Dr. X and Dr. Nikolic

Heroism and sacrifice sprouted richly in the green mountains of Yugoslavia. With them the tares of pain, hunger and disease grew too. They maimed men's bodies and spirits, crippled Marshal Tito's guerrilla army. Last week, from two firsthand reports, direct word of this suffering came to the Allies.

Nails through Bones. Dr. X is a tough New Zealander who asked for a transfer to Yugoslavia a year ago after performing 9,000 operations in Africa. On landing he was arrested by guerrillas, freed by Marshal Tito, who told him to set up a 200-cot hospital in a farmhouse.

Dr. X drove the pigs and chickens out of the house, went to work without instruments or medicines. For antiseptic he used salt water. Bandages were washed in a creek, re-used until they fell apart. His instruments: a carpenter's hammer, a hack saw, chisels. ("In fractures we hammered house nails through bones. ... To chip away the bone we used an ordinary chisel...")

To keep up the spirits of the wounded, unanesthetized men--and to drown the sound of the saw gritting through bone-- Dr. X ordered boys & girls to sing Partisan songs. The wounded stared hard at the ceiling, sometimes hoarsely joined the singing. Often half of the injured were women.

Patients with arm or leg injuries had only an even chance to live, since it took so long to reach a hospital. ("One boy, with legs gangrenous to the knees, walked 20 miles through snow. . . .")

Back in Cairo last week, Dr. X had one light note to record: the girl guerrillas carry so much armament "it's difficult to dance with them."

War on Lice. Dr. Nikolic, another Partisan surgeon, is a little, weary man with a fighter's heart and a scholar's mind (in 1926 he held a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study malaria). In 1943 the Germans put him in a concentration camp, held him there nine months until the Partisans traded a German officer for him. Among the Partisans his fight has been as much against disease as against wounds.

Last summer 35% of Tito's men had typhus, said Dr. Nikolic. So he declared war on lice, and two months ago the rate had dropped to less than 1%. But disease, as in all wars, still kills more than enemy bullets.

Said Dr. Nikolic: the Nazis have sent 500 Yugoslav doctors to Germany and the Russian front, looted hospital equipment and food, refused to aid the sick, often spread disease as a political persuasion. In huge concentration camps "for the undesirables," said he, men, women & children were deliberately exposed to typhus.

"Partisan Tubs." Dr. Nikolic's favorite weapon was the "Partisan Tubs." Some were plain gasoline tins, placed over fire and filled with lousy clothes and blankets.

From time to time live lice in a linen bag were dipped into the tin: if they lived, logs were added to the fire. Later, bread ovens and even rooms, heated from outside, were used for the same purpose. To prevent clothes from catching fire, paper slips were used as indicators: if they toasted black the temperature was too high; if yellow, just right.

In guerrilla hospitals the patients lay close together on a straw-strewn floor. Suspect cases could not be segregated, and sometimes disease infected an entire hospital. No patient undressed, for a flight might be ordered at any moment. When that happened, the worst typhus cases were carried on stretchers; the others rode horseback or walked. At trek's end the soaked, cold, hungry patients usually collapsed.

But what the Germans sowed they also reaped, said little Dr. Nikolic. He had studied the records of captured German hospitals, seen the growing German cemetery at Kosevo, which is near Sarajevo. His grimly happy deduction: the Germans themselves are dying of typhus.

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