Part 3

Dr. Girard-Mangin was sent to Verdun on November 1st, 1914, and was there steadily for more than a year, until the 28th of February, 1916. She found her sick men on mattresses, in tents, on such low ground that they were often literally in water. Whenever there was freezing weather, those who cared for them slid about on sheets of ice. Above them, on higher ground, were some rough old barracks, empty, partly remodeled, said to have been left there by the Prussians in 1871. “Why don’t we move the sick up there?” she asked, and was met by all the usual dragging, clogging reasons given by administrative inertia.

The sheds were not ready to occupy; there were no expert carpenters to get them ready; it would be impossible to heat them; no order for the change had come from Headquarters--furthermore, a reason not mentioned, the sheds, being on higher ground, were more exposed to shell-fire. Dr. Girard-Mangin had had some experience with administrative inertia in her struggles for better housing for the poor; and long before the war she had known what it was to put herself voluntarily in danger--the scar from a bad tubercular infection on her hand is the honorable proof of that. She knew that the sick men would be better off in the barracks on higher ground. So she took them there. Just like that.

She was to have the entire care of the typhoid epidemic, and the only help which could be given her was to come from twenty men, absolutely unassorted--such a score as you would gather by walking down any street and picking up the first twenty men you met. There were several farm-laborers, a barber, an accountant, miscellaneous factory hands. The only person remotely approaching a nurse was a man who had had the training for a pharmacist, but as he had never been able to stay sober long enough to take his examinations, you may not be surprised that he was the least useful of them all.

These twenty casually selected human beings went unwillingly up the hill toward the barracks, ironic, mocking, lazy, indifferent, as human beings unelectrified by purpose are apt to be. But, although they did not know it, there marched at their head an iron will, a steel-like purpose, and an intelligence which was invincible. They took this to be but a smallish, youngish woman in uniform, and were all in great guffaws at the comic idea of being under her orders.

Of course, to begin with, she did not know one of her men from another, but she studied them closely as they worked, driven along by her direction, setting up the rough camp-stoves, stopping the worst of the holes in the walls, arranging the poor apologies for mattresses, and cutting off the tops of gasoline-cans for heating water--for our woman doctor was asked to take care of several hundred typhoid cases and was not provided with so much as a bowl that would hold water. Presently, as they worked, she noticed that there were but nineteen men there. All day she studied their faces, their bearing, what was written on them for the seeing eye to read. At night, at supper-time, there were twenty men. Those clear brown eyes swept around the circle and pounced on a mild-looking _poilu_ innocently taking his soup with the others.

“Where have you been all day?” she asked him.

He fairly turned pale with astonishment, “Why, how did you--? I’ve been right here, working!” he tried to bluster her down.

“No, you haven’t. You haven’t been here since a quarter past ten this morning,” she assured him.

He hung his head a moment, then looked an ugly defiance. “Well, I’ve been in to Verdun to spend the day with a friend. What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to have you punished for disobeying an officer,” she said promptly, though so little military had been her beneficent life, that she had no more idea than you or I or any other woman would have of what punishment could be given in such a case.

“Officer’s orders!” said the man. “_What_ officer?” All the men laughed.

“I’m your officer,” she said, and went away to telephone to the military authority in charge of such cases.

“I can’t be expected to have discipline if I’m not backed up,” she said. “This is a test case. It’s now or never.”

The answer was a non-com and a guard marching up to the barracks, saluting the military doctor, and, with all due military ceremony, carrying off the offender for a week in prison. Dr. Girard-Mangin laughs still at the recollection of the consternation among the nineteen who were left. “I never had any trouble about _discipline_, after that,” she says. “Of course there were the utter incompetents to be weeded out. For that I followed the time-honored army custom of sending my worst man whenever the demand from Headquarters came for a good, competent person to be sent to other work! Before long I had reduced the force of nurses to twelve. Those twelve I kept for all the time of my service there, and we parted at the end old friends and tried comrades. I have never lost track of them since. They always write me once in a while, wherever they are.”

