Chapter II: Part 2

Of course, to begin with, she did not know one of her men from another, but she studied them closely as they worked, driven along by her direction, setting up the rough camp-stoves, stopping the worst of the holes in the walls, arranging the poor apologies for mattresses, and cutting off the tops of gasoline-cans for heating water--for our woman doctor was asked to take care of several hundred typhoid cases and was not provided with so much as a bowl that would hold water. Presently, as they worked, she noticed that there were but nineteen men there. All day she studied their faces, their bearing, what was written on them for the seeing eye to read. At night, at supper-time, there were twenty men. Those clear brown eyes swept around the circle and pounced on a mild-looking _poilu_ innocently taking his soup with the others.

“Where have you been all day?” she asked him.

He fairly turned pale with astonishment, “Why, how did you--? I’ve been right here, working!” he tried to bluster her down.

“No, you haven’t. You haven’t been here since a quarter past ten this morning,” she assured him.

He hung his head a moment, then looked an ugly defiance. “Well, I’ve been in to Verdun to spend the day with a friend. What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to have you punished for disobeying an officer,” she said promptly, though so little military had been her beneficent life, that she had no more idea than you or I or any other woman would have of what punishment could be given in such a case.

“Officer’s orders!” said the man. “_What_ officer?” All the men laughed.

“I’m your officer,” she said, and went away to telephone to the military authority in charge of such cases.

“I can’t be expected to have discipline if I’m not backed up,” she said. “This is a test case. It’s now or never.”

The answer was a non-com and a guard marching up to the barracks, saluting the military doctor, and, with all due military ceremony, carrying off the offender for a week in prison. Dr. Girard-Mangin laughs still at the recollection of the consternation among the nineteen who were left. “I never had any trouble about _discipline_, after that,” she says. “Of course there were the utter incompetents to be weeded out. For that I followed the time-honored army custom of sending my worst man whenever the demand from Headquarters came for a good, competent person to be sent to other work! Before long I had reduced the force of nurses to twelve. Those twelve I kept for all the time of my service there, and we parted at the end old friends and tried comrades. I have never lost track of them since. They always write me once in a while, wherever they are.”

As soon as it grew dark enough, that first night, for the ambulances to dash out through the blackness, over the shell-riddled roads to the _abris_, close to the front, the stricken men began to come in. Before dawn, that very first night, there were fifty-five terrible typhoid cases brought into the bare sheds. Then it was that Dr. Girard-Mangin, working single-handed with her score of crude, untrained helpers, needed all her capacity for going without sleep. Then it was that her men, seeing her at work, stopped laughing because she was a woman and admired her because she was a woman doing wonderful things; then, best of all, forgot that she was a woman, and took her simply for the matchless leader that she is, in the battle against disease. I think it was not wholly the guard, marching away the disobedient man to prison, who was responsible for the fact that our little woman doctor had no further difficulty with discipline.

The condition of the typhoid patients was harrowing beyond words. A man going out with his squad to a front-line trench would be stricken down with fever on arriving. It was impossible for him to return until his squad was relieved and he could be carried to the rear on a comrade’s back. There he was, there he must remain, for the three or four or five days of his squad’s “turn” in the front lines. Can you imagine the condition of a man with typhoid fever, who has lain in a trench in the mud for four days, with no shelter from the rain or snow but an overcoat spread over him, with no care beyond an occasional drink of water from a comrade’s flask? For your own sake I hope you can not imagine it. And I will not go into details. Enough to say that such men were brought in by the tens, by the twenties, by the fifties, filthy beyond words, at the limit of exhaustion, out of their heads with weakness and fever and horror.

And there to stem that black tide of human misery stands this little upright, active, valiant, twentieth-century woman. I think, although we are not of her nation, we may well be proud of her as a fellow-being who had voluntarily renounced ease to choose the life which had made her fit to cope with the crisis of that night--and of the more than four hundred days and nights following. For cope with it she did, competently, resolutely, _successfully_. “Oh yes, we gave them cold baths,” she says, when you ask for details. “We managed somehow. They had all the right treatment, cold baths, wet packs, injections, the right food--everything very primitive at first, of course, but everything you ever do for typhoid anywhere. Our percentage of losses was very low always.”

“But how? _How?_ How did you manage?” you ask.

“Oh, at the beginning everything was very rough. We had only one portable galvanized-iron bathtub. Since they were all so badly infected, there was less danger in bathing them all in the same tub than in not fighting the fever that way. And then, just as soon as I could reach the outside world by letter, I clamored for more, and they were sent.”

“But how could you, single-handed, give cold baths to so many men? It’s a difficult matter, giving a cold bath to a typhoid patient.”

“I wasn’t single-handed. I had my twelve soldier-nurses.”

“‘_Nurses_,’ you say! Farm-laborers, accountants, barbers, drunken druggists!”

“But I got rid of that good-for-nothing pharmacist at once! And the others--the twelve good ones--they learned what to do. They learned how to give the simple remedies. They learned how to do the other things enough to give me a report--how to take temperatures, how to give the baths at the right degree for the right time, how to take the pulse.”

“How could they learn all that?” you ask, amazed.

