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Updated: May 22, 2025
Of the doctors and nurses, the stretcher-bearers and orderlies, whose brave and sacred work it was to gather the wounded from the battle-line, and to bring to bear upon the suffering and martyrdom of war all that human skill and human tenderness could devise, Sir Douglas Haig has said many true and eloquent things in the course of his despatches.
And always something beside me murmurs, mutely: "You see, you see, he was wrong when he said he would rather die." I am convinced of it, and this is why I have told your story. You will forgive me, won't you, Leglise, my friend? Every morning the stretcher-bearers brought Vize-Feldwebel Spat down to the dressing ward, and his appearance always introduced a certain chill in the atmosphere.
During the day a good many of us, including all our stretcher-bearers, made many trips through the devastated German trenches, getting out wounded and collecting arms and other plunder.
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.
No further ground, however, was secured; the men were at the limits of their endurance, and by next morning it was clear that everything had combined to render a further attack impossible. The day was therefore, passed quietly for the exhausted combatants; in front the stretcher-bearers bravely and indefatigably picked up the wounded, who had lain out all night in the liquid mud.
Whether it was that the lifting rain had made them more visible or that the sound of their digging had been heard they never knew, but the rifle fire for some reason became faster and closer, and again and again the call passed for stretcher-bearers, and a constant stream of wounded began to trickle back from the trench-diggers.
The stretcher-bearers carried their burden into the front trench and there attempted to set about the first bandaging of their casualty. The job, however, was quite beyond them, but one of them succeeded in finding a doctor, who in all the uproar of a desperate battle was playing Mahomet to the mountain of such cases as could not come to him in the field dressing station.
Funds were most generously provided, but it was a great relief when an application for 1,500 stretcher-bearers came from the front, and thus the congestion among the men was rendered less severe How eagerly the poor fellows accepted the offered employment, and the drill hall was in a few minutes crowded with those eager to go! =Welcoming the Troops at Durban.=
"I have to, Tommy. You see, I'm all alone, mostly," Roscoe added as he fumbled in the dead officer's clothing. "There are no surgeons or nurses in reach. I don't have stretcher-bearers following me around and it isn't often that even a Hun will surrender, fair and square, to one man. I've seen too much of this 'kamarad' business. I can't afford to take chances, Tommy.
These were the stretcher-bearers, who had in every fight carried on their work of mercy under the heaviest fire, and that without the excitement that nerves soldiers to face danger.
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