Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... FIRST DAYS AT THE HOSPITAL For six weeks after the declaration of war my friend and I went every morning to the big yellow Hospital of St. George. I don't think I shall ever forget the first morning, when Baroness Wrangel, leading us through dim corridors, brought us to the ambulance ward, where we were to start work, and introduced us to the sister in charge. It was a big, light room divided into two separate partitions for men and women. High glass windows gave out into the walled-in, untidy courtyard of the hospital, low wooden benches stood against the walls and all down the centre of the room. At one end stood a plain deal table with instruments and a big metal dish of boiling water, on another table stood jars of ointments and liniments and big cases of bandages. And on all the wooden benches a crowd of men, women, children, babies--a throng of humanity, poor, dirty, suffering, with dumb, patient eyes that watched the sisters come and go, and looked with terror on all that paraphernalia of instruments, bandages, and medicines which to them meant nothing but torture unknown and terrible, whose healing power they trusted in but could not understand. At that time J knew hardly a word of Russian, I had never been in a hospital before, I had never seen anything worse than, perhaps, a cut finger. My first feeling when I stood in the middle of all that suffering was one of sheer, helpless despair, and I think I very nearly just sat down on that stone floor and burst into tears. The sister in charge, however, saved me from disgracing myself in this way by thrusting a bundle of bandages, cotton-wool, and a pot of ointment into my hands and telling me to hold them for her while she attended to a man with an abscess in his ear. Not in the...