Confession In The Wards

Horowhenua Chronicle, 27 September 1916, Page 2

Confession In The Wards

A DOCTOR'S STORIES OF THE GERMANS. (London Times). There are many sides to w.ir but liu side which the doctor trees is the strangest of them. For the doctor looks past the soldier to behold the man ; ho is witness of the supreme encounters in which weakness and pain, an J death strive for the conquest of a man's spirit. The battlefield has no grandeur to compile with til's conflict under the ward-lamps when the ward is still. Not with weapons, but with such courage as may be left to him a man wagns it. The war doctor in li s working hours has death always very close to him, and so his vision is different from that cf other men. In some ways it is a clearer vision. At least it is unclouded by anger. War wears no tinsel under that quiet gaze, before which the sail of war is revealed. Til is revelation of the soul of war is valuable even now; its value will inercaHo that it '•* go v] that ;t : bond b.> p'aee:l on rcc r 1 faithfully and with as little e nbnydeving as porsible. It. is soo'l that we should be ;;b'e to read in a book written while vet the memory of the vision fingered that a doctor who attended them tried to dislike the ' dying Hoist-lies" and faMed. That, in fact, be rather liked them, because, as lie says: "They were all so forlorn. so patient, so humble, so grateful for the little one was able to I do for them." j A DYING GERMAN'S CONFESSION. In that honest word is the secret of the worth of this dcctor'fs book, "lied Cross and Iron Cross" (Murray), in which the horror of war summons are displayed so convincingly. Tho book tells tiutli. whether the stories be built up of many incidents or be themselves, plain narratives, unadorned. It tol'rs the truth that flying men do not lie, and from the lips of a dying man records this story:— "I rolled off to sleep that night with a bottle of champagne in my hand on the steps of the high altar in ono of their churches . . . so .you had better spare your priest coming to see me through! Do not trouble about me, you Red Cross people, for I have shot lots of your wounded at Tamines! Don't read any Pater Nosters tor me, you, Sister, for I raped one of the nuns of the Sacre Coenr, whese prayers did not help her more than your prayers can help me." There is truth, too, in the picture of the dead German major, with the risun sardonieuson his face—the horrid death grin of lock-jaw. He, was of the men who helped to light the fires of Lourain and Aerschot, and who dipped his hands in tho blood of the women of Dinant. True, again, is the tale of the old woman a man stabbed at Dinant as she was running away from him down the .street. She was a very old woman, "Eine sehr alte Frau," said he. "He stabbed her as she was entering a house ; she fell on the threshold. As he bent over her face to see if she was dead she opened her eyes and looked at him with the same eyes as liis grandmother had looked at him the day he started for the war and bade her farewell in their village church—the same pad., humble eyes. The old woman was holding her prayer-book and her spectacle case in her hand, just as his grandmother was holding her prayerbook and her spectacle case in her old hands. She was quite dead, hut she kept oil looking at him.!' Tt seems to be quite true also tint after this they sang the hymn, "Nun danket alle Gott" around a hnnfire in the central square at Dinant. CONTRASTS. You must put these things «ne against the other if you would understand tho meaning of this book. You must put the humble gratitude of the dying .IJosehes against, the stabbing of the old woman in Dinant and try to see both events ais the writer saw th'eni. The eyes of the old woman" naunted her murderer to his death; yet, as he died, the doctor, who tried to hate him could not do it. So we obtain a glimpse of the soul of war! "Ho you think I am going to hell?" said the man who stubbed the old woman, with his last breath. There is a picture of a woman of France. Josephine, nursing a great fellow (German) who killed her son — though, islie was not aware of this. That a picture to linger over. And the setting is a church full of the-wound-ed and the broken, the floor la : d with straw, puddled with red blood. There were no bandages, no dressings: there was no morphia, no chloroform in that hospital. Tn the night a shell drove through the church from nave to chancel. but without wrecking it: in the morning dawn found the village priest on the isteps of his altar, and the dying upon the straw at his feet saw him lift the chalice over his head as the sun rose through the broken vault of tho apse. Adalbert is the final truth of the book: the incredible thing that the world has come to believe. He steps upon the straw-covered stage with its puddles of red blood, just at tho right moment. The spirit of Knltur is contrasted with that older spirit, death, to death's disadvantage. How small a thing is a man's death when a German officer is looking on at it! And here is the cud of the story in the author's own words : — "La Chambre ties enfants,' said the old caretaker as she opened the door to the children's nursery on the top fl ; <or. ■ • • Near the door stood a recking horse oil three legs, • stripped of its saddle, its mane and tail torn off, its back and flanks hacked by deep I

angry cut from some sharp instrument. Fn the corner of the room stood a large dolt's house, with its red-tiled roof smashed in nrnt half buried among the wreckage lay, its tiny inhabitants amid all sorts of broken toy furniture. .... Leaning against the pillows of iQ little settee eat a big teddy bear with its stomach ripped open. . . . In » dainty brass bed with blue curtains well tucked up under her embroidered counterpane lay a smart Paris doll with her own baby doll clasped in her arms, murdered in her sloop by a well-directed blow wlrcli lmd battered in her face. wfn——y