In one case, last spring, two hundred convalescents, leaving
one of these hospitals on a cold day in March, were called back, on
the arrival of a hundred freshly wounded men, that every superfluous
bandage on their wounds might be removed, to be used again.
Naturally, depending entirely on the unskilled nursing of the village
women, much that we regard as fundamental in hospital practice is
ignored. Wounded men, typhoid and scarlet fever cases are found in the
same wards. In one isolated town a single clinical thermometer is
obliged to serve for sixty typhoid and scarlet fever patients.[F]
[Footnote F: Written in June, 1915.]
Sometimes the men in these isolated and ill-equipped refuges realise
the horror and hopelessness of their situation. The nights are
particularly bad. Any one who knows hospitals well, knows the night
terrors of the wards; knows, too, the contagion of excitement that
proceeds from a hysterical or delirious patient.
In some of these lonely hospitals hell breaks loose at night. The
peasant women must sleep. Even the tireless nuns cannot labour forever
without rest. The men have come from battlefields of infinite horror.
A frenzied dream, a delirious soldier calling them to the charge, and
panic rages.
To offset these horrors of the night the peasants have, here and
there, resorted to music.
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