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CHAPTER XVIII
GROANS, LAUGHS AND SOBS IN THE HOSPITAL

There were fourteen wounded American soldiers in my ward – all men from the ranks and representing almost as many nationalistic extractions. There was an Irishman, a Swede, an Italian, a Jew, a Pole, one man of German parentage, and one man of Russian extraction. All of them had been wounded at the front and all of them now had something nearer and dearer to them than any traditions that might have been handed down to them from a mother country – they had fought and bled and suffered for a new country, their new country.

Here in this ward was the new melting pot of America. Not the melting pot of our great American cities where nationalistic quarters still exist, but a greater fusion process from which these men had emerged with unquestionable Americanism. They are the real and the new Americans – born in the hell of battle.

One night as we lay there, we heard an automobile racing through a street in this sleepy, warm little faubourg of Paris. The motor was sounding on its siren a call that was familiar to all of us. It was the alarm of a night attack from the air. It meant that German planes had crossed the front line and were on their way with death and destruction for Paris.

A nurse entered the room and drew the curtains of the tall windows to keep from our eyes the flash and the glitter of the shells that soon began to burst in the sky above us as the aerial defences located on the outer circle of the city began to erect a wall of bursting steel around the French capital. We could hear the guns barking close by and occasionally the louder boom that told us one of the German bombs had landed. Particles of shrapnel began falling in the garden beneath the windows of our ward and we could hear the rattle of the pieces on the slate roof of a pavilion there. It is most unpleasant, it goes without saying, to lie helpless on one's back and grapple with the realisation that directly over your head – right straight above your eyes and face – is an enemy airplane loaded with bombs. Many of us knew that those bombs contained, some of them, more than two hundred pounds of melilite and some of us had witnessed the terrific havoc they wrought when they landed on a building. All of us knew, as the world knows, the particular attraction that hospitals have for German bombs.

The aerial bombardment subsided after some ten or fifteen minutes and soon we heard the motor racing back through the streets while a musician in the car sounded on a bugle the "prologue" or the signal that the raid was over. The invaders had been driven back. All of us in the ward tried to sleep. But nerves tingled from this more or less uncomfortable experience and wounds ached and burned. Sleep was almost out of the question, and in the darkened ward I soon noticed the red glow of cigarette after cigarette from bed to bed as the men sought to woo relief with tobacco smoke.

We began to discuss a subject very near and very dear to all wounded men. That is, what they are going to do as soon as they get out of the hospital. It is known, of course, that the first consideration usually is, to return to the front, but in many instances in our ward, this was entirely out of the question.

So it was with Dan Bailey who occupied a bed two beds on my right. His left leg was off above the knee. He lost it going over the top at Cantigny.

"I know what I'm going to do when I get home," he said, "I am going to get a job as an instructor in a roller skating rink."

In a bed on the other side of the ward was a young man with his right arm off. His name was Johnson and he had been a musician. In time of battle, musicians lay aside their trombones and cornets and go over the top with the men, only they carry stretchers instead of rifles. Johnson had done this. Something had exploded quite close to him and his entire recollection of the battle was that he had awakened being carried back on his own stretcher.

"I know where I can sure get work," he said, glancing down at the stump of his lost arm. "I am going to sign up as a pitcher with the St. Louis Nationals."

Days later when I looked on Johnson for the first time, I asked him if he wasn't Irish, and he said no. Then I asked him where he lost his arm and he replied, "At the yoint." And then I knew where he came from.

But concerning after-the-war occupations, I endeavoured that night to contribute something in a similar vein to the general discussion, and I suggested the possibility that I might return to give lessons on the monocle.

The prize prospect, however, was submitted by a man who occupied a bed far over in one corner of the room. He was the possessor of a polysyllabic name – a name sprinkled with k's, s's and z's, with a scarcity of vowels – a name that we could not pronounce, much less remember. On account of his size we called him "Big Boy." His was a peculiar story.

He had been captured by three Germans who were marching him back to their line. In telling me the story Big Boy said, "Mr. Gibbons, I made up my mind as I walked back with them that I might just as well be dead as to spend the rest of the war studying German."

