06 A DAY IN THE WARDS

Chapter 6 A DAY IN THE WARDS As I have already said, the Afghans never forget their tribal feuds except in the presence of foes from without. Then they may put them aside for a while, especially if their foe be not Mussulman in faith, but only for a while. The feuds begin again as soon as the danger is past. But in the wards of the mission hospital all this is changed, and here may be seen representatives of all the frontier tribes chatting fraternally together, who as likely as not would be lying in ambush for one another if they were a few miles off across the frontier. But it is generally recognized among them that feuds are to be forgotten in hospital ; and accordingly the doctor gets an audience from half a dozen different tribes in one ward when he is drawing out the conversation from the land of feuds to the Prince of Peace, and when he contrasts the Gospel of loving your neighbour with their rule of " shoot your neighbour and get his rifle." They say in a half-apologetic tone : " True ; but God has decreed that there shall always be discord among the Afghans, so what can we do ?" Sometimes a patient will say : " I want to be in a ward that has no windows, because I am afraid that one of my enemies may come at night when the lamp is burning in the ward and shoot me through the window by its light."

Great as is the variety of physiognomy, of dress, and of dialect, even more diverse are the complaints for which they come. Eye diseases form more than a quarter of the whole, and few cases give so much satisfaction both to surgeon and patient as these, in many of which the surgeon is able to restore sight that has been lost for years, and to send the patient back to his home rejoicing and full of gratitude. Here is a Bannuchi malik suffering from consumption, a not uncommon complaint in their crowded villages; next him is a Wazir lad from the hills, Muhammad Payo by name, suffering from chronic malarial poisoning. He is an old acquaintance, as he returns to his home when he feels strong enough, and then, what with coarse fare and exposure (for he is a poor lad), soon relapses and comes back to us at death’s door, as white as a sheet, and has to be nursed back again to vigour. Just now he is convalescent, and is going about the ward doing little services for the other patients, and telling them what to do and what not to do, as though he had been in the hospital all his life. Poor fellow! He has lost both his parents in a village raid, and would have been dead long ago himself but for the open door of the mission hospital. In another bed is a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy of twelve from Khost, suffering from disease of the bones of his right leg, which he has not been able to put to the ground for two years. His home is eighty miles away across the mountains, and he had no one to bring him to Bannu, though he had begged some of the traders to let him sit on one of their baggage camels ; but who was going to inconvenience himself with a friendless boy like that ? He had heard such wonderful stories of the cures effected in the Bannu Hospital from a man in his village who had been an inmate for six weeks for an ulcer of the leg, that he determined to get there by hook or by crook, and he had accomplished the greater part of the journey crawling on his hands and knees, with an occasional lift from some friendly horseman, and had been six weeks on the road, begging a dinner here and a night’s lodging there from the villages through which he passed. When he arrived, his state can be better imagined than described : the weary, suffering look of his face ; the few dirty rags that covered him ; the malodorous wound on his leg, full of maggots, bound round with the last remains of his pagari ; while now there is no brighter, happier boy in the hospital, with his white hospital shirt and pyjamas, clean, gentle face and pleasant smile, as he moves about from bed to bed with his crutch, chatting with the other patients.

Passing on, we see a big swarthy Afghan, with fine martial features, in which suffering is gradually wearing out the old truculent air. He had gone armed with a friend one night to a village where there was a Militia guard. He maintains that they had merely gone to visit a friend, and had been delayed on the road till night overtook them ; but to be out armed at night is of itself sufficient to raise a prima-facie case against a man on the border, and when the Militia soldiers challenged him, and instead of replying he and his friend took cover, it was so clear to the former that they must be marauders, that they opened fire. The friend escaped, but our patient received a bullet through the left thigh, which shattered the bone. He was not brought to the mission hospital for some time, and when we first saw him it was obvious that unless the limb were speedily removed, his days were numbered. He, like all Afghans, had an innate repugnance to amputation, but finally consented on condition that the amputated limb should be given to him to take back to his home, that it might ultimately be interred in his grave ; only thus, he thought, would he be safe from being a limb short in the next world. Once I tried to argue an Afghan out of this illogical idea, and when other arguments failed, I suggested that the unsavoury object might be buried in a spot in the mission compound, and he might leave a note in his grave specifying where it might be found. He answered at once : " Do you suppose the angels will have nothing better to do on the Resurrection Day than going about looking for my leg ? And even if they would take the trouble, they would not come into this heretic place for it." So the limb was removed and carefully wrapped up and stored away somewhere, so that he might on recovery take it back with him to his village. His wound is nearly healed now, and he has sent oft’ his sister, who was in hospital to nurse him, to his home to fetch a horse on which to ride back the forty miles to his village, where he will wile away many a long winter’s night with stories of his experiences in the Bannu Mission Hospital, and how kind the feringis were to him.

