Kings, Queens, and Pawns | Page 7

difficulty. I had a large
package of cigarettes for the soldiers, for given his choice, food or a
smoke, the soldier will choose the latter. At last after much talk I got
them in free of duty. And then I was footfree.

Here again I realise that I should have encountered great difficulties. I
should at least have had to walk to Calais, or to have slept, as did one
titled Englishwoman I know, in a bathtub. I did neither. I took a
first-class ticket to Calais, and waited round the station until a train
should go.
And then I happened on one of the pictures that will stand out always in
my mind. Perhaps it was because I was not yet inured to suffering;
certainly I was to see many similar scenes, much more of the flotsam
and jetsam of the human tide that was sweeping back and forward over
the flat fields of France and Flanders.
A hospital train had come in, a British train. The twilight had deepened
into night. Under the flickering arc lamps, in that cold and dismal place,
the train came to a quiet stop. Almost immediately it began to unload.
A door opened and a British nurse alighted. Then slowly and painfully
a man in a sitting position slid forward, pushing himself with his hands,
his two bandaged feet held in the air. He sat at the edge of the doorway
and lowered his feet carefully until they hung free.
"Frozen feet from the trenches," said a man standing beside me.
The first man was lifted down and placed on a truck, and his place was
filled immediately by another. As fast as one man was taken another
came. The line seemed endless. One and all, their faces expressed keen
apprehension, lest some chance awkwardness should touch or jar the
tortured feet. Ten at a time they were wheeled away. And still they
came and came, until perhaps two hundred had been taken off. But now
something else was happening. Another car of badly wounded was
being unloaded. Through the windows could be seen the iron
framework on which the stretchers, three in a tier, were swung.
Halfway down the car a wide window was opened, and two tall
lieutenants, with four orderlies, took their places outside. It was very
silent. Orders were given in low tones. The muffled rumble of the
trucks carrying the soldiers with frozen feet was all that broke the quiet,
and soon they, too, were gone; and there remained only the six men
outside, receiving with hands as gentle as those of women the stretchers

so cautiously worked over the window sill to them. One by one the
stretchers came; one by one they were added to the lengthening line
that lay prone on the stone flooring beside the train. There was not a jar,
not an unnecessary motion. One great officer, very young, took the
weight of the end as it came toward him, and lowered it with
marvellous gentleness as the others took hold. He had a trick of the
wrist that enabled him to reach up, take hold and lower the stretcher,
without freeing his hands. He was marvellously strong, marvellously
tender.
The stretchers were laid out side by side. Their occupants did not speak
or move. It was as if they had reached their limit of endurance. They
lay with closed eyes, or with impassive, upturned faces, swathed in
their brown blankets against the chill. Here and there a knitted neck
scarf had been loosely wrapped about a head. All over America women
were knitting just such scarfs.
And still the line grew. The car seemed inexhaustible of horrors. And
still the young lieutenant with the tender hands and the strong wrists
took the onus of the burden, the muscles of his back swelling under his
khaki tunic. If I were asked to typify the attitude of the British Army
and of the British people toward their wounded, I should point to that
boy. Nothing that I know of in history can equal the care the English
are taking of their wounded in this, the great war. They have, of course,
the advantage of the best nursing system in Europe.
France is doing her best, but her nursing had always been in the hands
of nuns, and there are not nearly enough nuns in France to-day to cope
with the situation. Belgium, with some of the greatest surgeons in the
world, had no organised nursing system when war broke out. She is
largely dependent apparently on the notable work of her priests, and on
English and Dutch nurses.
When my train drew out, the khaki-clad lieutenant and his assistants
were still at work. One car was emptied. They moved on to a second.
Other willing hands