Part 13

The rain came swishing down. Water gathered on the canvas above, and heavy drops fell splashing on to the floor with monotonous regularity. Somebody was muttering curses in his sleep. Others were snoring loudly. I lay awake for a long time, staring into the black darkness of the marquee. Suddenly--it must have been two or three o'clock in the morning--the familiar rumbling noise broke out in the distance. It seemed to spread along the whole horizon. The "stunt" had begun.

A drowsy voice growled: "They're at it again--why can't they stop it once and for all." Another groaned deeply and muttered: "Awful--awful slaughter--blackguards, blackguards."

The uproar increased. I was filled with a terrible dejection, but I went to sleep in the end.

It was broad daylight when I woke up to the sound of innumerable motor-cars coming and going out on the road. The wounded were streaming in.

The operating theatre was alive with figures clothed in white, blood-stained garments, bustling up and down, or standing in groups around the other tables. At the far end of the theatre someone was blubbering like a little child.

"Here, come on--hold this man's leg up. What d'you think you're here for?" It was the surgeon at the next table who was speaking to me.

I grasped the leg by the foot--it was quite cold--while the orderly removed a bandage from the thigh. The bone had been shattered. A bullet had also entered the man's chest, making a small round puncture. A shell fragment had struck his upper lip, leaving a jagged triangular hole below the nose. Several teeth had been knocked out. The upper palate had been gashed and partly separated from the bone. It hung inside the half-open mouth like a shrivelled flap. He breathed feebly and irregularly. The surgeon bent over him and asked him if he had been wounded long. He answered in low, hoarse whispers that he had been lying in the mud and rain for several days. Then he turned his eyes up so that only the whites were visible. They remained rigidly fixed in that position. He received a dorsal injection, being too weak for chloroform. The shattered thigh was painted with picric acid and the tourniquet tightened above the injury. The surgeon cut through the leg with a circular sweep of the knife, the splintered bone offering no resistance. The limb came off in my hands. I held it for a moment, being awed by it. It seemed very heavy. Then I dropped it into the pail below. When the surgeon had dressed the stump, he made a slight incision in the forearm in order to inject a saline solution. The man, who had not uttered a sound hitherto, winced and gave a faint cry.

"Come along--hold this leg up!"

I darted to the next table and seized another foot and ankle. There was a greenish festering hole so high up the leg that it was impossible to use a tourniquet. So the surgeon laid bare the main artery by a longitudinal incision and tied it up with catgut to prevent excessive loss of blood. With a rapid stroke of his knife he then made a shallow cut right round the limb above the injured spot, and depressing the blade cut deeply down to the bone. The blood gushed up suddenly, formed a pool on the towels and sheet underneath, overflowed the edge of the table, and splashed down on to the floor in a cascade. The operator paused a moment and then, while the blood continued to stream from the wound, he cut round the bone until flesh was entirely severed from flesh. The upper periosteum was pushed back and held by means of a metal plate. The bone was sawn through--the saw grated and jerked and jarred in a horrible manner. The leg came off and I dropped it into the white enamelled pail. The toe-nails clicked against the enamel, and the thigh, bumping against the rim, overturned it and flopped into the pool of blood under the table.

"Come on--look sharp--never mind that leg--give a help here and remove this man's bandages."

I was looking at a head that resembled a huge football made of soiled linen. In place of the mouth there was a small, dirty hole through which the fetid breath came and went. Above the hole was a big red patch. I unwound the bandages one by one. Gradually the face was revealed. Between the mouth with black, swollen lips and the bruised eyes, closed by grey greenish lids, there was, where the nose should have been, a red hole big enough to contain a human fist.

The wounded came and went in an unbroken stream. The tables were always occupied. I went from one to another, unwound bandages, held up limbs for amputation, fetched splints, padding, gauze, or new bandages. I was too busy to think or to feel any horror. I was vaguely conscious of nausea and of a hot, stifling atmosphere heavy with the fumes of chloroform and ether.

Some of the wounded had arms that hung by shreds of muscle and sinew. Others had feet that were nothing but masses of clotted blood, lumps of torn flesh, and bits of bone tied up in blood-sodden linen parcels. Some had deep holes in their backs, others had gashes in their heads from which soft, pink matter oozed.

