CHAPTER VIII

HOMEWARD BOUND

As soon as Hoddinott and Pike had left me, two other stretcher bearers carried me about two hundred yards farther to a rough shelter made of poles laid across supports composed of sandbags. This was the dressing station. On top of the poles, sandbags made it impervious to overhead shelling. On three sides it was closed in, but the side nearest the beach was open. From where my stretcher was placed I could just catch a glimpse of the AEgean Sea and of the ships. Men on stretchers were lined up in rows on the ground. Here and there a man groaned, but most of the men were gazing at the roof, with set faces. Some who were only slightly wounded were sitting up on stretchers while Red Cross men bandaged up their legs or feet. A doctor was working away methodically and rapidly. A little to the right another shelter housed the men who were being sent to hospital with dysentery, enteric, or typhoid. As soon as I was brought in, the doctor came to me. "I'll do this one right away," he said to one of his assistants. The assistant stripped the blanket from me and cut off the portions of the blood-stained shirt still remaining. As he did so, something dropped on the ground. The Red Cross man picked it up.

"Here's the bullet that hit you," he said, putting it beside me on the stretcher. "It dropped out of your shirt. It just got through you and stuck in your shirtsleeve."

"You'd better get him a little bag to keep his things in," said the doctor.

The Red Cross man produced a bag, took my pay book, and everything he found in my pocket, and put them in it, then tied them to the stretcher. By this time I was ready for the doctor to begin work. That doctor knew his business. In a very few minutes he had probed and cut and cleaned the wound, and adjusted a new bandage. The bleeding had stopped by this time. He asked me the circumstances of being hit. He told me to grip his hand and squeeze. I tried it with my right hand but could do nothing; then I tried the left hand and succeeded a little better. The doctor looked grave when I failed to grip with my right hand, but brightened a little when I gripped with my left. All the time he talked to me genially. That did me nearly as much good as the surgical attention he gave me. He was a Canadian, he told me. At the outbreak of the war he had been taking post-graduate courses at Cambridge University in England. The University sent several hospital units to the front, and he had come with this one. He knew Canada and the States pretty thoroughly.

"Where do you come from?" he asked me.

"Newfoundland," I told him. "But I live in the United States."

"What part?" he asked.

"Cambridge, Massachusetts," I told him.

"Oh," he said, "that's where Harvard University is."

"Yes," I said, "I was a student there when I enlisted."

The doctor called to a couple of the Red Cross men. "Here's a chap from Harvard University in Cambridge, over in the United States." The two Red Cross men came and told me they were students at Cambridge. They talked to me for quite a little while. Before they left me to attend to some more wounded, they made me promise to ask to be sent to Cambridge, England, to hospital. The University had established a very large and thoroughly equipped hospital there. All I had to do, they said, was tell the people that I had been a student at the other Cambridge, and I should be an honored guest. They persisted in calling Harvard, Cambridge, and when they went away said that they were overjoyed to have seen a man from the sister university.

The doctor came back in a few minutes.

"How are you feeling now?" he said.

"I feel pretty well now," I answered, "but it's very close in here with all these wounded men, and the place smells of chloroform. Can't I be moved outside?"

"I'll move you outside if you say so," said the doctor, "but you're taking a chance. Occasionally a stray shell comes over this way. The Turks are trying to locate a battery close to this place. Sometimes a shell bursts prematurely, and drops around here."

On the Peninsula, officers who gave men leave to go on dangerous missions salved their consciences by first warning the men that in doing it "they were taking a chance." The caution had come to mean nothing.

"All right, doctor," I said. "I'll take a chance."

Two stretcher bearers came, and lifted me outside the shelter, where the wind blew, fresh and invigorating. Just as they turned, I heard the old familiar shriek that signaled the coming of a shell. It burst almost overhead. Most of the missiles it contained dropped on the other side of the shelter, but a few tiny pieces flew in my direction. Three of them hit me in the right arm, a fourth landed in my leg.

"Is anybody hit?" yelled a Red Cross man, whose accent proclaimed him as an inhabitant of the country north of the Clyde.

"I've got a couple of splinters," I said.

I was lifted inside quickly. The Scotchman who put on some bandages on the little cuts looked at me accusingly.

"Ye were warned, before ye went," he said. "Ye desairved it. But then," he added, "ye might hae got it worse. Ye're lucky ye did not get it in the guts."

