Letters From the Front

Dated:

Interesting details of the work of No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill) have been received in a letter from Lieutenant Colonel J. M. Elder of Montréal, dated France, September 14. The letter in part, reads:

We have been now at work for some time, not hard at work, tho by fits and starts it is so. The wounded come down to us by train (a convoy), which usually gets here after midnight. The numbers in the convoy vary from 50 to 115. Last night we got 81, and so perfect is the organization for handling these poor fellows that they were all in bed and settled for the night inside of one hour! Our men are divided into two groups for this work, and they take alternate convoys.

This morning I have before me a list of 10 operations, and this afternoon there will be more. Don't think I do all this work. I have excellent men on my staff, and my chief duty is to organize and direct; but to do this for several hundred cases takes time and attention. But our results are splendid. We have lost but two cases out of a total of about 800.

Our wards are like a glimpse of Oriental magnificence - large, lofty, multicolored Indian Durbar tents, with inner lining running down to the floor, which leaves a corridor running around the inner space. How large some of the tents are you will appreciate when I tell you that inside the inner covering we have space for 40 beds in each tent.

When the tents are smaller, we put 3 to 5 in a row, end to end, and lash them together, making a continuous, long corridor or of 50 beds. And you should see how our nurses have worked out the color scheme of the tents in fitting up their wards! All sorts and shapes of packing cases have been cunningly covered with every shade, and tint of chintz, and converted into ward cupboards, which make the most expensive for furniture look cheap and nasty by comparison. And all at the expense of a few francs in money! But how much labor and ingenuity was involved on the part of the nurses, they alone know. As a result of all this our wards have become a “show” place for visitors, which is very flattering, but not always convenient.

In the operating room I have a large room, where four tables are busy at one time, besides another smaller room for clean cases. Military injuries (and as a consequence military surgery), are quite different from that to which we have been accustomed in civil life, but the same principles govern all, and as we are all men of considerable experience, we seem to have, almost unconsciously, shaken down into our new work; and our efforts are backed up by the best nursing on the part of the sisters, and the best catering on the part of the quartermaster (Captain Law) and his staff, that I have ever seen in any hospital, not even excepting our hospitals in Montréal, which are second to none in the world, so far as essentials go. And I would like, also, to say very large word of praise for the X-ray department, under the care of Captains. Pirie and Wilkins, without whose excellent plates the daily hunt for shrapnel and bullet in these poor soldiers cannot be done as it is. They are able to localize for the surgeons, to a fraction of an inch the exact position of these foreign bodies, and their removal is a comparatively simple matter, and can be done with a minimum of shock to the patient. How busy they are at this work you can estimate when I tell you that they sometimes take as many as 95 X-ray plates in a single day.

What impresses us more than anything else is the fine, uncomplaining, often cheerful, spirit of the patients. It is wonderful! Men with the most ghastly wounds never uttering a sound of complaint, and so grateful for any attention. They except all with such stoical: indifference to pain and such determination to do their “bit” as well as they can, that you can't help liking them. I said to a poor Irish soldier on my rounds yesterday morning: “Well, what's the matter with you my man?” “Shrapnel, sor”, was the reply. “A shell burst in the trench. Me mates in Paradise, sor”. And all in the most matter-of-fact tone, as though relating an everyday occurrence, as indeed he was. We have all been made very happy during the past week by a visit from our old friend Sir William Osler, who has been camping with us in order to see our work and get experience at first hand. It would be well if all man in authority over us did likewise.

We expect to have a few huts ready for the winter, but mostly we will have to carry on in tents as at present, and just how they will stand up to the gales which accompany the equinox we are in doubt. As regards heating, we think that small oil stoves will solve that difficulty. But the chill and fog from the adjoining ocean is bound to be bad. I fear our drying house will be overtaxed. But it is poor policy, on active service, to anticipate trouble. How often it never comes at all! And even when it does come, it is seldom as bad as our foolish imaginations pictured at. The old Scotch motto, “Do thy Darg”, is particularly applicable to men, who know little, believe less. You people in Canada, I am sure, hear more news and are in a better position to judge of the general progress of the war than we are. We are too near it to judge of more than our immediate surroundings, which is an infinitesimal bit of the whole. It is a microscope, not a telescope we are gazing through. But be the result what it may, we are here, God willing, to see it through; and we all feel that you would all have us to do so, much as you would like to see us back, and glad as we would all be, were it satisfactorily ended, to be back with you again.