The Beauty and the Sorrow (17 page)

SATURDAY
, 3
APRIL
1915
Harvey Cushing makes a list of interesting cases at a military hospital in Paris

Grey, black and red. Those were the colours he had before his eyes the whole time as he and the others travelled by bus two days ago from the Gare d’Orléans, across the river, past the Place de la Concorde and on to the hospital out in Neuilly. Full of curiosity, indeed, hungry with curiosity, he had stared out at the streets of the city. Grey was for all the military vehicles, painted in the same uniform shade—staff cars, ambulances, armoured vehicles; black was for all those wearing mourning—“everyone not in uniform seems to be garbed in black”; red was for the soldiers’ trousers and for the crosses on the hospitals and ambulances. His name is Harvey Cushing, an American doctor from Boston, and he
has come to France to study war surgery. In a few days’ time he will be forty-six.

Today Cushing is at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris—or the Ambulance Américaine as it is now called.
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It is a private military hospital founded at the outbreak of war by enterprising American residents in France and financed by collections. Those who work there are mainly from the United States—they are volunteers from the medical faculties at various universities and they serve here for periods of three months. Some of them come for purely idealistic reasons. Others, like Cushing, are motivated mainly by professional interest since there is an opportunity here to treat injuries of a kind that hardly ever occur in a neutral country like the United States, screened off from international politics. And since Harvey Cushing is a brain surgeon, a particularly accomplished one indeed, he hopes to see and learn a great deal in wartime France.
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He has not yet reached any firm conclusions as far as the war is concerned. As a reasonable, educated man he regards many of the extravagant and elaborate horror stories about what the Germans are doing and have done with a degree of ironic scepticism. He thinks he can see through the empty pathos. Harvey Cushing is small, fair and thin. His gaze is scrutinising, with narrowed eyes, and his mouth small and tight: he gives the impression of a man used to getting his own way.

Yesterday, Good Friday, was his first proper working day at the hospital and he has already begun to form a picture of what the work involves. He has met the injured, often patient, quiet men with broken, twisted bodies and infected wounds that are taking a long time to heal. Bullets and shrapnel are not the only things that are taken out of their wounds: there are also what are known in the trade as secondary projectiles—pieces of clothing, stones, splinters of wood, cartridge cases, bits of equipment and even fragments of other men’s body parts. He has already had time to see some of the worst problems. Firstly, many of the soldiers’ feet are sore, blue, frozen and almost unusable, which seems to be a result of standing in cold, muddy water day in and day out.
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Secondly, there are
the malingerers and those who exaggerate their problems, whether from shame or vanity. Thirdly, “souvenir surgery”—the dangerous business of operating to remove projectiles which could, in fact, have been left in the body, operating partly because the wounded man himself would like to have that particular bullet or piece of shrapnel as a trophy that he can proudly show off. Cushing shakes his head.

Today is Easter Saturday. The cold but clear spring weather of recent days has turned into steady rain.

Cushing spends the morning walking through the half-full wards and listing the cases that are of most interest from a neurological point of view. Since there are few men there with serious head injuries he also includes various kinds of nerve damage. The patients come almost exclusively from the south-eastern sectors of the front, so the majority of them are French, with a few black, colonial troops (he has been told that the Germans do not take black prisoners, but he doubts the truth of this) and a small number of Englishmen (who are usually soon taken to hospitals up on the Channel coast or transported home). Eventually his list is complete. It reads as follows:

    Eleven upper-limb injuries varying from wounds of the brachial plexus to minor ones of the hand; five of them musculospinal paralyses with compound fractures of the humerus.

    Two painful nerve injuries of the leg; operated on by Tauer with a suture.

    Three facial paralyses. One of them had “un morceau d’obus” as big as the palm of a hand driven into his cheek which he proudly exhibited—i.e., the “morceau.”
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    A cervical sympathetic paralysis in a man shot through the open mouth.

    Two fractures of the spine, one dying, the other recovering. A beam supporting the “tranchées d’obri” had fallen on him when a shell landing near by blew up the section where he was stationed.

    Only one serious head injury; this in the case of Jean Ponysigne, wounded five days ago in the Vosges and brought in here to the Ambulance in some mysterious fashion.

One of the orderlies tells Cushing during lunch that a few days earlier he saw a legless veteran from the war of 1870–71 stand to attention, swaying on his crutches, to salute a man forty-five years younger than him, a victim of the current conflict who had also lost his legs. During the afternoon Cushing visits the section for dental surgery and is very impressed by the new, ingenious and efficient methods being developed. “It is remarkable what they are able to do in aligning the jaws and teeth of an unfortunate with a large part of his face shot away.”

FRIDAY
, 9
APRIL
1915
Angus Buchanan waits for a train at Waterloo Station

Another day of rain. As dusk falls over London the city seems unusually grey and damp. He has been waiting on Platform 7 since six o’clock this evening and there is still no sign of their train. There are many of them standing there. The platform is full of people, not only men in khaki uniforms but also crowds of civilians—relations and friends who have come to Waterloo to wave them off. The weather may be miserable but the mood among those standing in groups, waiting and chatting, is free and easy. If any of them are impatient about the delay, they are not showing it.