As soon as it grew dark enough, that first night, for the ambulances to dash out through the blackness, over the shell-riddled roads to the _abris_, close to the front, the stricken men began to come in. Before dawn, that very first night, there were fifty-five terrible typhoid cases brought into the bare sheds. Then it was that Dr. Girard-Mangin, working single-handed with her score of crude, untrained helpers, needed all her capacity for going without sleep. Then it was that her men, seeing her at work, stopped laughing because she was a woman and admired her because she was a woman doing wonderful things; then, best of all, forgot that she was a woman, and took her simply for the matchless leader that she is, in the battle against disease. I think it was not wholly the guard, marching away the disobedient man to prison, who was responsible for the fact that our little woman doctor had no further difficulty with discipline.

The condition of the typhoid patients was harrowing beyond words. A man going out with his squad to a front-line trench would be stricken down with fever on arriving. It was impossible for him to return until his squad was relieved and he could be carried to the rear on a comrade’s back. There he was, there he must remain, for the three or four or five days of his squad’s “turn” in the front lines. Can you imagine the condition of a man with typhoid fever, who has lain in a trench in the mud for four days, with no shelter from the rain or snow but an overcoat spread over him, with no care beyond an occasional drink of water from a comrade’s flask? For your own sake I hope you can not imagine it. And I will not go into details. Enough to say that such men were brought in by the tens, by the twenties, by the fifties, filthy beyond words, at the limit of exhaustion, out of their heads with weakness and fever and horror.

And there to stem that black tide of human misery stands this little upright, active, valiant, twentieth-century woman. I think, although we are not of her nation, we may well be proud of her as a fellow-being who had voluntarily renounced ease to choose the life which had made her fit to cope with the crisis of that night--and of the more than four hundred days and nights following. For cope with it she did, competently, resolutely, _successfully_. “Oh yes, we gave them cold baths,” she says, when you ask for details. “We managed somehow. They had all the right treatment, cold baths, wet packs, injections, the right food--everything very primitive at first, of course, but everything you ever do for typhoid anywhere. Our percentage of losses was very low always.”

“But how? _How?_ How did you manage?” you ask.

“Oh, at the beginning everything was very rough. We had only one portable galvanized-iron bathtub. Since they were all so badly infected, there was less danger in bathing them all in the same tub than in not fighting the fever that way. And then, just as soon as I could reach the outside world by letter, I clamored for more, and they were sent.”

“But how could you, single-handed, give cold baths to so many men? It’s a difficult matter, giving a cold bath to a typhoid patient.”

“I wasn’t single-handed. I had my twelve soldier-nurses.”

“‘_Nurses_,’ you say! Farm-laborers, accountants, barbers, drunken druggists!”

“But I got rid of that good-for-nothing pharmacist at once! And the others--the twelve good ones--they learned what to do. They learned how to give the simple remedies. They learned how to do the other things enough to give me a report--how to take temperatures, how to give the baths at the right degree for the right time, how to take the pulse.”

“How could they learn all that?” you ask, amazed.

“I taught them,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, slightly surprised, in the simplest, most matter-of-fact tone.

You look past her, out there to that hand-to-hand struggle with death which was carried on by the one indomitable will and the one well-trained mind, strong enough not only to animate this woman’s body before you, but those other bodies and ignorant, indocile minds.

“They did it very well, too,” she assures you, and you do not doubt her.

That woman could teach anybody to do anything.

You come back to details. “But how could you get enough water and heat it for so many baths, on just those rough, small, heating-stoves?”

“Well, we were at it all the time, practically, day and night. We cut the tops off those big gasoline-cans the automobilists use, and stood one on every stove up and down the barracks. There wasn’t a moment when water wasn’t being heated, or used, or carried away.”

