The American public has just heard of Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, the woman doctor who was mobilized and sent to the front by mistake, and who proved herself so fearless and useful that she was kept there for two years amid bursting shells and rattling mitrailleuses. She is being cited spectacularly as a dramatic proof that women can take men’s parts, and do men’s work, and know the man’s joy of being useful. But she is much more than a woman doing a man’s work. She is a human being of the highest type, giving to her country the highest sort of service, and remaining normal, sane, and well-balanced. Long before the tornado of the war burst over the world, Paris knew her in many varying phases which now, as we look back, we see to have been the unconscious preparation for the hour of crisis. Personally I knew of her, casually, as the public-spirited young doctor who[40] was attached to the Paris lycée where my children go to school, and who was pushing the “fresh-air” movement for the city poor. People who met her in a social way knew her as an attractive woman with a well-proportioned figure, lovely hair, and clear brown eyes, whom one met once or twice a week at the theater or in the homes of mutual friends, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh and cheerful, chatting talk. Other people who saw her every morning in her laboratory garb, serious, intent, concentrated, knew her as one of those scientific investigators who can not rest while the horrible riddle of cancer is unsolved.
Those who saw her in the afternoon among the swarming sick and poor of the clinique of the great Beaujon Hospital, knew her as one of those lovers of their kind who can not rest as long as the horrible apathy of public opinion about tuberculosis continues. People who investigated cures for city ills and who went to visit the model tenement house for the very poor, near the St. Ouen gate of Paris, knew her as the originator and planner of that admirable enterprise,[41] whose energy and forcefulness saw it financed and brought to practical existence. Observers who knew her in the big international Feminist Conferences in European capitals, saw an alert, upright, quick-eyed Parisienne, whose pretty hats showed no sign of the erudition of the head under them. Friends knew her as the gently bred woman who, although driven by no material necessity, renounced the easy, sheltered, comfortable life of the home-keeping woman for an incessant, beneficent activity, the well-ordered regularity of which alone kept it from breaking down her none too robust health. And those intimates who saw her in her home, saw her the most loved of sisters and daughters, the most devoted of mothers, adored by the little son to whom she has been father and mother ever since he was four years old.
No one dreamed of war, but if the very day and hour had been known for years, Dr. Girard-Mangin could hardly have prepared herself more completely for the ordeal. Unconsciously she had “trained” for it, as the runner trains for his race. She was not very strong, slightly built,[42] with some serious constitutional weakening, but she filled every day full to the brim with exacting and fatiguing work. She had two great factors in her favor. One of them was that enviable gift which Nature gives occasionally to remarkable people, the capacity to live with very little sleep. The other is even more noteworthy in a doctor—in whom close acquaintance with the laws of health seems often to breed contempt.
Dr. Girard-Mangin is that rare bird, a doctor who believes profoundly, seriously, in the advice which she gives to others, in the importance of those simple, humdrum laws of daily health which only very extraordinary people have the strength of mind to obey. Never, never, she says, as though it were a matter of course, has she allowed fatigue, or overoccupation, or inertia, or boredom to interfere with her early morning deep-breathing and physical exercises, and her tonic cold bath. Never, never, no matter how long or exhausting the day, has she rolled into bed, dead beat, too tired to go through the simple processes of the toilet, which make sleep so much more refreshing. No matter how absorbed[43] in her work, she has always taken the time at regular intervals to relax, to chat sociably with quite ordinary people, to go to the theater, to hear music. She has always breakfasted and lunched with her little boy, has steered him through his spelling and arithmetic, has gone on walks with him, has been his comrade and “pal.” This has been as good for her as for him, naturally. Every summer she has had the courageous good sense to take a vacation in the country. In short, she is a doctor who takes to her own heart the advice about rational life which doctors so often reserve for their patients.
