# War's Dark Frame/Hospitals and Headquarters

CHAPTER XI
HOSPITALS AND HEADQUARTERS
FIRST of all we drove to a temporary hospital on the close the adjective had prepared us for a comfortless and hastily thrown together affair. Instead we found another monument to that admirable efficiency which the English, since the commencement of the war, have developed at the cost of a multitude of traditional fetiches.
Grass plots and lower beds flourished. There was a net work of macadam roads put in by the Royal Engineers. Only one or two of the revered marquee tents survived; for, no matter how the satirist of British tradition may sneer, experience dictates everything in Kitchener's army, and long, narrow wooden buildings of one story have proved themselves more serviceable, more adaptable to cleanliness, and, curiously, less expensive, than the tents which served for field hospitals during so many wars.
A colonel of the medical corps greeted us, offering to direct our exploration.
The name drew a laugh of surprise.
"Anything," he laughed back, "that we put up of wood in the war zone is christened 'hut.' Don't know how it started, but it's easy to say, and everybody knows what it means."
He opened a door. The long building, filled with a pallid green light from the curtained windows, stretched away in an interminable vista of suffering Above the beds, set in a double row at right angles to the walls, were arranged odd contrivances of wood, reminiscent of cotton looms. They gave the ward an appearance of a factory whose activity has been suddenly arrested. Then gradually from the mesh of posts and beams drawn faces detached themselves, the stumps of limbs protruded. The faces watched us curiously while the surgeon led us down the aisle, pointing out the elaborate system of weights and pulleys, arranged on the wooden frames to take the strain from injured legs and arms. Some poor devils lay on their backs with both legs and both arms in the slings.
"Several of these frames have been used before," the surgeon said with a little pride. "Others—this one, for instance—have been invented here since the beginning of the war."
He braced his hand against the wood and leant over the patient beneath. ​ “You tell us what you think of it, Jock."
The soldier grinned. Evidently he progressed, and forecasted a sound escape. He moved his bandaged limbs to show us how beautifully the machinery responded.
"And it doesna hurt much," he said, " and a man can move about a little and go twist like on his side. Watch, sirs."
He did it—a trick as difficult, doubtless, as a contortionist's masterpiece, and conquered with heaven knows what agony secreted behind the features suddenly stripped of their grin.
Certainly one should be grateful for that much. When one has suffered for eight months it must be pleasant to move a little and to go twist like on one's side.
But across the aisle was slung one of those tragic stumps, and the face beyond it was sunken and feverish, and the eyes could not conceal a despairing restlessness.
The surgeon spoke to the man gently, asking him how it went.
"A good deal of fever," the mutilated fellow answered dully," but all right, I guess."
It became clear that he didn't care, that for him the future held no energetic lure. The horrible stump of scarcely healed flesh quivered in the sling. His eyes closed. We didn't want to ​ see a man's grief for himself, so we hurried on. It was necessary to call upon a bleak cynicism, equal to the surgeon's; to recall that the most likely end for the youth of Europe is a room like this, or else a common grave, or a resting place unblanketed even by the friendly earth.
In another ward we saw above the bed-clothes of the end cot a young face, square, thick-lipped, a little animal-like,
“A prisoner," the surgeon explained with a smile. “We were afraid we were going to lose him, but he's coming right enough now, and he likes it here. He's a great favourite with the nurses.'
The German did, indeed, have an air of contentment, but he glanced at the Tommies in the neighbouring beds, at the pleasant, quiet nurses, at the surgeon who had pulled him through, and his expression held a great question, as if he would ask why he had been commanded to strafe such friendly and lovable people.
We drove across the plateau to a convalescent camp.
