There Are Still Ways to Live
Burma Surgeon. By Gordon S. Seagrave. (Gollancz. ns.).
Both missionary work and Burma were in Dr. Seagrave's blood. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather and many of his mother's forbears had been Burma missionaries. He was born in Burma and spoke Karen before he spoke English. His earliest hero was a gigantic and adventurous medical missionary. At the age of five he knew what he wanted to be and has never repented. But he is obviously—at the moment he is a colonel in the American Army—a missionary of an extremely unorthodox and jovial type; and he must have occasioned the worthy society that employed him as much perplexity as long ago was occasioned to another society by George Borrow. At the age of twelve he went back to America, where he helped to pay for his education by acting as a waiter, a librarian, and a corrector of examination papers; and at the age of twenty-four, with a wife and baby, a few surgical instru- ments, an immense fund of hope and energy and an entire disregard for money as an object for personal accumulation, he returned to Burma. He was assigned to Namkham in the north, then four days' journey by carrier and on foot across the mountains from Bhamo, but already, in 5922, at the head of a mud track—it was little more—with bamboo bridges, feeling its way from Lashio to China and presently to become world-famous as the Burma Road. There were no hospitals where surgical operations could be per- formed nearer than Bhamo, Lashio 550 miles to the south, Kunming boo miles to the north-east and—via jungle trails—Mandalay and Maymyo loo miles to the south-west. But there was a hospital at Namkham, the hospital that they had been dreaming about. When they arrived, they found a small ram-shackle building, its rotten floors stained with blood, pus and medicines, and containing twenty beds completely bare of furnishing, nineteen of which were empty. Small wonder that the two young people, on their first night, were reduced to sobbing in each other's arms.
But they were neither of them of the stuff to sob for long. Within three months, Seagrave had taught himself the Shan language and his wife had made the beginnings of a vegetable garden. Not long afterwards a patient strayed in with a condition demanding a major operation. Seagrave tackled its successfully, his wife, under his tuition, giving the anaesthetic ; and so the work began. Seagrave found himself faced with operations that he had never even seen. The night before performing them, he tells us, he spent many hours reading them up, was then profusely sick, and was still suffering from nausea when he undertook them the next morning. But he had taken the hurdles and this phase soon passed. Next came the training of nurses—the girls, as he always affectionately calls them—Karen, Shan, Kachin, who had to be taught de novo, beginning at their own personal cleanliness. But before long they could do both minor and major dressings and give intra-venous injections with an accuracy and delicacy some- times exceeding his own. There were many ther things that he had to teach both them and himself, tncludtng the driving of second-
hand cars, and later lorries and ambulances, over roads with a six-inch clearance between their wheels and the edge of a precipice. It is to be gathered that he had little time, and perhaps use, for dogmatic theology and it is certain that he was not easily shocked by anything but the physical misery with which he and his wife and the girls had to cope unaided. But within six years, thanks largely to a generous present from America, they had built, chiefly with their own hands, a stone hospital with a hundred beds—he and his wife lorrying building materials all the way from Lashio— and had established subsidiary dispensaries in the jungle. He had accustomed himself to travel all night and operate all day, some- times in the throes of neglected malaria. He had climbed 6000-Ieet mountains to attend difficult confinements. He had fought plague and prejudice, with occasional relaxations into sing-songs, in which his nurses played an enthusiastic part; and in 1937, when he and his wife returned from a well-earned spell of leave in America, he found his beloved Namkham a place of growing importance. Owing to the China japan " incident ", the Burma Road was being urgently pressed forward from both ends and was already motorable for another fifty miles beyond Namkham. Not long afterwards some American engineers, driven from China, decided to build an aircraft factory in the neighbourhood. They built a hospital near it for their staff, and Seagrave took a parental charge of. this at their request. Coolies and drivers from the Road were added to his never-too-many responsibilities. But the sing-songs and the jokes went on, even ender the now approaching shadow of war.
This came to the valley in the shape of Japanese bombers attacking the aircraft factory and, from thence onward, Dr. Seagrave's book is the continuous story of an epic courage and resource in the face of ever-increasing odds and handicaps. Owing to illness his wife and young children had to be sent to India and thence to America. But he and his nurses—ultimately attached to General Stilwell's forces—continued to give their valiant and indis- pensable aid to all and sundry. Crowding into slit-trenches during, air-attacks, they operated in improvised tents or in the open. During the great retreat, and the confused fighting of the early Burma campaign, they spent long hours on foot, often without food, sometimes stricken with malaria, threading jungles and fording rivers, to rally at the end of them and spend further long hours operating, dressing, interpreting, and arranging for the transport of ill and wounded—men and women, soldiers, refugees, from a score of different races.
One word -in conclusion. --Fastidious readers may be tempted, perhaps, to lay this book 'aside because of its occasional, rather naive facetiousness. " Eric was out burying Chinese all afternoon. It was ' high' time "—is an example.- But they are hereby implored not to. This is a book to be read for its substance- not its style. When the Burma Road and its tributaries. are an accepted part of local civilisation, it will be an authentic document for the future historian of the retreat from Burma in the second world war. But above all it is the authentic saga of an endlessly gallant, more than capable, and great-hearted American . surgeon and his wife.
H. H. BASHFORD.
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