“I taught them,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, slightly surprised, in the simplest, most matter-of-fact tone.

You look past her, out there to that hand-to-hand struggle with death which was carried on by the one indomitable will and the one well-trained mind, strong enough not only to animate this woman’s body before you, but those other bodies and ignorant, indocile minds.

“They did it very well, too,” she assures you, and you do not doubt her.

That woman could teach anybody to do anything.

You come back to details. “But how could you get enough water and heat it for so many baths, on just those rough, small, heating-stoves?”

“Well, we were at it all the time, practically, day and night. We cut the tops off those big gasoline-cans the automobilists use, and stood one on every stove up and down the barracks. There wasn’t a moment when water wasn’t being heated, or used, or carried away.”

“What could you do about intestinal hemorrhages?” you ask. “You must have had many, with such advanced cases. Your farm-hand nurses couldn’t----”

“I never tried to teach them how to handle any real crisis, only to recognize it when it came, and go quickly to fetch me. I taught them to watch carefully and at the first sign of blood on their patients’ clothing or on the mattress, to take the knapsack out from under the sick man’s head--they had no other pillow, of course--to lay him down flat, and then to run and call me, from wherever I was.”

“You must have had almost no sleep at all.”

“That was the greatest help I had, being able to get along on little sleep. And I got more work out of my helpers than any man could, for they were ashamed to ask to sleep or rest, seeing that a woman, half their size, could still keep going.”

“But how about your famous hygienic regularity, the morning exercises and cold baths and----”

“Oh, as soon as I saw I was in for a long period of regular service, I took the greatest care to go on with all the things which keep one fit for regular service.”

“Morning tubs?”

“Yes, morning tubs! I slept--what time I had to sleep--in an abandoned peasant’s house in an evacuated village near the hospital. I didn’t take any of the downstairs rooms because people are likely to walk right into an abandoned house, and part of the time there were soldiers quartered in the village. Then there was usually somebody in the house with me. The other times I had it all to myself. I took a room on the second floor. It happened to have a flight of steps leading up to it, and another one going out of it into the attic. Of course, I never had any heat, and the drafts from those two open stairways--well, it was like sleeping in the middle of a city square. Sometimes I used to take down a bottle filled with hot water, but the bed was so cold that it was almost instantly chilled. Many a time I have gone to sleep, all curled up in a ball, holding my feet in my hands, because they were so cold, and wakened to find them still as icy. Oh, the cold! That is the worst enemy of all at the front, the most wearing, the most demoralizing, the most dehumanizing, because it _lasts_ so. With other things--hunger, wounds, danger--either it kills you, or it passes. But the cold is always there.”

She loses herself for a moment in brooding recollection and you wonder if Jeanne d’Arc ever did anything braver for her country than did this delicate, stout-hearted modern woman, sleeping alone for months and months in bitter cold in a deserted house in a deserted village.

She comes back to the present. “And it was there that I took my morning tubs!” she says with an amused smile. “Of course the water froze hard into a solid lump. So I put _carbonate de potasse_ into it. This not only kept it from freezing, but made it alkaline, so that it was an excellent detergent and stimulant to the skin. I assure you, after a night in which I had been incessantly called from one bed to another, when I felt very much done-up, my cold sponge-bath in that water was like a resurrection. I was made over. Then, of course, no matter how busy I was, I took care of my feet--changed my stockings and shoes every day. Feet are one’s weakest point in a long pull like that.”

You venture to remark about a slight limp noticeable when she walks. “Yes, it comes from a frozen foot--I have to admit it. But it’s really not my fault. That was later, at the time of the battle at Verdun. There are always brief crises, when you have to give your all and not stop to think. I went nine days then without once taking off my shoes. I hadn’t my other pair by that time. The _Boches_ had them, probably.”

But we have not come to that terrific epic, as yet. Before that second tornado burst over the heads of the French and of our woman doctor, there was a long, hard, dull period of four hundred and seventy days of continuous service--for Dr. Girard-Mangin, being a pioneer woman, felt in honor bound to do more than a man would do. In the three years and more of her war service, she has had just three weeks’ furlough, seven days out of every year to see her son, to see her family, to relax. Every other day of that long procession of days, she has been on duty, active, and, as befits a woman, constructively active.

She did not continue resignedly to struggle with tin-can drinking-cups, and one bathtub for two hundred men. Neither did she rely on the proverbially slow mills of the Government to grind her out the necessary supplies. She was not only the army doctor in charge of the contagious cases in the big sanitary section and hospital near Verdun, she was also a figure of international importance, the _Présidente_ of the Hygiene Department of the _Conseil International des Femmes_--her predecessor had been Lady Aberdeen; she was high in honor at the big Beaujon Hospital in Paris; she was well-known to the charitable world in the Society for Hygienic Lodgings for the poor, which owed so much to her; and she had a wide circle of friends everywhere. The little _aide major_ sent out from her bare shed-hospital, lacking in everything, a clarion call for help for her sick men. With years of experience in organization back of her, she set to work and, in the midst of the fury of destruction all about her, built up, item by item, a little corner of order and competent activity. In November, 1914, there was nothing but a windswept shed, with straw pallets and tin-can utensils. By June of the next year you would have found, if you had had the courage to go within two kilometers of the front line, a very well-appointed contagious ward of a military hospital, where nothing was lacking for the men’s comfort--except a certainty that the whole thing might not be blown to pieces by a shell. And by the end of 1915, when there began to be talk of a great German drive against Verdun, the men under our doctor’s supervision had as good care as they could have had anywhere, with laboratory and sterilizing facilities--everything. Dr. Girard-Mangin knew what was the best to be had in hospitals and she did not rest until somehow, Aladdin-like, she had made it to blossom, out there in danger and desolation.

