Читать книгу Brave Men - Ernie Pyle - Страница 10

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Behind me is a distinguished and unbroken record for being sick in every country I ever visited. Since Sicily was new terrain for me I figured I might as well get sick right away and get it over with. So on my fifth day ashore they threw me into an ambulance and off we went hunting for a hospital.

We were looking for a certain clearing station, and we couldn’t find it because it was moving forward while we were moving back, and we passed on different roads. The result was that the determined ambulance boys drove nearly halfway across Sicily before they finally gave up and started back. We drove a total of seventy-five agonizing miles over dusty gravel roads, and then found the hospital all set up and ready for business within four miles of where we had started from in the first place.

The clearing station was a small tent hospital of the Forty-fifth Division, a sort of flag stop for wounded on the way back from the lines. The first regular hospital was about fifteen miles to the rear. The average patient stayed in the clearing station only a few hours at most. But once the doctors got a squint at me they beamed, rubbed their rubber gloves, and cried out, “Ah! Here is the medical freak we have been waiting for. We’ll just keep this guy and play with him awhile.”

So they put me to bed on a cot, gave me paregoric and bismuth, aspirin and codeine, soup and tomato juice, and finally wound up with morphine and a handful of sulfaguanidine. The only thing I can say on behalf of my treatment is that I became well and hearty again.

My family physician in this case was Captain Joe Doran, of Iowa City, Iowa. Captain Doran, a young and enthusiastic doctor, was different from most front-line doctors in that his main interest lay in treating sick soldiers rather than wounded ones. Captain Doran liked to get at the seat of a man’s ills. To further this interest he had set up a nice little laboratory in one of the tents, complete with microscope and glass tubes. He was always taking specimens from his patients and then peering at his test tubes, like Dr. Arrowsmith.

Captain Doran’s germ quest upon me was somewhat agitated by the fact that on the evening of my arrival he received a letter saying he had become a father for the second time, about six weeks previously. He was so overjoyed he gave me an extra shot of morphine and I was asleep before I could say “Congratulations!”

The doctors kept me in what is known as a semicomatose condition for about twenty-four hours, and then they began to get puzzled. At first they thought I had dysentery, but the little laboratory showed no dysentery. Then they thought I had malaria, so they called in a couple of Italian malaria experts from down the highway. They chatted in English, punched my finger, took blood specimens, and reported back later that I had no malaria. By that time I was getting better anyhow, so they decided that what I had was a nonconforming and at the moment fairly common illness which they called “battlefield fever.” A man with this ailment aches all over and has a high temperature. The doctors thought it was caused by a combination of too much dust, bad eating, not enough sleep, exhaustion, and the unconscious nerve tension that comes to everybody in a front-line area. A man doesn’t die of battlefield fever, but he thinks he’s going to.

They put me in a corner of a tent, and in my section at various times there were three officers with similar fevers. Their illnesses were even briefer than mine; they all graduated before I did.

One of my classmates was a redheaded and bespectacled lieutenant named Rahe Chamberlin, from Clarksville, Ohio. After going into the Army, Chamberlin bought a half interest in a grocery store back home. Whenever they brought us fruit juice in cans he would take a good gander to see if it was a product his partner was selling back in the States.

Another fellow sufferer was Lieutenant Richard Van Syckle, of Sewaren, New Jersey. He used to be in the automobile business at Perth Amboy. He was married to Clare Raftery, a delicious former Powers model, and he carried magazine-cover pictures of her in his map case.

The third was Major Ellzey Brown of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, who used to be president and general sales manager of the Cleveland Tractor Company. He was a tough outdoor man, and he was so thoroughly disgusted at getting sick that it made him even sicker. He celebrated his forty-fourth birthday just before entering the hospital. Major Brown distinguished himself in our midst by paying a flat hundred dollars to the station’s chaplain for a fourteen-dollar air mattress. His own gear was all lost in the original Sicily landings and, as he said, money meant nothing over there anyhow, so why not pay a hundred dollars for something that would help a little?

