CHAPTER XIV
FRANCE AND THE MEDICOES
THE history of the A. E. F. will be in most respects the history of resources cunningly turned to new ends, of force redirected, with some of its erstwhile uses retained, and of a colossal adventure in making things do. Where the artillery was weak, the A. E. F. eked out with the coast-artillery. Where the engineer corps was insufficient, the railroads were called on for special units, frankly unmilitary. A whole citizenry was abruptly turned to infantry. But one branch of the service, though scarcely worthy of much responsibility when the war began, was, nevertheless, the one most thoroughly prepared. The prize service was the Medical Corps, and it was in this state of astonishing preparedness because immediately before it became the Medical Corps, it had been the Red Cross, and the Red Cross knows no peace-times.
The question of what is Medical Corps and what is Red Cross has always been a facer for the superficial historian.
Broadly speaking, the base hospitals of the army are organizations recruited and equipped in America by the Red Cross, and transported to France, where they become units of the army, under army discipline and direction, and supplied by the Medical Corps stores except in cases where these are inadvertently lacking, or unprovided for by the strictness of military supervision. In any case, where sufficient supplies are not forthcoming from the Medical Corps, they are given by the Red Cross.
This is the Red Cross on its military side. In its civilian work, which is extensive, and in its recreational work it carries on under its own name and by its own authority. Where it divides territory with the Y. M. C. A., the division is that the Y. M. C. A. takes the well soldier and the Red Cross the sick one, whenever either has time on his hands.
But the Medical Corps plus the Red Cross created between them a branch of the American Army in France which, from the moment of landing, was the boast of the nation.
For a year before America entered the war Colonel Jefferson Kean, director-general of the military department of the American Red Cross, had been organizing against the coming of American participation. Within thirty days after America's war declaration Colonel Kean announced that he had six base hospitals in readiness to go to the front, and within another thirty days these six units were on their way, equipped and ready to step into the French hospitals, schools, and what-not, waiting to receive them, and to do business as usual the following morning.
The six were organized at leading hospitals and medical schools: the Presbyterian Hospital of New York, with Doctor George E. Brewer in command; the Lakeside Hospital, Cleveland, with Doctor George W. Crile; the Medical School of Harvard University, with Doctor Harvey Cushing; the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, with Doctor Richard Harte; the Medical School of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, with Doctor Frederick Besley, and Washington University Hospital, Saint Louis, with Doctor Frederick T. Murphy.
A little while later the Postgraduate unit went from New York, the Roosevelt Hospital unit from there, and the Johns Hopkins unit from Baltimore. Many others followed in due time.
These hospital units, recruited and organized under the Red Cross, took their full complement of surgeons, physicians, and nurses. All these became members of the army as soon as they landed in France, and they were supplemented, either there or before they crossed, with members of Medical Corps, enlisted just after America entered the war.
The military rank of the physicians and surgeons conformed in a general way to the unofficial rank of the same men when they had worked together in the hospitals from which they came. There were, of course, some exceptions to this rule, but not enough to make it no rule at all.
It was true of the medicoes, as it was of the engineers, that they took military discipline none too seriously, because they brought a discipline of their own. Wherever, in civilian pursuits, the lives of others hang on prompt obedience, there is a strictness which no military strictness can outdo. This was true of the personnel of any hospital in America, before there was thought of war. It was equally true, of course, after the units were established behind the fighting-lines. But there was a certain lack of prompt salute and a certain freedom with first names which not the stoutest management from the military arm of the service could obliterate from the base hospitals. The Medical Corps enlisted men were naturally not sinners in this respect. The routine work of the base hospitals all fell to them. It was usually a sergeant of the army – though he was never a veteran – who attended the reception-rooms, kept account of symptoms, clothes, and first and second names, and did the work of orderly in the hospital. It was the privates who kept the mess and washed the dishes and changed the sheets.
The nurses went under military discipline and into military segregation – sometimes a little nettlesome, when the hospitals were far from companionship of any outside sort.