All during January of 1916 there was terrific tension along that front. The monster German offensive against Verdun was in the air. The month of January passed with desperate slowness, such intent, apprehensive suspense being torturing for human nerves, especially tired human nerves which had already been through a long, severe period of trial.

Everybody showed signs of nervousness. Our little doctor stuck faithfully to her bedrock principles of health, changed her shoes and stockings every day, took her Spartan baths and rub-downs in her colder-than-freezing water, went through her deep-breathing and her setting-up exercises every morning. By such merely feminine reliance on everyday sanity in life, she kept herself in excellent physical shape, and did not succumb to the temptation, which is too much for so many doctors under strain, of hypodermics of strychnin, and other stimulants.

February 1st came. The great storm, looming murkily, had not burst.

February inched itself along, and finally, because human nature can only stand about so much of strain, nerves began to relax in utter fatigue.

On February 21st, which was a Monday, it was fairly clear, cold, with what passes for sunshine in that region. Dr. Girard-Mangin stepped out in front of her shed-hospital ward, after lunch, and made this remark to herself: “I don’t believe the _Boches_ are going to pull off that offensive at all. And to-day is almost sunny. I have a good notion to go over to the 165th and get my hair washed.” There was an ex-coiffeur in that regiment who kept on with his trade in his leisure moments.

As this singularly peace-time thought passed through her mind, an _obus_ screamed its way loudly over her head. “That’s near,” she thought, “nearer than they generally are.”

Before she could get back into the hospital, the battle of Verdun had begun.

The blow was delivered with astounding rapidity, and with stunning force. Up to that time, nothing had ever been conceived like the violence of the artillery fire. There in the hospital, only two kilometers back of the front, the noise was so great they could scarcely hear each other’s voices. Upon those men, and that woman, unnerved by six weeks of nerve-racking suspense, the great crisis leaped with murderous fury. It was as though the world were being battered to pieces about their heads. Each one called up in himself all the reserve strength his life had given him and, tight-lipped, clung as best he could to self-control.

The first nerves to give way were in the bakeshop. The bakers suddenly burst out of their overheated cell and, half-naked in that sharp cold, clad only in their white-linen aprons and trousers, fled away, anywhere, away, out of that hell. One of the doctors, seeing this beginning of the panic, shouted out in an angry attempt to stem the tide of fear, “Shame on you, men! What are you doing! What would happen if every one ran away!”

One of the fleeing bakers, dodging with agility the outstretched restraining arms, called out heartily, with a strong Southern accent, “Right you are, doctor, perfectly right!” and continued to run faster than ever. Which typically _Midi_ phrase and action was seized upon by those gallant French hearts for the laugh which is the Gallic coquetry in the face of danger.

But even they could not smile at what they next saw. At four o’clock that afternoon began the spectacle, awful to French eyes, of regiments of _chasseurs_ fleeing toward the rear.

“So inconceivable was this to me, that I repeated, ‘_Chasseurs!_ Retreating!’”

Dr. Girard-Mangin closed her eyes a moment as if she saw them again. “Oh, yes, retreating--and no wonder! All their equipment gone, no guns, no ammunition, no grenades, no bayonets--their bare fists, and those bleeding, for weapons. Many of them were naked, yes, literally naked, except for their leather cartridge belts. Everything made of cloth had been blown from their bodies by the air-pressure from exploding shells. Many of them were horribly wounded, although they were staggering along. I remember one man, whose wounds we dressed, who came reeling up to the hospital, holding his hand to his face, and when he took his hand down most of his face came with it. Oh, yes, they were retreating, those who had enough life left to walk. And they told us that Verdun was lost, that no human power could resist that thrust.”

All that night, and all the next day and all the next night, such men poured through and past the hospital and during all that time there was no cessation in the intolerable, maddening din of the artillery. When you ask Dr. Girard-Mangin how she lived through those days and nights, she tells you steadily, “Oh, that was not the worst. We could still work. And we did. More than eighteen thousand wounded passed through the hospital that week. We had too much to do to think of anything else. It seemed as though all the men in the world were wounded and pouring in on us.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the tide of men changed in character somewhat, and this meant that the end was near. In place of _chasseurs_ and the ordinary _poilus_, quantities of brown Moroccans, those who fight at the very front, came fleeing back, horribly wounded, most of them, yelling wild prayers to Allah, clutching at themselves like children and howling like wild beasts--impossible to understand or to make understand. And yet, somehow, the hospital staff, staggering with fatigue themselves, ministered to them, too, until--this was where they all touched bottom--until, on Wednesday night, the electricity suddenly gave out and, in the twinkling of an eye, blackness fell on the great wards, shaken by the incessant infernal screaming rush of the shells overhead, by the thunder of the cannon, and filled with the shrieks of the agonizing wild men from Africa. Blackness like the end of the world.