After a little while my arms and back began to ache violently. Two Red Cross men came along and moved me to another shelter similar to the first. This was the clearing station. From here motor ambulances carried the wounded to the shore. I knew from the burring speech of the big sergeant in charge that he hailed from Scotland. I asked him where he came from, and he told me that he came from Inverness.

"Our regiment trained near there for a while," I said. "They garrisoned Fort George."

"Ye'll no' be meanin' the Seaforth Highlanders, laddie," said he.

"No," I said, "we're Newfoundlanders, the First Newfoundland Regiment."

"Oh, I ken ye well, noo," he said, gloomily. "Ye're a bad lot; it took six policemen to arrest one o' your mob. On the Peninsula they call ye the Never Failing Little Darlings." After that he thawed quite a little. "I'll look at your wound noo, laddie," he said, after a few minutes. "Ye're awfu' light, laddie," he said as he raised me. "Puir laddie," he added, pityingly. "Puir laddie. Ye're stairved. I'll get ye Queen Mary's ration."

"What's Queen Mary's ration?" I asked.

"'T's Queen Mary's gift to the wounded. I'll get it for ye right away." He went outside the clearing station and returned in a few minutes with a cup of warm malted milk. "'T will help ye some till ye get aboard the hospital ship. Here's the ambulance noo."

A fleet of motor ambulances swayed over the uneven ground and rolled up close to the clearing station. The drivers and helpers began loading the stretchers aboard and one by one started away. Before I was put into one, the big Scotchman took a large syringe and injected a strong dose of morphia into my chest.

"Ye'll find it hard," he said, "bumping over the hill, but ye'll soon be all right and comfortable."

"Tell me," I said, "shall I get into a real bed on the ship?"

He laughed. "Sure ye will, laddie. The best bed ye've had since ye've been in the airmy. Good luck to ye, laddie."

Each of the motor ambulances carried four men, two above and two below. I was put on top, and the door flap pulled over. We jolted and pitched and swayed. Once we turned short and skidded at a curve. I knew just the very place, although it was dark in the ambulance. I had gone over the road often with ration parties. Fortunately the morphia was beginning to take effect, and dulled the pain to some extent. At last the ambulance stopped, somebody pulled the curtain back, and we were lifted out. We were on West Beach. A pier ran out into the sea. A man-o'-war launch towing a string of boats glided in near enough to let her first boat come close to the pier. The breeze was quite fresh, and made me shiver. The stretchers were laid across the boats, close to each other. Soon all the boats were filled. I could see the man on the stretcher to the right of me, but the one on the other side I could not see. I tried to turn my head but could not. The eyes of the man next me were large with pain. I smiled at him, but instead of smiling back at me, his lip curled resentfully, and he turned over on his side so that he could face away from me. As he did, the blanket slipped from his shoulder, and I saw on his shoulder strap the star of a second lieutenant. I had committed the unpardonable sin. I had smiled at an officer as if I had been an equal, forgetting that he was not made of common clay. Once after that, when he turned his head, his eyes met mine disdainfully. That time I did not smile. I have often laughed at the incident since, but there on that boat I was boiling with rage. Not a word had passed between us, but his expression in turning away had been eloquent. I cursed him and the system that produced him, and swore that never again would I put on a uniform. Gradually I calmed down; the morphia had got in its work. In a little while I had sunk into a comatose condition. I remember, in a hazy sort of way, being taken aboard a large lighter. There were tiers of stretchers on both sides. This time I was in the lower tier, and was wondering how soon the man above me would fall on me. At last I went to sleep. When I awoke, I was alone and in mid-air. All about me was black. By that time I was completely paralyzed from the waist up. I could see only directly above my head. It was night, and the sky was dotted with twinkling stars. I could feel no movement, but the stars came slowly nearer and nearer. "What was I doing here in mid-air?" Subconsciously I thought of the body of Mohammed, suspended between earth and heaven. Now I felt I had hit on the answer. I was going to heaven, and the thought was very comforting. Suddenly the stars stopped, and after a pause began receding. A face appeared above me, then the head and shoulders of a man dressed in the uniform of a naval officer. This suggested something else to me. The officers of the Flying Corps wear naval uniforms. I decided that while I was asleep I had been transferred to the Flying Corps.

