Part 4

But at this, the good head-doctor, who had daughters of his own in Paris, cried out that there was a limit, that he would never forgive any man who left a daughter of his alone in such a position, alone with dying men, alone under fire, alone to face the _Boches_. No, no Frenchman could be expected to do that.

Dr. Girard-Mangin appealed over his head to the military authority in command, for permission to do her duty as it fell to her. “I have not failed in my services so far. It is not just to force me to fail now.”

The military ruling was that the usual rule would hold. The little woman doctor stayed in danger, and the men went back to the rear. The parting was a moving one; those comrades of hers who had seen her working by their sides for so many months took her in their arms and wept openly as they bade her good-by.

If you venture to ask her what were her own emotions at this moment, she tells you with a shudder, “Oh, sorrow, black, black sorrow for France. We all thought, you know, that Verdun had fallen, that the Germans had pierced the line. No one knew how far they had gone. It was an awful moment.” Apparently she did not think of herself at all.

All day Friday, she was there with her stricken men and with two aides. Friday night she lay beside them in the dark. On Saturday the man left in charge of the hospital buildings went mad from the nervous tension--they expected almost from hour to hour to see the Germans appear--and from the hellish noise of the artillery.

I find myself cold as I try to think what another black night meant in those conditions. Dr. Girard-Mangin passed it and emerged into another dawn.

On Sunday morning the General in command of that region, amazed to find that any one was still there, sent peremptory orders that the premises must be evacuated entirely, dying men and all. They would certainly be killed if they were kept there. And more, there was no longer anything to give them to eat. This was a military order and so overrode the rulings of the Sanitary Service. Dr. Girard-Mangin prepared to evacuate. She had at her disposition a small _camion_ in which she put the four men best able to be carried, and her own ambulance in which she packed the five worst cases, crosswise of the vehicle. To try to give them some security against the inevitable jolting, she bound them tightly over and over to their stretchers. Then, with her little medicine-kit, she got in beside them and told her chauffeur to take them to Clermont-en-Argonne, and not by the safer route taken by the _ravitaillement_ convoys, because her sick men could never live through the length of that trip, but by the shorter road, leading along directly back of the front.

“I wonder that he was willing to take that dangerous route,” you say.

“I didn’t ask his opinion about it,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin with a ring of iron in her voice.

So began a wild ride of forty-three kilometers, constantly under fire, with five men at the point of death. The chauffeur dodged between the bursting shells, the woman in the car watched her sick men closely and kept them up with hypodermics of stimulants--which are not administered by a shaking hand!

You ask respectfully, looking at the white scar on her cheek, “It was then, during that ride, that you were wounded, wasn’t it?”

She nods, hastily, indifferently, and says, “And when we finally reached Clermont-en-Argonne, my sick men were no better off, for I found the hospital absolutely swamped with wounded. I said I was there with five mortally sick men from Verdun, and they answered, ‘If they were all Generals we could not take them in. You are mad, Madame, to bring _sick_ men here.’ So we went on ten kilometers further to a little village called Froidos, where my face-wound was dressed and where finally I was able to leave my men, all alive still, in good hands.”

“They didn’t live to get well, did they?” you ask.

At this question, she has a moment of stupefaction before the picture of your total incomprehension of what she has been talking about; she has a moment’s retrospective stare back into that seething caldron which was the battle of Verdun; she opens her mouth to cry out on your lack of imagination; and she ends by saying quietly, almost with pity for your ignorance, “Oh, I never saw or heard of those men again. There was a great deal too much else to be done at that time.”

Have you lost track of time and place in that adventure of hers? It is not surprising. She was then in the little village of Froidos, on the afternoon of Sunday, February 27th, almost exactly a week after the battle began--and after almost exactly a week of unbelievable horror--after four nights spent without a light in a great hospital full of wounded men--after a ride of nearly fifty kilometers constantly under fire, with mortally sick men. And she now turned, like a good soldier who has accomplished the task set him, to report at headquarters for another.