Messengers were sent hastily to grope their way down to the nearest village for candles. But they returned empty-handed. Long before that the soldiers had carried off all the supply of candles.

“What did you do, all that night?”

Dr. Girard-Mangin makes no light pretense of belittling the experience.

“It was awful beyond anything imaginable,” she tells you gravely. “The worst thing that can happen to a doctor had come--to be in the midst of suffering and not to be able to lift a finger to help. All that we could do was to give them water to drink. We could feel our way to the water-pitchers. The rest of the time we could only sit, helpless, listen to the shells and to the wounded men groaning, and wait for dawn.”

Yes, it is a small, delicately fashioned woman, like you, like me, who lived through those days and those nights, and came through them morally and physically intact, into an even greater usefulness. It will not be a bad thing to remember her the next time we feel “tired” in our ordinary round of small efforts.

On the next day came the order to evacuate the hospital, bitter proof of the German success. Dr. Girard-Mangin began sending off her sick men in relays of four in the only ambulance at her disposal. They were taken down to the nearest little branch railroad, there put on the train, and sent--nobody knew where, anywhere out of the range of German guns.

All day Thursday the evacuation went on. By Thursday evening there were left only nine men in her ward, men practically dying, far gone with intestinal hemorrhages, too ill to move. Dr. Girard-Mangin spent another black night beside her dying men, moving from one to another in the intense obscurity, raising her voice above the thunder of the artillery to comfort them, to give them what small help she could without a light. On Friday all the hospital staff, with a few exceptions, was to leave. The hospital buildings and equipment were to be left in the charge of a non-com and two privates; and the men too ill to transport were to be left with one doctor and two aides. The rule in the French Sanitary Service for that case is that the youngest doctor stays with the sick. Dr. Girard-Mangin was the youngest doctor.

But at this, the good head-doctor, who had daughters of his own in Paris, cried out that there was a limit, that he would never forgive any man who left a daughter of his alone in such a position, alone with dying men, alone under fire, alone to face the _Boches_. No, no Frenchman could be expected to do that.

Dr. Girard-Mangin appealed over his head to the military authority in command, for permission to do her duty as it fell to her. “I have not failed in my services so far. It is not just to force me to fail now.”

The military ruling was that the usual rule would hold. The little woman doctor stayed in danger, and the men went back to the rear. The parting was a moving one; those comrades of hers who had seen her working by their sides for so many months took her in their arms and wept openly as they bade her good-by.

If you venture to ask her what were her own emotions at this moment, she tells you with a shudder, “Oh, sorrow, black, black sorrow for France. We all thought, you know, that Verdun had fallen, that the Germans had pierced the line. No one knew how far they had gone. It was an awful moment.” Apparently she did not think of herself at all.

All day Friday, she was there with her stricken men and with two aides. Friday night she lay beside them in the dark. On Saturday the man left in charge of the hospital buildings went mad from the nervous tension--they expected almost from hour to hour to see the Germans appear--and from the hellish noise of the artillery.

I find myself cold as I try to think what another black night meant in those conditions. Dr. Girard-Mangin passed it and emerged into another dawn.

On Sunday morning the General in command of that region, amazed to find that any one was still there, sent peremptory orders that the premises must be evacuated entirely, dying men and all. They would certainly be killed if they were kept there. And more, there was no longer anything to give them to eat. This was a military order and so overrode the rulings of the Sanitary Service. Dr. Girard-Mangin prepared to evacuate. She had at her disposition a small _camion_ in which she put the four men best able to be carried, and her own ambulance in which she packed the five worst cases, crosswise of the vehicle. To try to give them some security against the inevitable jolting, she bound them tightly over and over to their stretchers. Then, with her little medicine-kit, she got in beside them and told her chauffeur to take them to Clermont-en-Argonne, and not by the safer route taken by the _ravitaillement_ convoys, because her sick men could never live through the length of that trip, but by the shorter road, leading along directly back of the front.

“I wonder that he was willing to take that dangerous route,” you say.

“I didn’t ask his opinion about it,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin with a ring of iron in her voice.

So began a wild ride of forty-three kilometers, constantly under fire, with five men at the point of death. The chauffeur dodged between the bursting shells, the woman in the car watched her sick men closely and kept them up with hypodermics of stimulants--which are not administered by a shaking hand!

You ask respectfully, looking at the white scar on her cheek, “It was then, during that ride, that you were wounded, wasn’t it?”

She nods, hastily, indifferently, and says, “And when we finally reached Clermont-en-Argonne, my sick men were no better off, for I found the hospital absolutely swamped with wounded. I said I was there with five mortally sick men from Verdun, and they answered, ‘If they were all Generals we could not take them in. You are mad, Madame, to bring _sick_ men here.’ So we went on ten kilometers further to a little village called Froidos, where my face-wound was dressed and where finally I was able to leave my men, all alive still, in good hands.”

“They didn’t live to get well, did they?” you ask.