"Hello, old chap," said the naval officer. "Do you know where you are?"

"No," I said. "Am I going to heaven, or have I joined the Flying Corps?"

"No," said the officer. "You're on the stretcher being hoisted aboard the hospital ship."

Two big, strapping, bronzed sailors approached and lifted the stretcher on to an elevator; they stepped on and the elevator descended. We stopped at the end of a short white-walled passageway, lighted by electricity. The sailors grasped the stretcher as lightly as if it had been empty, walked along to the end of the passageway into a ward. It had formerly been a dining saloon. Large square windows looked out upon the sea, everything was white and clean and orderly. After the dirt and filth of the Peninsula it was like a beautiful dream. The sailors lifted me gently into a bed and stood there waiting for orders from the nurse. As I looked at them I thought of our boys standing in the trenches during a bombardment and yelling, "Come on, the navy," and I murmured, "Come on, the navy;" and then when I looked at the calm, self-possessed, capable-looking nursing sister, moving about amongst the wounded, I said, and never had it meant so much to me, "Good old Britain."

The string of boats in which I had come was the batch that filled the quota of the patients of the hospital ship. In about half an hour she began to move. An orderly came around with meals. The doctor came in after a little while and began examining the patients. From some part of the ship not far from where I was came the sound of voices singing hymns. It was the last touch needed to emphasize the difference between the hospital ship and the Peninsula. Sunday evening on the Peninsula had meant no more than any other. The ship moved along so quietly that she seemed scarcely to stir. The doctor and the nurse worked noiselessly; over everything hung the spirit of Sabbath calm. Gallipoli might have been as far away as Mars.

It must have been about nine o'clock when an orderly came around and turned out all the lights except a reading lamp over the desk where the night sister sat. All that night I could not sleep. About midnight the night sister gave me a sleeping draught, but it did no good. I was suffering the most intense pain, but I was so glad to be away from the dirt of the trenches that I felt nothing else counted. The next day I was a great deal weaker, and could scarcely talk. When the doctor came around to dress my wounds, I could only smile at him. All that day the sister came to my bed at frequent intervals. I was too weak then to eat. Two or three times she gave me some sort of broth through a little feeding bowl. In the evening I had sunk into apathy. The sister sent for the doctor. He came, felt my pulse, took my temperature, then turned and whispered to the sister. She called an orderly, and I heard her say, "Bring the screens for this man." The orderly went away and in a few minutes returned with two screens large enough to entirely conceal my bed. When the screens had been put in position, the sister came in, wiped my mouth and forehead, and went away. On the other side of the screen I heard her speaking softly to the doctor. The whole thing seemed to me something entirely apart from me. I felt that I was watching a scene in a play, and that I found it of little interest. After about an hour the doctor and the sister came in again.

"Feeling all right, old man?" said the doctor.

"Yes," I said. "Fine."

"Sister," said the doctor, "give this man anything he wants."

The sister bent over me. She was a woman between thirty and thirty-five, of the type that inspires confidence; every word and movement reflected poise, and there was a calmness and serenity about her that you knew she could have acquired only as a result of having seen and eased much human suffering.

"If there is anything you would care to have, please ask for it, and if it is at all possible we will get it for you," she said, in a softly modulated voice, with the slightest suspicion of a drawl; it was the voice of a cultivated English-woman; after the Peninsula, a woman's voice was like a tonic.

"Yes," I said, "I want chicken and wine."

I had not the slightest desire for chicken and wine just then, but I felt that I had to ask for something, and the best I could think of was chicken and wine. She smiled at me, went away, and in about fifteen minutes she returned with a little tray. She had brought the chicken and wine. She had minced up the chicken, and she fed me little pieces of it with a spoon. In a little cup with a spout she had the wine. When I had eaten a little of the chicken, she put the spout between my lips; I had expected some port wine, but when I tasted, it was champagne. I drank it to the very last drop.

"How do you feel now?" said the sister.

"Never felt better," I answered.

"That's very nice," she said. "I hope you'll get to sleep soon."