To this woman, tempered to a steel-like strength by self-imposed discipline and by a regular, well-ordered life, came the great summons. And it found her ready to the last nerve in her strong, delicate little hand. You have read, probably, how on that “Day of Doom” when France called out her men, a concierge received, among mobilization papers for all the men in the big apartment house, one sending Dr. Girard-Mangin (presumably also a man, by the name) out to a military hospital in the Vosges[44] mountains. The notice of mobilization was handed to a woman, a patriotic woman who long ago had heard the call to fight for France’s best interests. She had seen her brother go before her into the fighting ranks and she followed him, into danger and service. She said a quick good-by to her friends, to her parents, to her son, her only child, a fine boy of fourteen then, from whom she had never before been separated.
Will every mother who reads these lines stop here and think what this means?
There is no need to repeat in detail here what has already been told of the first three months of her service—her arrival at the field hospital, disorganized, submerged by the terrible, ever-renewed flood of wounded men, of the astonishment of the doctor in charge. “What, a woman! This is no place for a woman. But, good God! if you know anything about surgery, roll up your sleeves and stay!”
There she stayed for three months, those blasting first three months of the war, when French people put forth undreamed-of strength to meet a crisis of undreamed-of horror. Out there in[45] that distant military hospital, toiling incessantly in great heat, with insufficient supplies, bearing the mental and moral shock of the first encounter with the incredible miseries of war, that modern, highly organized woman, separated for the first time from her family, from her child, fearing everything for them and for her country, had no word, no tidings whatever, till the 28th of August. Then no knowledge of her son, of her parents, only a notice that the Government had retreated from Paris to Bordeaux! Comforting news that, for the first! Next they knew that Rheims was taken. Then one of the men whose wounds she dressed told her that he had been able to see the Eiffel Tower from where he fell. This sounded as though the next news could be nothing but the German entry into Paris.
All France throbbed with straining, despairing effort, far beyond its normal strength, during those first three months; and to do the man’s part she took, the delicate woman doctor, laboring incessantly among the bleeding wrecks of human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull her through.
[46]Then the wild period of fury and haste and nervous, emotional exaltation passed, and France faced another ordeal, harder for her temperament even than the first fierce onset of the unequal struggle—the long period of patient endurance of the unendurable. The miracle of the Marne had been wrought; Paris was saved; the sting and stimulant of immediate, deadly danger was past; the fatigue from the supernatural effort of those first months dimmed every eye, deadened all nerves. Then France tapped another reservoir of national strength and began patiently, constructively to “organize” the war. And that daughter of France bent her energies to help in this need, as in the first.
A rough rearrangement of competences was attempted everywhere on the front. Dentists no longer dug trenches, bakers were set to baking instead of currying horses, and expert telegraphers stopped making ineffectual efforts to cook. It came out then that the real specialty of the valiant little woman doctor who had been doing such fine work in the operating-room was not surgery at all. “I’m no surgeon, you[47] know!” she says, and leaves it to her friends to tell you of the extraordinary record of her efficiency in that field, the low percentage of losses in her surgical cases. If you mention this, she says, “Ah, that’s just because I’m not a born surgeon. I have to take very special care of my cases to be equal to the job.” It was discovered that her great specialty was contagious diseases. There was great need for a specialist of that sort out at Verdun, where, alas! a typhoid epidemic had broken out. This was before the extra precautions about inoculations, which were taken later.
Dr. Girard-Mangin was sent to Verdun on November 1st, 1914, and was there steadily for more than a year, until the 28th of February, 1916. She found her sick men on mattresses, in tents, on such low ground that they were often literally in water. Whenever there was freezing weather, those who cared for them slid about on sheets of ice. Above them, on higher ground, were some rough old barracks, empty, partly remodeled, said to have been left there by the Prussians in 1871. “Why don’t we move the[48] sick up there?” she asked, and was met by all the usual dragging, clogging reasons given by administrative inertia.
The sheds were not ready to occupy; there were no expert carpenters to get them ready; it would be impossible to heat them; no order for the change had come from Headquarters—furthermore, a reason not mentioned, the sheds, being on higher ground, were more exposed to shell-fire. Dr. Girard-Mangin had had some experience with administrative inertia in her struggles for better housing for the poor; and long before the war she had known what it was to put herself voluntarily in danger—the scar from a bad tubercular infection on her hand is the honorable proof of that. She knew that the sick men would be better off in the barracks on higher ground. So she took them there. Just like that.