So he had struck the man on the right and the one on the left and had downed both of them, but the German in back of him, got him with the bayonet. A nerve centre in his back was severed by the slash of the steel that extended almost from one shoulder to the other, and Big Boy had fallen to the ground, his arms and legs powerless. Then the German with the bayonet robbed him. Big Boy enumerated the loss to me, – fifty-three dollars and his girl's picture.

Although paralysed and helpless, there was nothing down in the mouth about Big Boy – indeed, he provided most of the fun in the ward. He had an idea all of his own about what he was going to do after the war and he let us know about it that night.

"All of you guys have told what you're going to do," he said, "now I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm going back to that little town of mine in Ohio and go down to the grocery store and sit there on a soap box on the porch.

"Then I'm going to gather all the little boys in the neighbourhood round about me and then I'm going to outlie the G. A. R."

There was one thing in that ward that nobody could lie about and that was the twitches of pain we suffered in the mornings when the old dressings of the day before were changed and new ones applied.

The doctor and his woman assistant who had charge of the surgical dressings on that corridor would arrive in the ward shortly after breakfast. They would be wheeling in front of them a rubber-tired, white-enamelled vehicle on which were piled the jars of antiseptic gauze and trays of nickel-plated instruments, which both the doctor and his assistant would handle with rubber-gloved hands. In our ward that vehicle was known as the "Agony Cart," and every time it stopped at the foot of a bed you would be pretty sure to hear a groan or a stifled wail in a few minutes.

We had various ways of expressing or suppressing the pain. You who have had a particularly vicious mustard plaster jerked off that tender spot in the back, right between the shoulders, have some small conception of the delicate sensation that accompanies the removal of old gauze from a healing wound.

Some of the men would grit their teeth and grunt, others would put their wrists in their mouths and bite themselves during the operation. Some others would try to keep talking to the doctor or the nurse while the ordeal was in progress and others would just simply shout. There was little satisfaction to be gained from these expressions of pain because while one man was yelling the other thirteen in the ward were shouting with glee and chaffing him, and as soon as his wounds had been redressed he would join in the laughs at the expense of those who followed him.

There was a Jewish boy in the ward and he had a particularly painful shell wound in his right leg. He was plucky about the painful treatment and used to say to the doctor, "Don't mind me yelling, doc. I can't help it, but you just keep right on."

The Jew boy's cry of pain as near as I can reproduce it went something like this, "Oy! Oy!! Oy!!! YOY!!! Doctor!"

The Jew boy's clear-toned enunciation of this Yiddish lullaby, as the rest of the ward called it, brought many a heartless, fiendish laugh from the occupants of the other beds. We almost lost one of our patients on account of that laugh. He nearly laughed himself to death – in fact.

This near victim of uncontrollable risibilities was an Italian boy from the East Side of New York. A piece of shrapnel had penetrated one of his lungs and pleurisy had developed in the other one. It had become necessary to operate on one of the lungs and tape it down. The boy had to do his best to breathe with one lung that was affected by pleurisy. Every breath was like the stab of a knife and it was quite natural that the patient would be peevish and garrulous. The whole ward called him the "dying Wop." But his name was Frank.

When the Jew boy would run the scale with his torture cry, the "dying Wop" would be forced to forget his laboured breathing and give vent to laughter. These almost fatal laughs sounded something like this:

"He! Hee!! Hee!!! (on a rising inflection and then much softer) Oh, Oh, Oh! Stop him, stop him, stop him!" The "He-Hee's" were laughs, but the "Oh-oh's" were excruciating pain.

Frank grew steadily worse and had to be removed from the ward. Weeks afterward I went back to see him and found him much thinner and considerably weaker. He occupied a bed on one of the pavilions in the garden. He was still breathing out of that one lung and between gasps he told me that six men had died in the bed next to him. Then he smiled up at me with a look in his eyes that seemed to say, "But they haven't croaked the 'dying Wop' yet."

"This here – hospital stuff – " Frank told me slowly, and between gasps, "is the big fight after all. I know – I am fighting here – against death – and am going to win out, too.

"I'm going to win out even though it is harder to fight – than fighting – the Germans – up front. We Italians licked Hell out of them – a million years ago. Old General Cæsar did it and he used to bring them back to Rome and put 'em in white-wing suits on the streets."