“What could you do about intestinal hemorrhages?” you ask. “You must have had many, with such advanced cases. Your farm-hand nurses couldn’t----”

“I never tried to teach them how to handle any real crisis, only to recognize it when it came, and go quickly to fetch me. I taught them to watch carefully and at the first sign of blood on their patients’ clothing or on the mattress, to take the knapsack out from under the sick man’s head--they had no other pillow, of course--to lay him down flat, and then to run and call me, from wherever I was.”

“You must have had almost no sleep at all.”

“That was the greatest help I had, being able to get along on little sleep. And I got more work out of my helpers than any man could, for they were ashamed to ask to sleep or rest, seeing that a woman, half their size, could still keep going.”

“But how about your famous hygienic regularity, the morning exercises and cold baths and----”

“Oh, as soon as I saw I was in for a long period of regular service, I took the greatest care to go on with all the things which keep one fit for regular service.”

“Morning tubs?”

“Yes, morning tubs! I slept--what time I had to sleep--in an abandoned peasant’s house in an evacuated village near the hospital. I didn’t take any of the downstairs rooms because people are likely to walk right into an abandoned house, and part of the time there were soldiers quartered in the village. Then there was usually somebody in the house with me. The other times I had it all to myself. I took a room on the second floor. It happened to have a flight of steps leading up to it, and another one going out of it into the attic. Of course, I never had any heat, and the drafts from those two open stairways--well, it was like sleeping in the middle of a city square. Sometimes I used to take down a bottle filled with hot water, but the bed was so cold that it was almost instantly chilled. Many a time I have gone to sleep, all curled up in a ball, holding my feet in my hands, because they were so cold, and wakened to find them still as icy. Oh, the cold! That is the worst enemy of all at the front, the most wearing, the most demoralizing, the most dehumanizing, because it _lasts_ so. With other things--hunger, wounds, danger--either it kills you, or it passes. But the cold is always there.”

She loses herself for a moment in brooding recollection and you wonder if Jeanne d’Arc ever did anything braver for her country than did this delicate, stout-hearted modern woman, sleeping alone for months and months in bitter cold in a deserted house in a deserted village.

She comes back to the present. “And it was there that I took my morning tubs!” she says with an amused smile. “Of course the water froze hard into a solid lump. So I put _carbonate de potasse_ into it. This not only kept it from freezing, but made it alkaline, so that it was an excellent detergent and stimulant to the skin. I assure you, after a night in which I had been incessantly called from one bed to another, when I felt very much done-up, my cold sponge-bath in that water was like a resurrection. I was made over. Then, of course, no matter how busy I was, I took care of my feet--changed my stockings and shoes every day. Feet are one’s weakest point in a long pull like that.”

You venture to remark about a slight limp noticeable when she walks. “Yes, it comes from a frozen foot--I have to admit it. But it’s really not my fault. That was later, at the time of the battle at Verdun. There are always brief crises, when you have to give your all and not stop to think. I went nine days then without once taking off my shoes. I hadn’t my other pair by that time. The _Boches_ had them, probably.”

But we have not come to that terrific epic, as yet. Before that second tornado burst over the heads of the French and of our woman doctor, there was a long, hard, dull period of four hundred and seventy days of continuous service--for Dr. Girard-Mangin, being a pioneer woman, felt in honor bound to do more than a man would do. In the three years and more of her war service, she has had just three weeks’ furlough, seven days out of every year to see her son, to see her family, to relax. Every other day of that long procession of days, she has been on duty, active, and, as befits a woman, constructively active.

