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
We took but a cat-nap that night, and in the morning set down the
score on our love affair. The record indicates that during the
day Henry had lost; during the night he had won. He put it down in
his black book against the time when we should get to Paris, where
money would buy things. For we ate at camps, slept in hospitals
or in barns or in mess rooms of the ambulance men, and day by day
and night after night we saw much misery and were "acquainted with
grief." There are so many kinds of hospitals in France! The great
streams of broken men that flow unceasingly down from the front are
divided as they reach the base hospitals and field hospitals into
scores of smaller currents, each flowing to a separate place, where
specialists treat the various cases. The blind go one way; those
dumb with shell-shock go another; jaw cases separate from men with
scalp wounds, and hip fractures are divided from shoulder fractures
as the sheep from the goats. Travelling about among the hospitals
one picks up curious unrelated and unexplained bits of information;
as, for instance, that the British Tommy is the most patient man
in Europe under pain. He likes to distinguish between himself and
his wound and is likely to reply to the doctor any fine morning,
"Me? Oh, I'm right at the top form, Sir; but my leg is bothering
me a bit, Sir!" The Canadian isn't so game under a roof as he is
under the open sky and in the charge. And the American grunts more
than he should. But here is a queer thing. The French tubercular
soldier is despondent. With Americans, tuberculosis breeds hope.
Perhaps it is the buoyancy of the young blood of our country; but
no American feels he is ever going to die with tuberculosis. He
feels he is hit hard; that it may take six months or a year to get
on his feet; after that--he goes on dreaming his dream. But the
tubercular French soldiers are the saddest looking men in Europe.
Back in Kansas last spring we had heard a story to the effect that
the Germans were inoculating the French and Belgians behind the
lines of the allies with tubercular bacteria. We asked French and
American and British doctors about that story, and they all answered
that there was nothing to it. The doctors told us that the Germans
have a cheaper and better way to fill France with tuberculosis
than by wasting serum on their enemies. And then, one day in a
tuberculosis hospital we picked up this story, which explained what
the doctors meant.
We met a young man from Lille. It was his birthday; Henry bought
him a bouquet. He told us his story. He said:
"Three years ago when the war broke out I was 19 years old and was
living in Lille with my parents. The Germans came to our house one
day with their guns and took me away. They took me to a town in
Germany; I think it was Essen, where they made me work in an iron
or steel mill. I worked fourteen hours a day, slept on straw outside
the works in a shed, had only the clothes they took me in and had
only bran to eat!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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