The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me — John Shaqi
The Martial Adventures of Henry and MeWhite, William Allen
History
The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
White, William Allen
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
picture shows, listening to the regimental band, sitting on the
sidewalks before the cafes, or dancing with the girls in the parks.
Then a time came when the village streets were lonely and dark
and we knew that the bugle had sounded taps. And so in due course
we came to the end of the day's journey, at the end of a spur of
the railroad, near one sector of the Verdun front. There we found
a field hospital of four thousand beds. And when there is to
be renewed French activity on the Verdun sector, the first thing
that happens is the general evacuation of all the patients in the
hospital. It takes a great many railroad trains to clear out a
hospital wherein six thousand wounded men are jammed. We saw one
hospital train loading. This hospital had handled twenty-six hundred
cases in one day the week before we arrived. The big guns that we
had heard booming away for three days as we went up and down the
line had been grinding their awful grist. We walked through the
hospital, which covered acres of ground. It is a board structure,
some of the walls are not even papered, but show the two-by-fours
nakedly and the rafters above. Stoves heat most of the wards, and
hospital linoleum covers the runways between the rows of beds. Of
course, the operating rooms are painted white and kept spotless.
The French are marvellous surgeons, and their results in turning
men back to the line, both in per cent of men and time are up to
the normal average of the war; but they are not so finical about
flies and fresh air and unimportant dirt as the English or the
Americans. They probably feel that there are more essential things
to consider than flies and their trysting places! In this hospital
we saw our first wounded German prisoners. We saw boys fifteen
years old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. We
saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic
type, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubby
looking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust and
the scum of the earth."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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