All my life I have enjoyed being in hospitals (as soon as the original moaning-and-groaning stage is past), and my stay at this front-line army clearing station was no exception. On the third day I was scared to death for fear I was well enough to leave. But the doctor looked thoughtful and said he wanted me to stay another day. I would have kissed him if he had been a nurse instead of a man with a mustache and a stethoscope.

That was the only trouble with the hospital—it didn’t have any nurses. In fact we lacked a number of the usual hospital touches. We were hidden, inevitably, in an olive grove, and our floors were merely the earth. The toilet was a ditch with canvas around it. And if we washed we did so in our own steel helmets. There were no such things as hospital pajamas or bathrobes. I arrived in my Army coveralls and left in my coveralls, and I never once had them off all the time I was there.

Every morning a chaplain came around with a big boxful of cigarettes, tooth powder and stuff. During the day they kept the sides of our tent rolled up, and it was pleasant enough lying there with nothing to do. But at night the tent had to be tightly closed for the blackout, and it became deadly stuffy. And all night long the litter-bearers would be coming and going with new wounded. In the dim glow of our single lantern the scene was eerie, and sleep was almost impossible. So the last couple of nights we moved our cots outdoors and slept under the wide starry skies of Sicily, and attendants brought our medicine out there in the dark. German bombers came over but we just stayed put.

The doctor had me on a liquid diet at first, but I gradually talked him into advancing me to a soft diet and finally to a regular one. The progression from liquid to soft to regular diet was one of the great experiences of my life, for believe it or not, all three diets were exactly the same thing—soup and canned tomato juice.

When I accused the doctor of duping me he grinned and said, “Well, it comes under the heading of keeping the patient happy by pretending to humor his whims.”

Happy! I was hungry! But I survived, and actually I have never been treated better anywhere than by those doctors and men of the Forty-fifth Division.

During the time I lay at the clearing station with my own slight aches and pains, hundreds of wounded soldiers passed through on their way back to hospitals in the rear. I was in one of five small tents in which they were deposited on litters while waiting for ambulances. I lay right among them for four days and nights. It couldn’t help being a moving and depressing experience, and yet there was something good about it too.

It was flabbergasting to me to lie there and hear wounded soldiers cuss and beg to be sent right back into the fight. Of course not all of them did that; it depended on the severity of their wounds and on their individual personalities, just as it would in peacetime. But at least a third of the less severely wounded men asked if they couldn’t return to duty immediately.

The two main impressions I got from all the wounded men were (1) their grand spirit and (2) the thoughtful and attentive attitude of the doctors and wardboys toward them. Pitiful as wounded men are, it is easy to become hardened and cross with so many passing through your hands. A person could eventually get to look upon them all as just so many nuisances who came deliberately to cause more work. Yet the wardboys treated their wounded as though they were members of their own family. I paid particular attention to this matter as I lay there, and no wounded man ever made a request that a wardboy didn’t go jumping to fulfill. This was especially true of the wardmasters, who were responsible for whole tents. There were three—all from Oklahoma—that impressed me greatly.

One was Corporal Herman Whitt, of Enid. Before the war he was a salesman for a biscuit company. He had married a beautiful Indian girl back home. Corporal Whitt was tall, nice-looking, and talked very slowly and softly. He said he felt better about the war, doing this job—caring for the wounded—than if he had to be up front killing people himself.

Our night wardmaster was Corporal Woodrow Cox of Milo. He too was tall, more than six feet; he had been a ranch hand back home, and his voice was almost like a musical instrument. He talked with that snaillike Oklahoma drawl that is so soothing in times of excitement.

The third was Corporal Rodney Benton, of 8030 West Fifth Street, Oklahoma City. It was easy to see the difference between city and country in those boys. Rodney was all git-up-and-git. He talked faster and moved faster than the others. But all three had the same deep conscientiousness about their work and the same compassionate feeling for the wounded. Rodney was one of twins, and his identical brother Robert was a corporal in the division’s other clearing station. They were twenty-three years old. Both had had two years of premedical work at the University of Oklahoma and they intended to be doctors. They were in their glory at our clearing stations; in fact they almost drove the doctors nuts asking questions all the time.

