AMONG THE WOUNDED

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2370, 28 January 1915, Page 6

AMONG THE WOUNDED

DISPATCH RIDER'S STORY

VIVID NARRATIVE

A Cambridge undergraduate who is acting as a motor cyclist dispatch rider sends homo the following account of his experiences after being wounded:— "I was pushing off over the next field, when four big shrapnel shells burst near by, searching for a battery, but all they found was my loft foot, which got in the way of a piece. I was very annoyed about it for the moment, but by the time I had hobbled a mile and a half, and found the destination of the message. I' carried, I was resigned to my fate. A pal of mine cut my boot off and put a field dressing round my foot, and the kind-hearted old general let his car carry me off to a field ambulance. It's rotten for generals out there, you know, they get worried stiff —poor old chaps, and get loads and loads of responsibility and anxiety, and have to sit about all day in cold, damp ditches and splinter-proof shelters, and fume and scheme, ind feed on bread and chicken and ham paste and sardmes. It's all very well if you are young, but I know that I shouldn't like to see my governor mooching round like that day after day, week after week, on an interminable nerve-racking picnic.

"What I want to tell you is exactly what happens to a chap who gets wounded. I'll toll you the whole truth, and toothing but the truth, and this is so unusual in matters concerning the war that it may be interesting, if only as a novelty. The real starting point of my story is the moment when I wandered into the field ambulance. A field ambulance, you know, works like ' this—it sends out its bearer section to a point near the trenches, and the stretcher bearers carry wounded back to that point, and the unfortunates are roughly dressed there; this is called a dressing station. After dark the old horse wagons come up and carry the' wounded back to the field ambulance, situated two or three miles to the roar. Incidentally, those antiquated horse wagons are the wickedest anachronism of all our British war gear —slow, cumbersome, springless, creaking, jolting, with no accommodation in comparison with their size and unwieldiness, they wallow and bump along, an everlasting' monument to the inhumanity of their designer.

"I had avoided this ride and reported myself to the field hospital—established for tue moment in a big school. lam taken into a large hall with straw mattresses covering almost every inch of the floor space. Fifty or sixty men are lying there, and I lie down and wait. A very decent young padre comes along to pass the time of day. We discover one another to be Cambridge men. For the first time I feol the benefit of a 'Varsity education, because he promptly unearths a pillow and a blanket for me. A lieutenant and a dressor doing the round reached me after a time. The former looked at my foot, dabbed some iodine' on it—iodine is the basis of all field dressing—and the latter bandaged me up. Tea, actually with milk in it, is brought in, and I share a mug with my next door neighbour. The one spice of humour about that meal occurred when an orderly brought round bread and margarine, and was going to pass over a soldier who was lying groaning and shouting, 'Oh, the pain I The pain !' and generally making a terrific disturbance. He stopped suddenly when he saw what was happening, and exclaimed in a very healthy voice, 'Hi, mate, let's have 'a bit of that stuff 1' We all roared'with laughter at him, and those who couldn't roar smiled big smiles 1 "I sat up and looked about for a bit, but men kept coining in with very terrible wounds, and I did not like it, mid there is no need to tell you about it. The stretcher kept coming in through the long night. I slept a good deal be-' cause I was very weary. I woke as day dawned. Every inch of the room was filled with suffering men, and the other rooms and the passages. There were 560 wounded in that field hospital. There was tea and bread and butter and bacon ready for all who could eat it. That was very creditable for a place miles from the firing line. Later in the morning a fleet of motor ambulances, quick, well sprung, and holding twice as many as the old horse wagons, came along. Thoy soon shifted a lot of cases to the rail head. I was one of the first to be shifted, and I was classed as a lying down case. I share a compartment with a Yorkshire boy with a badly fractured leg.

"All that day we waited in the station, watching the futile efforts of the German aeroplanes to drop bombs on the. station, and the equally futile efforts of the English high-angle guns to hit them. Everything is quite comfortable on the 'train, good cushions to lie on, and blankets and food are brought to ns.

. . . The train starts to move slowly, and stops many times. I doze fretfully. There is a good deal of noise in the next compartment at one place, and I wake sufficiently to realise that a man has died en route, and is being taken out. -Once one of the R.A.M.C. men comes along and pulls out my arm to see the time by the watch on my wrist. Hie nurse, good, capable, masculine, soul, came and had a look round. I" wake definitely just before daylight. At 7 o'clock comes breakfast of bread, bacon, and tea. A corporal of a .guards regiment comes wandering in. He has a bullet in his head, and tells me he has come to the oyster _ supper _ party to which I have invited him. Tho R.A.M.C. . man persuades him to go back to his compartment.

"We reach Boulogne that morning, but were not unloaded until after dark. I find myself in a temporary hospital established in what had been formerly a Hotel. I was put in a room with two other men, one, poor felloe, had a bullet in his lungs, and was getting very weak, but, was still cheerful, '(lie other was a Jock, and was hoping 'to get out soon and have some moore.' I went off 4o sleep quite early. After breakfast they told mo to get ready to move. A motor ambulance took me to the miay, and I was loaded on to-ri hospital ship— a large boat holding 700 patients.

"This evening, my second on the boat, I look out of my cosy top bunk down tho long, white ward filled with green cots—and I ponder a bit. There is the cheerfnl rattle of tea mugs, and smart nurses scuttle ui> and clown, and li<rht and warmth and cleanliness, and I've got a packet of Woodbines; and, nhove all, I have the knowledge that for a time at least I, in company with tho rest of the men in this ward, 'have rest from the to'l nnd wenrinoss and strain of tho battlefield. Yet, as I ihink, I picture very clearly those good pals of. the Mo'bike dispatch riding section T leave behind. At this moment they will he sitting round a little fire in the open eating the evening m«\al of bread and inm with huge, healthy appetites, and they will have the srroat feeling of another day's hard work over."