World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, American
Not a man but that came down with fever. One man ran a high temperature
for forty days and nights without a break, but with most of the men
the fever and the pain were remittent. Some suffered so severely that
the doctors were obliged to inject morphia.
Those men who were inoculated with the blood of the trench fever
patients developed the malady almost immediately. They suffered
variously with pain and fever, just as the others did.
“The monotony of it was bad,” said one of the men, a big teamster from
Boston. “Nothin’ to do but lay there and burn up and curse the pains
in your blasted legs. Next day you’d feel better, perhaps, but so weak
that you couldn’t move. The nurses were fine, and there was plenty to
eat. But we was too sick to care whether there were women around or
not, and the best stuff they gave us to eat tasted like sawdust.”
They agreed that the monotony of existence in trench fever was worse
than the pain. Life was a dreary waste. The eyes of the patients were
so affected that they were even denied the solace of reading.
The worst was yet to come for these devoted servants of science. When
the German drive began on the twenty-first of last March it was found
that their isolation hospital, thought to be so safe, was directly
in the line of attack. Lying in their beds, with nothing over them
but tent walls, their fever-racked bodies and weakened limbs became
tormented by the shriek of shells and the roar of artillery. German
airplanes chattered over their heads and bombs exploded around them.
“They wouldn’t let us get up and see the show,” grumbled one lad in
the rest hospital. “Some of us crawled to the door of the tent and
saw a little, but those English nurses shooed us back, and when it
got hotter they made us dive under the beds. They are dreadful stern,
those English nurses. You have to mind them as though they were the doc
himself.”
By March twenty-seventh the place had got too hot to hold invalids,
and the men were taken down to Paris. The journey was a fright. No
beds, little food or water, slow trains which took twenty-four hours to
traverse a distance of fifty-odd miles; but the men stood it, and when
I saw them in the hospital near Paris all but one was out of bed and on
the road to health. They were eating well, and more than one begged me
to “use my influence” to get them out of the hospital.
When a sick man begins to eat like a harvest hand and begs to get out
it indicates that he has only a few weeks of convalescence ahead of
him. At least that is what the head physician of the hospital told me
when I put in their petitions.
The cause of trench fever, thanks to our keen army and Red Cross
surgeons, and to the courageous men who volunteered to help them, has
definitely been established. The trench louse, once called a nuisance,
is now known to be almost as dangerous as the stegomya mosquito.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account