She was to have the entire care of the typhoid epidemic, and the only help which could be given her was to come from twenty men, absolutely unassorted—such a score as you would gather by walking down any street and picking up the[49] first twenty men you met. There were several farm-laborers, a barber, an accountant, miscellaneous factory hands. The only person remotely approaching a nurse was a man who had had the training for a pharmacist, but as he had never been able to stay sober long enough to take his examinations, you may not be surprised that he was the least useful of them all.
These twenty casually selected human beings went unwillingly up the hill toward the barracks, ironic, mocking, lazy, indifferent, as human beings unelectrified by purpose are apt to be. But, although they did not know it, there marched at their head an iron will, a steel-like purpose, and an intelligence which was invincible. They took this to be but a smallish, youngish woman in uniform, and were all in great guffaws at the comic idea of being under her orders.
Of course, to begin with, she did not know one of her men from another, but she studied them closely as they worked, driven along by her direction, setting up the rough camp-stoves, stopping[50] the worst of the holes in the walls, arranging the poor apologies for mattresses, and cutting off the tops of gasoline-cans for heating water—for our woman doctor was asked to take care of several hundred typhoid cases and was not provided with so much as a bowl that would hold water. Presently, as they worked, she noticed that there were but nineteen men there. All day she studied their faces, their bearing, what was written on them for the seeing eye to read. At night, at supper-time, there were twenty men. Those clear brown eyes swept around the circle and pounced on a mild-looking poilu innocently taking his soup with the others.
“Where have you been all day?” she asked him.
He fairly turned pale with astonishment, “Why, how did you—? I’ve been right here, working!” he tried to bluster her down.
“No, you haven’t. You haven’t been here since a quarter past ten this morning,” she assured him.
He hung his head a moment, then looked an ugly defiance. “Well, I’ve been in to Verdun to[51] spend the day with a friend. What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to have you punished for disobeying an officer,” she said promptly, though so little military had been her beneficent life, that she had no more idea than you or I or any other woman would have of what punishment could be given in such a case.
“Officer’s orders!” said the man. “What officer?” All the men laughed.
“I’m your officer,” she said, and went away to telephone to the military authority in charge of such cases.
“I can’t be expected to have discipline if I’m not backed up,” she said. “This is a test case. It’s now or never.”
The answer was a non-com and a guard marching up to the barracks, saluting the military doctor, and, with all due military ceremony, carrying off the offender for a week in prison. Dr. Girard-Mangin laughs still at the recollection of the consternation among the nineteen who were left. “I never had any trouble about discipline, after that,” she says. “Of course[52] there were the utter incompetents to be weeded out. For that I followed the time-honored army custom of sending my worst man whenever the demand from Headquarters came for a good, competent person to be sent to other work! Before long I had reduced the force of nurses to twelve. Those twelve I kept for all the time of my service there, and we parted at the end old friends and tried comrades. I have never lost track of them since. They always write me once in a while, wherever they are.”
As soon as it grew dark enough, that first night, for the ambulances to dash out through the blackness, over the shell-riddled roads to the abris, close to the front, the stricken men began to come in. Before dawn, that very first night, there were fifty-five terrible typhoid cases brought into the bare sheds. Then it was that Dr. Girard-Mangin, working single-handed with her score of crude, untrained helpers, needed all her capacity for going without sleep. Then it was that her men, seeing her at work, stopped laughing because she was a woman and admired her because she was a woman doing wonderful[53] things; then, best of all, forgot that she was a woman, and took her simply for the matchless leader that she is, in the battle against disease. I think it was not wholly the guard, marching away the disobedient man to prison, who was responsible for the fact that our little woman doctor had no further difficulty with discipline.
The condition of the typhoid patients was harrowing beyond words. A man going out with his squad to a front-line trench would be stricken down with fever on arriving. It was impossible for him to return until his squad was relieved and he could be carried to the rear on a comrade’s back. There he was, there he must remain, for the three or four or five days of his squad’s “turn” in the front lines. Can you imagine the condition of a man with typhoid fever, who has lain in a trench in the mud for four days, with no shelter from the rain or snow but an overcoat spread over him, with no care beyond an occasional drink of water from a comrade’s flask? For your own sake I hope you can not imagine it. And I will not go into details. Enough to say that such men were[54] brought in by the tens, by the twenties, by the fifties, filthy beyond words, at the limit of exhaustion, out of their heads with weakness and fever and horror.