Among Afghans a man’s nearest relations are often his deadliest enemies, and " he hates like a cousin " is a common expression. Thus it came to pass that one day a wounded Afghan was brought to the mission hospital on a bed borne of four, and examination showed a serious condition. He had been shot at close quarters the night before while returning to his house from the mosque after evening prayers. The bullet had passed completely through the left side of the chest, the left lung was collapsed, and the patient was blanched and faint from the severe bleeding that had occurred. A compress of charred cloth and yolk of egg had been applied, through which the red stream was slowly trickling. He believed he had been shot by his uncle, with whom he had a dispute about the possession of a field, but had not seen his face clearly. A room was got ready, the patient’s blood-saturated garments were replaced by hospital linen, and the wound was cleansed and dressed. For a long time he hovered between life and death, constantly attended by two brothers, who, if they had been as instructed as they were assiduous, would have made two very excellent nurses. Gradually, however, he recovered strength, and the wound healed ; and one day when visiting his ward I found him sitting up with a smile on his face, and after the usual greetings, he said : " Please come to me, Sahib; I have a request to make." I sat by his bedside, and asked what I could do for him. He drew me closely to him, and said in a subdued voice : " Sahib, I want you to get me some cartridges; see, here are four rupees I have brought for them." " Why, what do you want them for ?" said I. " Look here," said he, pointing to the wound in his chest ; " here is this score to pay off. I am stronger now, and in a few days I can go home and have my revenge."

I said to him deprecatingly : " Cannot you forego your revenge after all the good counsels you have been hearing while in hospital? We have, after so much trouble and nursing, cured you, and now, I suppose, in a few days we shall be having your uncle brought here on a bed likewise, and have to take the same trouble over him." " Don’t fear that, Sahib," was the prompt reply ; " I am a better shot than he is." Well, we never did have to deal with that uncle, though I never gave him the cartridges; probably he got them elsewhere.

Another day a similar cortege came to the hospital. This time the man on the bed was a fine young Pathan of about twenty summers, and his father a greybeard, with handsome but stern features, and one arm stiffened from an old swordcut on the shoulder accompanied the bearers, carefully shielding his sons face from the sun with an old umbrella. His was a long-standing feud with the malik of a village hard by, and he had been shot through the thigh at long range while tending his flocks on the mountain-side. It had happened four days ago, but the journey being a difficult one, they had delayed bringing him ; and meanwhile they had slain a goat, and, stripping the skin off the carcass, had bound it round the injured limb with the raw side against the flesh. Under the influence of the hot weather the discharges from the wound and the reeking skin had brought about a condition of affairs which made bearers and bystanders, all except the father and the doctor, wind their turbans over their mouths and noses as soon as the hospital dresser began to unfold and cut through the long folds of greasy pagari which bound the limb to an improvised splint and that to the bed. It was a severe compound fracture of the thigh-bone, with collateral injuries, and I called the father aside and said : " The only hope of your son’s life is immediate amputation. If I delay, the limb will mortify, and he will certainly die." The old man, visibly restraining his emotion, said : " If you amputate the leg, can you promise me that he will recover? " No," I said ; " even then he might die, for the injury is severe, and he is weak from loss of blood; but without amputation there is no hope." " Then," said the father, " let it be as God wills : let him die, for, by our tribal custom, if he dies as he is I can go and shoot my enemy ; but if he dies from your operation then I could not, and I want my revenge." After this they would not even accept my offer of keeping the wounded lad in the hospital to nurse, but bore him away as they had brought him, so that he might die at home among his people, and then well, the mind pictured the stealthy form crouching behind the rock ; the hapless tribesman of the other village with his rifle loaded and slung on his shoulder right enough, but who was to warn him of his lurking enemy? And then the shot, the cry, and exultation. A man of the Khattak tribe was out on the hills with a friend after mountain goats ; he tracked one, but in following it up passed over into the hills of a section of the Wazir tribe. He was passing along one of those deep gorges which the mountain torrents have worn through the maze of sandstone ridges, where the stunted acacia and tufted grass afford pasturage to little else than the mountain goats, when his practised eye descried two heads looking over the ridge four hundred feet above him. Seeing they were observed, the two Wazirs stood up and challenged them.