Her headquarters, the _Direction du Service Sanitaire_ was at Bar-le-Duc. Without a moment’s rest or delay, she set out for Bar-le-Duc, she and her chauffeur, half-blind with lack of sleep. They arrived there at midnight. She reported herself at the hospital, so large that in normal times it holds three thousand wounded. “I have just brought in the last of the sick from the military hospital at Verdun,” she said, to explain her presence. They were astounded to hear that any one had been there so lately. Every one had thought that certainly the Germans were there by that time.

“Please, is there a place where I may sleep a few hours?” she said.

But there was no place, not one. The great hospital was crowded to the last inch of its space with wounded--halls, passageways, aisles, even the stairs had wounded on them. Finally some one gave her a blanket and she lay down on the floor in the little office of the head-doctor and slept till morning--five or six hours. Then she went out into the town to try to find a lodging. Not one to be had, the town being as full as the hospital. She had not taken her clothes off, naturally, nor her shoes.

“Oh, then I did feel tired,” she says. “That morning, for the first time, I knew how tired I was, as I went dragging myself from door to door, begging for a room and a bed. It was because I was no longer working, you see. As long as you have work to do, you can go on.”

At last a poor woman took pity on her, said that she and her daughter would sleep together on one narrow bed, and let her have the other one.

“I was so glad, so glad,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, “to know I was to have a real bed! I was like a child. When you are as tired as that, you don’t think of anything but the simple elementals--lying down, being warm, having something to eat--all your fine, civilized ideas are swept away.”

She went back toward the hospital to get what few things she had been able to bring with her, and there she saw her chauffeur waving a paper toward her. “We are to be off at once,” he said, and showed her an order to leave Bar-le-Duc without delay, taking two nurses with them, and to go with all speed to the hospital at Vadelaincourt. They were crowded with wounded there.

“Then, at once, my tiredness went away,” she says. “It only lasted while I thought of getting a bed. When I knew we were going into action once more, I was myself again.”

By two o’clock that afternoon--this was Monday--they were _en route_ for the hospital, the doctor on the seat by the chauffeur, the two nurses, hysterical with fear over the shells, weeping inside.

“What a terrible, tragic, inspiring trip that was!” she exclaims, and almost for the only time during her quietly told narration her voice quivers, her eyes suffuse. “We were going against the tide of fresh reserves, rushing out to the front--mile after mile, facing those strongly marching ranks of splendid young Frenchmen, all going out to suffer the unimaginable horrors from which I had just come. I could not bear to look into those eager, ardent faces. I was so proud of them, so yearning over them! And they were so full of spirit, hurrying forward to the supreme sacrifice. They shouted out to us again and again, ‘The battle isn’t over yet, is it? Will we get there in time?’ They laughed light-heartedly, the younger ones, when they saw me and called out, ‘Oh, the women are fighting out there, too, are they?’ Wave after wave of them, rank on rank, the best of my country, marching out to death.”

They were delayed by an accident to a tire, being instantly--as is the rule on military roads, always crammed to the last inch--lifted bodily into a neighboring field for repairs. No stationing for repairs is allowed on a road where every one is incessantly in movement. While the repairs were being made, the car sank deeper and deeper into the mud, and it was a Herculean undertaking to get it back in the main thoroughfare. As usual, a crowd of good-natured _poilus_ managed this, heaving together with the hearty good-will to which all drivers of American ambulances can testify.

Delayed by this, it was nearly midnight when they drew near their destination. The chauffeur turned off the main road into a smaller one, a short cut to the hospital, and sank at once in mud up to his hubs. From twelve o’clock that night till half-past five in the morning, they labored to make the few kilometers which separated them from Vadelaincourt. Once the chauffeur, hearing in the dark the rush of water against the car, announced that he was sure that the river had burst its banks, that they had missed the bridge and were now in the main current. Dr. Girard-Mangin got down to investigate and found herself knee-deep in mud so liquid that its sound had deceived the chauffeur. They toiled on, the nurses inside the car wringing their hands.