For all his quaint knowledge of Cæsar's successes against the progenitors of Kulturland of to-day, Frank was all American. Here was a rough-cut young American from the streets of New York's Little Italy. Here was a man who had almost made the supreme sacrifice. Here was a man who, if he did escape death, faced long weakened years ahead. It occurred to me that I would like to know, that it would be interesting to know, in what opinion this wounded American soldier, the son of uneducated immigrant parents, would hold the Chief Executive of the United States, the man he would most likely personify as responsible for the events that led up to his being wounded on the battlefield.

"Frank," I asked, "what do you think about the President of the United States?"

He seemed to be considering for a minute, or maybe he was only waiting to gather sufficient breath to make an answer. He had been lying with his eyes directed steadfastly toward the ceiling. Now he turned his face slowly toward me. His eyes, sunken slightly in their sockets, shone feverishly. His pinched, hollow cheeks were still swarthy, but the background of the white pillow made them look wan. Slowly he moistened his lips, and then he said:

"Say – say – that guy – that guy's – got hair – on his chest."

That was the opinion of the "dying Wop."

After Frank's removal from our ward, the rest of us frequently sent messages of cheer down to him. These messages were usually carried by a young American woman who had a particular interest in our ward. Not strange to say, she had donned a Red Cross nursing uniform on the same day that most of us arrived in that ward. She was one of the American women who brought us fruit, ice cream, candy and cigarettes. She wrote letters for us to our mothers. She worked long hours, night and day, for us. In her absence, one day, the ward went into session and voted her its guardian angel. Out of modesty, I was forced to answer "Present" instead of "Aye" to the roll-call. The Angel was and is my wife.

As Official Ward Angel it was among the wife's duties to handle the matter of visitors, of which there were many. It seemed, during those early days in June, that every American woman in France dropped whatever war work she was doing and rushed to the American hospitals to be of whatever service she could. And it was not easy work these women accomplished. There was very little "forehead-rubbing" or "moving picture nursing." Much of it was tile corridor scrubbing and pan cleaning. They stopped at no tasks they were called upon to perform. Many of them worked themselves sick during the long hours of that rush period.

Sometimes the willingness, eagerness and sympathy of some of the visitors produced humourous little incidents in our hospital life. Nearly all of the women entering our ward would stop at the foot of "Big Boy's" bed. They would learn of his paralysed condition from the chart attached to the foot of the bed. Then they would mournfully shake their heads and slowly pronounce the words "Poor boy."

And above all things in the world distasteful to Big Boy was that one expression "Poor boy" because as soon as the kindly intentioned women would leave the room, the rest of the ward would take up the "Poor boy" chorus until Big Boy got sick of it. Usually, however, before leaving the ward the woman visitor would take from a cluster of flowers on her arm, one large red rose and this she would solemnly deposit on Big Boy's defenceless chest.

Big Boy would smile up to her a look which she would accept and interpret as one of deep, undying gratitude. The kindly-intentioned one surrounding herself with that benediction that is derived from a sacred duty well performed, would walk slowly from the room and as the door would close behind her, Big Boy's gruff drawling voice would sing out in a call for the orderly.

"Dan, remove the funeral decorations," he would order.

Dan Sullivan, our orderly, was the busiest man in the hospital. Big Boy liked to smoke, but, being paralysed, he required assistance. At regular intervals during the day the ward room door, which was close to Big Boy's bed, would open slowly and through the gap four or six inches wide the rest of the ward would get a glimpse of Dan standing in the opening with his arms piled high with pots and utensils, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

With one hand he would extract the cigarette, insert hand and arm through the opening in the door until it hovered above Big Boy's face. Then the hand would descend and the cigarette would be inserted in Big Boy's mouth just as you would stick a pin in a pin-cushion. Big Boy would lie back comfortably and puff away like a Mississippi steamboat for four or five minutes and then the door would open just a crack again, the mysterious hand and arm would reach in once more and the cigarette would be plucked out. That was the way Big Boy got his "smokes."

If Big Boy's voice was gruff, there was still a gruffer voice that used to come from a man in the corner of the ward to the left of my bed. During the first four or five days I was an inmate of the ward, I was most interested in all the voices I heard because I lay in total darkness. The bandages extended down from the top of my head to my upper lip, and I did not know whether or not I ever would see again. I would listen carefully to all remarks within ear-shot, whether they be from doctors, nurses or patients. I listened in the hope that from them I might learn whether or not there was a possibility of my regaining vision. But all of their remarks with regard to my condition were ambiguous and unsatisfactory. But from this I gained a listening habit and that was how I became particularly interested in the very gruff voice that came from the corner on my left.

