The real horrors of war were to be seen in the hospitals, not on the battlefield.
John Glubb, August 1917
As the third battle of Ypres lurched into its third week, another Allied offensive shambled to a bloody halt. Orders were sent round to all officers that because of the proximity of enemy guns, they were not to ride horses close to the front. Too many officers had already been lost and those that remained shouldn’t turn themselves into easy targets. John Glubb, a young lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, ignored the orders. He loved being on horseback. He could cut through the traffic jams that built up behind the lines and find gaps through which supplies could move forward.1 He also thought it was important for him to be seen at the front, without fear, as it gave the men confidence – something in short supply in the third week of August 1917 at Passchendaele. So for almost a week Glubb rode on, day and night, supervising the repair of roads and moving supplies up to the line. He didn’t particularly like his horse, a young mare called Geisha, which shied and whinnied at every little thing, but he was needed everywhere at once and being on horseback was by far the most efficient means of getting around.
On 21 August he was sent to look for a wagonload of equipment that was supposed to be somewhere on the congested Hénin–Saint-Martin-sur-Cojeul road. He had pulled up briefly to lean in through a cab window to ask a lorry driver if he had seen the supplies when a shell exploded nearby, lifting him off Geisha’s back and tossing him high in the air. He later remembered landing slowly back on his horse, before tumbling to the ground. Then he got angry because it felt as if someone had punched him or hit him across the face with a cricket bat. It must have been that bloody horse he never liked, he thought, which had kicked him and cut his face with her shoe.
But it wasn’t Geisha (who was terrified but uninjured, and had galloped for safety as soon as Glubb let go of her reins). Instead he had been injured by the fragments of the shell that had exploded just ahead of him, its metal debris hitting his mouth and neck. He struggled to his feet, trying to pull himself together. He waited for a while to see what would happen next. He realised he had been deafened, but when he managed to stay on his feet he decided to head for the crossroads where, despite all the chaos, he remembered he had seen a medical post in an old cellar. He should be able to get there, he thought. He was surprised that he wasn’t feeling any pain, although there was the weird sound of swishing liquid pumping rhythmically close to his ear: at least his hearing was beginning to return. When he lifted his hand he saw there was blood running down his sleeve, dripping off his fingers.2
The lorry driver to whom Glubb had been talking came running over to the crumpled heap lying in a pool of blood. Another driver came to help, taking Glubb’s arm and putting it over his shoulders, trying not to look at his smashed face. Glubb stuttered some words, but the man didn’t understand. The driver also remembered the medical post in the cellar and together they brought the young officer there.
There was no MO at the dressing station, just an orderly. But three weeks at Passchendaele had provided him with his own medical qualification, so he was perfectly capable of running the post himself. He took Glubb from the lorry driver and helped him lie down on the battered pine table in the middle of the dressing station. He gently turned his head from side to side. He had seen some sights that day, but this face was one of the very worst. The left side of the jaw was all but gone, torn away by the shrapnel from the shell, and there were bits of bone and teeth strewn in the wreckage. Everything below the nose was torn from its moorings, including an artery, from which was pumping fresh red blood just below the ear: this was the swishing sound that Glubb had heard when he was kneeling in the road. At least it told the orderly where to start. Same priority as always: stop the bleeding. He carefully put a bandage in place to plug the torn artery. Glubb could no longer hear the swishing sound of his life draining away. Then the orderly dressed the wound as best he could, covering the debris, holding it in place.
He knew there was nothing more he could do. Glubb had to be taken to a casualty clearing station as soon as possible, but there was no ambulance. Walking was the only option, but the wounded man would never make it on his own. So the orderly made a swift decision: he would close the dressing station and take Glubb to the CCS himself. He helped Glubb off the table and they set off, the younger man leaning on the orderly’s arm, barely capable of registering each step. Along the way they stumbled across another medical dugout. The MO there only needed to look at Glubb to know that he wouldn’t be able to walk much further. The orderly must find an ambulance or Glubb would die; it was a miracle that he was still alive. As luck would have it, there was an ambulance ready to leave for the nearest CCS. The loss of blood was starting to tell and Glubb began to feel cold. What remained of his teeth began to chatter. He still wasn’t in any pain, but feeling his broken jaw and floating teeth was strange and deeply unpleasant. He grunted and pointed at the MO’s notepad. Writing shakily, he asked the MO to let his unit know that he was injured. The MO nodded. When the ambulance pulled away with Glubb in the back, heading for No. 20 CCS at Ficheux, he sent a wire to his battalion saying that Glubb was badly wounded and probably wouldn’t last the day.