She did not continue resignedly to struggle with tin-can drinking-cups, and one bathtub for two hundred men. Neither did she rely on the proverbially slow mills of the Government to grind her out the necessary supplies. She was not only the army doctor in charge of the contagious cases in the big sanitary section and hospital near Verdun, she was also a figure of international importance, the _Présidente_ of the Hygiene Department of the _Conseil International des Femmes_--her predecessor had been Lady Aberdeen; she was high in honor at the big Beaujon Hospital in Paris; she was well-known to the charitable world in the Society for Hygienic Lodgings for the poor, which owed so much to her; and she had a wide circle of friends everywhere. The little _aide major_ sent out from her bare shed-hospital, lacking in everything, a clarion call for help for her sick men. With years of experience in organization back of her, she set to work and, in the midst of the fury of destruction all about her, built up, item by item, a little corner of order and competent activity. In November, 1914, there was nothing but a windswept shed, with straw pallets and tin-can utensils. By June of the next year you would have found, if you had had the courage to go within two kilometers of the front line, a very well-appointed contagious ward of a military hospital, where nothing was lacking for the men’s comfort--except a certainty that the whole thing might not be blown to pieces by a shell. And by the end of 1915, when there began to be talk of a great German drive against Verdun, the men under our doctor’s supervision had as good care as they could have had anywhere, with laboratory and sterilizing facilities--everything. Dr. Girard-Mangin knew what was the best to be had in hospitals and she did not rest until somehow, Aladdin-like, she had made it to blossom, out there in danger and desolation.

All during January of 1916 there was terrific tension along that front. The monster German offensive against Verdun was in the air. The month of January passed with desperate slowness, such intent, apprehensive suspense being torturing for human nerves, especially tired human nerves which had already been through a long, severe period of trial.

Everybody showed signs of nervousness. Our little doctor stuck faithfully to her bedrock principles of health, changed her shoes and stockings every day, took her Spartan baths and rub-downs in her colder-than-freezing water, went through her deep-breathing and her setting-up exercises every morning. By such merely feminine reliance on everyday sanity in life, she kept herself in excellent physical shape, and did not succumb to the temptation, which is too much for so many doctors under strain, of hypodermics of strychnin, and other stimulants.

February 1st came. The great storm, looming murkily, had not burst.

February inched itself along, and finally, because human nature can only stand about so much of strain, nerves began to relax in utter fatigue.

On February 21st, which was a Monday, it was fairly clear, cold, with what passes for sunshine in that region. Dr. Girard-Mangin stepped out in front of her shed-hospital ward, after lunch, and made this remark to herself: “I don’t believe the _Boches_ are going to pull off that offensive at all. And to-day is almost sunny. I have a good notion to go over to the 165th and get my hair washed.” There was an ex-coiffeur in that regiment who kept on with his trade in his leisure moments.

As this singularly peace-time thought passed through her mind, an _obus_ screamed its way loudly over her head. “That’s near,” she thought, “nearer than they generally are.”

Before she could get back into the hospital, the battle of Verdun had begun.

The blow was delivered with astounding rapidity, and with stunning force. Up to that time, nothing had ever been conceived like the violence of the artillery fire. There in the hospital, only two kilometers back of the front, the noise was so great they could scarcely hear each other’s voices. Upon those men, and that woman, unnerved by six weeks of nerve-racking suspense, the great crisis leaped with murderous fury. It was as though the world were being battered to pieces about their heads. Each one called up in himself all the reserve strength his life had given him and, tight-lipped, clung as best he could to self-control.

The first nerves to give way were in the bakeshop. The bakers suddenly burst out of their overheated cell and, half-naked in that sharp cold, clad only in their white-linen aprons and trousers, fled away, anywhere, away, out of that hell. One of the doctors, seeing this beginning of the panic, shouted out in an angry attempt to stem the tide of fear, “Shame on you, men! What are you doing! What would happen if every one ran away!”

One of the fleeing bakers, dodging with agility the outstretched restraining arms, called out heartily, with a strong Southern accent, “Right you are, doctor, perfectly right!” and continued to run faster than ever. Which typically _Midi_ phrase and action was seized upon by those gallant French hearts for the laugh which is the Gallic coquetry in the face of danger.