The commandant, an elderly grey-haired man in a colonel's uniform, welcomed us for the moment into his official family. He was really like that—a paternal type—a father with a gigantic ​ brood of children; and the grounds of his camp were his front yard and his fields. Immediately he boasted a little as the heads of thrifty households do. He reckoned pridefully what he expected to get for his crop of hay—much more than last year, so just that much more for the government, for even here efficiency was a deity. It expressed itself in the sight of his brood, working at their own trades, remaking shoes, converting jam and butter tins into pails and sprinklers and gasolene funnels, seeing that no smallest piece of rough material went wholly to waste.
He made us gasp at the sight of that extraordinary process of feeding the British soldier. Assuredly it must be a painful scandal to the German.
It was only a little before tea time, and in the dining hut long deal tables were neatly arranged with plates, cups, and saucers, with huge loaves of bread between, and bowls of jam and butter and cheese. On serving tables arose pyramids of egg cups. The colonel with his air of a thoughtful parent indicated these.
Any boy that wants it," he said, “can have a boiled egg with his tea. And look here, if you like."
He took us into a kitchen as wide as a barn and as clean as a dairy. Pails of tea cooled, sharpen​ ing our own appetites. Splendid rashers of bacon had been brought from the storehouse for tomorrow's breakfast, and legs of lamb beyond counting for tomorrow's dinner. And I've learned since that there was nothing exceptional here. Tommy fights on such food unless his sup- plies are cut off by an unexpected bombardment, or, in an attack, he is caught for the night ahead of his transport.
The colonel grinned.
"Now and then they complain if they don't get just the type of cheese or jam they're accustomed to. But that sort of thing's looked after."
We followed him breathlessly to a hollow of the grounds where a hut stood reminiscent of the Y. M. C. A. shacks I had seen in Panama during the construction of the canal. The colonel verified that hazard. There is, he told me, a chain of these behind the front, furnished according to the familiar pattern with a store at one end, a billiard table at the other, and often a miniature stage for concerts and amateur theatricals.
"So," he said, "if a boy gets hungry or doesn't like what we give him up there he drops in and buys some chocolate or a cup of tea or coffee and maybe a handful of biscuits."
Somebody ventured the opinion that over-eat​ ing can be as deadly as bullets. The colonel remained placid.
“When you work as hard as these boys do, you get awfully healthy, and you need lots of food. Besides, when you're going into battle you don't worry much about your liver.”
Here—and in this respect the camp may be taken as conformable with the ordinary cantonment—the Y. M. C. A. had no monopoly of recreation work. There were two other huts, one furnished by the government, the other endowed by individuals.
There was a garden about this last where two young women, gloved and wearing rough straw hats, toiled with rake and hoe. We paused and, following the colonel's lead, chatted for some moments about their potatoes and beans and cabbages. As we walked on the colonel laughed a little.
"You know that very handsome young girl with the rake is Lady So and So. The war is changing things rather, don't you think?"
That admitted no dispute. As I have indicated, its truth is everywhere impressed upon one. The war is changing things rather. Lady So and So has forgotten the interval that formerly gaped between her and Tommy So and So. The hard ​ facts have really levelled that. The presence of death, its constant threat—for even here the lady and the Tommy are equally subject to an aeroplane bomb or an unlovely Zeppelin attack—make one's recollection of such social rifts a little abashed. And that's the best thing that can be said for this war, the finest thing that can survive it. The individual has learned largely to seek his own level, holding within easy reach a universal and attainable goal.
In this very camp a soldier pointed out a working example. The three recreation huts sift the men into an instinctive classification.
"In one," the soldier said, "you can toss your fags on the floor, lift your feet on the tables, and shout your blooming head off, if you please. In the second maybe ash trays don't grow, but the floor's the place for feet, and shouting's not tolerated. The third, over there, is a regular little club where you behave like a gentleman, and read the papers and magazines, and improve your mind.”
He glanced at his neatly brushed uniform.
