Page:Diary of a Prisoner in World War I by Josef Šrámek.pdf/24



We left Skoplye for Djevdjekia. It is on the very border with Greece, on the track that goes Nish-Skoplye-Salonica. There are 15 of us, and we are assigned to be nurses. The town is nice, and there are Turks, Bulgarians, Greeks, etc. The weather is lovely. There are about 500 Austrians serving within an American medicinal mission. Some of them are enjoying a golden age; the Americans have brought just about everything—underwear, medication, beds, food cans, sugar, tea, kerosene, boots. Everything.

They are putting everything in order, setting up hospitals, and separating the injured from the typhus-infected.

I work as a nurse. The hospital is a former Turkish state store, an enormous building of 5 floors. I was assigned to department Soba VI. There are 5 of us as nurses serving more than 80 people who are sick with typhus. I shudder to look at them. The majority of them are Serbs, thin recruits with frostbitten legs. They lie on mattresses on the ground, in dirt like I have never seen in my life. They cannot walk, and the toilets are too far anyway. The ceiling is made of planks so it's dripping and running upon them from above. It's hell. 6 or 8 of them die every day, and others take their places.

The lice seem to move the entire building. There is no medication. A doctor comes once every in 3 days. We have a lot to do. We carry meals and divide them, clean the rooms, carry