a big city hospital is what we saw, and worked on, that night. Compound fractures,
limbs shattered to uselessness, burns – horrible burns. If the burns weren’t too bad
we slathered them with a gel that would not be seen here for centuries, put
dressings over the affected areas, and had them carried outside by civil defence
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stretcher bearers. The worst cases were carried in the other direction by Cas and
Pol – behind that curtain, through a Burroughs-Carter-Libby gate, to Ira Johnson
Hospital in Boondock, and (for burn cases) shifted again to Jane Culver Burroughs
Memorial Hospital in Beulahland, there to spend days or weeks in healing, then to be
returned to Coventry at `All Clear’ this same night.
All of our casualties were civilians, mostly women, children, and old men. The only
military (so far as I know) around or in Coventry were Territorials manning AA guns.
They had their own medical set-up. I suppose that in London a first-aid station such
as ours would probably be in the underground. Coventry had no tube trains; this aid
station was merely sandbags out in the open but it was safer, perhaps, than it would
have been in a building – one that might burn over it. I’m not criticising.
Everything about their civil defence had a make-do quality about it, a people with
their backs to the wall, fighting gallantly with whatever they had.
In our aid station we had three tables, operating tables by courtesy, in fact plain
wooden tables with the paint scrubbed right off them between raids. Father was using
the one nearest the entrance; Woodrow was using the one nearest the curtain; the
middle one was used by an elderly Englishman who was apparently a regular for this
aid station: Mr Pratt, a local veterinary surgeon, assisted by his wife, `Harry’ for
Harriet. Mrs Pratt had unkind things to say about the Germans during the lulls but
was more interested in talking about the cinema. Had I ever met Clark Gable? Gary
Cooper? Ronald Colman? Having established that I knew no one of any importance she
quit trying to draw me out. But she agreed with her husband when he said it was
decent of us Yanks to come over and help out… but when were the States going to
come into the War?
I said that I did not know.
Father spoke up. `Don’t bother the Sister, Mr Pratt. We’ll be along a bit late, just
like your Mr Chamberlain. In the meantime please be polite to those of us who are
here and helping.’
‘No offence meant, Mr Johnson.’
`And none taken, Mr Pratt. Clamp!’
(Mrs Pratt was as good an operating nurse as I’ve ever seen. She was always ready
with what her husband needed without his asking for it – long practice together, I
suppose. She had fetched the instruments he used; I assume that they were the tools
of his animal practice. That might bother some people; to me it made sense.)
Mr Pratt was at the table that we had expected would be used by Jubal and Jill. (Our
research on fine details was less than perfect, since it came from questioning
people after the War was over.) So Jubal went out into the anteroom where the
wounded waited and worked on triage, tagging the cases Cas and Pol were to carry
through to Boondock – the ones who would otherwise have been allowed to die
untreated, as being beyond hope. Jill gave a hand to both Dagmar and me, especially
with anaesthesia, such as it was.
Anaesthesia had been a subject of much discussion at our Potemkin Village drill. It
was bad enough to show up in the twentieth century with anachronistic surgical
instruments… but Boondock anaesthetic gear and procedures? Impossible!
Galahad decided on pressure injectors supplying metered amounts of `neomorphine’ (as
good a name as any – a drug not available in the twentieth century). Jill moved
around the station and the anteroom, injecting the damaged and the burned and
thereby left Dagmar and me with our hands free for surgery assistance. She made one
try at helping Mrs Pratt but was waved away – Mrs Pratt was using something I had