And there to stem that black tide of human misery stands this little upright, active, valiant, twentieth-century woman. I think, although we are not of her nation, we may well be proud of her as a fellow-being who had voluntarily renounced ease to choose the life which had made her fit to cope with the crisis of that night—and of the more than four hundred days and nights following. For cope with it she did, competently, resolutely, successfully. “Oh yes, we gave them cold baths,” she says, when you ask for details. “We managed somehow. They had all the right treatment, cold baths, wet packs, injections, the right food—everything very primitive at first, of course, but everything you ever do for typhoid anywhere. Our percentage of losses was very low always.”
“But how? How? How did you manage?” you ask.
“Oh, at the beginning everything was very[55] rough. We had only one portable galvanized-iron bathtub. Since they were all so badly infected, there was less danger in bathing them all in the same tub than in not fighting the fever that way. And then, just as soon as I could reach the outside world by letter, I clamored for more, and they were sent.”
“But how could you, single-handed, give cold baths to so many men? It’s a difficult matter, giving a cold bath to a typhoid patient.”
“I wasn’t single-handed. I had my twelve soldier-nurses.”
“‘Nurses,’ you say! Farm-laborers, accountants, barbers, drunken druggists!”
“But I got rid of that good-for-nothing pharmacist at once! And the others—the twelve good ones—they learned what to do. They learned how to give the simple remedies. They learned how to do the other things enough to give me a report—how to take temperatures, how to give the baths at the right degree for the right time, how to take the pulse.”
“How could they learn all that?” you ask, amazed.
[56]“I taught them,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, slightly surprised, in the simplest, most matter-of-fact tone.
You look past her, out there to that hand-to-hand struggle with death which was carried on by the one indomitable will and the one well-trained mind, strong enough not only to animate this woman’s body before you, but those other bodies and ignorant, indocile minds.
“They did it very well, too,” she assures you, and you do not doubt her.
That woman could teach anybody to do anything.
You come back to details. “But how could you get enough water and heat it for so many baths, on just those rough, small, heating-stoves?”
“Well, we were at it all the time, practically, day and night. We cut the tops off those big gasoline-cans the automobilists use, and stood one on every stove up and down the barracks. There wasn’t a moment when water wasn’t being heated, or used, or carried away.”
“What could you do about intestinal hemorrhages?”[57] you ask. “You must have had many, with such advanced cases. Your farm-hand nurses couldn’t——”
“I never tried to teach them how to handle any real crisis, only to recognize it when it came, and go quickly to fetch me. I taught them to watch carefully and at the first sign of blood on their patients’ clothing or on the mattress, to take the knapsack out from under the sick man’s head—they had no other pillow, of course—to lay him down flat, and then to run and call me, from wherever I was.”
“You must have had almost no sleep at all.”
“That was the greatest help I had, being able to get along on little sleep. And I got more work out of my helpers than any man could, for they were ashamed to ask to sleep or rest, seeing that a woman, half their size, could still keep going.”
“But how about your famous hygienic regularity, the morning exercises and cold baths and——”
“Oh, as soon as I saw I was in for a long period of regular service, I took the greatest[58] care to go on with all the things which keep one fit for regular service.”
“Morning tubs?”
“Yes, morning tubs! I slept—what time I had to sleep—in an abandoned peasant’s house in an evacuated village near the hospital. I didn’t take any of the downstairs rooms because people are likely to walk right into an abandoned house, and part of the time there were soldiers quartered in the village. Then there was usually somebody in the house with me. The other times I had it all to myself. I took a room on the second floor. It happened to have a flight of steps leading up to it, and another one going out of it into the attic. Of course, I never had any heat, and the drafts from those two open stairways—well, it was like sleeping in the middle of a city square. Sometimes I used to take down a bottle filled with hot water, but the bed was so cold that it was almost instantly chilled. Many a time I have gone to sleep, all curled up in a ball, holding my feet in my hands, because they were so cold, and wakened to find them still as icy. Oh, the cold! That is the worst enemy[59] of all at the front, the most wearing, the most demoralizing, the most dehumanizing, because it lasts so. With other things—hunger, wounds, danger—either it kills you, or it passes. But the cold is always there.”
