The Backwash of War by Ellen N. La Motte

Author:Ellen N. La Motte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

1. The strategically positioned Belgian town of Ypres was the site of three major battles during World War I.

2. Waiting room.

3. Ypres was in the British sector of the battlefield.

4. The Triple Entente alliance—the French Republic, British Empire, and Russian Empire—fought against the Central Powers.

5. Mary Borden, the hospital’s director, had a husband and three young daughters living in England.

6. These dirty Belgians.

The Interval

As an orderly, Erard wasn’t much good.

He never waited upon the patients if he could help it, and when he couldn’t help it, he was so disagreeable that they wished they had not asked him for things. The newcomers, who had been in the hospital only a few days, used to think he was deaf, since he failed to hear their requests, and they did not like to yell at him, out of consideration for their comrades in the adjoining beds. Nor was he a success at sweeping the ward, since he did it with the broom in one hand and a copy of the Petit Parisien1 in the other—in fact, when he sat down on a bed away at the end and frankly gave himself up to a two-year-old copy of Le Rire,2 sent out with a lot of old magazines for the patients, he was no less effective than when he sulkily worked. There was just one thing he liked and did well, and that was to watch for the Generals. He was an expert in recognizing them when they were as yet a long way off. He used to slouch against the window panes and keep a keen eye upon the trottoir on such days or at such hours as the Generals were likely to appear. Upon catching sight of the oak-leaves in the distance, he would at once notify the ward, so that the orderlies and the nurse could tidy up things before the General made rounds. He had a very keen eye for oak-leaves—the golden oak-leaves on the General’s képi3—and he never by any chance gave a false alarm or mistook a colonel in the distance, and so put us to tidying up unnecessarily. He did not help with the work of course, but continued leaning against the window, reporting the General’s progress up the trottoir—that he had now gone into Salle III.—that he had left Salle III. and was conversing outside Salle II.—that he was now, positively, on his way up the incline leading into Salle I., and would be upon us any minute. Sometimes the General lingered unnecessarily long on the incline, the wooden slope leading up to the ward, in which case he was not visible from the window, and Erard would amuse us by regretting that he had no periscope for the transom over the door.

There were two Generals who visited the hospital. The big General, the important one, the Commander of the region, who was always beautiful to look upon in his tight, well-fitting black jacket, trimmed with astrakhan,4 who came from his limousine with a Normandy stick dangling from his wrist, and who wore spotless, clean gloves.

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