A NOTE ON " HORRORS. "
WHEN sympathetic people ask whether work in a war hospital does not necessitate the witnessing of dreadful sights, it is a temptation to answer with a " nothing-can-horrify-me " shrug, and in a blase voice to announce that the spectacle of wounds and blood is too everyday an affair to disturb one's official equanimity. The pose is insincere, an instinctive reflex response to the flattery —be it never so faint—which poor human nature eternally scents for and savours even in such a natural question as the one just quoted. But the attitude, for all that, would be almost pardonable —if such foolishness can be pardoned—in so far as it is based on a fact : the fact that all kinds of sights which, in normal circum- stances, would be infrequent and shocking, here present themselves commonly. They are so common that the luxury of being harrowed by them is forbidden both by considerations of time and of lack of strength. It is only the idle person or the strong person who can afford to spend himself on a succession of emotional orgies. Busier folks, and folks not so bountifully endowed with tough nerves, must cultivate a less dramatic, but perhaps more practical, callousness : a callousness, be it added, not only to others, but— from a subtler angle—to themselves.
Walking through the corridors of the hospital, the visitor beholds a certain number of the obvious " horrors " of such an institution : bandaged heads and limbs, crooked bodies on crutches, blinded men, and so forth. But the public are accustomed to this nowadays ; and the horrors " alluded to by the curious questioner are rather those which are displayed only in the privacy of the wards and the operating theatre and with which no outsider coma in contact, When the bandages are unwrapped from a hopelessly septic wound or from the stump of an amputated leg—is not that a " horror" ? When the surgeon is removing a patient's rib— is not that a " horror " " Didn't it make you feel queer ? " Whereupon we perceive an opening for our sangfroid shrug. For. as a matter of strict truth, none of these revelations made us feel queer in the slightest degree. I speak for myself and for ecores of others. The point is one which the R.A.M.C. recruit naturally debates, when first detailed to a surgical ward. Has he, or has he not, got the necessary fortitude ? Well—lie always has.
Myself, I detest "horrors." I flee from the neighbourhood of street accidents and fallen cab-horses. To this day I recollect with a shudder having witnessed a dog run over by a train—an incident which took place twenty years ago and is still indelibly imprinted on my mind. (And it was some one else's dog ; I was quite unacquainted with it) Yet the abominations which I found myself expected not only to see, but sometimes to touch, in the war hospital, were not in the least upsetting. There are severs reasons for this, but the main one is that which is involved in the difference between the professional and the unprofessional. How- ever newly enlisted he is, the C3 youth who wears the Red Cross is a professional, and, consciously or otherwise, comports himself as such. Before I joined the R.A.M.C. I could not watch a hospital train evacuated, and the solemn cortege of ambulances leaving the station, without being afflicted by a lump in my throat. No sooner was I in khaki than I had the job of helping to evacuate these same trains and to carry a mournful string of stretchers. Not once did that lump in the throat trouble me. The second night after My enlistment I was allotted the task of removing a dead body and depositing it in the shell in the mortuary. I bad never. handled a corpse before ; but now it was my business: th do as I was told, and I did as I was told....
Ward work involves duties a good deal more repellent than lending aid while Sister dresses a bad mound ; duties—incidentally —which neither Sister nor any other expert ie to supervise. These, too, which would in normal circumstances not bear contemplation, by some mysterious ands blessed influence become—I won't say pleasant—at any rate endurable, and, in a manner, satisfying. For, all the time, it is manifest that any discomfort to which the orderly is exposed is negligible—an affair positively to blush for— compared with the sufferings and unavoidable physical humilia- tions of the patient. I wish I could enlarge on this theme, but unfortunately I am confronted by the unprintable. (Might not that always dubious taboo be lifted in war time, when there are happenings which it would be for the good of the nation's soul to ponder ?) It is sufficient if I indicate that things nasty can turn one's stomaeh--should it be an organ thus susceptible—as pro- folindly as things horrible ; but that, either way, it is the patient who is to be pitied, not the orderly. The latter, indeed; I think feels rather that his is (without any sentimentalism) an enviable lot; he congratulates himself on the facilities which have been given him to ease his conscience by so simple an ordeal. Frankly. I caught myself being glad not only at the circumstance that I was in a position to serve wounded mon in intimate ways which were in certain respects irksome, but also—rather shamelessly !—that my penance was so light ; I moan my penance first for having had some remote and roundabout share in letting them in for the war, and secondly for having then had some remote and roundabout share in sending them to the front while I stayed at home.
Thoughts of this kind, more or less illogical and indefinite., must occur to every one who has waited on the wounded. They probably prevent a total lapse into professionalism and callousness. For although time staff of a war hospital (at least this is true of the one of which I write) are necessarily unmoved by " horrors." they retain, I am convinced, the essentials of tenderness and warmth. The men with whom I take my meals in the orderlies' canteen hose, many of them, been working in the hospital for longer than I have. Nevertheless, compassion of the meet unfeigned sort is for ever cropping up in the gossip of their wards' doings. In a sense it may be said that nothing can horrify these men ; in another sense it may be said that they are horrified at everything. The two statements are not as inconsistent as they sound. We hate 'war in this country—it and its results are an outrage on new aspirations. The ordinary man in an R.A.M.C. unit is—the ordinary man. His khaki and his lied Cross badges have altered him not an atom. But, like other ordinary men, while hating war, he is able, when put to it, to stand up to the brutalities of was Not quelling his hatred, lie declines to allow it to choke his normal flow of common-sense. " Horrors " have to be dealt with. There- fore they are dealt with. They have not. however—and this ie the saving grace of civilization—really ceased to horrify. Heaven forbid that they ever should ! On the other hand, let us thank the gods who have endowed us with the gift for being horrified and at the same time keeping our heads. That is a more precious possession than the power (if any one outside a lunatic asylum could have such a power) to go through life without ever being
Previous page