"I like that place, and it's funny. Most of the men after they've been here a while drift up that way. Anybody likes to be respectable if he gets the chance,"
Our party entered the officers' mess for tea and ​ sat down, blessing the Army Service Corps for all it had placed before us. In the confusion names had been lost, but in addition to the medical officers there were two men whose khaki carried the black facings of the church. The chaplain next to me, tall, slender, a little grey-haired, had spent a good deal of time in America. We discovered common friends. We asked each other's names. Since his is a nom de plume perhaps the censor will let it through "If you would know of me at all," he said modestly," it would be as G. A. Birmingham."
The thought of those rollicking Irish stories and plays made his presence here seem an injustice. It gave the lie again to the so-called British apathy. It was one more example of how every social and intellectual class is feeding this monster of war.
While we talked some one produced Harry Lauder on the gramophone, a hymn or two, and a waltz, Williams closed the entertainment with the announcement that we had a forty mile drive to General Headquarters ahead of us.
One goes rapidly in these military cars. There is no speed limit outside of villages where transport parks, cavalry, or billets make it necessary. In each of these, sturdy men whose khaki carried a black sleeve band with M. P. in red, stepped out ​ and regulated our passage with the assurance of a London bobby at Oxford Circus. Where the traffic was congested and diverse, staff officers and Tommies, truck drivers and airmen bowed with an cqual meekness to the mandates of these calm, stern creatures. Yet the military policemen have never once seemed in key with the disorder of war. It is hard to appreciate that such clockwork detail makes that vast disorder possible at all.
For long stretches the drive might have been a pleasure jaunt. A black and yellow board at a crossroads, pointing the route to a Belgian field hospital, was a momentary reminder. The long road, lined with poplars or lime trees, bisected a highly cultivated countryside. Our entrance even into one of the two general headquarters towns that have replaced Saint Omer since the extension of the British line, had nothing to offer of the panoply of war. A brook rippled beneath an ancient bridge. Grey stone houses, half hidden among trees, terraced a steep hillside. A gothic church tower raised its sharp silhouette against a sky already sprinkled with gold.
This is one half of the heart of the British army.
Williams' words sounded like a joke in bad taste. Yet the other headquarters town a little farther on was equally rural, quite as picturesque. ​ In the sleepy buildings officers worked at desks, disturbed by the roar of cannon only when an unusually heavy bombardment conspired with a favourable wind. You pictured Sir Douglas Haig, even farther removed, in an isolated château, seated in a somnolent library, the cradle of every detail of routine and death. Peace at headquar- ters and horror at the front, but not an ounce of glamour left in war anywhere!
Our own home shared the restfulness of the headquarters villages. We came upon it for the first time on the edge of this golden sunset. Far at the end of an avenue of huge and symmetrical trees stood the red and white façade of a château. Two time-stained gate houses were outposts. A clock stared from the top story, justifying Williams' hurry.
Two dogs ran around the corner, greeting us excitedly. Military servants took our bags. I was led into a comfortable room, and stared from its broad windows at a great park, bounded by evergreens and elms. I saw a sun dial in the centre. Magpies flew with a gentle rustling of wings among the trees. It was difficult any longer to believe in the reason for this visit. And it was always like that at the château. To be sure staff officers came to dine with us each night, and we talked continually of war, for to discuss shop isn't ​ bad taste in the British army any longer. But the impulse to all this chatter seemed far removed from the dining-room and the quiet movements of the servants. One might talk just so in London or New York. From the first it wasn't reasonable that less than forty miles away lay that open wound in the body of civilisation which we had come to probe.
It was brought nearer as we started for bed the night of our arrival. Williams appeared then with an armful of khaki-coloured bags, slung from straps. He handed one to each of us.
"These are gas masks," he said seriously. On no account forget them tomorrow."
With an assumed indifference one wanted to know what kind of gas the Germans were using.
An improved variety," Williams answered. He lighted a cigarette.
“If you get the alarm," he went on between puffs," hold your breath until you put your masks on, because three whiffs of this new stuff is certain death, and it isn't a pretty way to go either."