The sites selected for the hospitals were either French hospitals which were given over, or schools or big public buildings remade into hospitals by the engineers. Each site was arranged so that it could be enlarged at will. And the railways which connected the outlying hospitals with the rest of the American communications were laid so that other hospitals could be easily placed along their line. There was a splendid elasticity in the Medical Corps plan.
One base hospital was much like another, except for size. Those near the line differed somewhat from those farther back, but their scheme was uniform. At any rate, the history of their doings was similar enough to have one history do for them all. Take, for example, one of the New York units which landed in August and was placed nearer the coast than the fighting. It was put in trim by the engineers, then sanitated by the humbler members of the Medical Corps. The great wards were laid out, the kitchens were built, windows were pried open – always the first American job in France, to the great disgust and alarm of the French – and baths were put in.
The chief surgeon had specialized in noses and throats at home. When the hospital was ready, naturally the soldiers were not in need of it – being still in training in the Vosges – so the services of the hospital were opened to the civilian population of France.
By November there was not an adenoid in all those parts. The death-rate almost vanished. Into this rural France, where there had been no hospital and only a nursing home kept by some Sisters of Mercy who saw their first surgical operation within the base hospital, there came this skilful organization, handled by men whose incomes at home had been measured in five figures, and all the healing they had was free.
Multiply this by twenty, and then by thirty, before the pressing need for care for soldiers directed the Medical Corps back to first channels, and there will be some gauge of what this service did for France.
And the gratitude of France was more than commensurate. Praise of the American Medical Service flowed unceasingly from officials and civilians, statesmen and journalists. There were constant demands made upon the French Government that it should pattern its own medical forces exactly upon the American, making it the branch of the medical specialist and not of the politician or the military man.
The individual officers of the Medical Corps had much to learn, however, from the French and the British. Though they knew hygiene, prophylaxis, antisepsis, and surgery as few groups of men have ever known it, they became scholars of the humblest in the surgery of the battle-field. Every officer of the Medical Corps was kept on a round of visits behind French and British fronts during the fairly peaceful interim between their landing and the American occupation of a front-line sector.
The Red Cross was the great auxiliary of the Medical Corps. It kept up its recruiting in America, both for nurses and physicians, and for supplies.
And in supplies it played its greatest part. The Red Cross maintained enormous warehouses, separate entirely from army control, which contained provisions to meet every possible shortage. It was known by the Red Cross that never in the history of the world had there been a medical corps of any army that had not finally broken down. No matter how painstaking the provision, the need was always tragically greater.
And so surgical dressings, sets of surgical instruments, medicines, antiseptics, and anæsthetics piled up in the great A. R. C. store-houses.
Then there were the things for which the Medical Corps frankly made no provision, which could have no place in a strictly military programme, such as food delicacies of great cost, special articles of clothing, and amusements. Every hospital convalescent ward had its phonograph, its checker-boards, its chess-sets, and its dominoes. That was the Red Cross.
The Red Cross had three hospitals of its own in Paris. The first of these was at Neuilly, the hospital which had been the American Ambulance Hospital from the beginning of the war, given over on the third anniversary of its inauguration. Here French and American soldiers, American civilians who worked with the army, and Red Cross officers and men were cared for. The second had been Doctor Blake's Hospital, and when it became a Red Cross hospital, it was made to include the gigantic laboratory where investigations were made, and where the American Red Cross had the honor to ferret out the cause of trench-fever. This fever had been one of the baffling tragedies of the war, because in the press of caring for their wounded, other hospitals had been unable to give it sufficient research.
The third was the Reid Hospital, equipped and supplied by Mrs. Whitelaw Reid.
In the long period when all this hospital organization was at the command of civilian France, inestimably fine work was done. It was a sort of poetic tuition fee for the instruction in war surgery which was meanwhile going on from veteran French surgeons to the American newcomers. At the end of the first year, the Medical Corps was itself ready for any stress, and it had mightily relieved the stress it had already found.
