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The ambulances were now arriving fast from the field dressing-stations close to the line, and we hurried away, and were soon driving through Poperinghe. Here and there there was a house wrecked with shell-fire. The little town indeed with its picturesque place is constantly shelled. But, all the same, life seems to go on as usual.
We were frequently requested by the Belgian doctors to assist them in the various Red Cross dressing-stations around Antwerp, and it was our custom to visit several of these stations each day to give what assistance we could. One of the most important of the stations was at Malines, and one of our cars called there every day. I went out there myself on an afternoon late in September.
It seems to be impossible for our professional brethren on the Continent to imagine any treatment apart from a completely equipped hospital. Their one idea seems to be to get the wounded back to a base hospital, and if they die on the way it cannot be helped. The dressing-stations are mere offices for their redirection, where they are carefully ticketed, but where little else is done.
They passed the dressing-stations, perched on either side on the steep slope, where hundreds of wounded lay, then over a ridge where the track stopped and out into the pitch black open. The bullets zipped past or thudded into the ground. The troop lay down while they got their bearings. A fellow close by Mac gave a yell and was dead. A few wounded men, limping or crawling back, passed them.
No one can understand them who has not been there, where all personal aims are a wash-out and the courage to endure remains one's sole possession. The sisters at the Casualty Clearing Station they understood. The Casualty Clearing Station is the first hospital behind the line to which the wounded are brought down straight from the Dressing-Stations.
He held his men together through the afternoon and brought them in under cover of darkness, for which the D.C.M. was his reward. Mort had won the D.C.M. earlier in the campaign. All through that hot afternoon the wounded Manchesters trailed back to the busy dressing-stations, pictures of suffering and patience.
So in the rear of the sector where the Italians planned to give battle on a front of thirty miles, a series of great base hospitals were established, and, nearer the front, a series of clearing-hospitals, and, still closer up, field-hospitals, and in the immediate rear of the fighting-line, hundreds of dressing-stations and first-aid posts were located in dugouts and bomb-proof shelters.
They looked so different when thousands came down again, to field dressing-stations the walking wounded and the stretcher cases, the blind and the gassed as we saw them on the mornings of battle, month after month, year after year. Our work as chroniclers of their acts was not altogether "soft," though we did not go "over the top" or live in the dirty ditches with them.
This was the hospital nearest to the trenches in that region, and the wounded come to it direct from the dressing-stations which lie immediately behind the trenches. When a man falls, or men fall, the automobile is telephoned for, and it arrives at the appointed rendezvous generally before the stretcher-bearers, who may have to walk for twenty or thirty minutes over rough ground.
As I have hovered in seeming priestly impotence over miracles of cheerful patience lying on stretchers in dressing-stations, I have said I have vowed to myself "Here are men worth doing anything for." There is a great heart in the people. It is not a great mind. In officers and men there is little intellectual grip upon what we are fighting for.
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