At this question, she has a moment of stupefaction before the picture of your total incomprehension of what she has been talking about; she has a moment’s retrospective stare back into that seething caldron which was the battle of Verdun; she opens her mouth to cry out on your lack of imagination; and she ends by saying quietly, almost with pity for your ignorance, “Oh, I never saw or heard of those men again. There was a great deal too much else to be done at that time.”

Have you lost track of time and place in that adventure of hers? It is not surprising. She was then in the little village of Froidos, on the afternoon of Sunday, February 27th, almost exactly a week after the battle began--and after almost exactly a week of unbelievable horror--after four nights spent without a light in a great hospital full of wounded men--after a ride of nearly fifty kilometers constantly under fire, with mortally sick men. And she now turned, like a good soldier who has accomplished the task set him, to report at headquarters for another.

Her headquarters, the _Direction du Service Sanitaire_ was at Bar-le-Duc. Without a moment’s rest or delay, she set out for Bar-le-Duc, she and her chauffeur, half-blind with lack of sleep. They arrived there at midnight. She reported herself at the hospital, so large that in normal times it holds three thousand wounded. “I have just brought in the last of the sick from the military hospital at Verdun,” she said, to explain her presence. They were astounded to hear that any one had been there so lately. Every one had thought that certainly the Germans were there by that time.

“Please, is there a place where I may sleep a few hours?” she said.

But there was no place, not one. The great hospital was crowded to the last inch of its space with wounded--halls, passageways, aisles, even the stairs had wounded on them. Finally some one gave her a blanket and she lay down on the floor in the little office of the head-doctor and slept till morning--five or six hours. Then she went out into the town to try to find a lodging. Not one to be had, the town being as full as the hospital. She had not taken her clothes off, naturally, nor her shoes.

“Oh, then I did feel tired,” she says. “That morning, for the first time, I knew how tired I was, as I went dragging myself from door to door, begging for a room and a bed. It was because I was no longer working, you see. As long as you have work to do, you can go on.”

At last a poor woman took pity on her, said that she and her daughter would sleep together on one narrow bed, and let her have the other one.

“I was so glad, so glad,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, “to know I was to have a real bed! I was like a child. When you are as tired as that, you don’t think of anything but the simple elementals--lying down, being warm, having something to eat--all your fine, civilized ideas are swept away.”

She went back toward the hospital to get what few things she had been able to bring with her, and there she saw her chauffeur waving a paper toward her. “We are to be off at once,” he said, and showed her an order to leave Bar-le-Duc without delay, taking two nurses with them, and to go with all speed to the hospital at Vadelaincourt. They were crowded with wounded there.

“Then, at once, my tiredness went away,” she says. “It only lasted while I thought of getting a bed. When I knew we were going into action once more, I was myself again.”

By two o’clock that afternoon--this was Monday--they were _en route_ for the hospital, the doctor on the seat by the chauffeur, the two nurses, hysterical with fear over the shells, weeping inside.

“What a terrible, tragic, inspiring trip that was!” she exclaims, and almost for the only time during her quietly told narration her voice quivers, her eyes suffuse. “We were going against the tide of fresh reserves, rushing out to the front--mile after mile, facing those strongly marching ranks of splendid young Frenchmen, all going out to suffer the unimaginable horrors from which I had just come. I could not bear to look into those eager, ardent faces. I was so proud of them, so yearning over them! And they were so full of spirit, hurrying forward to the supreme sacrifice. They shouted out to us again and again, ‘The battle isn’t over yet, is it? Will we get there in time?’ They laughed light-heartedly, the younger ones, when they saw me and called out, ‘Oh, the women are fighting out there, too, are they?’ Wave after wave of them, rank on rank, the best of my country, marching out to death.”

They were delayed by an accident to a tire, being instantly--as is the rule on military roads, always crammed to the last inch--lifted bodily into a neighboring field for repairs. No stationing for repairs is allowed on a road where every one is incessantly in movement. While the repairs were being made, the car sank deeper and deeper into the mud, and it was a Herculean undertaking to get it back in the main thoroughfare. As usual, a crowd of good-natured _poilus_ managed this, heaving together with the hearty good-will to which all drivers of American ambulances can testify.

Delayed by this, it was nearly midnight when they drew near their destination. The chauffeur turned off the main road into a smaller one, a short cut to the hospital, and sank at once in mud up to his hubs. From twelve o’clock that night till half-past five in the morning, they labored to make the few kilometers which separated them from Vadelaincourt. Once the chauffeur, hearing in the dark the rush of water against the car, announced that he was sure that the river had burst its banks, that they had missed the bridge and were now in the main current. Dr. Girard-Mangin got down to investigate and found herself knee-deep in mud so liquid that its sound had deceived the chauffeur. They toiled on, the nurses inside the car wringing their hands.

By the time it was faintly dawn they arrived at the hospital, where the hard-worked head-doctor, distracted with the rush of wounded, cried out upon her for being a woman, but told her for Heaven’s sake to stay and help. The nurses were taken in and set to work, where at once they forgot themselves and their fears. But again there was no place for the new doctor to sleep, the hospital being overflowing with human wreckage. She did what all ambulance people hate to do, she went back to the reeking ambulance, laid herself on a stretcher, wet boots and all, drew up about her the typhoid-soaked blankets of her ex-patients, and instantly fell asleep. The chauffeur had the preferable place of sleeping under the car, on another stretcher.