The Forty-fifth Division was originally made up largely of men from Oklahoma and West Texas. I didn’t realize how different certain parts of our country are from others until I saw those men set off in a frame, as it were, in a strange, faraway place. The men of Oklahoma are drawling and soft-spoken. They are not smart alecks. Something of the purity of the soil seems to be in them. Even their cussing is simpler and more profound than the torrential obscenities of Eastern city men. An Oklahoman of the plains is straight and direct. He is slow to criticize and hard to anger, but once he is convinced of the wrong of something, brother, watch out.

Those wounded Oklahomans were madder about the war than anybody I had seen on that side of the ocean. They weren’t so mad before they went into action, but by then the Germans across the hill were all “sonsabitches.”

And those men of the Forty-fifth, the newest division over there, had already fought so well they had drawn the high praise of the commanding general of the corps of which the division was a part.

It was those quiet men from the farms, ranches and small towns of Oklahoma who poured through my tent with their wounds. I lay there and listened for what each one would say first.

One fellow, seeing a friend, called out, “I think I’m gonna make her.” Meaning he was going to pull through.

A second asked, “Have they got beds in the hospital? Lord, how I want to go to bed.”

A third complained, “I’m hungry, but I can’t eat anything. I keep getting sick at my stomach.”

Another, as he winced from the deep probing for a buried piece of shrapnel in his leg, said, “Go ahead, you’re the doc. I can stand it.”

A fifth remarked jocularly, “I’ll have to write the old lady tonight and tell her she missed out on that ten thousand dollars again.”

The youngster who was put down beside me said, “Hi, pop, how you getting along? I call you pop because you’re grayheaded. You don’t mind, do you?”

I told him I didn’t care what he called me. He was friendly, but you could tell from his forward attitude that he was not from Oklahoma. When I asked him, it turned out he came from New Jersey.

One big blond infantryman had slight flesh wounds in the face and the back of his neck. He had a patch on his upper lip which prevented him from moving it, and made him talk in a grave, straight-faced manner that was comical. I’ve never seen anybody so mad in my life. He went from one doctor to another trying to get somebody to sign his card returning him to duty. The doctors explained patiently that if he returned to the front his wounds would become infected and he would be a burden to his company instead of a help. They tried to entice him by telling him there would be nurses back in the hospital. But in his peaceful Oklahoma drawl he retorted, “To hell with the nurses, I want to get back to fightin’.”

Dying men were brought into our tent, men whose death rattle silenced the conversation and made all of us thoughtful. When a man was almost gone, the surgeons would put a piece of gauze over his face. He could breathe through it but we couldn’t see his face well.

Twice within five minutes chaplains came running. One of those occasions haunted me for hours. The wounded man was still semiconscious. The chaplain knelt down beside him and two wardboys squatted nearby. The chaplain said, “John, I’m going to say a prayer for you.”

Somehow this stark announcement hit me like a hammer. He didn’t say, “I’m going to pray for you to get well,” he just said he was going to say a prayer, and it was obvious to me that he meant the final prayer. It was as though he had said, “Brother, you may not know it, but your goose is cooked.” Anyhow, he voiced the prayer, and the weak, gasping man tried vainly to repeat the words after him. When he had finished, the chaplain added, “John, you’re doing fine, you’re doing fine.” Then he rose and dashed off on some other call, and the wardboys went about their duties.

The dying man was left utterly alone, just lying there on his litter on the ground, lying in an aisle, because the tent was full. Of course it couldn’t be otherwise, but the aloneness of that man as he went through the last few minutes of his life was what tormented me. I felt like going over and at least holding his hand while he died, but it would have been out of order and I didn’t do it. I wish now I had.

