The ward is waiting.
I saw a man who had been shot in the lungs. His lungs were filled with
jagged pieces of steel. He was inhaling oxygen from a tank. There was
an inhaler strapped over his mouth and nostrils, and the oxygen passed
through a bottle of water, to moisten it before it entered his
tortured lungs.
The water in the bottle seethed and bubbled, and the man lay and
waited.
He was waiting for the next breath. Above the mask his eyes were
fixed, intent. Would it come? Ah, that was not so bad. Almost a full
breath that time. But he must have another, and another.
They are all waiting; for death, maybe; for home; for health again, or
such travesty of health as may come, for the hospital is not an end
but a means. It is an interval. It is the connecting link between the
trenches and home, between war and peace, between life and death.
That one hospital had been a school. The children's lavatory is now
the operating room. There are rows of basins along one side, set a
trifle low for childish hands. When I saw them they were faintly
rimmed with red. There was a locker room too. Once these lockers had
held caps, no doubt, and overshoes, balls and other treasures. Now
they contained torn and stained uniforms, weapons, knapsacks,
Does it matter how many wards there were, or how many surgeons? Do
figures mean anything to us any more? When we read in the spring of
1915 that the British Army, a small army compared with the others, had
lost already in dead, wounded and missing more than a quarter of a
million men we could not visualise it Multiply one ward by infinity,
one hospital by thousands, and then try to realise the terrible
by-products of war!
In that Calais hospital I saw for the first time the apparatus for
removing bits of shell and shrapnel directly under the X-ray.
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