My spirit
bowed before them as I watched them at work. I was proud if I could
carry soup to any of them when they came into the refectory for a
hurried meal, or if I could wash a plate clean so that they might fill it
with a piece of meat from the kitchen stew. I would have cleaned their
boots for them if it had been worth while cleaning boots to tramp the
filthy yard.
"It's not surgery!" said one of the young surgeons, coming out of the
operating-theatre and washing his hands at the kitchen sink; "it's
butchery!"
He told me that he had never seen such wounds or imagined them,
and as for the conditions in which he worked--he raised his hands
and laughed at the awfulness of them, because it is best to laugh
when there is no remedy. There was a scarcity of dressings, of
instruments, of sterilizers. The place was so crowded that there was
hardly room to turn, and wounded men poured in so fast that it was
nothing but hacking and sewing.
"I'm used to blood," said the young surgeon. "It's some years now
since I was put through my first ordeal, of dissecting dead bodies and
then handling living tissue. You know how it's done--by gradual
stages until a student no longer wants to faint at the sight of raw flesh,
but regards it as so much material for scientific work.
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