Probably it isn’t clear to most people just how the Army’s setup for the care of the sick and wounded works on a battlefront. Let’s take the medical structure for a whole division. A division runs roughly fifteen thousand men. And almost a thousand of that number are medical men. To begin right at the front, three enlisted medical-aid men go along with every company. They give what first-aid they can on the battlefield. Then litter-bearers carry the wounded back to a battalion aid station. Sometimes a wounded man is taken back right away. But at other times he may be pinned down by enemy fire so that the aid men can’t get to him, and he will have to lie out there for hours before help comes. Right there is the biggest difficulty and the weakest feature of the Army’s medical setup.

Once a soldier is removed from the battlefield his treatment is superb. The battalion aid station is the first of many stops as he is worked to the rear, and ultimately to a hospital. An aid station is merely where the battalion surgeon and his assistant happen to be. It isn’t a tent or anything like that—it’s just the surgeon’s medical chest and a few stretchers under a tree. Each station is staffed by two doctors and thirty-six enlisted men. Frequently it is under fire.

At an aid station a wounded man gets what is immediately necessary, depending on the severity of his wounds. The idea all along the way is to do as little actual surgical work as possible, but at each stop merely to keep a man in good enough condition to stand the trip on back to the hospital, where there are full facilities for any kind of work. For instance, if a soldier’s stomach is ripped open the doctors perform an emergency operation right at the front but leave further operating to be done at a hospital. If another man has had his leg shattered by shrapnel, they bind it up in a metal rack, but the operating and setting aren’t done till he gets back to the hospital. They use morphine and blood plasma copiously at the forward stations to keep sinking men going. The main underlying motive of all front-line stations is to get patients evacuated quickly and keep the decks clear so they will always have room for any sudden catastrophic run of battle casualties.

From the battalion aid station the wounded are taken by ambulance, jeep, truck or any other means back to a collecting station. The station is a few tents run by five doctors and a hundred enlisted men, anywhere from a quarter of a mile to several miles behind the lines. There is one collecting station for each regiment, making three to a division.

Here are facilities for doing many things the aid station can’t do. If the need is urgent, the medics re-dress wounds and give the men more morphine. Also, they perform quite a lot of operations. Then the men are sent by ambulance back to the clearing station. Some divisions have two clearing stations. Ordinarily, only one works at a time while the other takes a few hours’ rest. The second then leapfrogs ahead of the first, sets up its tents and begins receiving patients. In emergencies, both clearing stations work at once, temporarily abandoning their rest-and-leapfrog routine.

All these various crews—the company aid men, the battalion aid station, the collecting station, and the clearing station—are part of the division. They move with it, work when it fights, and rest when it rests.

The clearing station I lay in was really a small hospital. It consisted of five doctors, one dentist, one chaplain, and sixty enlisted men. It was contained in six big tents and a few little ones for the fluoroscope room, the office, and so forth. Everybody slept outdoors on the ground, including the commanding officer. The mess was outdoors under a tree. The station could knock down, move, and set up again in an incredibly short time. They were as proficient as a circus. Once, during a rapid advance, my station moved three times in one day.

Behind the clearing stations the real hospitals begin, the first ones usually forty miles or more to the rear of the fighting. These hospitals are separate units; they belong to no division, but take patients from everywhere.

The farther back they are, the bigger they get, and, in Sicily, patients were evacuated from the hospitals right onto hospital ships and taken back to still bigger hospitals in Africa.

Army ambulances carry four stretchers each, or nine sitting wounded. When they reached our clearing station, they backed up to the surgical tent and unloaded. The men lay there on their stretchers on the floor of the tent while the aid men, in order to handle the worst cases first, looked at their medical tags to see how severe the wounds were. Those who didn’t need immediate further attention were carried right on through to the ward tents to wait for the next ambulance going back to a hospital.

Those who had graver wounds were carried into the operating room. Two big army trunks sat upended there on the dirt floor. The trunks contained all kinds of surgical supplies in drawers. On top of each trunk was fastened a steel rod which curved up at each end. The wounded man was carried in his litter and set on these two trunks. The curved rods kept him from sliding off. Thus his litter formed his operating table.

