Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

It appeared that I had some fever. He prescribed kaolin poultices every four hours. All Sunday, Gerda made them in the kitchen, spreading the shiny white china clay on a square of pink lint with a spatula, then boiling it like a cabbage in a saucepan of water. With frowning seriousness she wrapped the poultice, tight and scalding, round my finger. I always winced and gasped, and she would say as she applied the layer of waterproof gauze and a bandage, 'Remember, Herr Elgar, it is for your own good.' I felt this unnecessarily schoolmistressy.

My mind became increasingly occupied with the chances of earning a living as a one-armed chemist. I had every faith in Dr Dieffenbach. He was superior to a Krankenkasse doctor, one employed by the compulsory public sickness insurance which was established in Germany in 1883, anticipating our British National Health Service by sixty-five years. And like our British National Health Service, its doctors complained that they were underpaid and overworked, its patients complained that they could not always choose their doctor, though the Verbдnde der Artze Deutschlands did its best to provide a selection. Dr Dieffenbach looked down on the Krankenkasse severely.

I stayed on my feet that Sunday, my right arm in a sling. I clearly could not go to the brewery on Monday. Anyway, Jeff was in Berlin. I awoke feeling so ill, and my hand so pained, that I could not rouse myself from my bed.

Gerda brought me some barley-water, but I was too sick even to savour her concern. About noon, Dr Dieffenbach sent a maid to summon me to his surgery. As he took off the jacket of my pyjamas, I could see clearly red streaks now reaching from my hand and up my forearm towards my heart.

Dr Dieffenbach stood smoking his cigar for the best part of a minute, inspecting the unbandaged hand impassively.

'We'll try some new pills,' he decided.

I was then so frightened I would have swallowed arsenic had he suggested it. 'Perhaps I should send a letter home,' I said shakily. 'To break the news that I am ill-'

'You are hardly in top condition for correspondence. I'll send a line on your behalf to Sir Edward Tiplady. I owe him a note on other matters anyway. But if these pills do their job properly, by the time he receives it you will be cured.'

Dr Dieffenbach went to the glass cupboard. He reached inside for the Aesculape Field Surgical Chest he had acquired from Army surplus after the War. It was the size of my Woolworth's attachй case, gleaming steel, canvas lined, every instrument's place outlined in black and fitted with German ingenuity and precision. For a second I was horrified that he was about to cut off my arm without more ado. But he produced a glass phial about four inches long, for which the chest was a hiding place.

'I heard only today of these tablets being used on a professional brother, who pricked his finger doing a post mortem on a septic case,' he informed me unnervingly. 'That's often a death warrant, you know. Germs become more virulent, altogether more proud of themselves, after a triumphal passage through the human body.'

He tipped some tablets into his palm. They were an inch across, reddish yellow, about twenty of them in the phial. 'These would make a horse retch, my dear chappie,' he continued with amusement. 'You must get a couple of them down you three times a day. You have quite a nasty Phlegmone there in your arm. The enemy is attacking up the easy roads of your lymphatic system. Well, we shall teach this adventurous streptococcus a lesson.'

'What are they?' I inspected the two pills in my hand as he filled a glass with water.

'Curiosity is a superfluous quality in the patient. It's stuff called "Streptozon", which to you can mean no more than another brand of schnapps. Now back to bed, dear chappie. You're feverish enough to boil a kettle.'

Illness abroad is doubly wretched. 'The purple wallpaper which we will grow to hate as we lie in bed with grippe,' Cyril Connolly wrote perceptively about his cheap Paris hotel. I was oppressed by my wallpaper, a design of violets. The sloping ceiling seemed to be descending to crush me like the torture chamber of _peine forte et dure._ The ghostlike Frau Dieffenbach brought me broth, but I wanted only water. Even the sounds of Gerda next door were no more than an irritation.

About eight that evening I descended the narrow attic stairs, grey woollen dressing-gown over my shoulders, to the lavatory on the landing below. A minute later I was hurriedly out again. I leant over the banisters shouting in panic for Dr Dieffenbach. He appeared from the living-room, napkin under chin, half alarmed and half angry.

'Doctor, I'm bleeding to death,' I cried in German. Frau Dieffenbach and Gerda appeared behind him, wondering if I were dying or delirious.

'Bleeding? Where from?' the doctor asked brusquely.

This was awkward, in front of the ladies. 'Internally.'

'Fore or aft?' he demanded impatiently.

'Fore.'

He mounted the stairs, snatching off his napkin and mumbling bad-temperedly. He followed me into _die Toilette,_ where I indicated dramatically with my good hand the bright red water in the pan of solid china, made in Staffordshire and named amid a spray of flowers in English, _The Little Thunderer._ Dr Dieffenbach's professional balance seemed shaken. 'Have you any left?' he demanded, pulling his beard. 'I need a drop more, if you can find it.'

He brought a conical flask from his surgery, into which I passed an inch of this alarmingly coloured fluid. He packed me back to bed. After a few minutes he appeared in smiling reassurance. 'No nephritis,' he announced in English. 'No septicaemic abscess, no pyelitis. I've tested your offering, my dear chappie, by the tincture of guiac method, and find it free from all blood. The colour is a harmless dye, which should have occurred to me. But a doctor never thinks at his clearest when snatched away from his dinner. I've seen the same effect in children who've gorged themselves with sweets which the manufacturers have turned pretty red colours with aniline dyes. They pass straight through to the urine, and you can imagine how the mothers get hysterics. How's the hand? Why, a great improvement already.'

I noticed that the red lines were fading. 'The streptococcus is in full retreat,' Dr Dieffenbach said with satisfaction. 'We shan't send you home looking like Admiral Nelson after all.'

He left me lying feebly on my pillow. 'Streptozon' was transparently a fancy name for sulphonamide, as 'Atebrin' was for the mepacrine hydrochloride used against malaria. I was an involuntary colleague of Professor Domagk's mice.

In summer, everybody thinks less. With leaves and flowers to distract the eye, skin and air making friends again, fresh fruit to eat-delicious proof of Nature's kindly abundance-people stop brooding and grow lazy and lecherous. Life looks different, a golden thread to be spun out as long as possible, not a coin to be risked for a cause. A country becomes docile towards its native politicians and completely indifferent towards foreign ones. From his first year of office, Hitler grasped this as instinctively as any other item of mass psychology.

Hitler busied himself in the sunshine to annihilate his antagonists. The Storm Troopers had for years been able to murder whoever they liked with the tolerance of the Law. It would have taken a braver witness to testify, a braver juryman to convict and a braver judge to sentence than in Ireland during the Troubles. Now they had the force of Law itself. There were rumoured to be 100,000 Germans in concentration camps, each prisoner playing the grisly double role of terrorizing those still left outside. All opponents of Hitler not behind barbed wire were under the earth, and even the wraiths of resistance vanished.