Behind the Scenes in Warring GermanyFox, Edward Lyell
History
Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany
Fox, Edward Lyell
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
"Gosh, it's good to see an American. What news have you got?" And Dr.
Sanders' merry eyes twinkled. "How about it--come on, loosen up! You
must have left the States a month after I did." A look of concern
clouded his chubby face, and I wondered what worrisome thing was on his
mind. "Say," he said, "you're a baseball fan, aren't you?" When I told
him I was, he seemed relieved. "Tell me," he begged then, "Walter
Johnson didn't sign up with the Feds, did he? I have a hospital in
Washington, you know, and whenever Griff's boys are home, I am out there
at the park, pulling hard."
And this was the first thing one heard in a city of war! The puffy,
mustached sanitation officer bid us good day; the droschky moved on. All
the way down the old cobbled streets of dreary Gleiwitz, Dr. Sanders
kept talking baseball; not once did the subject of the war come up. I
wondered if he were avoiding it as long as possible; later when you
learned what he had seen, you could not blame him. Presently our
droschky drew up in front of a rather shady-looking café. It had all the
appearance of being the Maxim's of Gleiwitz, a sordid place, reflecting
all the sordid dreariness of the town. Wondering why the doctor was
getting out here--he had not seemed that sort--he said that this was as
far as we went. I looked again at the place. It was a gray-stoned
building, on the corner of a café, then a hotel entrance, then a
gateway. I followed him through this gateway and we came into a cobbled
inner court facing a wing of the building that appeared to be a theater;
at least the sign over the door read, "Victoria Theater." By now I had
begun to guess it, and when a blue-coated German _Landwehr_ opened the
theater door, I was quite sure.
"Doctor, I suppose you have your office here," I remarked.
He laughed outright. "Office," he said, "this is my hospital."
And I thought of the place, the café, the hotel, the entire building of
which this was a part. He must have known what was passing through my
mind.
"I know," he remarked, "I felt the same way when I first saw it. It
seemed funny, putting a hospital next to a rough house like that. But it
was the only place they had left. By the time we got here, every school
and public building in the town was filled with the wounded."
As we entered the lobby of the theater I saw that it had been
transformed into a corridor for convalescents. The stench of iodoform
assailed you. Four German soldiers, their arms or legs bandaged, were
sitting at a rough board table drinking beer, which you perceived, as a
waiter appeared with a tray full of steins, came by way of a connecting
passageway from the café next door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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