A little later she was ordered to Verdun to organise a hastily improvised epidemic hospital. For the first week she had no doctors and no nurses. There was no equipment but a barracks and the beds. As fast as these could be set up, a patient was put in. There were no utensils of any kind but the tin cans which she picked up outside where they had been cast away by the commissary department when emptied of meat. There was no heat. There was no water in which to bathe her patients except that which she melted from the ice over an oil lamp. For six weeks she worked without once having her clothing off. One of her feet froze and she had to limp about in one shoe. Eventually medical aid arrived and she had a staff of twenty-five men under her direction. There were eight hundred beds. For seventeen months the hospital was under shell fire. There were officers in the beds who went mad. Three hundred and twenty-nine panes of glass were shattered one day. A man next the little doctor fell dead. A piece of shell struck her but she had only time to staunch the flow of blood with her handkerchief. Outside the American ambulance men were coming on in their steady lines. They delivered to Nicole Gerard-Mangin 18,000 wounded in four days, whom she in turn gave first aid and passed on to interior hospitals. Later when 150,000 French soldiers were coming back from the army infected with tuberculosis, the Government required its greatest expert for the diagnosis of such cases. And Dr. Gerard-Mangin in the fall
