A Regimental Surgeon by Robert Valentine Dolbey

Author:Robert Valentine Dolbey [Dolbey, Robert Valentine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, War/Military, POW, Western Front, Biographical, WWI, Medical
Published: 1917-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IV

IN GERMAN HANDS

In La Bassée I was separated from my wounded and my orderlies and taken to the dressing station of the 120th regiment, installed in a café in the main street of the town. But there was no sign of camaraderie on the part of my German confreres to me. This puzzled me at first; for in medicine and surgery there are supposed to be no frontiers, no international boundaries; later on, of course, I got to know that the German doctors and nurses behaved most vilely towards our wounded and prisoners.

I was hungry, and I did not mind telling them so. A small steak of horseflesh was eventually brought to me and some beer, and I was graciously permitted to occupy a corner of a table, over the rest of which a wounded German major sprawled. He finished his meal in silence, rapped his empty beer mug on the table, and said in excellent English, "I am wounded, you see, and by a dum-dum bullet; what swine you English are! "This I denied with heat, and soon we had an excited audience. Each of them kept repeating stories of his personal knowledge of dumdum bullets being discovered on English prisoners; and of the wounds which they all were certain were made by explosive bullets. Out they rushed me to some houses to see the wounds caused by explosive bullets, the existence of which I had denied. They showed me five or six men with big lacerated exit wounds. "Show me my own wounded," I said, "and I can show you the counterpart of every wound like this in them." So to a dirty house we went; and, sure enough, there were our English wounded lying on the bare floor, and by great good fortune exhibiting just as bad wounds as those existing among the Germans. Our men were frightened, but were comforted by seeing me. To those who were in dire need, and they were many, I gave the last of my morphia. When I suggested that they might, at least, have mattresses, the senior German doctor said, decidedly, No!—they were lucky to be alive after all their countrymen had done. Back in the café the argument was renewed. I told the wounded major, the only reasonable one among them (the less militant and non-combatant branches of the German service are always the most savage), the reason of all this talk of dum-dum bullets. All this misunderstanding about explosive ammunition, I said, lay in the pointed Spitz bullet that we had copied from the Germans themselves. We had no dum-dums; they could believe it or not, as they liked. I had seen hundreds of rounds of ammunition poured out on the floor of very many dressing stations. That was the order with the English; no ammunition in hospitals or ambulances. To do the major justice, he did not believe it, and said so without ceremony. The whole trouble, I went on, lay in the fact that we

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