Somme, 1st Battle of the, France, 1916 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Kentucky stayed there some minutes longer, waiting his turn and
watching the doctors at their work. They were kept hard at it. The
casualties came stumbling down the stair in an unbroken procession,
and in turn passed along to the doctors at the tables. Most of those
that walked had bandages about their heads, faces, hands, or arms;
most of them were smeared and spattered with blood, all of them were
plastered thick with mud. Many had sleeves slit open or shirts cut
away, and jackets slung loosely over their shoulders, and as they moved
glimpses of white flesh and patches of bandage showed vividly fresh
and clean behind the torn covering of blood-stained and muddy khaki.
As fast as the doctor finished one man another took his place, and
without an instant’s pause the doctor washed from his mind the effort
of thought concentrated on the last case, pounced on the newcomer,
and, hurriedly stripping off the bandages, plunged into the problem
of the fresh case, examining, diagnosing, and labeling it, cleansing
the wound of the clotted blood and mud that clung about it, redressing
and bandaging it. Then each man’s breast was bared and a hypodermic
injection of “anti-tetanus” serum made, and the man passed along to
join the others waiting to go back to the ambulances. And before he was
well clear of the table the doctor had turned and was busied about the
next case. The work went on at top speed, as smooth as sweet-running
machinery, as fast and efficiently as the sorting and packing of goods
in a warehouse by a well-drilled and expert staff. It was curiously
like the handling of merchandise, if you gave your main attention to
the figures passing down the stairs, moving into line up to the tables,
halting there a few minutes, moving on again and away. The men might
have been parcels shifting one by one up to the packers’ tables and
away from them, or those pieces of metal in a factory which trickle up
leisurely to a whirling lathe, are seized by it, turned, poked, spun
about with feverish haste for a minute by the machine, pushed out clear
to resume their leisured progress while the machine jumps on the next
piece and works its ordered will upon it. That was the impression if
one watched the men filing up to and away from the doctor’s hands. It
was quite different if attention were concentrated on the doctor alone
and the case he handled. That brought instant realization of the human
side, the high skill of the swiftly moving fingers, the perfection of
knowledge that directed them, the second-cutting haste with which a
bandage was stripped off, the tenderness that over-rode the haste as
the raw wound and quivering flesh were bared, the sure, unhesitating
touch that handled the wound with a maximum of speed finely adjusted to
a minimum of hurt, the knowledge that saw in one swift glance what was
to be done, the technical skill, instant, exact, and undeviating, that
did it. Here, too, was another human side in the men who moved forward
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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