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Around the operating-tables there was a sound of half-audible conversation as the surgeons gave directions to their assistants or discussed the injuries of the men upon whom they were at work, and now and then a peremptory call for "Litter-squad here!" showed that another man was about to be brought to the operating-table, or carried from it into the field and laid on the ground.
A single glance showed him his cupboard had been rifled of its food supplies. He leaped toward his operating-table and stopped aghast. His face turned pale, his hands fell helplessly to his sides, and he stood looking at the instruments before him, the picture of despair. A heavy file lay across the terminals of his battery, and the battery was useless. Unnerved, Charley sank down on a chair.
She let the cigarette fall into the box, closed the lid gently, leaned against the table, folded her arms upon her bosom and looked full at me. I was as acutely conscious of her every movement, of the very coming and going of the breath at her nostrils, as a man on the operating-table is conscious of the slightest gesture of the surgeon.
The doctor sniffed scornfully, "Devilish lot Larrimer knows about ethnology." He then became lucid. "Larrimer's head at the Drevel Hospital, y' know; deuced clever at the operating-table, but set in his ideas. Lord, dynamite would n't move him; stubborn's no name for it.
I found myself to be seated upon a heavy wooden bench set flat against a wall, which was covered with a kind of straw matting. My hands were firmly tied behind me. In the first agony of that reawakening I became aware of two things. I was in an operating-room, for the most conspicuous item of its furniture was an operating-table!
So I a little black ant in a shadow on the earth under the eternal sky used to think like this, and to stop thinking these silly irritating thoughts turned to the job in hand, which generally was to take up one end of a stretcher laden with a bloody man, or to give my shoulder to a tall soldier who leaned upon it and stumbled forward to an open door which led to the operating-table and an empty bed, where he might die if his luck were out.
In a bright spot of light through a window one by one the wounded were being lifted up on to a seat, if they were not too badly hit, and on to an operating-table if their condition were serious. A doctor and a sturdy Frenchwoman of about thirty, in spotless white, were in charge. Another woman undid the first-aid bandage and still another applied a spray.
The dread of a coming ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again the moment that effort ceases.
Then the uproar ceased, almost as suddenly as it had begun; the stillness of night settled down again upon the lonely tropical wilderness; and if I had not been able to hear the voices of the surgeons as they consulted over an operating-table, and an occasional shot from a picket or a sharpshooter in the forest, I should not have imagined that there was an army or a battle-field within a hundred miles.
Nevertheless, as the young Colonel in charge said to me: "The function of a Clearing Station is to clear. We keep the majority of the cases only a few hours." Thence the horizontal forms pass into Ambulance Trains. But besides Ambulance trains there are Ambulance barges, grand vessels flying the Union Jack and the Red Cross, with lifts, electric light, and an operating-table.
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