A portable surgical lamp stood in a tripod over the wounded man. A little motor and generator outside the tent furnished power, but usually the doctors just used flashlights. One or two surgeons in coveralls or ordinary uniform bent over the man and removed his dressings. Medical-aid men crowded around behind, using steel forceps to hand the doctors compresses or bandages from a sterile cabinet. Other aid men gave the patient another shot of morphine or injected blood plasma or offered him a drink of water through a rubber tube they put in his mouth.

Just outside the surgical tent was a small trench filled with bloody shirt sleeves and pant legs the surgeons had snipped off wounded men in order to get at the wounds more quickly. The surgeons redressed the wounds, and sprinkled on sulfanilamide powder. Sometimes they poked for buried shrapnel, or recompressed broken arteries to stop the flow of blood.

They didn’t give general anesthesia there. Occasionally they gave a local, but usually the wounded man was so doped up with morphine by the time he reached the station that he didn’t feel much of anything. The surgeons believed in using lots of morphine. It spares a man so much pain and consequently relieves the general shock to his system.

On my third day at the clearing station, when I was beginning to feel better, I spent most of my time around the operating table. As they undressed each new wound I held firmly to a lamp bracket above my head, for I was still weak and I didn’t want to disgrace myself by suddenly keeling over at the sight of a bad wound. Many of the wounds were hard to look at, and yet Lieutenant Michael de Giorgio said he had never seen a human body so badly smashed up in Sicily as he had in traffic accidents back in New York, where he used to practice.

One soldier had caught a machine-gun bullet right alongside his nose. It had made a small clean hole and gone clear through his cheek, leaving—as it came out—a larger hole just beneath his ear. It gave me the willies to look at it, yet the doctors said it wasn’t serious at all and would heal with no bad effects.

The man with the most nerve was one who had two big holes in his back. I could have put my whole hand in either one of them. As the surgeons worked on him he lay on his stomach and talked a blue streak. “I killed five of the sonsabitches with a hand grenade just before they got me,” he said. “What made me so damn mad was that I was just out of reach of my rifle and couldn’t crawl over to it, or I’da got five more of them. Jeez, I’m hungry! I ain’t had nothing to eat since yesterday morning.”

But most of the wounded said nothing at all when brought in—either because they saw no acquaintances to talk to or because they were too weak from their wounds or too dopey from morphine. Of the hundreds that passed through while I was there I heard only one man groan with pain.

Another thing that struck me, as the wounded came through in a ceaseless stream on their stretchers, was how dirt and exhaustion reduce human faces to such a common denominator. Everybody they carried in looked alike. The only break in the procession of identically tired and dirty men would be when an extreme blond was carried in. His light hair would seem like a flower in a row of weeds.

Every day at the front produces its quota of freak wounds and hairbreadth escapes. Almost any wounded man has missed death by a matter of inches. Sometimes a bullet can go clear through a man and not hurt him much, while at other times an infinitesimal fragment of a shell can pick out one tiny vital spot and kill him. Bullets and fragments do crazy things. Our surgeons picked out more than two hundred pieces of shrapnel from one man. There was hardly a square inch of him, from head to toe, that wasn’t touched. Yet none of them made a vital hit, and the soldier lived.

I remember one soldier who had a hole in the front of his leg just below the hip. It was about the size of a half dollar. It didn’t look bad at all, yet beneath that little wound the leg bone was shattered and arteries were severed, and the surgeons were working hard to get the arteries closed so he wouldn’t bleed to death.

Another had caught a small shell fragment in the wrist. It had entered at a shallow angle and gone clear up the arm to the elbow, and remained buried there. The skin wasn’t even broken at the elbow, but right over the spot where the fragment stopped was a blister as big as a pigeon’s egg. The blister had been raised by the terrific heat of that tiny piece of metal.

That’s one thing most people don’t realize—that fragments from bursting shells are white-hot. During the air raid just before our ship left Africa, a heavy bomb had burst about a hundred yards away. Among the many fragments that hit our ship was one about half as big as a tennis ball. It first struck a bronze water pipe along the ship’s rail, then tore, through a steel bulkhead into the radio room, wounded a sailor in the shoulder, turned at right angles and went through a radio set, and finally shot through one more steel bulkhead before it stopped.

