Diary Entries From A WWI Medicial Camp

A Story by Lady KrimZen

January 10.01.1918

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, the casualty clearing stations were frequently the scene of the most distressing sight which human eye can witness, that is the re-wounding and killing of already wounded men by an enemy's bomb dropped suddenly in the dead of night. There was hardly a moonlight night that the Hun did not visit our neighbourhood and drop bombs. We dug below the level of the ground to form shallow graves, two by six, by eighteen inches deep, which were dug through the floor of our tents, and when the anti-aircraft guns were shooting and particles of the exploded shells were falling, we partly closed over a section of the floor of the tent which was hinged and which had a piece of sheet iron nailed on the underside. Night bombing is a terrifying thing, and those who are not disturbed by it possess unusual qualities. I believe the nurses showed less fear than anyone.

The first hard experience came when an exceedingly large convoy of patients, overwhelmed by Mustard gas, and the picture of intense suffering, poured in on them in great numbers... 600 in less than 48 hours, and it was repeated for many a night.

I watched the white eyes writhing in one patient's head, his hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues. The patient beside him - who was another Mustard gas victim, however, this patient also suffered from Shell Shock - bared his teeth that leer like skull's teeth; eyeballs shrink tormented back into his brain, hysterically twitching his facial muscles and suffering from terrifying nightmares of being unable to withdraw bayonets from the enemies' bodies long after the slaughter and screeching complaints of stomach aches.

The operating team struggled to keep the shell shock victim still as he violently shook and jerked his head about like a suicidal maniac who had just suffered a nervous breakdown. The team managed to sedate the patient and rushed him off to be operated on.

I glanced down to the Mustard gas victim, who was now pale grey from severe blood-loss, and gently grasped his wrist to check for a pulse. But to my disappointment, found his pulse growing weaker by the second. He let out a final gargle of frothy blood and shrunk his eyes back into his head.

January 11.01.1918

The steam, the ether, and the filthy clothes of the men; the odour in the operating room was so terrible that it was all any of them could do to keep from being sick. No mere handling of instruments and sponges, but sewing and tying up and putting in drains while the doctor takes the next piece of shell out of another place. Then after fourteen hours of this with freezing feet, to a meal of tea and bread and jam.

Legless, sewn short at elbow I saw him sitting there; yesterday's Shell Shocked gas patient. He sat in a wheeled chair motionless. Only shivered as the wind whistled around the tent. He seemed to mumble a word or two now and again, of a time when he liked a blood-smear down his leg, after the matches, carried shoulder-high - of how he smiled when they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.

He seemed to be suffering from either a chronic case of melancholic or psychotic depression - which could be treated with physical treatments (such as antidepressant drugs) in the mental tents - as he waited to see if the kind old sun would show him a sign of remedy for his pains.

If his picking at the rope-knouts of his scourging was enough to cause me to feel anxious for the poor lad, was not as terrifying as hearing the sound, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from his froth-corrupted lungs; seeing him violently grasping his neck, suffocating himself as he drowned in his own foamy blood.

I rushed over to him to give him medical assistance, but instead, he handed me a note. Scribbled on this note was the man's final wish: "I want to die."

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, I watched him drown in his wheeled chair. And by his smile on his bloody, pale face, I knew we stood in Hell.

Later we buried the deceased soldiers in shallow graves and gave them a minute of silence in their honour. And in memory to these doomed youth, I dedicated this elegaic poem to them.

And of my weeping something been left, which must die now. The truth untold, the pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled, or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. None will break ranks, though nations trek progress. Courage was mine, and I had mystery, wisdom was mine, and I had mastery; to miss the march of this retreating world into vain citadels that are not walled. Then when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels I would go up and wash them from sweet wells.