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
And back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the hospital--a
new modern barracks of a hospital, in a field sheltered from the
street by all that grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital was
made of rough, brown stained boards; it was one story high, built
architecturally like a tannery, and camouflaged as to the roof to
represent "green fields and running brooks." Board floors and board
partitions under the roof were covered as well as they could be;
and stoves furnished the heat. The beds--acres and acres of iron
beds--were assembled in the great wards and stretched far down the
long rooms like white ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place was
American--new, excruciatingly clean, and was run like a factory. We
were proud of it, and of the business-like young medical students
who as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went about in their
brand new uniforms--young crown princes of democracy, twice as
handsome and three times as dignified as they would have been if
they had royal blood. Henry called them the heirs apparent "of all
the ages" and enjoyed them greatly. They certainly gave the place
a tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown boards into a
king's palace. When we had finished our errand at the hospital and
were returning through the garden, we met our young doctor. He was
sitting on an old stone bench, among the asters and dahlias--wounded.
It was not a serious wound from an ordinary man's stand-point; but
from the Young Doctor's it was grave indeed. For it was a bullet
wound through his hand. He thought it would not affect the muscles
permanently--but no one could know. Then he sat there in the
mediaeval garden among the flowers under the yew trees and told us
how it happened; took us out to the first aid post again, and on
out to the first line trenches, and over them into No Man's Land,
stumbling over the dead, helping the stretcher bearers with the
wounded. In time he came to a wounded German--a Prussian officer
with a shell-wound in his leg.
He told us what happened, impersonally, as one who is listening to
another man's story in his own mouth. "I gave him something like
a first aid to stop the bleeding," the young Doctor paused, picked
a ravelling from his bandage and went on, still detached from the
narrative. "Then I put my arm around him, to help him back to the
ambulance." Again he hesitated and said quietly, "That was a half
mile back and the shells were still popping--more or less--around
us." He looked for appreciation of the situation. He got it, smiled
and went on without lifting his voice. "Then he did it"
"Not that fellow?" exclaimed Henry.
"Well, how?" from me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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