When we picked up the fragment it had a quarter-inch plate of solid bronze on one side of it. The fragment’s intense heat had simply welded on a sheet of bronze as it went through the water pipe at the rail. It was as solid as though it had been done on purpose.

There in northern Sicily it was all hill fighting, as it had been in northern Tunisia, only worse. Getting the wounded out was often a problem. We had one wounded man who had been lowered by ropes over a sheer 75-foot cliff. He said he wasn’t so concerned about his wounds, but the thought that maybe the rope would break gave him the worst scare of his life.

German medical facilities were apparently as good as ours. Captured medical supply dumps showed that they were well-stocked with the finest stuff. We knew that their system for collecting their wounded and burying their dead was efficient, for it was only after the most sudden and rapid advances on our part that we found their dead unburied.

We also captured several big Italian medical dumps. Our doctors found our surgical instruments far superior to the Italians’, but both the Germans and the Italians had bandages and compresses that were better than ours.

There were many kinds of human beings among the wounded in our clearing-station tent during the time I spent there.

We had a couple of slightly wounded Puerto Ricans, one of whom still carried his guitar and sat up on his stretcher and strummed lightly on it. There were full-blooded Indians, and Negroes, and New York Italians, and plain American ranch hands, and Spanish Americans from down Mexico way. There were local Sicilians who had been hit by trucks. There was a captured Italian soldier who said his own officers had shot him in the face for refusing to attack. There were two American aviators who had been fished out of the sea. There were some of our own medics who had been wounded as they worked under shellfire.

There was even one German soldier, who had been shot apparently while trying to escape to Italy in a small boat. He was young, thin, scared to death, and objected furiously to being given a shot of morphine. He seemed to think we were torturing him. When he finally discovered he was being treated exactly like everybody else, his amazement grew. I could see bewilderment and gratitude in his face when the wardboys brought him water and then food. And when at last the chaplain, making his morning rounds, gave him cigarettes, candy, tooth powder and soap, the same as all the rest, he sat up grinning and played with them as though he were a child on Christmas morning. It took him five minutes to find out how to get the cellophane wrapper off his pack of cigarettes, and our whole tent stopped to watch in amusement.

Some of the wounded were sick at the stomach. One tough-looking New York Italian, faint with malaria, tried to crawl outside the tent to be sick but passed out cold on the way. He was lying there on the ground in his drawers, yellow as death, when we noticed him. He was carried back, and ten minutes later was all over his sudden attack and as chipper as anybody.

Other men were as hungry as bears. Still others couldn’t eat a bite. One fellow, with his shattered arm sticking up at right angles in its metal rack, gobbled chicken-noodle soup which a wardboy fed him while the doctor punched and probed at his other arm to insert the big needle that feeds blood plasma.

That front-line clearing station was made up of doctors and men who were ordinary, normal people back home. The station commandant was Captain Carl Carrico of 2408 Reba Drive, Houston, Texas. His wife and eight-year-old boy were in Houston. He was a slow, friendly man, speckled all over with big red freckles. He took his turn at surgery along with the others, usually wearing coveralls. The other surgeons were Captain Carson Oglesbee, of Muskogee, Oklahoma, Captain Leander Powers, of Savannah, Georgia, Captain William Dugan, of Hamburg, New York, and Lieutenant Michael de Giorgio, New York. The station’s medical doctor was Captain Joe Doran, of Iowa City, and the dentist was Captain Leonard Cheek, of Ada, Oklahoma.

These men lived a rough-and-tumble life. They slept on the ground, worked ghastly hours, were sometimes under fire, and handled a flow of wounded that would sicken and dishearten a person less immune to it. Time and again as I lay in my tent I heard wounded soldiers discussing among themselves the wonderful treatment they had had at the hands of the medics. They’ll get little glory back home when it’s all over, but they had some recompense right there in the gratitude of the men they treated.