By the time it was faintly dawn they arrived at the hospital, where the hard-worked head-doctor, distracted with the rush of wounded, cried out upon her for being a woman, but told her for Heaven’s sake to stay and help. The nurses were taken in and set to work, where at once they forgot themselves and their fears. But again there was no place for the new doctor to sleep, the hospital being overflowing with human wreckage. She did what all ambulance people hate to do, she went back to the reeking ambulance, laid herself on a stretcher, wet boots and all, drew up about her the typhoid-soaked blankets of her ex-patients, and instantly fell asleep. The chauffeur had the preferable place of sleeping under the car, on another stretcher.

She had no more than closed her eyes, when came a loud, imperious pounding on the car, “Get up quickly. The _médecin-en-chef_ sends for you at once; terrible lot of wounded just brought in; every hand needed.”

She went back through the mud to the hospital, had a cup of hot coffee and--detail eloquent of the confusion and disorganization of that feverish week--some plum-cake! By what freak of _ravitaillement_ there was only plum-cake, she never knew.

Then she put on her operating-apron and cap. She went into the operating-room at half-past seven in the morning. She operated steadily, without stopping, for more than five hours. At one o’clock she felt giddy and her legs failed her. She sat down flat on the floor, leaning back against the wall. “Here it comes!” she said to herself, fighting the faintness which dissolved all her members, “Here comes womanishness!”

But it did not come. She sat thus, setting her teeth and tightening her will until she conquered it. A new relay of doctors came in. She staggered off, had more coffee, a piece of chocolate and another piece of plum-cake! And was told that she would be “off duty” till eight that evening. Where could she go to rest? Nowhere. Snow lay on the fields, mud was deep in the roads. There was not a bed empty.

“I sat down in a corner, in a chair, quite a comfortable chair,” she tells you, “and took down my hair and brushed and braided it. You know how much that rests you!”

Now, Dr. Girard-Mangin is the last person in the world over whom to sentimentalize, and I swore before beginning to write about her that I would try not to do it. But I can not restrain myself from asking you here if you do not feel with me like both laughing and crying at the inimitable, homely femininity of that familiar gesture, at the picture of that shining little warrior-figure, returning in that abomination of desolation to the simple action of a sheltered woman’s everyday home life?

Then she went to sleep, there in the “quite comfortable” chair, with her shoes unlaced but still on her feet. “I had lost my other pair somewhere along the route,” she explains, “and I didn’t dare to take those off because I knew I could never get them on again if I did.”

There followed twenty days of this terrific routine, steady work in the operating-room with intervals of seven hours’ “rest,” with nowhere to go to rest. “But the food got better almost at once,” she says, in explanation of her having lived through it. “We couldn’t have gotten along on plum-cake, of course!”

For nine of those twenty days, she never took off her shoes at all, and the foot was frozen there which now she drags a little in walking.

On March 23rd, a month after the battle of Verdun had begun, the _médecin-chef-inspecteur_ came to Vadelaincourt, went through the usual motions of stupefaction to find a woman doctor there, decided--rather late--that it was no place for a woman, and sent her to Châlons. For six months thereafter, she was in the Somme, near Ypres, working specially among the tubercular soldiers, but also taking her full share of military surgery. “Just the usual service at the front, nothing of special interest,” she says with military brevity, baffling your interest, and leaving you to find out from other sources that she was wounded again in June of that year.

On the 11th of October, 1916, a remarkable and noteworthy event took place. For once a Governmental action was taken with intelligence. The Government, wishing to institute a special course of training for military nurses at the front, called to its organization and direction, not somebody’s relation-in-law, not a politician’s protégée, but the woman in France best fitted to undertake the work. Such an action on the part of any Government is worthy of note!

