the american public has just heard of dr. nicole girard-mangin, the woman doctor who was mobilized and sent to the front by mistake, and who proved herself so fearless and useful that she was kept there for two years amid bursting shells and rattling mitrailleuses. she is being cited spectacularly as a dramatic proof that women can take men’s parts, and do men’s work, and know the man’s joy of being useful. but she is much more than a woman doing a man’s work. she is a human being of the highest type, giving to her country the highest sort of service, and remaining normal, sane, and well-balanced.
long before the tornado of the war burst over the world, paris knew her in many varying phases which now, as we look back, we see to have been the unconscious preparation for the hour of crisis. personally i knew of her, casually, as the public-spirited young doctor who[40] was attached to the paris lycée where my children go to school, and who was pushing the “fresh-air” movement for the city poor. people who met her in a social way knew her as an attractive woman with a well-proportioned figure, lovely hair, and clear brown eyes, whom one met once or twice a week at the theater or in the homes of mutual friends, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh and cheerful, chatting talk. other people who saw her every morning in her laboratory garb, serious, intent, concentrated, knew her as one of those scientific investigators who can not rest while the horrible riddle of cancer is unsolved.
those who saw her in the afternoon among the swarming sick and poor of the clinique of the great beaujon hospital, knew her as one of those lovers of their kind who can not rest as long as the horrible apathy of public opinion about tuberculosis continues. people who investigated cures for city ills and who went to visit the model tenement house for the very poor, near the st. ouen gate of paris, knew her as the originator and planner of that admirable enterprise,[41] whose energy and forcefulness saw it financed and brought to practical existence. observers who knew her in the big international feminist conferences in european capitals, saw an alert, upright, quick-eyed parisienne, whose pretty hats showed no sign of the erudition of the head under them. friends knew her as the gently bred woman who, although driven by no material necessity, renounced the easy, sheltered, comfortable life of the home-keeping woman for an incessant, beneficent activity, the well-ordered regularity of which alone kept it from breaking down her none too robust health. and those intimates who saw her in her home, saw her the most loved of sisters and daughters, the most devoted of mothers, adored by the little son to whom she has been father and mother ever since he was four years old.
no one dreamed of war, but if the very day and hour had been known for years, dr. girard-mangin could hardly have prepared herself more completely for the ordeal. unconsciously she had “trained” for it, as the runner trains for his race. she was not very strong, slightly built,[42] with some serious constitutional weakening, but she filled every day full to the brim with exacting and fatiguing work. she had two great factors in her favor. one of them was that enviable gift which nature gives occasionally to remarkable people, the capacity to live with very little sleep. the other is even more noteworthy in a doctor—in whom close acquaintance with the laws of health seems often to breed contempt.
dr. girard-mangin is that rare bird, a doctor who believes profoundly, seriously, in the advice which she gives to others, in the importance of those simple, humdrum laws of daily health which only very extraordinary people have the strength of mind to obey. never, never, she says, as though it were a matter of course, has she allowed fatigue, or overoccupation, or inertia, or boredom to interfere with her early morning deep-breathing and physical exercises, and her tonic cold bath. never, never, no matter how long or exhausting the day, has she rolled into bed, dead beat, too tired to go through the simple processes of the toilet, which make sleep so much more refreshing. no matter how absorbed[43] in her work, she has always taken the time at regular intervals to relax, to chat sociably with quite ordinary people, to go to the theater, to hear music. she has always breakfasted and lunched with her little boy, has steered him through his spelling and arithmetic, has gone on walks with him, has been his comrade and “pal.” this has been as good for her as for him, naturally. every summer she has had the courageous good sense to take a vacation in the country. in short, she is a doctor who takes to her own heart the advice about rational life which doctors so often reserve for their patients.
to this woman, tempered to a steel-like strength by self-imposed discipline and by a regular, well-ordered life, came the great summons. and it found her ready to the last nerve in her strong, delicate little hand. you have read, probably, how on that “day of doom” when france called out her men, a concierge received, among mobilization papers for all the men in the big apartment house, one sending dr. girard-mangin (presumably also a man, by the name) out to a military hospital in the vosges[44] mountains. the notice of mobilization was handed to a woman, a patriotic woman who long ago had heard the call to fight for france’s best interests. she had seen her brother go before her into the fighting ranks and she followed him, into danger and service. she said a quick good-by to her friends, to her parents, to her son, her only child, a fine boy of fourteen then, from whom she had never before been separated.
will every mother who reads these lines stop here and think what this means?
there is no need to repeat in detail here what has already been told of the first three months of her service—her arrival at the field hospital, disorganized, submerged by the terrible, ever-renewed flood of wounded men, of the astonishment of the doctor in charge. “what, a woman! this is no place for a woman. but, good god! if you know anything about surgery, roll up your sleeves and stay!”
