CHAPTER III
THE HOSPITAL IN THE HÔTEL CLARIDGE IS OPENED
The second morning in Paris found the Corps busily engaged at the Hôtel Claridge. There was a great deal of cleaning to do and many arrangements to make before the place would be habitable. In the centre of the building was a handsome paved hall with a many-coloured marble table and enormous glass chandeliers. Out of this four good-sized salons opened, and it was in these that wards were first arranged.
The salons were only divided from one another by plate glass; and some degree of privacy is necessary for a ward. Doctors and nurses alike put on aprons and rolled up their sleeves, and while some cleaned the whitening off the glass, the others pasted the lower part over with white paper. With help from the Belgian refugees, who were lodged on the seventh story, the floors were cleaned and polished, beds were put up and order began to be evolved.
The ladies’ cloakroom, with its pavement, its hot-water supply and basins, was converted into the operating theatre. A gas steriliser and a powerful electric light were fixed in it. Though small, it proved serviceable and well equipped.
The cleaning was sufficiently advanced to allow of the Corps moving into its quarters on the first floor next day, and they spent the morning carrying bedding and furniture down to the wards. These at once began to have a professional look, and by concentrating on two wards they were successful in getting fifty beds prepared for patients by the evening.
The work of preparation was at its height when a doctor from the American hospital walked in. Upon the outbreak of the war, the American colony in Paris had organised their fine hospital in the Lycée at Neuilly and had established a fleet of ambulances. Their ambulances enabled them to carry hundreds of men from the fighting line in to Paris. Both French and British wounded were in terrible straits; for there was no organised motor transport service, and the Armies depended on the railways for the removal of the sick and injured. The long delays and the conditions under which the men lay whilst waiting for removal were fatal, and the American service was the means of saving numbers of lives.
When trains were available the wounded were packed into them and despatched to distant places in the interior. As they passed Paris, those who were so severely wounded that they were unlikely to survive a long journey were left at the stations on the Circle Railway round the city. There they would lie on straw or sacks, waiting for friendly ambulances to come out and bring them in.
In those first weeks there was no system of communication between the hospitals and the stations; the French ambulances were small and bad, and the British had none available for Paris. The matter depended largely upon individual effort, and the ambulances of the American and other voluntary hospitals played a devoted and humanitarian part.
The doctor from Neuilly was in charge of the ambulance service. The American hospital was already very full of French and British, but, in response to a message which he had received, he was sending out his cars that day, and he hoped that there might be beds ready for some of the cases at ‘Claridge’s.’
‘How many can you take?’ he asked.
‘We can take twenty-four this afternoon and another twenty-six to-night,’ replied Dr. Murray, well knowing that the baggage was still at the station, and conscious of the expression on the faces of those who heard her.
‘Good! Will you take officers?’ he said.
‘Yes. We have a ward for officers,’ she answered, remembering for the first time that officers get wounded as well as men, and that no special pyjamas or cambric handkerchiefs had been included in the equipment!
‘Well, I shall bring officers,’ he said; ‘British ladies are the right people to look after British officers.’ And remarking that he only brought in severe cases, and that they would all need immediate operations, he left the stall to face the inadequacy of their preparations from the officer’s point of view.
‘At any rate, they’ll have lovely beds, if nothing else,’ Orderly Campbell remarked, with a reassuring laugh.
Fortunately, a notice had come from the Railway Company that morning to say that the baggage was at the station, and Orderly Hodgson had started early to retrieve it. She spent hours dealing with the intricate formalities required by the Company and finding transport for the baggage; but she stuck to it resolutely, and drove in triumph to the door with it a few minutes before the first ambulance full of wounded arrived. The stretchers and the packing cases were carried into the hall side by side, and while the nurses and surgeons cared for the patients, the orderlies unpacked the equipment.
As those first stretchers with their weary burdens were carried in, a thrill of pity and dismay ran through the women who saw them. The mud-stained khaki and the unshaven faces spoke to them no less than the wounded limbs and shattered nerves. Here, for the first time, they touched the wastage and the desolation of war. In every wounded man they saw some other woman’s husband or son, and the thought of those other women made a double claim on their energy and sympathy. The battered, inarticulate, suffering men who lay there needed service, and they braced themselves for the work before them.
Organisation developed automatically: nurses for night duty were sent to rest; the theatre sister began to sterilise; chloroform, instruments, drugs and dressings were produced and distributed.
Late in the afternoon a message from the Chief Surgeon was brought from the wards:
‘Dr. Anderson wishes to know if the theatre is ready and if she can operate to-night.’
‘It is ready now,’ was the answer.
And the surgeons operated till a late hour that night.
The hospital was a smooth-running concern by the end of the week. Nurses and patients had settled down in the wards; work in the operating theatre was going well; and though it was far from perfect in all its details, the comfort of the officers and men was assured, and their contentment and satisfaction with their surroundings were very pleasant to see.