The hospital which had been built for charitable purposes on the Rue Desnouettes was loaned to the Government. What was needed for its head was some one who knew all about what training was essential for nursing service at the front. Any good military doctor could have done this part. Also some one was needed who knew all about what is the life of a woman at the front. Any good nurse of military experience could have seen to this. Also there was needed a person with experience in organization, with the capacity to keep a big enterprise in smooth and regular running. Any good business man could have managed this. Furthermore there was needed a person with magnetism who could inspire the women passing through the school with enthusiasm, with ardor, with devotion-- I needn’t go on, I think. You must have seen that only one person combined all these qualifications, and she is the one now at the head of the hospital-school.

Dr. Girard-Mangin received a call summoning her back to that “work at the rear” which is such a trial for those who have known the glory of direct service at the front.

This meant drudgery for her, long hours of attention to uninteresting but important details, work with a very mixed class of intelligences--the women in her courses of study vary from peasant girls to officers’ widows; bending her quick intelligence to cope with sloth and dullness. It meant, worst of all and hardest of all, living again in the midst of petty bickerings, little personal jealousies, mean ambitions. Nothing is more startling for those who “come back from the front” than to find the world at the rear still going on with its tiny quarrels and disputes, still industriously raking in its muck-heap. And nothing more eloquently paints our average, ordinary life than the intense moral depression which attends the return to it of those who have for a time escaped from it to a rougher, more dangerous, and more self-forgetful atmosphere.

For me, no part of Dr. Girard-Mangin’s usefulness is more dramatic than the undramatic phase of it in which she is now faithfully toiling. Her coolness under fire, her steadiness under overwhelming responsibilities, her astonishing physical endurance do not thrill me more than this prompt, disciplined ability to take up civilian life again and quiet, civilian duties.

She has organized the hospital ingeniously along original lines, as a perfect reproduction of what the nurses will encounter at the front: a series of barracks, a ward to each shed, with the nurse’s little sleeping-cubicle at the end with its rough but sufficient sanitary arrangements. Another unit is given over to the operating-room and its appendages, the sterilizing-room, anesthetic-room, etc. Another is the administrative building, and contains the offices of the _médecin-en-chef_, the head-nurse, the pharmacy, the bacteriological laboratory. At one side are very simple but wholesome sleeping quarters and study-rooms for the fifty and more nurses who pass through the school every three months. For Dr. Girard-Mangin only takes them in hand when they have already completed a course of training in ordinary hospitals. Even then she weeds out rigorously, in the middle of the short, intensive, concentrated course, those who do not show the necessary physical, mental, and moral qualities to fit them for the grave responsibilities they will have at the front, for nurses from this hospital go out to direct and run the field hospitals, not merely to be nurses there.

The work for the doctor at the head is a “grind,” nothing less, monotonous, like all teaching--an ever-reiterated repetition of the same thing--no glory, no change, no bright face of danger. The clear brown eyes face it as coolly, as undaunted, as they faced bursting shells, or maddened soldiers. The clear-thinking brain sees its vital importance to the country as well as it saw the more picturesque need for staying with sick men under fire. The well-tempered will keeps lassitude and fatigue at bay, keeps the whole highly strung, highly developed organism patiently, steadily, enduringly at work for France.

There, my fellow-citizens in America, there is a citizen to envy, to imitate!

LOURDES

_From the Ends of the Earth they come--Old and Young, the Lame and the Blind--to Ask for the Blessing._

Afternoon. There was not a vacant place left in the long line of waiting sick, so that at the last, when a little, white-faced blind boy with dreadful horny growths on his eyes, was handed over the heads of the crowd, he seemed to have come too late.

His mother’s voice rose anxiously, in reiterated piteous demands to the stretcher-carriers to make a place for him, any place, where he could receive the blessing, for it was the day of the greatest pilgrimage of the year, when twenty-five thousand people sang and prayed together for the cure of the sick, when the Host was carried in solemn procession to bless them, lying in long lines up and down the broad esplanade.

