om waking her, early one morning, when I had to transfuse a
blackwater case with salt solution. She thought, she who had had quite
enough to do the day before, that I did not call her because I thought
she did not want to get up. She felt that I was tacitly drawing a
distinction between her conduct of that morning and the self-denial of
the other night, when she and Elizabeth sat up all night and day with a
German soldier who had perforated his intestines during an attack of
typhoid fever. I had operated upon him to close the hole the typhoid
ulcer had made. The German doctor, to whom we had given his liberty, in
order that he might attend the civil population, and whom I had called
in consultation over the case, had disagreed with our diagnosis. But I
had overruled him, and at the operation was glad to be able to show him
and the German sisters that our diagnosis was right, and that I was not
operating on him just because he happened to be a prisoner of war. The
German sisters were grateful to us for getting up at night and in the
early morning to give him the salt solution that might save his life,
and they repaid it in the only way they could, by kindness to our men.
But in any case they could not help liking our sick soldiers, and many
is the time that they have been indignant with me for deficiencies in
food and equipment which I could not help. "Our German soldiers would
have complained until their cries reached Lettow himself," they said,
"if they had to put up with what you make your soldiers endure."

And if, at first, Hildegarde, of the sour and disapproving face, did
little irregular things for wounded German soldiers, faked temperature
charts, prepared little forbidden meals at night, and in other ways
pretended to a degree of illness in her German soldiers that my clinical
eye refused to see, I could not altogether blame her. When I remembered
the treatment that I saw our sick and wounded prisoners in Germany get
from the Hun doctor, I was often furious, and determined to do a bit of
"strafing" on my own. But I could not forget that the French and Belgian
nurses did just the same for our wounded in German hands, adding
bandages to unwounded limbs, describing to the German doctor our
sleepless nights of pain when the walls of that French convent had
echoed only to our snores, preparing delicious feasts, at night, for us
to compensate for German rations, and in many ways contriving to keep us
longer in their h