双语·居里夫人的故事 第十六章　战争

Chapter XVI　War

August 1st, 1914.

“Dear Irène, dear Eve,

“Things seem to be going from bad to worse: we are expecting mobilization at any moment—I don't know if I shall be able to get away. Keep cool, be brave and calm. If there is no war, I shall come on Monday; if war comes, I shall remain here and send for you as soon as possible. Irène, you and I must try to make ourselves useful.”

August 2nd.

“Mobilization has begun and the Germans have entered France without a declaration of war. It will be difficult to get letters through for some time.

“Paris is calm and impressive in spite of the grief for the men going to the Front.”

August 6th.

“Brave little Belgium has not agreed to let them pass through without fighting. Everybody in France is hopeful that the struggle, though hard, will end in victory.

“Poland has been occupied by the Germans. What will remain of my country when they have finished with it? I have no news of my family.”

So wrote Marie to the children, who were on holiday in Brittany.

In Paris, Marie was extraordinarily alone. All her fellow-workers had gone to the war except one mechanic who had heart-disease and could not join up. Marie was ill and weak. But it did not enter her head to think of that or of the catastrophe that was happening to her work. She did did not follow the crowd of women who were offering to be nurses. As she had always done, she thought quickly and fiercely: where was there a gap to be filled with her work? The hospitals at the front, the hospitals behind the lines, were almost without X-ray appliances, were without that almost new and magic device by which a surgeon could see through men's flesh the shot or splinter of shell sitting fixed in the depths of a wound. X-rays had never been any business of Marie's; she had only been interested in them and had had a few lessons on them. That didn't matter. She would, with all speed, create X-ray stations. It took her only a few hours to make a list of all the X-ray apparatus available in Paris and get it distributed to the hospitals. Then she collected any scientists who could or would use it, and distributed them also. Paris was provided for.

But the wounded, pouring back, pouring back in their thousands, in ambulances from the front to field hospitals, what was to become of them? Marie did not hesitate. Time was everything. She turned for money to the U. F. de F. —the Union of the Women of France—and produced the first “Radiologic Car.” It was an ordinary motor-car with the electricity for the X-ray run off the engine. That travelling X-ray station went from hospital to hospital in the poor, shattered, beautiful Marne country, enabling all the wounded of the greatest battle of the war to be quickly examined, safely operated on, and many, many of them to be saved, who without it would have died. But before the battle of the Marne the Germans were fighting only a few miles from Paris. Would they get through? Would they take Paris? What ought Marie to do? Her children were alone in Brittany. Ought she to go to them? Ought she to go with the medical corps when they evacuated Paris? No. She was going to stay in Paris, whatever happened; because, as she put it, “Perhaps if I am on guard in the new buildings of the Pierre Curie laboratory the Germans will not dare to sack it; whereas if no one is there, for certain they will leave nothing.” Headstrong, unyielding Marie hated the mere thought of any flight. To be afraid was to help the enemy. Not for anything in the world would she give the enemy the satisfaction of entering a deserted Pierre Curie Institute! But if Marie wasn't leaving Paris, her one precious gramme of Radium had to go, and there was no one to escort it but herself.

She put on her black alpaca dust coat, packed her night things, and with a small, extraordinarily heavy packet of lead, took train for Bordeaux. Cramped on a wooden bench in the crowded train, with her Radium at her feet, she gazed out of the window at the fields under the burning early September sun and at the roads crowded with unending cars and carts fleeing always, fleeing to the west.

At Bordeaux, on the far western sea, Marie stood on the platform, hour after hour, with her little packet of lead still at her feet, the packet which was too heavy for a woman to carry and too valuable to be left alone. There were no porters and no taxis and no bedrooms. She smiled as she wondered if she would have to stand there all night. But she was rescued at last by a fellow-traveller, who helped to find her a bed and to house the Radium safely in a bank.

On the next morning she returned to Paris. In the evening she had been an unnoticed traveller in a mighty crowd of safety seekers, but in the morning she was stared at by a crowd who had collected to see the strange marvel of “the woman returning up there!” The woman returning up there was glad of the chance to tell them that there was no danger “up there,” that Paris would not fall, that its inhabitants would be in no danger. The woman returning up there, however, was hungry. She had had nothing to eat since the night before, and the troop train she was on merely crept towards Paris when it wasn't standing at ease in the fields. She was very glad of a bit of bread a friendly soldier gave her out of his haversack. And then when she reached lovely, threatened Paris, the joyful news came out to meet her that the enemy was held on the Marne.

Without a moment's rest, Marie rushed to the headquarters of the “National Help Society” to see what next she should do.

“Lie down, woman!” exclaimed its President, Appell, “Lie down and rest.'” She obeyed, but only while she discussed her future work. “With those great eyes of hers in her pale face,” said Appell, “she is nothing more than a flame.”

Then came the turn of the “little Curies.” Marie had two children in Brittany, but to the soldiers of France she was mother to the X-ray motor-cars that soon began to meet them everywhere as they were brought wounded from fighting. Marie fitted those cars out one by one at the laboratory and wrung from unwilling officials all they needed. She who had once been timid, bearded any lion in any den on behalf of her little Curies. She extracted “passes” from one, “pass- words” from another, visas from another— money from the rich, smart motor-cars from the kindly—“I'll return them,” said she, “if they are still returnable at the end of the war—I will indeed.”

A big Renault, more like a lorry than a car, she took for herself. Then began a life of outdoor adventure.

