I hope somebody in this war writes a book about the medics who served on the African front.  I don’t mean the hospitals so much as the units that were actually attached to troops and worked on the battlefields under fire.  They were a noble breed.  They and the telephone linemen deserve more praise than I have words for.  Their job was deadly, and without respite.  Just in one battalion several of the battlefield medics were killed, and a number were decorated.

But noble as it was, it seemed to me—and to the doctors themselves—that our battlefield medical system wasn’t all it should have been.  There weren’t enough stretcher-bearers in an emergency, and in a battle at which I was present some of our wounded lay out as long as twenty hours before being brought in.  The work of the medics came in peaks.  If they had had enough stretcher-bearers for all emergencies there would have been thousands of men sitting around most of the time with nothing to do.  Yet when an emergency did come and there were not enough, it was an awful thing.

Wounded men had a rough time of it in that rocky, hilly country of Northern Tunisia.  It was hard enough to walk when a man wasn’t carrying anything, but when two or four men were lugging two hundred pounds on a stretcher it was almost impossible to keep on their feet.  I saw litter-bearers struggling down a rocky hillside with their heavy burden when one of them would slip or stumble on a rock and fall down, and the whole litter would go down, giving the wounded man a bad shaking up.

Litter-bearers sometimes had to carry wounded men five miles or more over that rugged country.  A bearer was just about done in by the time he did that, yet in battle he had to start right back again.  And somehow, even though it got to be just a miserably tough job, I noticed that they managed to keep their sympathetic feeling for the wounded.

We heard stories about the Germans shooting up ambulances and bombing hospitals, and I personally knew of instances where those stories were true.  But there were also stories of just the opposite nature.  Many of our officers told me the Germans fought a pretty clean war in Tunisia.  They did have scores of crafty, brutal little tricks that we didn’t have, but as for their observance of the broader ethics of war, our side had no complaint.

One battalion surgeon told me of running his ambulance out onto a battlefield under heavy artillery fire—whereupon the Germans stopped shelling and stayed stopped while he evacuated the dead and wounded for eight hours.

I heard other stories about our ambulances going past German machine-gun nests without knowing it until the Germans came out and stopped them and, seeing they had wounded, waved them on.  And so far as our doctors knew, the German doctors gave our captured wounded good medical care—as we did theirs.

In the last war nerve cases were called “shell shock.”  In this war they’re called “anxiety neurosis.”  About fifty per cent of our neurosis cases were recoverable, and even returned to fighting units.  A large proportion of those cases were brought about by complete fatigue, by fighting day and night on end with little sleep and little to eat.

Surgeons sometimes spotted neurosis cases that they suspected of being faked in order to get out of the front lines.  Their system was to put those men on stretcher-bearer duty—a hard, thankless, dangerous task.  If they were faking they got well quickly and asked to be returned to their regular outfits.