Then she went away, and in a few minutes the night sister came on. She peeped in at me, smiled, and went away. All that night I looked up at a tiny spot on the ceiling. In the board directly above my eyes, there was a curious knot. A little flaw ran across the center of it. It reminded me of a postman carrying his bag of letters. It seemed to me that night that I could stand the pain no longer. My back seemed to be tearing apart, as if a man was pulling on each shoulder, trying to separate them from the spine. I tried to jump up from the bed but could not move a muscle. I felt that it would be better to tear my back apart myself at once and have it over, but when I tried to move my arms I found them useless. It must have been well into the morning when the night sister came around again. The doctor was with her. He had a large syringe in his hand. He said nothing. Neither did I. I closed my eyes. I wanted to be alone. I felt him open my shirt at the neck and rub some liquid on my chest. I opened my eyes. He was putting the needle of the long-syringe into my chest where he had rubbed it with iodine. The skin was leathery and at first the needle would not penetrate. At last it went in with a rush. It seemed at least a foot long. He rubbed another spot, and plunged the needle in a second time. "We've got to get him asleep," he said to the night sister. "If he's not asleep in an hour, call me again." Very soon a drowsiness crept over me. Nothing seemed to matter. I wanted to rest. In a short time I was asleep. When I woke, it was broad daylight. The day sister was standing by my bed, smiling. She turned around and beckoned to some one. The doctor came close to the bed, felt my pulse, took my temperature again, and smiled. "Quite all right, sister," he said.

An orderly came in, lifted me up in bed, washed my face and hands, and brought in a tray with chicken. There was the same little feeding cup. This time it had port wine in it. The orderly propped me up in bed, putting cushions carefully behind my back and shoulders. The sister and the doctor superintended while he was doing it. Lifting a wounded man is a science. An unskilful person, no matter how well intentioned, may sometimes do incalculable damage. Putting a strain on the wrong muscle may undo the work of the doctor. I could see out one of the large windows now, and I noticed that we were passing a good many ships, mostly vessels of war. They seemed to increase in number every few minutes; and by the time I had finished breakfast, we were in the midst of a forest of funnels and rigging. Soon the engines stopped. When the doctor came around to dress my back, I asked him where we were.

"We're in Alexandria, now," he said. "In an hour's time we'll have unloaded. You're the last patient to be dressed. We're doing you last so that you won't have so long to wait before the bandages are changed."

"Doctor," I asked, "how long will it be before this wound gets better?"

"I don't know," he said. "It's impossible to tell until you've been X-rayed. Last night we were certain you were dying, but this morning you are perfectly normal."

In a short time the ward filled with men from the shore, landing officers, orderlies with messages, sergeants in charge of ambulance corps, and an army of stretcher bearers. The orderlies of the hospital ship began putting out the kits of the wounded at the foot of their beds. The disembarkation began as soon as the doctor had completed his dressing. I was propped up in bed, and could see a long line of motor ambulances on the pier. The less seriously wounded cases were taken off first. The sister told me that these were going by train to Cairo. Those who could not stand the train journey were going to different hospitals in Alexandria. I was to go to Alexandria, she said. A middle-aged man passed us on a stretcher. He was hit in the leg, and sat on the stretcher, smiling contentedly, and looking about him interestedly. When he saw the sister, his eyes lighted up.

"Good-by, sister," he shouted. "I'll see you again, the next time I'm wounded."

The sister returned his good-by. Then she turned to me, and said: "That man was on the hospital train that left Antwerp the day the Germans shelled it in 1914. When he came in the other night I didn't recognize him, but he remembered me."

While I waited for my turn the sister told me that she had been in the first batch of nurses to cross the Channel at the beginning of the war. She had been in the hospitals in Belgium that were shelled by the Germans. At eight o'clock in the morning she had left Antwerp on the last hospital train, and at nine o'clock the Germans occupied the town. She had been on different hospital ships and trains ever since. Once only had she had a rest. That was some time in the summer of 1915. She expected a week off in London at Christmas, when the ship she was now attached to laid up for repairs. The boat I was on, she said, carried ordinarily seven hundred and fifty wounded. At present she carried nine hundred. They generally arrived in Suvla Bay in the morning, and left that night, filled with wounded. At the time of the first landing at Anzac an hour after the assault began they left with twelve hundred wounded Australians. The sisters were sent out from a central depot in England, and went to the various fronts. When the stretcher bearers came to take me away, the sister gathered up my belongings in a little bag, tied it to the stretcher, put a pillow under my head, and nodded a bright good-by.