In her room in Paris the telephone bell rang. A big convoy of wounded needed an X-ray station. She went out to her car, painted grey for war with a big red cross; she carefully checked over her apparatus; then, while the soldier chauffeur filled up, she put on her dark coat, with red cross arm-band, and her soft, round, faded hat, and climbed into the seat beside the driver, with her old, yellow, cracked and sun-scorched leather bag. And then, at all the speed the slow old car could muster, she went, wind-whipped or rain-whipped, in the day or in the night, and without lights, into the war at places whose names are known for the fierceness of the fighting—Amiens, Ypres, Verdun.

Sentinels stopped them, enquired, passed them. The Renault found the hospital. Madame Curie chose her room and had the cases carried into it; then rapidly she put the apparatus together while others unrolled the electric cable that connected the car's dynamo with the apparatus. The chauffeur started up and Marie verified the current. Then she placed each thing in its right place, her protective gloves and glasses, her special pencils and lead wires for localising metal; then she darkened the room, with curtains if there were any or with bedclothes if there weren't. Meanwhile a second room had been got ready as a photographic dark room.

In half an hour from the time of her arrival, everything was ready, including the surgeon. Then began the long procession of the stretchers with the wounded; one after the other, one after the other, men in great pain, they came. Marie arranged her apparatus; the surgeon looked and saw among the shapes of bones or organs a dark fragment of this or that.

Sometimes an assistant wrote notes about the position of the metal at the surgeon's dictation for a later serious operation. Sometimes then and there the surgeon was able to operate and watch, while he worked, his pincers advancing into the wound and getting round some part of the bony skeleton to seize a piece of shrapnel.

The hours, and sometimes the days, passed. As long as there were wounded, Marie stayed in the dark room. Before she left the hospital, she had made her plans for installing a permanent X-ray theatre in it. In a few days, having moved heaven and earth to get it, she returned with the new apparatus and a new radiologist, whom she had conjured from nobody knew where.

In that way she personally installed 200 X-ray stations in hospitals, which, with her twenty cars treated more than a million wounded. That was great work for one woman.

But we mustn't fancy her, when she drove, always sitting beside a chauffeur in luxury on her front seat, protected from the weather. There were times when she had to do the driving and swing the mighty starting handle. She could congratulate herself when she hadn't more than two punctures, in a journey on those roads covered with splinters of every kind. She was often changing wheels with those same delicate, radium-burnt fingers in the terrible frost and wet that marked the war years. Sometimes she might be seen frowning a scientist's frown as she cleaned, most scientifically, an unfamiliar carburettor. Some-times she was doing porter's work, lifting heavy cases, when all men were in the fighting line.

Once she was angry! Her chauffeur, taking a curve too quickly, upset the car into a ditch and buried Marie under all the loose cases. Not that Marie mattered. It was the thought of what had happened to her delicate apparatus that made her furious. But she laughed aloud from under the cases when she heard the young man running round and round the car trying to catch a glimpse of her and asking, “Madame, are you dead? Madame, are you dead?”

Sometimes she forgot her breakfast or her dinner. Always she slept anywhere—in a bed if she could get one, under the stars if only they were available. It was natural to her, who had lived hard in her youth, to find herself a soldier of the Great War.

But that soldierly work was not all Marie's work. When She had time, she packed all the instruments in her old laboratory and had them taken to Pierre Curie's new laboratory. There she unpacked them and gradually fitted out the new home of science. She went to Bordeaux and brought back her gramme of Radium, and every week she “drew” its emanations from it, enclosed them in tubes and sent them for use to the hospitals.

With the tremendous increase of X-ray work, radiologists were needed. Marie taught and trained them in the new Radium Institute. Some of them were stupid and clumsy and hard to teach; but with infinite patience and sympathy she encouraged them and helped them, till they, too, could make a success of the delicate work. In that teaching she was helped by Irène, who was 17 by then. Irène had been studying radiology while still at the Sorbonne, and her mother had not thought her too young to work in the war hospitals.

In two years they trained 150 radiology nurses.

As if all that were not enough, Marie visited Belgian hospitals. Sometimes in hospitals where she was a stranger, fashionable ladies, who were nursing, mistook the shabby, poor-looking woman for a cleaner and treated her with scant courtesy. Marie didn't mind; she only felt more warmed and comforted by the charm of a certain nurse and a certain silent soldier who contentedly worked with her at d'Hoogstade: Elizabeth the Queen and Albert the King of the Belgians. She herself had lost all her cold distant manner and was just charming and infinitely gentle and encouraging with the wounded soldiers. She used to explain to the ignorant, scared peasants that her strange apparatus would not hurt them any more than a camera would. She was gay again.

She never spoke of herself, never said she was feeling tired, never felt frightened of shells falling round her. With all that work she went on daily, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

But she longed for peace, longed for all that mad cruelty to come to an end! For her, with all the rest of the world, November 11th, 1918, was the happiest day that had been, when the cannon shot that marked the Armistice surprised her in her laboratory. Instantly she rushed out with her assistant, Mlle. Klein, to buy flags that the Institute might join in the glory. But there wasn't a flag in Paris! They had to make do with lengths of three colours which they sewed together. Then Marie took the old Renault and joined the wild throng in the streets, reckless of the fact that she had ten uninvited passengers on the wings and on the roof.

Who can guess the joy of the days that came after?

For Marie, it was not only her France that was free from the overwhelming terror, but her Poland also. Poland at last was free and in-dependent. She wrote to her brother:

“So we, ‘born in servitude and chained in our cradles,’ have seen the resurrection of our country.”