She had no more than closed her eyes, when came a loud, imperious pounding on the car, “Get up quickly. The _médecin-en-chef_ sends for you at once; terrible lot of wounded just brought in; every hand needed.”

She went back through the mud to the hospital, had a cup of hot coffee and--detail eloquent of the confusion and disorganization of that feverish week--some plum-cake! By what freak of _ravitaillement_ there was only plum-cake, she never knew.

Then she put on her operating-apron and cap. She went into the operating-room at half-past seven in the morning. She operated steadily, without stopping, for more than five hours. At one o’clock she felt giddy and her legs failed her. She sat down flat on the floor, leaning back against the wall. “Here it comes!” she said to herself, fighting the faintness which dissolved all her members, “Here comes womanishness!”

But it did not come. She sat thus, setting her teeth and tightening her will until she conquered it. A new relay of doctors came in. She staggered off, had more coffee, a piece of chocolate and another piece of plum-cake! And was told that she would be “off duty” till eight that evening. Where could she go to rest? Nowhere. Snow lay on the fields, mud was deep in the roads. There was not a bed empty.

“I sat down in a corner, in a chair, quite a comfortable chair,” she tells you, “and took down my hair and brushed and braided it. You know how much that rests you!”

Now, Dr. Girard-Mangin is the last person in the world over whom to sentimentalize, and I swore before beginning to write about her that I would try not to do it. But I can not restrain myself from asking you here if you do not feel with me like both laughing and crying at the inimitable, homely femininity of that familiar gesture, at the picture of that shining little warrior-figure, returning in that abomination of desolation to the simple action of a sheltered woman’s everyday home life?

Then she went to sleep, there in the “quite comfortable” chair, with her shoes unlaced but still on her feet. “I had lost my other pair somewhere along the route,” she explains, “and I didn’t dare to take those off because I knew I could never get them on again if I did.”

There followed twenty days of this terrific routine, steady work in the operating-room with intervals of seven hours’ “rest,” with nowhere to go to rest. “But the food got better almost at once,” she says, in explanation of her having lived through it. “We couldn’t have gotten along on plum-cake, of course!”

For nine of those twenty days, she never took off her shoes at all, and the foot was frozen there which now she drags a little in walking.

On March 23rd, a month after the battle of Verdun had begun, the _médecin-chef-inspecteur_ came to Vadelaincourt, went through the usual motions of stupefaction to find a woman doctor there, decided--rather late--that it was no place for a woman, and sent her to Châlons. For six months thereafter, she was in the Somme, near Ypres, working specially among the tubercular soldiers, but also taking her full share of military surgery. “Just the usual service at the front, nothing of special interest,” she says with military brevity, baffling your interest, and leaving you to find out from other sources that she was wounded again in June of that year.

On the 11th of October, 1916, a remarkable and noteworthy event took place. For once a Governmental action was taken with intelligence. The Government, wishing to institute a special course of training for military nurses at the front, called to its organization and direction, not somebody’s relation-in-law, not a politician’s protégée, but the woman in France best fitted to undertake the work. Such an action on the part of any Government is worthy of note!

The hospital which had been built for charitable purposes on the Rue Desnouettes was loaned to the Government. What was needed for its head was some one who knew all about what training was essential for nursing service at the front. Any good military doctor could have done this part. Also some one was needed who knew all about what is the life of a woman at the front. Any good nurse of military experience could have seen to this. Also there was needed a person with experience in organization, with the capacity to keep a big enterprise in smooth and regular running. Any good business man could have managed this. Furthermore there was needed a person with magnetism who could inspire the women passing through the school with enthusiasm, with ardor, with devotion-- I needn’t go on, I think. You must have seen that only one person combined all these qualifications, and she is the one now at the head of the hospital-school.

Dr. Girard-Mangin received a call summoning her back to that “work at the rear” which is such a trial for those who have known the glory of direct service at the front.

This meant drudgery for her, long hours of attention to uninteresting but important details, work with a very mixed class of intelligences--the women in her courses of study vary from peasant girls to officers’ widows; bending her quick intelligence to cope with sloth and dullness. It meant, worst of all and hardest of all, living again in the midst of petty bickerings, little personal jealousies, mean ambitions. Nothing is more startling for those who “come back from the front” than to find the world at the rear still going on with its tiny quarrels and disputes, still industriously raking in its muck-heap. And nothing more eloquently paints our average, ordinary life than the intense moral depression which attends the return to it of those who have for a time escaped from it to a rougher, more dangerous, and more self-forgetful atmosphere.

For me, no part of Dr. Girard-Mangin’s usefulness is more dramatic than the undramatic phase of it in which she is now faithfully toiling. Her coolness under fire, her steadiness under overwhelming responsibilities, her astonishing physical endurance do not thrill me more than this prompt, disciplined ability to take up civilian life again and quiet, civilian duties.

