Armageddon - Max Hastings [110]
Sometimes it seemed that something more than chance decided a man’s fate. Dr. David Tibbs was driving up a snowclad hillside, recovering British dead. With him was a stretcher-bearer, Billy Roper, a pacifist like many of his kind. Roper suddenly cried out: “Please sir, stop, sir!” Tibbs did so. “Why, Billy?” he demanded. “Because the Lord tells me I should, sir,” said the man earnestly. Next day, another officer who saw their jeep tracks in the snow reported that they had halted on the edge of a German minefield. God meant a lot to many men of that generation, especially Midwestern Americans. “I could worry every minute of every hour if it were not for my faith and trust in God,” Staff-Sergeant Harold Fennema from Wisconsin wrote to his wife. “I know his presence is everywhere, and I have resigned myself to his will. Army life has been and always will be a shroud of uncertainty.”
Most of Dr. David Tibbs’s work consisted of patching up men for transfer to field hospitals, but he also found himself treating puncture wounds, for which he had little training, and even carrying out tracheotomies. One of the harshest tasks for every battlefield medic was to make an instant judgement about which men might survive and which were hopeless cases. Many doctors gave the latter swift and massive injections of morphine. Bullet wounds were usually clean, but mortar and shell fragments inflicted grotesque injuries. Tibbs was horrified to find himself confronted by one man whose shoulder had been pierced by a falling baulk of timber, which protruded from his chest. He was still alive and conscious, though plainly doomed. Men sometimes shouted aloud: “I’m not going to die! I’m not going to die!,” despite having had all the flesh stripped from their lower limbs by blast. No normal soldier ever grows wholly inured to the spectacle of other young men hideously mangled by deliberate human intent.
Almost all soldiers found disposal of the dead a distasteful task. Corporal Iolo Lewis put his hand on a shrivelled body and felt the flesh hardened into carbon, which upset him deeply: “Nothing had prepared me for the smells of war, above all that of roasted flesh. It was very unnerving for a young lad.” Corporal Andy Cropper, a tank commander in the Sherwood Rangers, was sent to identify some dead comrades:
I saw a line of soldiers in uniform, feet towards me. Slowly I walked along searching. Sometimes, I had to step between them to get a better look at a face, half turned away, or a regimental insignia that was partly obscured. None of them appeared to be grossly mutilated. No separate messes here—officers rubbed shoulders with privates, a sergeant-major with a corporal. All had the same waxen pallor, some eyes were closed, some open, but all unseeing. At last, I had found one of the lads—old Harry, who was never on net. I touched him. He was icy cold, and somewhat rigid. Carefully I removed one of his identity discs. I did it as if he were asleep and I didn’t want to awaken him. I stood before him for a few seconds. I didn’t pray. I didn’t think. It wasn’t homage really, just a sort of “cheerio, Harry.”
Recovering bodies often demanded the collection of mere human fragments, sometimes hanging on bushes and trees. David Tibbs, though a medical officer, recoiled in revulsion from the spectacle of pigs snuffling around the separated torso of a much respected sergeant, who had been leading his company into an attack. “When people ask me what war is like,” Tibbs said afterwards, “I tell them to imagine that.” Some commanders of fighting units refused to allow their own men to handle corpses, arguing that it damaged morale. The task then fell to Field Hygiene Sections. Sometimes it was impossible to reach the dead for days. Even veterans flinched at bloated corpses, the skin of their fingers swelling green over the nails. Some remains had to be sprayed with oil and creosote before they could be handled, especially if they had been badly burned in armoured brew-ups. During the Scheldt battle, 52nd (Lowland) Division’s Reconnaissance Regiment