there she stayed for three months, those blasting first three months of the war, when french people put forth undreamed-of strength to meet a crisis of undreamed-of horror. out there in[45] that distant military hospital, toiling incessantly in great heat, with insufficient supplies, bearing the mental and moral shock of the first encounter with the incredible miseries of war, that modern, highly organized woman, separated for the first time from her family, from her child, fearing everything for them and for her country, had no word, no tidings whatever, till the 28th of august. then no knowledge of her son, of her parents, only a notice that the government had retreated from paris to bordeaux! comforting news that, for the first! next they knew that rheims was taken. then one of the men whose wounds she dressed told her that he had been able to see the eiffel tower from where he fell. this sounded as though the next news could be nothing but the german entry into paris.
all france throbbed with straining, despairing effort, far beyond its normal strength, during those first three months; and to do the man’s part she took, the delicate woman doctor, laboring incessantly among the bleeding wrecks of human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull her through.
[46]then the wild period of fury and haste and nervous, emotional exaltation passed, and france faced another ordeal, harder for her temperament even than the first fierce onset of the unequal struggle—the long period of patient endurance of the unendurable. the miracle of the marne had been wrought; paris was saved; the sting and stimulant of immediate, deadly danger was past; the fatigue from the supernatural effort of those first months dimmed every eye, deadened all nerves. then france tapped another reservoir of national strength and began patiently, constructively to “organize” the war. and that daughter of france bent her energies to help in this need, as in the first.
a rough rearrangement of competences was attempted everywhere on the front. dentists no longer dug trenches, bakers were set to baking instead of currying horses, and expert telegraphers stopped making ineffectual efforts to cook. it came out then that the real specialty of the valiant little woman doctor who had been doing such fine work in the operating-room was not surgery at all. “i’m no surgeon, you[47] know!” she says, and leaves it to her friends to tell you of the extraordinary record of her efficiency in that field, the low percentage of losses in her surgical cases. if you mention this, she says, “ah, that’s just because i’m not a born surgeon. i have to take very special care of my cases to be equal to the job.” it was discovered that her great specialty was contagious diseases. there was great need for a specialist of that sort out at verdun, where, alas! a typhoid epidemic had broken out. this was before the extra precautions about inoculations, which were taken later.
dr. girard-mangin was sent to verdun on november 1st, 1914, and was there steadily for more than a year, until the 28th of february, 1916. she found her sick men on mattresses, in tents, on such low ground that they were often literally in water. whenever there was freezing weather, those who cared for them slid about on sheets of ice. above them, on higher ground, were some rough old barracks, empty, partly remodeled, said to have been left there by the prussians in 1871. “why don’t we move the[48] sick up there?” she asked, and was met by all the usual dragging, clogging reasons given by administrative inertia.
the sheds were not ready to occupy; there were no expert carpenters to get them ready; it would be impossible to heat them; no order for the change had come from headquarters—furthermore, a reason not mentioned, the sheds, being on higher ground, were more exposed to shell-fire. dr. girard-mangin had had some experience with administrative inertia in her struggles for better housing for the poor; and long before the war she had known what it was to put herself voluntarily in danger—the scar from a bad tubercular infection on her hand is the honorable proof of that. she knew that the sick men would be better off in the barracks on higher ground. so she took them there. just like that.
she was to have the entire care of the typhoid epidemic, and the only help which could be given her was to come from twenty men, absolutely unassorted—such a score as you would gather by walking down any street and picking up the[49] first twenty men you met. there were several farm-laborers, a barber, an accountant, miscellaneous factory hands. the only person remotely approaching a nurse was a man who had had the training for a pharmacist, but as he had never been able to stay sober long enough to take his examinations, you may not be surprised that he was the least useful of them all.
these twenty casually selected human beings went unwillingly up the hill toward the barracks, ironic, mocking, lazy, indifferent, as human beings unelectrified by purpose are apt to be. but, although they did not know it, there marched at their head an iron will, a steel-like purpose, and an intelligence which was invincible. they took this to be but a smallish, youngish woman in uniform, and were all in great guffaws at the comic idea of being under her orders.
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[50] 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[51] 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[52] 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[53] 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[54] 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[55] 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.
[56]“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?”[57] 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[58] 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[59] 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[60] 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[61] 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,[62] 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[63] 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[64] 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[65] 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[66] 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[67] 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[68] 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[69] 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[70] 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.”
[71]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[72] 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[73] 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[74] 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[75] 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[76] 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.”
[77]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,[78] 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[79] 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[80] 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[81] 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[82] 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[83] 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 chalons. 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[84] 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.
[85]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[86] 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[87] 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!
