Trench Knives and Mustard Gas: With the 42nd Rainbow Division in France

Chapter 17 The End

T H E E N D 179 CHAP TE R SEVE NTE E N The End S ix months. Six endless, agonizing months since that fatal day in September when I had come out of the St. Mihiel salient with my own life, but without many more comrades whose places could never be refilled; six months that were sometimes blurred, sometimes vivid, but always fantastic, before I exchanged the hell of Base Hospital No. 48 for the now relative heaven of Base Hospital No. 69. Long accustomed to my own fetid wound, I hardly noticed the odor of bandages, dressings, and Dakin’s solution which permeated the somber officers’ ward. Capt. Douglas, a fracture case on my right, and Keenan and Bartell, bathrobed patients with heavily splinted arms, played red dog on the captain’s bed. A medical officer and nurse probed the pleural cavity of a gasping emphysema case across the way. Sisters of Charity, from that part of Brittany which surrounded the hospital, visited among the pallid men to my left, while a group of bedridden fractures beyond serenaded an inspecting medico with an oft-repeated local version of “Dublin Bay”: Good-bye, I’m on my way From dear ol’ Savenay— I do not care to stay, That’s why I’m feeling gay. The doctors all agree It’s fun to ? on me. 180 TRENCH KNIVES AND MUSTARD GAS That’s why I’m glad to get away From Savenay. The choral farewell, which was a bit premature, to say the least, had hardly died away when a group of “Y” entertainers shoved a portable melodeon into the ward. Patients raised up on elbows for the performance, while Stevenson, with a leg off above the knee; Fleming, with both legs off at the hips; and other wheel-chair cases rolled under their own hand power toward the source of excitement. A uniformed organist struck a few sickly chords; a quartet of varied abilities burst into song: In the good old summertime, In the good old summertime, Strolling down that sha . . . The singers were interrupted by a series of feeble catcalls and the eastern end of the ward offered its interpretation of the ancient portable hit: In th’ base at Savenay, Where th’ sick an’ wounded lay Runnin’ up their temper’tures, More an’ more each day. Oh, they put ‘em all in plaster casts An’ that’s a very good sign That they will stay in Savenay Till th’ good ol’ summertime. “Oh, Frenchy,” “Smiles,” and “Hinky, Dinky, Parlay Vous?” followed in raucous succession and the song leaders pushed their music box to another part of the building. Only the initiate could know that the emaciated yodelers who now settled down into grimacing moans or grunting talk had exercised their vocal cords not because they were particularly happy, but out of sheer gratitude that they had lately left a past which had seemed a hell on earth for their mutilated but relatively comfortable present. T H E E N D 181 Although my own circumstance was just one of hundreds and rather cause for thanks, compared to that of many others, I understood it best, aided by that seemingly natural egotism which makes one’s little personal world—especially in adversity —the most important world of all. I knew that I might still lose my leg, after a fight of many weeks to save it. I knew that the future held more months upon my back and a series of operations, when and if ever I reached the United States, but for the moment I was in no mood to anticipate these painful events. Like most of my wardmates I was thankful that nature had at least turned compassionate for the nonce, leaving only manageable traces of those six months such as a plaster cast with a “window” that permitted the daily dressing of my festering wound; a temperature that rarely exceeded 102 degrees; paroxysms of rheumatic pain from my injured sciatic nerve, which were now as much a part of me as breathing, and a few other routine indignities better left undescribed. Only recently had I been taken down from a Balkan frame, incased in plaster and shipped by stages from Base No. 48 to Base No. 69. The last lap of the journey, made from Nantes to Savenay in a bumpy ambulance, had angered the streptococci, which thrived upon...