Life in the Besieged City
261
the east and south sides of the street, for the bombs seemed
to prefer the west and north sides. Stray bullets, however,
came from all directions. I toured the hospitals. St. Joseph's
Convent, operated by French nuns, and once a school for six
hundred Arab girls (who since had fled with their parents)
had been converted into a hospital by Hadassah1 and the
Jews spoke with gratitude of their co-operation. Near by was
the former English mission hospital now used as an emergency clinic. As soon as an ambulance arrived, a corps of attendants with stretchers rushed to meet it. Then began the
grisly parade: bodies covered with sheets were earned direct
to the morgue; those with bloodsoaked clothing were rushed
to the operating-room. On one stretcher I saw a boy of perhaps eleven, with a shock of thick black hair and olive skin.
His large brown eyes were open. His right arm and side were
soaked in blood, and the stretcher was crimson.
He was the image of a little boy I knew back home, and I
became attached to him.
"He's badly hurt, but he isn't crying," I said to a nurse.
"He is too shocked to feel pain. Sometimes," she added,
"they don't come out of shock. . . . We bury about thirty
people a day from this hospital."
They took the boy to the operating-room. For the next
hour I looked for him in the crowded wards. Finally they
brought him out. The color had left his face. His brown eyes
were closed. He was whimpering, still under the anesthesia.
They laid him on a bed that had been used, the sheeting
soiled. (Two patients were often placed in one bed.) Gently
the nurse rolled him over on his left side, and I saw that his
arm was gone. In its place was a thick, round bandaged stump.
1
Jerusalem's hospitals were financed mainly by Hadassah, the Women's
Zionist Organization of America. They were equipped with American supplies
and technical apparatus. The extreme efficiency of the hospital staffs and the
rapid ambulance service from the fighting fronts kept Jewish fatalities to a
minimum. On the other hand, many Arab casualties were due to woefully inadequate facilities. The use of plasma, for example, was rare among the Arabs,
but commonplace among the Jews.