''And they thought we wouldn't fight'' - Floyd Phillips Gibbons (fantasy books to read txt) 📗

worker whom I could not see but who stood over me and carried on conversations with other people to my utter and complete exclusion. And all the time he was engaged in feeding me the fumes that I knew would soon steal away my senses.

"Now, never you mind about your pulse," he replied somewhat peevishly. "I'm taking care of this." It seemed to me from the tone of his voice that he implied I was talking about something that was none of my business and I had the distinct conviction that if the proceedings were anybody's business, they certainly were mine.

"You will pardon me for manifesting a mild interest in what you are doing to me," I said, "but you see I know that something is going to be done to my right eye and inasmuch as that is the only eye I've got on that side, I can't help being concerned."

"Now, you just forget it and take deep breaths, and say, Charlie, did you see that case over in Ward 62? That was a wonderful case. The bullet hit the man in the head and they took the lead out of his stomach. He's got the bullet on the table beside him now. Talk about bullet eaters—believe me, those Marines sure are."

I hurled myself back into the conversation.

"I'll take deep breaths if you'll loosen the straps over my chest," I said, getting madder each minute. "How can I take a full breath when you've got my lungs strapped down?"

"Well, how's that?" responded the conversational anesthetist, as he loosened one of the straps. "Now, take one breath of fresh air—one deep, long breath, now."

I turned my head to one side to escape the fumes from the stifling towel over my face and made a frenzied gulp for fresh air. As I did so, one large drop of ether fell on the table right in front of my nose and the deep long breath I got had very little air in it. I felt I had been tricked.

"You're pretty cute, old timer, aren't you?" I remarked to the anesthetist for the purpose of letting him know that I was on to his game, but either he didn't hear me, or he was too interested in telling Charlie about his hopes and ambitions to be sent to the front with a medical unit that worked under range of the guns. He returned to a consideration of me with the following remark:

"All right, he's under now; where's the next one?"

"The hell I am," I responded hastily, as visions of knives and saws and gimlets and brain chisels went through my mind. I had no intention or desire of being conscious when the carpenters and plumbers started to work on me.

I was completely ignored and the table started moving. We rolled across the floor and there commenced a clicking under the back of my head, not unlike the sound made when the barber lowers or elevates the head-rest on his chair. The table rolled seemingly a long distance down a long corridor and then came to the top of a slanting runway.

As I started riding the table down the runway I began to see that I was descending an inclined tube which seemed to be filled with yellow vapour. Some distance down, the table slowed up and we came to a stop in front of a circular bulkhead in the tunnel.

There was a door in the centre of the bulkhead and in the centre of the door there was a small wicket window which opened and two grotesquely smiling eyes peered out at me. Those eyes inspected me from head to foot and then, apparently satisfied, they twinkled and the wicket closed with a snap. Then the door opened and out stepped a quaint and curious figure with gnarled limbs and arms and a peculiar misshapen head, completely covered with a short growth of black hair.

I laughed outright, laughed hilariously. I recognised the man. The last time I had seen him was when he stepped out of a gas tank on the 18th floor of an office building in Chicago where I was reclining at the time in a dentist chair. He was the little gas demon who walked with me through the Elysian fields the last time I had a tooth pulled.

"Well you poor little son-of-a-gun," I said, by way of greeting. "What are you doing way over here in France? I haven't seen you for almost two years, since that day back in Chicago."

The gas demon rolled his head from one side to the other and smiled, but I can't remember what he said. My mental note-taking concluded about there because the next memory I have is of complete darkness, and lying on my back in a cramped position while a horse trampled on my left arm.

"Back off of there," I shouted, but the animal's hoofs didn't move. The only effect my shouting had was to bring a soft hand into my right one, and a sweet voice close beside me.

"You're all right, now," said the sweet voice, "just try to take a little nap and you'll feel better."

Then I knew it was all over, that is, the operation was over, or something was over. Anyhow my mind was working and I was in a position where I wanted to know things again. I recall now, with a smile, that the first things that passed through my mind were the threadbare bromides so often quoted "Where am I?" I recall feeling the urge to say something at least original, so I enquired:

"What place is this, and will you please tell me what day and time it is?"

"This is the Military Base Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine just on the outskirts of Paris, and it is about eleven o'clock in the morning and to-day is Friday, June the seventh."

