World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Considering its obvious utility, whether in war or in civil practice,
it has always been a source of wonder to me that there is no
such thing as a car designed and built with a view to radiography.
Perhaps it exists, but if so, I have never met It only means the
building into the frame of suitable dynamo, and the provision of
means for storing the rest of the equipment. It would place an
X-ray equipment at the disposal of ever cottage hospital, or
even of a country-house, and it would place the cottage hospital,
not to mention the country-house, at the disposal of the
enterprising radiographer.
As soon as our patients could be moved, we had to send them
on to their base hospitals--the Belgians to Calais and the
French to Dunkirk.
From Calais the Belgians were brought over the Channel, and
distributed all over England and Scotland. I had a postcard from
one of them from Perth. The French were taken on in hospital
ships to Cherbourg and other seaports along the coast. From
Furnes they were all carried in hospital trains, and the scene at
the station when a large batch of wounded was going off was
most interesting. Only the worst cases were ever brought to our
hospital; all the others were taken straight to the station, and
waited there until a train was ready to take them on. Often they
would be there for twelve hours, or even twenty-four, before
they could be got on, and the train itself would be constantly
shunted to let troops and ammunition go by, and might take
twelve hours to reach its destination. There were no proper
arrangements for the feeding of these men, all of whom were
more or less badly wounded; and at first, when we heard at the
hospital that a train was about to be made up, we took down all
the soup and coffee we could manage to spare in big pails and
jugs. But this was a mere makeshift, and was superseded very
soon by a more up-to-date arrangement. A proper soup-kitchen
was established at the station, with huge boilers full of soup and
coffee always ready, and after that it was never necessary for a
wounded soldier to leave Furnes hungry. All this was due to the
energy and resource of Miss Macnaughtan, the authoress, who
took it up as her special charge. She had a little passage
screened off, and in this were fitted up boilers for coffee and
soup, tables for cutting up meat and vegetables, and even a
machine for cutting up the bread. It was all most beautifully
arranged, and here she worked all day long, preparing for the
inevitable crowd of wounded which the night would bring. How it
was all managed was a mystery to me, for there was not enough
food in Furnes to feed a tame cat, let alone a trainload of famished
soldiers, and I am looking anxiously for her next book in the
hopes of finding the solution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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