Before me lay a man with a blackened face, a shattered knee, and festering holes all over his body. Gas-gangrene had set in and the stench was almost unendurable. The surgeon gently felt the injured leg, but the man gave such long-drawn piercing shrieks that he had to be left alone. He was sent to the resuscitation ward to recover strength a little, for he was very weak through loss of blood. In the evening he began to rave--he asked for whisky in a boisterously jovial voice, and then he yelled and cried: "Sergeant, Sergeant, Sergeant, you've ruined my career." In the night he died.

The wounded were often perfectly silent. But more often they would groan or wail or shout. Sometimes they would all howl in chorus like cats on a roof. Indeed the weird and terrible howling of wounded men is more like the howling of cats than any other sound I know.

Men regaining consciousness after an operation would sometimes laugh uproariously or cackle fiendishly. Or they would break into torrents of filthy language. One man yelled in a crazy voice that England was the most glorious country on earth and that he had done his best to be a good soldier. Then he was seized by a fit of violent weeping, while someone at the other end of the theatre was shouting with intense fury: "If I had Lloyd George here, I'd shoot the blighter," and another man was carried out with his head lolling from side to side and saying in mad, amiable tones: "Zig-zag, zagazig, zig-zag," and so on without a break.

A man who had undergone an operation some days previously was brought in to have his wound redressed--a deep laceration, that reached from knee to hip and exposed the thigh-bone. The padding was removed, but as soon as the raw flesh was touched he threw back his head, bared his teeth, and uttered shrill, piercing cries in sudden blasts, and nothing could be done to comfort him.

Near by a wounded man had been lying quietly on a table when all at once he gave a yell and, before we could rush to the spot, he plunged head foremost and crashed down on to the floor. We picked him up, but his mind seemed too confused to realize what had happened. He did not struggle any more, but gibbered and whimpered piteously.

If the chloroform and ether were not administered with great care and skill, the patients would choke and kick and make furious efforts to tear the mask from their faces. And so great was the number of wounded and so rapidly was it necessary to perform each operation, that it was not humanly possible to devote sufficient time to each individual case. Gas was the most merciful anodyne, but it could only be used for brief operations. Under its influence men became unconscious quickly and without a struggle, and they recovered consciousness without the fearful retching and vomiting that always followed the use of chloroform or ether. And yet, even with gas, haste and carelessness and defective apparatus added suffering to suffering.

On the table lay a man with a shattered gangrenous knee. He received gas and became unconscious, but, just as the bone was being sawn through, he regained his senses. His face was ashen pale and the sweat ran down it in big drops. He was too weak to struggle, but his eyes were staring in a way that was terrible to see. I held the foot and an orderly held the stump while the saw grated harshly as it cut through the bone, and the man moaned in piteous drawling tones: "Jesus Christ have mercy upon me, God Almighty have mercy upon me, and forgive me all my sins." When the operation was over, he was carried out, making unintelligible sounds.

He was followed by a man from whose chest I removed a filthy, blood-sodden mass of padding. I observed that his breathing was becoming weaker and weaker. The anaesthetist shouted:

"Fetch the oxygen--look sharp!"

An orderly brought a long black cylinder along, but the rubber tubing was knotted in a bundle and several seconds passed before it could be disentangled. At last the end of the tube was pushed into the mouth of the dying man. The tap of the cylinder was turned on, but there was no sound of gas running through. The anaesthetist glared angrily around and shouted: "Corporal Chamberlain!"

The Corporal came and the anaesthetist thundered:

"Go and get a new cylinder--this one's empty--your damned carelessness again--look sharp about it."

It was the Corporal's business to see that the cylinder in the theatre was always full. He fumbled in his pockets for the key to the cupboard in which the reserve cylinders were kept, but he could not find it. He walked out and searched in the shed opposite the theatre. He came back without it.

"Hurry up for God's sake--the man's dying--it'll be too late in a minute!"

He looked round the theatre with affected deliberation, for the angry shouting of the anaesthetist had wounded his pride. At last he found the key on a shelf. He unlocked the cupboard, fetched out a new cylinder, and placed it beside the table. The tube was pushed into the open mouth, the tap was turned, there was a rush of gas. But it was too late. The man was dead.