The men gathered on the platform make up the main body of a battalion of volunteers, the 25th Royal Fusiliers, and they are just setting off on their long journey to East Africa. They already know that it is not easy for European units to work in that part of Africa but the majority of the uniformed men here already have experience of hot climates and difficult terrain. “This old Legion of Frontiersmen” comes from places as varied as Hong Kong, China and Ceylon, Malacca, India and New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Egypt; the battalion includes both former polar explorers and former cowboys. When the war broke out Buchanan himself had been in the far north of the Canadian wilderness, fully occupied collecting Arctic flora and fauna, and it was the end of October before he heard what had happened. He immediately set off south, reached the first larger settlement around Christmas but moved on at once, all in order to enlist.

Buchanan’s company is led by the experienced big-game hunter Frederick Courteney Selous, well-known for two very popular books
about Africa.
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Selous is the embodiment of the classic Victorian explorer: fearless, optimistic, ruthless, innocent, tough and inquisitive. He has a short white beard and is sixty-four years old but moves with the ease of a thirty-year-old. (The battalion has a generous upper age limit of forty-eight, but a good number of the men are older and have clearly lied about their age—there was still that much enthusiasm around.)
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From the start the battalion has been surrounded by an aura of being an elite troop of chosen adventurers. Among those waiting on the platform are actually a number of men who have deserted from other units in order to join the 25th Royal Fusiliers. And it speaks for itself that this is the only unit in the whole British expeditionary corps which has not been put through any military training at all: the men are considered to be so experienced that it is unnecessary—indeed, it would be an insult to these
gentleman adventurers
. It is hardly strange, then, that there is “a spirit of romance” in the air this evening.

Most of the men do not know one another and many of these singular individualists are quite unaccustomed to seeing their own individuality—usually so marked—cloaked in uniform. They are very keen to become acquainted. Angus Buchanan is twenty-eight years old, a naturalist, botanist and zoologist with a particular interest in birds. He intends to collect specimens of East African flora and fauna when he has time to spare.

The hours pass. The hum of voices and laughter continues to rise from the many clusters of people. By eleven o’clock, however, family and friends begin to tire of waiting and disappear sadly in groups of two or three. After one o’clock only the uniformed men are left on the platform. The train rolls in and they climb aboard. Immediately before it departs the police appear and start searching the carriages for deserters, but they
have all been forewarned and quickly climb out of the other side of the train, where they remain hidden until the police have left.

At two o’clock the train rolls out of Waterloo Station. The destination is Plymouth, where a steamer, HMTS
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Neuralia
, is waiting. It will take them all the way to East Africa.

ONE DAY ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF APRIL
1915
Laura de Turczynowicz sees a soldier eating an orange in Suwalki

The incident with the orange affected her very badly, which is perhaps surprising, given that she has already witnessed so much. But what she has been through in recent months probably explains her reaction—everyone has a breaking point. Her frenetic activity, always rushing from one thing to another, does not only stem from a genuine desire to help, it is a conscious method of keeping her own demons in check: “Every moment was occupied or I should have gone mad!”

Two whole months have passed since the Germans marched into Suwalki for the second time and Laura and her children have been stranded on the wrong side of the front line ever since.

The worst thing was the typhus. They had been unable to flee the advancing enemy because one of the five-year-old twins had fallen ill with it, and soon afterwards his brother had caught the same disease. She came close to losing them both:

I was a machine—night after night with my patients—how pitiful they looked—little grey shadows of my darling boys. They never stopped talking—only their voices grew weaker—each night meant a battle with death.

During one of these long days and nights of anxious watching and waiting Laura happened to catch sight of “a wild, white, strange-looking woman” and it took her a moment to realise that it was herself she was seeing, reflected in a mirror on the wall. When at last, after three weeks of struggle and against all expectations, the boys recovered, her
six-year-old daughter went down with it and all the worry and wearying anxiety began again.

But now the snow has started to disappear. Spring is here.

The shortage of food is a constant scourge. The stores she laid in at the outbreak of war are now almost gone, most of them stolen by German soldiers or confiscated by their officers. All that remains is quite a lot of flour, some jam, macaroons (large and tough), tea and a few well-guarded potatoes, and that is about it. (The Germans have failed to discover one of her hiding places—inside a sofa.) Fortunately she still has a little money, but neither she nor the servants can always find produce to buy with it. Sometimes she is lucky enough to procure some black bread, and sometimes not. Sometimes there is milk, sometimes not. Wood, only occasionally, and the house is often freezing. Potatoes and eggs go for astronomical prices.

The day she bought five live chickens was a day of joy. They are now shut in what used to be the library, sitting perched up on the filthy bookshelves or scratching round the floor and covering the books with their droppings. But she no longer cares. The books have lost any significance for her—it is as if they belong to a different world, a world that came to an end in August last year.

For Laura, these problems are inextricably linked with two other evils: the war in general and the German occupation in particular. The family exists in a constant state of emergency, in which their private life is just as restricted as their mobility. German soldiers can force their way in at any time, claiming some errand and behaving threateningly or authoritatively or both. And since the house is so large and imposing, it acts as a magnet for German officers, keen to find a billet there or just to use it for parties. There is an improvised typhus hospital in one wing but the rest of the building is mainly used by the German command.
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Laura and her children and servants are squeezed into a couple of overcrowded rooms and strictly forbidden to enter the parts of the house where the Germans have their telephone exchange and telegraph. A tangle of telephone cables now runs from the house and there is a tall aerial sticking up from the roof.

The town has changed. Street cleaning has broken down completely and there is rubbish and filth everywhere. The streets are littered with abandoned furniture and other objects. The front is still so close that they can hear the roar of the big guns all the time. The roads are jammed with the constant comings and goings of German supply wagons and automobiles, and German infantry sometimes march through, almost always singing. She has come to detest that sound.