She loses herself for a moment in brooding recollection and you wonder if Jeanne d’Arc ever did anything braver for her country than did this delicate, stout-hearted modern woman, sleeping alone for months and months in bitter cold in a deserted house in a deserted village.
She comes back to the present. “And it was there that I took my morning tubs!” she says with an amused smile. “Of course the water froze hard into a solid lump. So I put carbonate de potasse into it. This not only kept it from freezing, but made it alkaline, so that it was an excellent detergent and stimulant to the skin. I assure you, after a night in which I had been incessantly called from one bed to another, when I felt very much done-up, my cold sponge-bath in that water was like a resurrection. I was made over. Then, of course, no matter how busy I was, I took care of my feet—changed my[60] stockings and shoes every day. Feet are one’s weakest point in a long pull like that.”
You venture to remark about a slight limp noticeable when she walks. “Yes, it comes from a frozen foot—I have to admit it. But it’s really not my fault. That was later, at the time of the battle at Verdun. There are always brief crises, when you have to give your all and not stop to think. I went nine days then without once taking off my shoes. I hadn’t my other pair by that time. The Boches had them, probably.”
But we have not come to that terrific epic, as yet. Before that second tornado burst over the heads of the French and of our woman doctor, there was a long, hard, dull period of four hundred and seventy days of continuous service—for Dr. Girard-Mangin, being a pioneer woman, felt in honor bound to do more than a man would do. In the three years and more of her war service, she has had just three weeks’ furlough, seven days out of every year to see her son, to see her family, to relax. Every other day of that long procession of days, she has been on[61] duty, active, and, as befits a woman, constructively active.
She did not continue resignedly to struggle with tin-can drinking-cups, and one bathtub for two hundred men. Neither did she rely on the proverbially slow mills of the Government to grind her out the necessary supplies. She was not only the army doctor in charge of the contagious cases in the big sanitary section and hospital near Verdun, she was also a figure of international importance, the Présidente of the Hygiene Department of the Conseil International des Femmes—her predecessor had been Lady Aberdeen; she was high in honor at the big Beaujon Hospital in Paris; she was well-known to the charitable world in the Society for Hygienic Lodgings for the poor, which owed so much to her; and she had a wide circle of friends everywhere. The little aide major sent out from her bare shed-hospital, lacking in everything, a clarion call for help for her sick men. With years of experience in organization back of her, she set to work and, in the midst of the fury of destruction all about her, built up, item by item,[62] a little corner of order and competent activity. In November, 1914, there was nothing but a windswept shed, with straw pallets and tin-can utensils. By June of the next year you would have found, if you had had the courage to go within two kilometers of the front line, a very well-appointed contagious ward of a military hospital, where nothing was lacking for the men’s comfort—except a certainty that the whole thing might not be blown to pieces by a shell. And by the end of 1915, when there began to be talk of a great German drive against Verdun, the men under our doctor’s supervision had as good care as they could have had anywhere, with laboratory and sterilizing facilities—everything. Dr. Girard-Mangin knew what was the best to be had in hospitals and she did not rest until somehow, Aladdin-like, she had made it to blossom, out there in danger and desolation.
All during January of 1916 there was terrific tension along that front. The monster German offensive against Verdun was in the air. The month of January passed with desperate slowness, such intent, apprehensive suspense being[63] torturing for human nerves, especially tired human nerves which had already been through a long, severe period of trial.
Everybody showed signs of nervousness. Our little doctor stuck faithfully to her bedrock principles of health, changed her shoes and stockings every day, took her Spartan baths and rub-downs in her colder-than-freezing water, went through her deep-breathing and her setting-up exercises every morning. By such merely feminine reliance on everyday sanity in life, she kept herself in excellent physical shape, and did not succumb to the temptation,............