This writer, not knowing Hope, can only
conjecture what goes on inside the man. He has seen horrible things and has
survived them with good humor and made them more bearable, but that doesn’t
happen without putting a wound on a man. He is cut off from rest, and even from
admitting weariness. Having become a symbol, he must lead a symbol life.
Probably the most difficult, the most tearing
thing of all, is to be funny in a hospital. The long, low buildings are
dispersed in case they should be attacked. Working in the gardens, or reading
in the lounge rooms are the ambulatory cases in maroon bathrobes. But in the
wards, in the long aisles of pain the men he, with eyes turned inward on
themselves, and on their people. Some are convalescing with all the pain and
itch of convalescence. Some work their fingers slowly, and some cling to the
little trapezes which help them to move in bed.
The immaculate nurses move silently in the
aisles at the foot of the beds. The time hangs very long. Letters, even if they
came every day, would seem weeks apart. Everything that can be done is done,
but medicine cannot get at the lonesomeness and the weakness of men who have
been strong. And nursing cannot shorten one single endless day in a hospital
bed. And Bob Hope and his company must come into this quiet, inward, lonesome
place, and gently pull the minds outward and catch the interest, and finally
bring laughter up out of the black water. There is a job. It hurts many of the
men to laugh, hurts knitting bones, strains at sutured incisions, and yet the
laughter is a great medicine.
This story is told in one of those nameless
hospitals which must be kept safe from bombs. Hope and company had worked and
gradually they got the leaden eyes to sparkling, had planted and nurtured and
coaxed laughter to life. A gunner, who had a stomach wound, was gasping softly
with laughter. A railroad casualty slapped the cast on his left hand with his
right hand by way of applause. And once the laughter was alive, the men laughed
before the punch line and it had to be repeated so they could laugh again.
Finally it came time for Frances Langford to
sing. The men asked for “As Time Goes By.” She stood up beside the little GI
piano and started to sing. Her voice is a little hoarse and strained. She has
been working too hard and too long. She got through eight bars and was into the
bridge, when a boy with a head wound began to cry. She stopped, and then went
on, but her voice wouldn’t work any more, and she finished the song whispering
and then she walked out, so no one could see her, and broke down. The ward was
quiet and no one applauded. And then Hope walked into the aisle between the
beds and he said seriously, “Fellows, the folks at home are having a terrible
time about eggs. They can’t get any powdered eggs at all. They’ve got to use
the old-fashioned kind that you break open.”