She has organized the hospital ingeniously along original lines, as a perfect reproduction of what the nurses will encounter at the front: a series of barracks, a ward to each shed, with the nurse’s little sleeping-cubicle at the end with its rough but sufficient sanitary arrangements. Another unit is given over to the operating-room and its appendages, the sterilizing-room, anesthetic-room, etc. Another is the administrative building, and contains the offices of the _médecin-en-chef_, the head-nurse, the pharmacy, the bacteriological laboratory. At one side are very simple but wholesome sleeping quarters and study-rooms for the fifty and more nurses who pass through the school every three months. For Dr. Girard-Mangin only takes them in hand when they have already completed a course of training in ordinary hospitals. Even then she weeds out rigorously, in the middle of the short, intensive, concentrated course, those who do not show the necessary physical, mental, and moral qualities to fit them for the grave responsibilities they will have at the front, for nurses from this hospital go out to direct and run the field hospitals, not merely to be nurses there.

The work for the doctor at the head is a “grind,” nothing less, monotonous, like all teaching--an ever-reiterated repetition of the same thing--no glory, no change, no bright face of danger. The clear brown eyes face it as coolly, as undaunted, as they faced bursting shells, or maddened soldiers. The clear-thinking brain sees its vital importance to the country as well as it saw the more picturesque need for staying with sick men under fire. The well-tempered will keeps lassitude and fatigue at bay, keeps the whole highly strung, highly developed organism patiently, steadily, enduringly at work for France.

There, my fellow-citizens in America, there is a citizen to envy, to imitate!

LOURDES

_From the Ends of the Earth they come--Old and Young, the Lame and the Blind--to Ask for the Blessing._

Afternoon. There was not a vacant place left in the long line of waiting sick, so that at the last, when a little, white-faced blind boy with dreadful horny growths on his eyes, was handed over the heads of the crowd, he seemed to have come too late.

His mother’s voice rose anxiously, in reiterated piteous demands to the stretcher-carriers to make a place for him, any place, where he could receive the blessing, for it was the day of the greatest pilgrimage of the year, when twenty-five thousand people sang and prayed together for the cure of the sick, when the Host was carried in solemn procession to bless them, lying in long lines up and down the broad esplanade.

“Oh, for the love of God, find a place for him!” she implored, in so strained a voice of entreaty that the crowd, dense as it was, gave way a little and allowed her to press forward, back of the wheeled chairs of the cripples. The stretcher-carrier who had taken the child in his arms hesitated, looking about him for a vacant spot. He glanced at a wounded soldier, rigid on his litter, his face as white as it would be in his coffin; and then turned to a child stricken with a disease of the bones which paralyzed his legs and made of his hands only twisted, shapeless stumps, but which still permitted him to sit in one of the wheeled chairs. His little withered body did not half fill it, and it was there beside him that the attendant decided to put down the blind boy.

His mother gave a long sigh of intense feeling and between the closely packed bodies of the crowd strained forward to be near him.

“I’m here, darling, I’m here,” she said in a voice of concentrated tenderness.

The blind boy turned his hanging head a little, toward the sound of her voice and stretched back a thin, waxy-white hand. She managed to touch it for an instant, but then said, “Not now, darling. You mustn’t turn back toward Mother. You must join your hands and pray to be cured, pray for the blessing. You must repeat whatever the priest says.”

For at that moment the powerfully built, bearded priest, with the eyes of fire and the thrown-back head of born command, strode down the center of the great open place and stood looking intently about him at the lines of the white-faced sick, and the immense throngs of pilgrims back of them. He raised his hands suddenly in a vivid gesture, and cried in a trumpet-like voice, like a captain leading forward a charge, “Brothers, pray! Pray for our sick. With all your soul, with all the strength of your body and mind, pray God for our sick!”

He paused a moment. Every eye was on him.

The blind boy held his face lowered meekly as blind children often do, as sensitive children who know themselves unsightly always do. His thin, white neck was bent like that of a victim awaiting the blow, but he put his little pale fingers together and, turning for a moment, tried to show to his mother that they were in the attitude of prayer. She whispered, “Yes, yes, darling, that is right. But not toward me. Toward where the blessing is coming, so that you may be cured.”

“Lord save us! Lord God save us, for we perish!” prayed the priest in a loud clear voice of exaltation; and after him all the multitude cried it aloud, in a great murmur like the voice of a forest, or of the sea.

The blind boy’s lips moved with the rest, but his little face was clouded and anxious. He whispered to the crippled child beside him:

“Are you blind, too, or can you see?”

“I can see,” said the other, “but I have never walked.”

“Then you must show me where I must put my hands so that they will be toward the blessing,” begged the blind child.

The other took the thin, transparent fingers between his twisted stumps, and directed them toward the priest, thrillingly upright, aspiring visibly toward the sky. “There, you must keep them turned toward the priest now,” he said with an accent of certainty. “Later on it will be toward the procession as it moves along, and then at the last toward the church.”

“You must tell me when to change them,” said the blind boy.

He stretched out his joined hands farther in the direction indicated by his companion and repeated with the others, after the priest, his little voice lost in the great upward rush of the supplications of the thousands around him, “Lord! Lord! Our sole trust is in Thee!”