But even they could not smile at what they next saw. At four o’clock that afternoon began the spectacle, awful to French eyes, of regiments of _chasseurs_ fleeing toward the rear.

“So inconceivable was this to me, that I repeated, ‘_Chasseurs!_ Retreating!’”

Dr. Girard-Mangin closed her eyes a moment as if she saw them again. “Oh, yes, retreating--and no wonder! All their equipment gone, no guns, no ammunition, no grenades, no bayonets--their bare fists, and those bleeding, for weapons. Many of them were naked, yes, literally naked, except for their leather cartridge belts. Everything made of cloth had been blown from their bodies by the air-pressure from exploding shells. Many of them were horribly wounded, although they were staggering along. I remember one man, whose wounds we dressed, who came reeling up to the hospital, holding his hand to his face, and when he took his hand down most of his face came with it. Oh, yes, they were retreating, those who had enough life left to walk. And they told us that Verdun was lost, that no human power could resist that thrust.”

All that night, and all the next day and all the next night, such men poured through and past the hospital and during all that time there was no cessation in the intolerable, maddening din of the artillery. When you ask Dr. Girard-Mangin how she lived through those days and nights, she tells you steadily, “Oh, that was not the worst. We could still work. And we did. More than eighteen thousand wounded passed through the hospital that week. We had too much to do to think of anything else. It seemed as though all the men in the world were wounded and pouring in on us.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the tide of men changed in character somewhat, and this meant that the end was near. In place of _chasseurs_ and the ordinary _poilus_, quantities of brown Moroccans, those who fight at the very front, came fleeing back, horribly wounded, most of them, yelling wild prayers to Allah, clutching at themselves like children and howling like wild beasts--impossible to understand or to make understand. And yet, somehow, the hospital staff, staggering with fatigue themselves, ministered to them, too, until--this was where they all touched bottom--until, on Wednesday night, the electricity suddenly gave out and, in the twinkling of an eye, blackness fell on the great wards, shaken by the incessant infernal screaming rush of the shells overhead, by the thunder of the cannon, and filled with the shrieks of the agonizing wild men from Africa. Blackness like the end of the world.

Messengers were sent hastily to grope their way down to the nearest village for candles. But they returned empty-handed. Long before that the soldiers had carried off all the supply of candles.

“What did you do, all that night?”

Dr. Girard-Mangin makes no light pretense of belittling the experience.

“It was awful beyond anything imaginable,” she tells you gravely. “The worst thing that can happen to a doctor had come--to be in the midst of suffering and not to be able to lift a finger to help. All that we could do was to give them water to drink. We could feel our way to the water-pitchers. The rest of the time we could only sit, helpless, listen to the shells and to the wounded men groaning, and wait for dawn.”

Yes, it is a small, delicately fashioned woman, like you, like me, who lived through those days and those nights, and came through them morally and physically intact, into an even greater usefulness. It will not be a bad thing to remember her the next time we feel “tired” in our ordinary round of small efforts.

On the next day came the order to evacuate the hospital, bitter proof of the German success. Dr. Girard-Mangin began sending off her sick men in relays of four in the only ambulance at her disposal. They were taken down to the nearest little branch railroad, there put on the train, and sent--nobody knew where, anywhere out of the range of German guns.

All day Thursday the evacuation went on. By Thursday evening there were left only nine men in her ward, men practically dying, far gone with intestinal hemorrhages, too ill to move. Dr. Girard-Mangin spent another black night beside her dying men, moving from one to another in the intense obscurity, raising her voice above the thunder of the artillery to comfort them, to give them what small help she could without a light. On Friday all the hospital staff, with a few exceptions, was to leave. The hospital buildings and equipment were to be left in the charge of a non-com and two privates; and the men too ill to transport were to be left with one doctor and two aides. The rule in the French Sanitary Service for that case is that the youngest doctor stays with the sick. Dr. Girard-Mangin was the youngest doctor.