Then I went back to sleep with an etherised taste in my mouth like a motorman's glove.

CHAPTER XVIII GROANS, LAUGHS AND SOBS IN THE HOSPITAL

There were fourteen wounded American soldiers in my ward—all men from the ranks and representing almost as many nationalistic extractions. There was an Irishman, a Swede, an Italian, a Jew, a Pole, one man of German parentage, and one man of Russian extraction. All of them had been wounded at the front and all of them now had something nearer and dearer to them than any traditions that might have been handed down to them from a mother country—they had fought and bled and suffered for a new country, their new country.

Here in this ward was the new melting pot of America. Not the melting pot of our great American cities where nationalistic quarters still exist, but a greater fusion process from which these men had emerged with unquestionable Americanism. They are the real and the new Americans—born in the hell of battle.

One night as we lay there, we heard an automobile racing through a street in this sleepy, warm little faubourg of Paris. The motor was sounding on its siren a call that was familiar to all of us. It was the alarm of a night attack from the air. It meant that German planes had crossed the front line and were on their way with death and destruction for Paris.

A nurse entered the room and drew the curtains of the tall windows to keep from our eyes the flash and the glitter of the shells that soon began to burst in the sky above us as the aerial defences located on the outer circle of the city began to erect a wall of bursting steel around the French capital. We could hear the guns barking close by and occasionally the louder boom that told us one of the German bombs had landed. Particles of shrapnel began falling in the garden beneath the windows of our ward and we could hear the rattle of the pieces on the slate roof of a pavilion there. It is most unpleasant, it goes without saying, to lie helpless on one's back and grapple with the realisation that directly over your head—right straight above your eyes and face—is an enemy airplane loaded with bombs. Many of us knew that those bombs contained, some of them, more than two hundred pounds of melilite and some of us had witnessed the terrific havoc they wrought when they landed on a building. All of us knew, as the world knows, the particular attraction that hospitals have for German bombs.

The aerial bombardment subsided after some ten or fifteen minutes and soon we heard the motor racing back through the streets while a musician in the car sounded on a bugle the "prologue" or the signal that the raid was over. The invaders had been driven back. All of us in the ward tried to sleep. But nerves tingled from this more or less uncomfortable experience and wounds ached and burned. Sleep was almost out of the question, and in the darkened ward I soon noticed the red glow of cigarette after cigarette from bed to bed as the men sought to woo relief with tobacco smoke.

We began to discuss a subject very near and very dear to all wounded men. That is, what they are going to do as soon as they get out of the hospital. It is known, of course, that the first consideration usually is, to return to the front, but in many instances in our ward, this was entirely out of the question.

So it was with Dan Bailey who occupied a bed two beds on my right. His left leg was off above the knee. He lost it going over the top at Cantigny.

"I know what I'm going to do when I get home," he said, "I am going to get a job as an instructor in a roller skating rink."

In a bed on the other side of the ward was a young man with his right arm off. His name was Johnson and he had been a musician. In time of battle, musicians lay aside their trombones and cornets and go over the top with the men, only they carry stretchers instead of rifles. Johnson had done this. Something had exploded quite close to him and his entire recollection of the battle was that he had awakened being carried back on his own stretcher.

"I know where I can sure get work," he said, glancing down at the stump of his lost arm. "I am going to sign up as a pitcher with the St. Louis Nationals."

Days later when I looked on Johnson for the first time, I asked him if he wasn't Irish, and he said no. Then I asked him where he lost his arm and he replied, "At the yoint." And then I knew where he came from.

But concerning after-the-war occupations, I endeavoured that night to contribute something in a similar vein to the general discussion, and I suggested the possibility that I might return to give lessons on the monocle.

The prize prospect, however, was submitted by a man who occupied a bed far over in one corner of the room. He was the possessor of a polysyllabic name—a name sprinkled with k's, s's and z's, with a scarcity of vowels—a name that we could not pronounce, much less remember. On account of his size we called him "Big Boy." His was a peculiar story.

He had been captured by three Germans who were marching him back to their line. In telling me the story Big Boy said, "Mr. Gibbons, I made up my mind as I walked back with them that I might just as well be dead as to spend the rest of the war studying German."

So he had struck the man on the right and the one on the left and had downed both of them, but the German in back of him, got him with the bayonet.