Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 273, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 November 1915 — SEES WAR MORS [ARTICLE]

SEES WAR MORS

Stretcher Bearer Gives Impressions of Life at Front Is Nearly Overcome by Sight of First Operation Till Given Slap by Surgeon—Dare Not Tell Man Truth. Villers-Cotterets.—We had just left the hospital and had reached the station. We were exchanging glances of joy and shaking hands, saying "Paris! We are going to see Paris again.” The train was waiting on a siding. We climbed into it; the hospital attendants placed us in our seats. There I heard a conversation that struck me more than has any other since the beginning of the war. One of the soldiers in our carriage, doubtless in a confidential mood that day, began to relate the impressions of his life as a military hospital attendant “It was in the early days of the war. I had received a commission as stretcher bearer in a hospital at Nice. The first wounded arrived; long trains were filled with them; they had lain on the straw of the cars throughout the interminable Journey across France in slow military trains, which were constantly delayed. Many died on the way; others were landed hero and there in heaps. How feverishly we had to work; there was not a minute to be lost. “I remember the terrible slap the head surgeon gave me the first day he entered the operating room, when 1 was ordered to hold a wounded soldier whose leg was being amputated. The odor, the cruel sight of the operation, caused me to turn as white as death, and I was about to faint. That blow brought me quickly to my senses. I have seen worre sights since! . “We spent some terrible moments of anguish there. We had no antitetanus serum; we had written and telegraphed everywhere for it. but the hospitals which had it kept it Jealously and it was impossible to obtain any. "I recall one of the finest men I have ever known, a charming comrade, who was wounded in the foot. His wound was not serious; at the end of two weeks it had healed. Then one night he felt a stiffness in his neck; his mind began to wander, his muscles to contract. He was done for. All we could do was to relievo his suffering. “Whenever a patient had an attack of this nature we dared not tell him what it was. He was sent to a special hospital; it wasn’t a hospital, it was a morgue. He went there to die. “Finally, one day we heard that serum could be procured at a fantastic price in Italy. The doctor immediately requisitioned the swiftest automobiles he could find in Nice. The next day we had sdrum and tetanus disappeared. “The recollection of this period is not more terrible than that of the days I spent in Arras as stretcher bearer during the fierce combats of Notre Dame de Lorette. I was there a month gathering the dead and wounded; witnessing the most terrible mutilations; my ears filled with the groans of men. The work was hard; we had to carry the men away on our backs, for the approaches were too narrow to permit of the use of stretchers. More than one died on my back. “I am old; I’m forty-six. I was taken from the trenches, and I am now one of the conductors of this train of wounded. “Day before yesterday we had a wounded soldier whose head was a mass of bandages, with a little hole in the place of his mouth. Another hospital attendant and I were curious enough to raise his bandage. His tag indicated that his nose and the lower part of his face had been torn away by the splinter of a shell. By luck he had not lost his sight. His wounds had been cleaned and disinfected; a piece of skin had been removed from his back and applied to his face; in this a round hole was made through which he was fed, and another through which he breathed. Liquid food was given him by means of a rubber tube. “And those poor unfortunates whose limbs have been amputated! I saw one whose two arms and a leg had been cut off. He had received more than 200 shell splinters; the greater part were small, like pinheads.” As we listened to this man, sad and serious, a fine tall Moroccan, who was wounded, got up from his seat. His eyes were filled with tears and he started to talk with fierce energy: “Why French take care boche wounded? After war they go home — have many children; begin war again with children, and war no good. French stupid. Boches, kill all, all bad men. When no more boches, no ; more war. That good.”