The stretcher bearers, two stalwart Australians, took me to the elevator, across the deck, and out onto the pier. It was now getting toward evening. A lady stopped the stretcher between the pier and the ambulance, and handed one of the bearers a little white packet containing a towel, soap, tooth-brush and tooth-powder. Without waiting to be thanked she went on to intercept another stretcher. The stretcher bearer put the package under my pillow. "Ready, Bill," said one of the bearers with the nasal twang of the Bushman. "Lift away," said Bill, and they lifted the stretcher up on the top tier of the ambulance wagon, without stepping up from the ground. They did it with the same motion as when two men swing a bag of grain. But it was not in the least uncomfortable for me. These Australian stretcher bearers who meet the incoming hospital ships are amazingly strong. There is an easy gracefulness in the way they swing along with a stretcher that makes you trust them. I was the last man to go in that ambulance wagon, and in a few minutes we were whirling smoothly along good roads amid the familiar smells of Egyptian bazaars. This ambulance drive was a good deal different from the one on the Peninsula just after I had been wounded. After about half an hour the ambulance swerved off the smooth asphalt road onto a gravel road, slowed down, and ran into a yard. The Australians reappeared, opened the flaps, and began unloading. We were in the square of a large hospital. All around us were buildings. A fine-looking, bronzed man, with the uniform of a colonel, was directing some Sikhs who were carrying the stretchers from the ambulances into the different buildings. All the stretchers were lying on the ground in a long row. As soon as each one was inspected by the colonel, he told the stretcher bearers where to take it. When he came to mine, he said, "Dangerously wounded, Ward three." Then, to the stretcher bearers, "Careful, very careful."

Ward three was a long ward with stone floor and plaster walls; it contained about fifty beds. More than half of the beds had little "cradles" at the foot; when I came to know hospitals, I learned that these were to prevent the bedclothes from irritating wounded legs. In a few minutes a doctor came around, gave orders, and the night sister began bandaging up the wounds of the men who had come in. The sister who arranged my bandages was Scotch, and the burr of her speech was pleasant in my ears. She came back about ten o'clock and gave me a sleeping potion. The change from the hospital ship must have been too much excitement for me, because I could not get asleep that night. But I did not feel as I had felt on the hospital ship. I have very seldom experienced such joy as I did that night when I found that I could move my head. I did it very slowly, and with great pain, and rested a long time before I tried to turn it back again. The door was right opposite my bed. I could see the sand shining white in the moonlight in the square, and right ahead of me a large marquee where, I found out later, some of the convalescent men slept. A man about four beds away from mine was dying. When I had first come in he had been groaning at intervals, but now he was silent. About one or two o'clock an orderly came running softly in rubber-soled shoes to tell the sister that the man had died. Half an hour later two men with a particularly long stretcher, appeared in the ward. They stepped quietly, trying not to disturb the sleepers. I saw them walk along to the bed of the dead man, and go in behind the screen. After a little while the ward orderly moved the screens back, and the stretcher bearers reappeared. Over the burden on the stretcher was draped a Union Jack. Often after that while I was in Ward three I saw the same soft-stepping men come in at night and depart silently with the flag-draped stretcher. Many of the wounded left the ward in that way, but their places were soon filled by incoming wounded.

The first morning I was in Ward three the doctor ordered me to be X-rayed. The X-ray apparatus was in another building. To get to it I had to pass through the square. The sun was too hot in the morning for us to cross the square. We therefore skirted it under the shade of the long portico that runs along the outside of nearly all buildings in Egypt. In beds outside the building were men with dysentery. At the corner of the square a plank gangway led to the quarters of the enteric patients. Just before I reached the X-ray room, a man hailed me from one of the beds. It was Tom Smythe, a boy I had known since I was able to walk. All the time I had been on the Peninsula I had not seen him, nor had I heard any news of him. On the way back from the X-ray room, the stretcher bearers stopped near his bed while I talked with him. He had been in the hospital about two weeks, he said, and hoped to get to England on the next boat. He promised to come to see me in my ward as soon as he was allowed up. The next day he came, although he was not supposed to be up, and brought with him a chap named Varney. Varney had been in the section next mine at Stob's Camp in Scotland, he told me. Smythe and Varney vied with each other after that in trying to make me comfortable. To me that has always been the most remarkable thing about our regiment: their loyalty to a comrade in trouble. I have known Newfoundlanders to fight with each other, using every weapon from profanity to tent mallets while in camp; on the Peninsula I have seen these same men carrying each other's packs, digging dugouts, and taking the other man's fatigue work. Varney was very much distressed to see the condition I was in. He knew I was fond of reading, and searched all over the place for books and magazines. Once he brought me three American magazines, one _Saturday Evening Post_ and two _Munsey's_. They were nearly two years old, but I read them as eagerly as if they had just been published.

