We went into one room containing only men suffering from chest wounds,
who coughed and wheezed and constantly fought off the swarming flies
that assailed them, and into another room given over entirely to
brutally abbreviated human fragments--fractional parts of men who had
lost their arms or legs. On the far mattress against the wall lay a
little pale German with his legs gone below the knees, who smiled upward
at the ceiling and was quite chipper.
"A wonderful man, that little chap," said one of the surgeons to me.
"When they first brought him here two weeks ago I said to him: 'It's
hard on you that you should lose both your feet,' and he looked up at me
and grinned and said: 'Herr Doctor, it might have been worse. It might
have been my hands--and me a tailor by trade!'"
This surgeon told us he had an American wife, and he asked me to bear a
message for him to his wife's people in the States. So if these lines
should come to the notice of Mrs. Rosamond Harris, who lives at
Hinesburg, Vermont, she may know that her son-in-law, Doctor Schilling,
was at last accounts very busy and very well, although coated with white
dust--face, head and eyebrows--so that he reminded me of a clown in a
pantomime, and dyed as to his hands with iodine to an extent that made
his fingers look like pieces of well-cured meerschaum.
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