Conservation is the watchword of the new surgery, to save
whenever possible. The ruthless cutting and hacking of previous wars
is a thing of the past.
I remember a boy in a French hospital whose leg bones had been fairly
shattered. Eight pieces, the surgeon said there had been. Two linear
incisions, connected by a centre one, like a letter H, had been made.
The boy showed me the leg himself, and a mighty proud and happy
youngster he was. There was no vestige of deformity, no shortening.
The incisions had healed by first intention, and the thin, white lines
of the H were all that told the story.
As if to offset the cheer of that recovery, a man in the next bed was
dying of an abdominal injury. I saw the wound. May the mother who bore
him, the wife he loved, never dream of that wound!
I have told of the use of railway stations as temporary resting places
for injured soldiers. One is typical of them all. As my visit was made
during a lull in the fighting, conditions were more than usually
favourable. There was no congestion.
On a bright afternoon early in March I went to the railway station
three miles behind the trenches at E----. Only a mile away a town was
being shelled. One could look across the fields at the changing roof
line, at a church steeple that had so far escaped.
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