The priest’s voice soared into a glorious note of song, in which the multitude joined, their eyes on him, their faces solemn in expectation. The priest sang a line, the multitude chanted a response; the man’s voice ran out again, yearning, beseeching, the voice of the multitude rose thousand-fold in answer. The earth seemed to shake in unison, the low-hanging, heavy gray clouds to send back the sound. The chanting, imploring, impassioned voice of the throng seemed more alive than its multitudinous bodies, rapt into utter stillness.

“Is it thus that I should hold my hands?” whispered the blind boy after a time.

“No, now the procession has just come into the other end of the square,” said the crippled child. With an effort he leaned, took the little white fingers again, and pointed them another way.

“So?” asked the blind child humbly.

“Yes, so,” answered the other. He tried to put his own shapeless stumps together in the attitude of prayer and began to sing with the pilgrims now defiling before them in endless lines, “Praise! All praise to Thee! Praise, all praise to Thee, Lord God!” The pilgrims were passing by, now, in single file, each with his long white taper, burning yellow in the gray light of the gray day. Their voices were loud and personal, each one as he passed being heard for an instant alone. “Glory! Glory to Thee!” they all sang the propitiatory words together, over and over, a hundred times repeated--the old wrinkled peasants in their blouses; the elegant officers in their well-cut uniforms; the stout elderly merchants; the thin, weedy boys; the white-faced, shaven priests; the black men from Senegal with bushy, woolly hair; the tall, fair-haired man from England; the occasional soldier on leave in his shapeless, faded, blue-gray uniform. Above all their voices rose the silver bugle-like call of the priest, burning, devouring in its ardor, “Brothers! Brothers! with all your souls, now. GLORY BE TO THEE! Oh, Lord, save us, for we perish! Lord, our trust is in Thee. Praised be Thy name!”

With each clamorous exhortation, repeated clamorously by all those imploring voices, he lifted the multitude up another step toward the great moment of awe and faith. The tears were streaming down the faces of many of the women in the crowd. The little boy’s mother sobbed loudly, and prayed with all her might.

The march past of the innumerable men, the incessant flickering passage of their pale-yellow lights, the never-ending procession of their pale, anxious faces, became an obsession. It seemed that every one, everywhere in the world, was marching together, singing and praying, hoping against hope for a miracle.

“Isn’t it time to change my hands?” asked the little blind boy desperately. “I have heard so _many_ people pass. I am very, very tired.”

“No, it is not yet time to change,” said the other, leaning forward to look down the esplanade. “The procession with the Host goes very slowly because it stops before each sick person. They are not near yet.”

“My hands are very tired,” murmured the little blind boy, faintly. But he held his hands out still, praying with the others, as the priest directed them. “Lord help us, for we perish. Lord! Thou alone canst save us! Lord, say but one word and we are healed. Lord, say but one word. But one word, oh, Lord!”

He held his strengthless hands out as he was told, groping helplessly for the blessing he so sorely needed; his blind eyes turned docilely in the direction indicated to him; he repeated meekly in his feeble little voice whatever words he was told to say--and all around him thousands and thousands of other helpless, docile, suffering human beings in similar plight, did the same, desperately, their faces groping up toward the sky, their joined hands imploring, “Lord save us, or we perish!”

The pilgrims filed past continually, their eyes staringly fixed on the feeble light of their tapers, their voices torn out of their bodies by the ever-deepening fervor and hope of the shouted, passionate commands of the priest, calling, “Brothers! With all your soul pray for our sick! Lord, say but one word and they are healed! But one word, oh, Lord!”

“The blessing is very long in coming,” faltered the blind boy timidly, his face even whiter than at the beginning, his lips blue.

The pilgrims passed constantly, the heavy tramp of their feet shaking the chair on which sat the little paralyzed boy and the blind child, their hands outstretched. The men’s voices were hoarse and deep now, trembling with fatigue and emotion.

The perspiration streamed down the face of the priest as in piercing tones he exhorted the multitudes, “Brothers, with all your soul, pray! _Pray!_”

Presently, because he was a weak, sick little child, and because the blessing was so long in coming, the little blind boy fell asleep, his head on the shoulder of the paralyzed child.

Then all the care and anxiety and humiliation and sorrow left his little white face. It was perfect in a perfect peace.

The blessing had come.

_Evening._

Scattered all over the vast stretch of the esplanade, thousands of little lights flickered and moved about in the rainy darkness, all that could be seen of the immense multitude gathering for the evening procession. The top of the great, horseshoe-shaped, marble, inclined plane up which they were later to defile, was so high above the ground that not a sound reached there of all those human voices talking together in the dark, calling to each other, as people tried to find their friends in the obscurity, and to form groups that they might march together. The little lights they held were only slightly sheltered from the gusts of wind-driven rain by cheap paper shades and they flickered and flared up, and many were extinguished. Although many went out and were lighted again only once more to have the wind puff them into blackness, the number of lighted ones grew fabulously as the crowd assembled. The little yellow spots of life spread further and further, till around the foot of the huge inclined plane was an ocean of lights, heaving formlessly, with a futile, aimless motion like the sea, humanity lost in the darkness.

Then a faint murmur came up through the rain and darkness. Speaking voices are not heard far, but voices raised in song have wings. The crowd was beginning to sing.