Other patients directing remarks into that corner would address them to a man whom they would call by name "Red Shannahan." I was quick to connect the gruff voice and the name "Red Shannahan," and as I had lots of time and nothing else to do, I built up in my mind's eye a picture of a tall, husky, rough and ready, tough Irishman, with red hair – a man of whom it would be conceivable that he had wiped out some two or three German regiments before they got him. To find out more about this character, I called over to him one day.

"Red Shannahan, are you there?" I said.

"Yes, Mr. Gibbons, I'm here," came the reply, and I was immensely surprised because it was not the gruff voice at all. It was the mild, unchanged voice of a boy, a boy whose tones were still in the upper register. The reply seemed almost girlish in comparison with the gruffer tones of the other patients and I marvelled that the owner of this polite, mannerly, high-pitched voice could be known by any such name as "Red Shannahan." I determined upon further investigation.

"Red Shannahan, what work did you do before you became a United States soldier?" I asked.

"Mr. Gibbons," came the reply, almost girlishly, "I am from Baltimore. I drove the wagon for Mr. Bishop, the canary bird and gold fish man."

All that had happened to this canary bird fancier and gold fish tamer was that he had killed two Germans and captured three before they got him.

Among those who came to visit us in that ward, there appeared one day a man I had not seen in many years. When I knew him last he had been a sport-loving fellow-student of mine at college and one of the fastest, hardest-fighting ends our 'Varsity football squad ever had. Knowing this disposition of the man, I was quite surprised to see on the sleeve of his khaki service uniform the red shield and insignia of the Knights of Columbus.

I was well aware of the very valuable work done by this institution wherever American soldiers are in France, but I could not imagine this former college chum of mine being engaged in such work instead of being in the service. He noticed my silence and he said, "Gib, do you remember that game with the Indians on Thanksgiving Day?"

"Yes," I replied, "they hurt your leg that day."

"Yes," replied my old college mate, whom we might as well call MacDougal inasmuch as that was not his name. "Yes, they took that leg away from me three years later."

I knew then why MacDougal was with the K. C. and I wondered what service he would perform in our ward in the name of his organisation. I soon found out. Without introduction, MacDougal proceeded to the bedside of Dan Bailey, the Infantryman with one leg off, who was lying in a bed on my right. MacDougal walked back and forth two or three times past the foot of Bailey's bed.

"How does that look?" he said to Bailey. "Do I walk all right?"

"Looks all right to me," replied Bailey; "what's the matter with you?"

MacDougal then began jumping, skipping and hopping up and down and across the floor at the foot of Bailey's bed. Finishing these exercises breathlessly, he again addressed himself to the sufferer with one leg.

"How did that look?" he said. "Did that look all right?"

"I don't see anything the matter with you," replied Bailey, "unless it is that you're in the wrong ward."

Then MacDougal stood close by Bailey's bedside where the boy with one leg could watch him closely. MacDougal took his cane and struck his own right leg a resounding whack. And we all knew by the sound of the blow that the leg he struck was wooden.

In that peculiar way did MacDougal bring into the life of Dan Bailey new interest and new prospects. He proved to Dan Bailey that for the rest of his life Dan Bailey with an artificial limb could walk about and jump and skip and hop almost as well as people with two good legs. That was the service performed by the Knights of Columbus in our ward.

There was one other organisation in that hospital that deserves mention. It was the most exclusive little clique and rather inclined towards snobbishness. I was a member of it. We used to look down on the ordinary wounded cases that had two eyes. We enjoyed, either rightly or wrongly, a feeling of superiority. Death comes mighty close when it nicks an eye out of your head. All of the one-eyed cases and some of the no-eyed cases received attention in one certain ward, and it was to this ward after my release from the hospital that I used to go every day for fresh dressings for my wounds. Every time I entered the ward a delegation of one-eyed would greet me as a comrade and present me with a petition. In this petition I was asked and urged to betake myself to the hospital library, to probe the depths of the encyclopædias and from their wordy innards tear out one name for the organisation of the one-eyed. This was to be our life long club, they said, and the insistence was that the name above all should be a "classy" name. So it came to pass that after much research and debate one name was accepted and from that time on we became known as the Cyclops Club.