“Oh, for the love of God, find a place for him!” she implored, in so strained a voice of entreaty that the crowd, dense as it was, gave way a little and allowed her to press forward, back of the wheeled chairs of the cripples. The stretcher-carrier who had taken the child in his arms hesitated, looking about him for a vacant spot. He glanced at a wounded soldier, rigid on his litter, his face as white as it would be in his coffin; and then turned to a child stricken with a disease of the bones which paralyzed his legs and made of his hands only twisted, shapeless stumps, but which still permitted him to sit in one of the wheeled chairs. His little withered body did not half fill it, and it was there beside him that the attendant decided to put down the blind boy.

His mother gave a long sigh of intense feeling and between the closely packed bodies of the crowd strained forward to be near him.

“I’m here, darling, I’m here,” she said in a voice of concentrated tenderness.

The blind boy turned his hanging head a little, toward the sound of her voice and stretched back a thin, waxy-white hand. She managed to touch it for an instant, but then said, “Not now, darling. You mustn’t turn back toward Mother. You must join your hands and pray to be cured, pray for the blessing. You must repeat whatever the priest says.”

For at that moment the powerfully built, bearded priest, with the eyes of fire and the thrown-back head of born command, strode down the center of the great open place and stood looking intently about him at the lines of the white-faced sick, and the immense throngs of pilgrims back of them. He raised his hands suddenly in a vivid gesture, and cried in a trumpet-like voice, like a captain leading forward a charge, “Brothers, pray! Pray for our sick. With all your soul, with all the strength of your body and mind, pray God for our sick!”

He paused a moment. Every eye was on him.

The blind boy held his face lowered meekly as blind children often do, as sensitive children who know themselves unsightly always do. His thin, white neck was bent like that of a victim awaiting the blow, but he put his little pale fingers together and, turning for a moment, tried to show to his mother that they were in the attitude of prayer. She whispered, “Yes, yes, darling, that is right. But not toward me. Toward where the blessing is coming, so that you may be cured.”

“Lord save us! Lord God save us, for we perish!” prayed the priest in a loud clear voice of exaltation; and after him all the multitude cried it aloud, in a great murmur like the voice of a forest, or of the sea.

The blind boy’s lips moved with the rest, but his little face was clouded and anxious. He whispered to the crippled child beside him:

“Are you blind, too, or can you see?”

“I can see,” said the other, “but I have never walked.”

“Then you must show me where I must put my hands so that they will be toward the blessing,” begged the blind child.

The other took the thin, transparent fingers between his twisted stumps, and directed them toward the priest, thrillingly upright, aspiring visibly toward the sky. “There, you must keep them turned toward the priest now,” he said with an accent of certainty. “Later on it will be toward the procession as it moves along, and then at the last toward the church.”

“You must tell me when to change them,” said the blind boy.

He stretched out his joined hands farther in the direction indicated by his companion and repeated with the others, after the priest, his little voice lost in the great upward rush of the supplications of the thousands around him, “Lord! Lord! Our sole trust is in Thee!”

The priest’s voice soared into a glorious note of song, in which the multitude joined, their eyes on him, their faces solemn in expectation. The priest sang a line, the multitude chanted a response; the man’s voice ran out again, yearning, beseeching, the voice of the multitude rose thousand-fold in answer. The earth seemed to shake in unison, the low-hanging, heavy gray clouds to send back the sound. The chanting, imploring, impassioned voice of the throng seemed more alive than its multitudinous bodies, rapt into utter stillness.

“Is it thus that I should hold my hands?” whispered the blind boy after a time.

“No, now the procession has just come into the other end of the square,” said the crippled child. With an effort he leaned, took the little white fingers again, and pointed them another way.

“So?” asked the blind child humbly.