During the six weeks I was in hospital in Alexandria, I improved wonderfully. The doctor in charge of the ward took a special interest in my progress, and seemed to pride himself on having handled the case successfully. Every day or so he brought in a doctor from some other ward to show him my wounds and the X-ray plates. He was very careful and tried in dressing to cause me as little pain as possible. "Poor old chap," he would say, when he saw me wince, "poor old chap." I think there was a great deal of psychology in my getting well. In this Twenty-first General Hospital nothing was omitted that could make one comfortable. Every morning an orderly washed me. The orderlies were all very considerate, except one. He did not last very long in our ward. He began washing the patients at four o'clock in the morning. He always made me think of a hostler washing a carriage. When he had washed my arms he always let them drop in a way that reminded me of the shafts of a wagon. He was soon replaced by a chap who did not begin his work until seven. At eight we had breakfast: fruit, cereal, and eggs. At eleven we had soda water and crackers or sweet biscuits. At one came dinner: soup, chicken, and vegetables, half a chicken to each man, with a dessert of pudding or custard. At four we had tea, with fish, and at eight came supper: cocoa and bread and butter, with jelly. In the morning visitors came in and brought us the daily papers. Sisters of the V.A.D.--Voluntary Aid Detachment--came in each afternoon to relieve the regular nursing sisters. They were mostly Englishwomen resident in Egypt. Most of their men folks were at one of the fronts. They read to the men who could not hold books in their hands, talked to us cheerfully, and wrote letters for us. Some of them brought us little delicacies: grapes and chocolate. Men in hospital have no money. Any money they have is taken away when they arrive and refunded when they leave. Like most of the rules in the army to-day, this was made for the old regulars. When the regulars felt they needed a rest they went into hospital; the only way they could be stopped was to keep all their money away from them. To-day two million men suffer as a result. Ever since the day I left the Peninsula I had wanted chocolate. But I had no money, and for a long time I had to go without it. At last young Varney got me some. He had gone errands for a wounded Australian, who had been given some money from outside, and the Australian had given him some; he could hardly wait to get to me with it.

As soon as a man was sufficiently recovered to travel, he was sent to England. New men were always coming in to take the places of the old. A lot of them were Australians. I kept asking them all as they came in if they could tell me anything of my friend White George. Of course a nickname is very little to go on. A man who was White George in one part of the trench might be Queensland Harry in another. All I knew about him was that he was in the Fifteenth Battalion, and that he had a beard. At last a chap did come in one evening from the Fifteenth Battalion. I was in bed at the time, and could not get a chance to ask him about White George. The next day the poor chap was writhing and screaming in the terrible spasms of tetanus, and for two days the screens were around his bed. On the third day he was better. As soon as Varney came in, he wheeled me up to the Australian's bed. I asked him what was the matter with him, and he told me that he had a flesh wound in the head that didn't bother him, but that his left leg was off at the knee.

"Are you from the Fifteenth Battalion?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Do you know a chap in that battalion," I said, "that they call White George?"

The wounded Australian looked at me in a quizzical way. Then he drawled slowly, "Well, I think I do. Why, damn it, man, I'm White George."

Then he recognized me. "Why, it's the Newfoundland Corporal. Hello, Corporal. You're just the man I wanted to see," he said. "I stood on that bomb all right, and got away with it--once. When I tried it a second time, I put the bomb on the firing platform, and when I stepped on it, my head was over the parapet; Johnny Turk got me in the head, and the bomb did the rest."

"Don't you wish now you hadn't tried the experiment?" I said.

"No," said White George, "I feel perfectly satisfied."

"By the way," I said, as I was leaving him, "why do they call you White George? Your hair is dark."

"My real name," he said, "is George White, but on the regimental roll it reads 'White, George.'"