A wonderful Philadelphia surgeon was in charge of the work in that ward. Hundreds of American soldiers for long years after the war will thank him for seeing. I thank him for my sight now. His name is Dr. Fewell. The greatest excitement in the ward prevailed one day when one of the doctor's assistants entered carrying several flat, hard wood cases, each of them about a yard square. The cases opened like a book and were laid flat on the table. Their interiors were lined with green velvet and there on the shallow receptacles in the green velvet were just dozens of eyes, gleaming unblinkingly up at us.

A shout went up and down the ward and the Cyclopians gathered around the table. There was a grand grab right and left. Everybody tried to get a handful. There was some difficulty reassorting the grabs. Of course, it happened, that fellows that really needed blue or grey ones, managed to get hold of black ones or brown ones, and some confusion existed while they traded back and forth to match up proper colours, shades and sizes.

One Cyclopian was not in on the grab. In addition to having lost one eye, he had received about a pound and a half of assorted hardware in his back, and these flesh wounds confined him to his bed. He had been sleeping and he suddenly awoke during the distribution of the glassware. He apparently became alarmed with the thought that he was going to be left out of consideration. I saw him sit bolt upright in bed as he shouted clear across the ward:

"Hey, Doc, pass the grapes."

When it became possible for me to leave that hospital, I went to another one three blocks away. This was a remarkable institution that had been maintained by wealthy Americans living in France before the war. I was assigned to a room on the third floor – a room adjoining a sun parlour, overlooking a beautiful Old World garden with a lagoon, rustic bridges, trees and shrubbery.

In early June, when that flood of American wounded had come back from the Marne, it had become necessary to erect hospital ward tents in the garden and there a number of our wounded were cared for. I used to notice that every day two orderlies would carry out from one of the small tents a small white cot on which there lay an American soldier. They would place the cot on the green grass where the sunlight, finding its way through the leafy branches of the tree, would shine down upon the form of this young – this very young – fighter from the U. S. A.

He was just two months over seventeen years of age. He had deliberately and patriotically lied one year on his age in order that he might go to France and fight beneath our flag.

He was wounded, but his appearance did not indicate how badly. There were no bandages about his head, arms or body. There was nothing to suggest the severity of his injuries – nothing save his small round spot on the side of his head where the surgeons had shaved away the hair – just a small round spot that marked the place where a piece of German hand-grenade had touched the skull.

This little fellow had forgotten everything. He could not remember – all had slipped his mind save for the three or four lines of one little song, which was the sole remaining memory that bridged the gap of four thousand miles between him and his home across the sea.

Over and over again he would sing it all day long as he lay there on the cot with the sunlight streaming all over him. His sweet boyish voice would come up through the leafy branches to the windows of my room.

I frequently noticed my nurse standing there at the window listening to him. Then I would notice that her shoulders would shake convulsively and she would walk out of the room, wet eyed but silent. And the song the little fellow sang was this:

 
"Just try to picture me
Back home in Tennessee,
Right by my mother's knee
She thinks the world of me.
She will be there to meet me
With a hug and kiss she'll greet me,
When I get back, when I get back
To my home in Tennessee."
 

American doctors and American nurses, both by their skill and care and tenderness, nursed that little fellow back to complete recovery, made him remember everything and shortly afterward, well and cured, he started back, safe and sound, to his home in Tennessee.

Nothing I can ever say will overstate my estimation of the credit that is deserved by our American doctors and nurses for the great work they are doing. I am not alone in knowing this. I call to witness any Canadian, Englishman or Frenchman, that, if he is wounded, when in the ambulance, he usually voices one request, "Take me to an American hospital."

I knew of one man who entered that United States Military Base Hospital near Paris, with one bullet through the shoulder, another through an arm, an eye shot out and a compound fracture of the skull, and those American doctors and nurses by their attention and skilfulness made it possible for him to step back into boots and breeches and walk out of the hospital in ten days.

It so happens that I am somewhat familiar with the details in that case because I am the man.