But he did last. Thanks to the experienced nurses at No. 20, he lived as long as the next morning, and then long enough to be wheeled into theatre for surgery. Glubb remembered orderlies carrying his stretcher along the muddy paths, and seeing the blue sky and drifting white clouds above him. It would be his last pleasant memory for quite some time. It was always difficult to anaesthetise a facial casualty, and when they used a huge rubber mask to flood his face with ether they had to guess at the right amounts. On the table Glubb began to hallucinate and felt that he was being suffocated. The surgery itself would be even worse. The repair of his jaw was much more difficult than the surgeon had anticipated and Glubb kept stirring awake and needed to be re-anaesthetised. Because of all the movement on the operating table, his tongue kept flopping about, getting in the way of the surgeon’s instruments, so he pinned a rod through it to keep it still. When Glubb came to after the operation he couldn’t believe that the pain was worse than when he went into surgery – and now his tongue was swollen as well. He could hardly breathe, was unable to talk and no longer understood what was happening to him.
When the orderly returned him to his bed in the ward Glubb tried to calm his mind. It was almost impossible. Everything the nurses usually did to make things more comfortable for their patients made his life more intolerable. A gramophone had been set up in the tent, playing jolly tunes all day long. But to Glubb it sounded like incessant tinny scratchings, like an insect stuck in his ear that would not be dislodged. His senses had suddenly been tuned to an excruciating level. Every touch – however kind or gentle – became a burn, every sound a screech. To make things worse, the man in the bed next to him had been injured in the head and screamed gibberish for hours on end.3 Glubb would easily have throttled him, if he had had the strength to get out of bed. His wound kept bleeding, but the nurses were too busy for regular dressing changes, leaving him lying in his own discharge, with its rank smell.
After a couple of days he finally managed to make himself understood through the bandages and gradually his senses returned to their normal state. It helped that he had plenty of visitors. His father, who was stationed nearby, came often, as did his comrades and his CO. His batman took away the clothes he had been wearing when he was hit and did his best to get the bloodstains out so that he would have something to wear for the journey home. Then, almost a week after he had been wounded, orderlies collected him for transportation to the hospital train. But nobody changed his dressings before he left, so he began the next phase of his journey with a set that were already twenty-four hours old.
From then on, Glubb’s journey got worse and worse. It was too complicated to feed him in transit, but he was lying in the train carriage next to the kitchen and could smell food all day and all night. He had never known hunger like it. He wanted to shout at the nurses who walked past him, carrying trays of food, to stop torturing him. The liquids they gave him by dropper were no consolation and nothing like enough. After twelve hours his dressing turned septic, but he was the only one who noticed. The smell of his own infected tissue made him want to weep.4 He tried to call out, but the noise of the train and the cries of the other patients drowned him out. Because he wasn’t on the meal roster, no one stopped by his bunk on a regular basis, and so there he lay, starving and ignored.
The hospital ship that bore him to England wasn’t much better. It was desperately understaffed, and rather than remove and entirely re-dress his wounds, a distracted nurse just added another layer of bandages. By the time they docked at Southampton he had an enormous white turban wrapped round his head. He looked like no other casualty on the boat, and a crowd gathered to watch as he was unloaded. When he was left on the dock for a while, surrounded by a silent crowd of spectators, Glubb could see the blue sky overhead, but at least this time it was English sky. Then there was no room on the hospital trains that ran directly between the coast and the London mainline stations, so he was berthed in a window seat in an ambulance carriage hitched up behind an ordinary passenger train, stopping at all its regular stations. At every single stop his turban drew a crowd. He couldn’t move away from the window and the attention, so he closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
He woke to find himself on a stretcher at Victoria Station, looking up to see the huge iron roof above him, its cavern filled with shouting and steam. Then the face of a nurse in a dark-blue cape appeared overhead. She explained that she was from the London Ambulance Column and would be taking him to the 3rd London General Hospital in Wandsworth. He did his best to nod under his turban. It was a beautiful evening, and she would leave the back doors of the ambulance open, so that he could see the late-September sun and all the people waiting to greet him. When the ambulance turned out of the shade of the station into the evening’s light, suddenly there was cheering all around them. Lifting his head, he saw crowds of men and women lining the streets, waving when they saw him, calling out that he was brave and they were proud of him. Tweed caps were waved, flowers were thrown and there was singing. Wave after wave of applause followed each little ambulance leaving the station. The nurse could only see his eyes but she could tell that, for the first time in a long while, pain had been replaced by pride and hope.5