" Who called you to come poaching in our country ?" " I shall come when I choose, without asking your permission,"" retorted the Khattak. " Swine ! has your father turned you out because there was no maize in your corn-bin?" The Khattak retorted with something stronger, and each proceeded to impugn the character of the other’s female relations, till the Wazir, thinking he had excited the Khattak to give him sufficient provocation, sent a bullet whistling past his head. The Khattak made a jump for the cover of a neighbouring rock, but before he had time to gain shelter a second bullet had struck him in the leg, bringing him headlong to earth. His companion had got the shelter of a rock and opened fire on the Wazirs ; but the latter, thinking they had sufficiently vindicated the privacy of their stony hills, made off another way. The Khattak could do no more than lift his friend into the shelter of a cliff, stanch the bleeding with a piece torn from his pagari, and make off in hot haste for his village to sound a chigah and bring a bed on which the wounded man might be carried home. The chigah, of course, came too late to track the Wazirs, but they bore the wounded man home, and next morning brought him to the mission hospital. He lay there for three months, carefully tended by his father and a brother, and there all three were attentive listeners to the daily exposition of the Gospel by the doctor or catechist ; but the wounded man got weaker and weaker, and when it became clear to all that his recovery could not be hoped for, they took him off to his home to die. The next day a Wazir of the same tribe that had shot him was brought in suffering from an almost identical gunshot wound, and we thought at first it had been the work of an avenger, but it proved to have been received in another feud about the possession of a few ber-trees (Zizyphus jitjubd). This Wazir submitted to amputation, and is now going about the hills the proud possessor of an artificial limb from England, which his father sold a rifle to buy, and which is the wonder and admiration of his neighbours. The devotion shown in some cases by relations who have accompanied some sick or wounded man to hospital is very touching, and in pleasing contrast to their frequent enmity. One case that imprinted itself on my memory was that of a man from Kabul, who had been a sufferer for several years from severe fistula; his nearest relation was a nephew, and he was a talib (student). Both were poor, but the man sold up some little household belongings and hired a camel-driver to bring him down on his camel. The journey to Bannu occupied fourteen days, and the sick man suffered much from the constraint and jolting of the camel-ride. An operation was performed, but it was some months before the patient was cured and discharged, and during all that time he was assiduously nursed by the talib, who sat day and night by his bedside, attending to his wants and reading to him either the Suraj of the Quran or some Persian poet, only leaving him to go into some mosque in Bannu, or in a village near, where some charitable Muhammadans would give him his morning and evening meal. To save the patients from the danger of having their money stolen by other patients or visitors, we advise them on admission to give up their money into our charge, to be kept safely until they get their discharge, when it is returned to them. Usually they readily agree to this, but sometimes we have some wary characters, usually Kabulis or Peshawuris, whose experience of the world has led them to trust no one, and these refuse to let their possessions out of their own keeping, usually securing their money in a bag purse tied round their waist under their clothes. One such Kabuli came into the hospital terribly ill with dysentery. Fearing, I suppose, we might take his money by force, he swore, in answer to the usual question, that he had not a single anna on him, and all through his illness he begged a few pice from us or from other patients to buy some little delicacy he fancied to supplement the regular hospital diet. He said he had no relations or friends living ; " all had died," and certainly none ever came to inquire after him. His disease resisted all our efforts to cure it he ’had been worn out with exposure and hard living and at last, one morning, we found him dead in his bed ; he had passed away quietly in the night, without even the patient in the bed next him knowing of it. We then found a bag containing eighty rupees bound round his waist ; he had kept it carefully concealed from everyone throughout, and now died leaving behind him what might have purchased him so many little delicacies. There being no claimant for the money, we made it into a fund for helping indigent patients to get back to their more distant homes.

There was once a Mullah in Bannu who was particularly virulent in his public denunciations of the mission and everything connected with it. He would frequently give public lectures which were tirades against all Christians, and missionaries in particular, telling the people that if they died in the mission hospital they would assuredly go to hell, and all the mission medicine they drank would be turned into so much lead, which would drag them relentlessly down, down to the bottomless pit and very much more in that strain. We were therefore somewhat surprised when one fine morning we beheld four white-robed talibs bringing a bed to the hospital, on which was a form covered by a white sheet, and on lifting the sheet, there was this very Mullah! We did not ask him awkward questions, but admitted him at once, and I think our Christian assistants throughout his long and dangerous illness showed him particular attentions, and nursed him with special care. They never taunted him with his former attitude to us, but strove, by the exhibition of Christian forbearance and sympathy, to give him a practical exposition of what Christianity is. When he left the hospital he thanked us in the presence of his disciples, offered a prayer for blessing on the hospital, and is now one of our staunchest friends.

Here is a very sad case in Bed 18, called " the Gleaners’ Bed," because it is supported by the Gleaners’ Union of Lambeth : A young man of twenty-five or thirty, blind from his birth, and yet brought to the hospital cruelly slashed in several places with sword and knife ; one cut on the right shoulder went through the muscle down to the bone. And this was done only to rob him of the few things he possessed. Had the culprit known that the man was blind, let us hope he would not have been so brutal, but poor Mirzada was on the ground asleep, covered up with a sheet, as is the custom with the natives, and had been attacked in this way before he could escape or beg them to spare him. It was so sad to see him stretched moaning on his bed, with eyes that had never seen the light or the beauty of God’s creation, heart that had never felt, ear that had never heard of the " Light of Life" or the "glory that shall be revealed." Our Christian assistants sat beside him day by day, and told him of Christ and His love ; but he never, so far as we could judge, seemed to grasp the truth for himself, and, when his wounds were healed, left us to beg by the wayside. We pray for Mirzada, " who sitteth by the wayside begging," that he may yet find the Light ! He at least has learnt to bless the mission hospital and the Christian friends in England, through whose charity he can say : " I was a stranger, and ye took me in ; sick, and ye visited me." The doctor or his assistants may go a long journey up and down the frontier and both sides of the border without coming to a village where they will not get a hearty welcome from some old patient. He will be made to sit down for a little good cheer in the village chauk, that the grateful patient may call his acquaintances round to shake hands with the Daktar Sahib, whose patient he was while in the mission hospital, and with stories about whom he has so often regaled them in the winter evenings.