tape, rules, and regulations. The hospital was full of the wastage of war – men sent down from the Front, suffering from the ordinary diseases of civil life, which should have precluded their enlistment. The Front knocked them out almost at once, and they came to be patched up, to convalesce, and return. The mess was full of rather war-weary men, who had endured much, and were glad of an easy berth. I had plenty of operating on ordinary civil-life disabilities, and, when not engaged in filling up ‘forms,’ enjoyed myself in field expeditions to collect butterflies and flowers, but the distant sound of guns was often disturbing. Through the influence of a kind consulting surgeon at G.H.Q., and to my great delight, I was appointed early in July as a surgeon to a casualty clearing station at Crouay, near Amiens.

A greater contrast to a Base hospital could hardly be imagined. All military discipline, red tape, and formality were reduced to a minimum. Within the camp, officers donned flannels or shorts, and the mess, a dozen altogether, formed a family party; there were a small number of highly trained sisters, and forty or fifty orderlies.

The institution of these small mobile hospitals near the fighting line had revolutionized the surgery of the War, and was the means of saving thousands of lives. It was found that the fatal sepsis and gas gangrene of wounds could be avoided if effective operation was performed within thirty-six hours of their infliction, and all dead and injured tissue removed, in spite of the extensive mutilation incurred. The essential parts of a C.C.S. were:

(1) A large reception marquee. (2) A resuscitation tent, where severely shocked or apparently dying cases were warmed up in heated beds, or transfused before operation. (3) A pre-operation tent, where stretcher cases were prepared for operation. (4) A large operating tent with complete equipment for six tables. (5) An evacuation tent, where the cases were sent after operation, to await the hospital train for the Base. (6) A ward tent for cases requiring watching for twenty-four hours, or too bad for evacuation.

I had two days to settle down, and get some idea of my new surroundings, and everyone was immensely kind, but I realized how entirely inexperienced I was in the work which would be required of me; my colleagues were all young men with two or three years’ War service.

Vast reserves of men and transport had silently for two nights been moving up the road to Amiens to support the Australian attack at Villers-Bretonneux. On my third day I was orderly officer, and after my day’s work had to be on duty all night as reception officer. On that evening the attack began, with a continuous roar of heavy guns, while the horizon was brilliantly lit with the flashes of exploding dumps, Verey lights, and star shells. The camp was quietly resting, and I was left with a few orderlies in the dimly lit reception tent. About 1 a.m. the ambulances began to arrive.

It is impossible to convey an adequate picture of the scene. Into the tent are borne on stretchers, or come wearily stumbling, figures in khaki, wrapped in blankets or coats, bandaged or splinted. All of them stiff with mud, or caked with blood and dust, and salt sweat, and with labels of their injuries attached. They come in such numbers that the tent is soon filled, and what can be done? I can’t cope with them all! Many are white and cold, and lie still and make no response, and those who do are laconic, or point to their label. I have had no instructions how to dispose of such numbers, or the method of procedure, but realize that they must be examined briefly and sorted, and sent to one or other of our hospital tents. But my non-com. orderly was at my side with whispered suggestions, and soon we had the stretchers on one side and the standing cases on the other, and, leaving the slighter cases to be dressed, I gradually sorted out the bad ones for the ‘resuss,’ ‘pre-op,’ or ‘evacuation’ tents. I had never seen such frightful wounds, and could not conceive how we three surgeons could deal with them on the ensuing day. It was 7 a.m. before I had cleared the tent, and I felt tired out after nearly twenty-four hours’ work, but at 10 a.m., I should have to begin to operate for another twelve hours and on cases like these!

It was extraordinary that in this charnel tent of pain and misery there was silence, and no outward expression of moans or groans or complaints. The badly shocked had passed beyond it; others appeared numbed, or too tired to complain, or so exhausted that they slept as they stood. Even the badly wounded often asked for a smoke. Here were lying uncomplaining men with shattered heads or ghastly disfiguration of their faces, others with shell and bullet wounds of the chest, spitting blood and gasping for breath; and, worst of all, those quiet, afraid-to-be-touched cases with the innocent tiny little mark where the bullet had entered the abdomen, but already with the thready pulse, drawn corners of the mouth, anxious look, and rigid muscles which betoken hopeless disaster within. And here were ‘multiple wounded,’ their bodies riddled with large or small shell fragments, terrible compound fractures in Thomas’s splints, and the stumps of torn-off limbs.

Well, I got a bath and some breakfast, and at ten o’clock began the operating: three of us at first, and later on in the day we were reinforced in response to S.O.S. calls by four visiting teams from distant C.C.C.s each consisting of surgeon, anaesthetist, sister, and trained orderly.

As the day wore on I felt nearer and nearer to collapse. The appalling wounds, my ignorance of the new methods of dealing with them, the utter fatigue of standing at the table, and the growing feeling that my assistants must be noticing my incompetency began to take away all self-confidence. I began to think of the bad luck of the wretched victims who came under my knife. How confidently they went under the ether, relying on my skill: how their lives and the happiness of their homes depended on me; how much better for them had fate brought them to the next table. Every feeling and introspection that should never cross a surgeon’s mind began to possess me and shake my nerve, and it was only concentration on the actual technique of the operation that kept me going. The hours dragged on. Would the ‘Resuss’ and ‘Pre-op’ wards never be emptied.

‘Resuss!’ ‘Pre-op!’ – abbreviated words always to be fixed in memory with the haunting faces of their inmates. ‘Resuss’ was a dreadful place. Here were sent the shocked and collapsed and dying cases, not able to stand as yet an operation, but which might be possible after the warming-up under cradles in heated beds or transfusion of blood. The effect of transfusion was in some cases miraculous. I have seen men already like corpses, blanched and collapsed, pulseless and with just perceptible breathing, within two hours of transfusion sitting up in bed smoking, and exchanging jokes before they went to the operating table.

The orderly in the ‘Resuss’ was a wonderful lad. A boy of twenty, he had served without relief for months in this tent, attending to the worst cases and the dying. He had all the patience, tenderness, and devotion of a woman, the gentle hands and skill of a nurse, and an enduring fortitude. He was recommended for the D.S.M., but his best reward must be the memory of many a farewell message home, many a silent grasp of hand, and the last look of grateful eyes.

That dreadful day of my first experience of a C.C.C. rush ended at 7 p.m., after thirty-six hours of continuous work, and somehow I had got through. I was completely exhausted with anxiety and fatigue, and felt I could never go on with it, and was not up to the task: but to give in was even more terrible. I could hardly articulate at dinner, but my condition escaped notice, and I crept to my tent to fall dead asleep before I could make a decision.

I woke refreshed on a glorious July day: we were encamped on cultivated down-land untouched by war, and the air was alive with the song of larks and the fields gay with poppies and marigolds and down flowers. The camp and country a picture of peaceful calm and beauty, if only one could forget the scene inside the tents. Fortunately, there were only a few cases left by the night shift, and in the afternoon I was able to leave the operating tent and get out among the birds and butterflies and flowers. It was this walk, I think, which saved the situation for me. I got time, alone, to pull myself together, and though many times afterwards even worse rushes occurred and more terrible scenes were enacted, I never became overwhelmed with the same panic of my first experience.