CHAPTER XV
IN CHARGE OF MORALE
IF the army as a whole was a story of old skill in new uses, certainly the most extraordinary single upheaval was that of the Y. M. C. A. Though it had grown into many paths of civil life, in peace-times, that could not have been foreshadowed by its founders, probably the wildest speculation of its future never included the purveying of vaudeville and cigarettes to soldiers in France.
Yet just that was what the Y. M. C. A. was doing, within less than a year from the American Army's arrival in France, and its only lamentation was that it had nowhere near enough cigarettes and vaudeville to purvey.
It accepted the offer of the United States Government to watch over the morale of the soldiers abroad, partly because it was so excellently organized that it could handle a task of such vast scope, and partly because both French and British Armies had got such fine results from similar organizations that the American Y. M. C. A. felt itself to be historically elected.
The Y. M. C. A. had cut its wisdom-teeth long before it became a part of the army. Its directors had accepted the fact that a young man is apt to be more interested in his biceps than in his soul, and that if he can have athletics aplenty, and entertainment that really entertains, he'd as lief be out of mischief as in it.
But even this was not quite broad enough for the needs of the army away from home. And one of the first things the Y. M. C. A. did in France, and the stoutest pillar of its great success, was to abandon the slightest aversion to bad language, or to the irreligion that brims out of a cold, wet, and tired soldier in defiant spurts, and to cultivate, in their stead, a sympathetic feeling for the want of smokes and a good show.
The secretaries sent abroad to build the first huts and watch over the first soldiers were men selected for their skill in getting results against considerable obstacles. Those who followed, as the organization grew, were specialists of every sort. There were nationally famous sportsmen, to keep the baseball games up to scratch, and to see that gymnastics out-of-doors were helped out by the rules. There were men who could handle crowds, keep an evening's entertainment going, play good ragtime, make good coffee, and produce cigarettes and matches out of thin air.
And, most important of all, they were men who could eradicate the doughboy's suspicion that the Y. M. C. A. was a doleful, overly prayerful, and effeminate institution.
The Y. M. C. A. was dealing with the doughboy when he was on his own time. If he didn't want to go to the "Y" hut, nobody could make him. Certain things that were bad for him were barred to him by army regulation. But there was a margin left over. If the doughboy was doing nothing else, he might be sitting alone somewhere, feeling of his feelings, and finding them very sad. The army did not cover this, but the Y. M. C. A. took the ground that being melancholy was about as bad as being drunk.
But, naturally, the Red Triangle man had to use his tact. If he didn't have any, he was sent home. His job was to persuade the doughboy, not to instruct him. And before long, the rule of the Y. M. C. A. was flatly put: "Never mind your own theories – do what the soldiers want."
That is why the "Y" huts – the combination shop, theatre, chapel, and reading-room, coffee-stall and soda fountain, baseball-locker and cigarette store, post-office and library which are run by the Y. M. C. A. from coast to battle-line – are packed by soldiers every hour of the day and evening.
The "Y" huts began with the army. Before the second day of the First Division's landing, there was a circus banner across the foot of the main street stating: "This is the way to the Y. M. C. A. Get your money changed, and write home." By following the pointing red finger painted on the banner, one found a wooden shack, with a few chairs, a lot of writing-paper and French money, a secretary and a heap of good-will.
As the army moved battleward, these huts appeared just ahead of the soldiers, with increased stores at each new place. American cigarettes were on the counters. A few books arrived.
The Y. M. C. A. proved its persuasiveness by its huts. A member of the quartermasters' corps said, one day, in a fit of exasperation over a waiting job: "How do these 'Y' fellows do it – I can't turn without falling over a shack, built for them by the soldiers in their off time. Do I get any work out of these soldiers when they're off? I do not. They're too busy building 'Y' huts."
The first entertainment in the "Y" huts was when the company bands moved into them because the weather was too bad to play out-of-doors. The concerts were a great success. By and by, men who knew something interesting were asked to make short lectures to the soldiers. It was an easy step to asking some clever professional entertainer to come down and give a one-man show. Then Elsie Janis, who was in Europe, made a flying tour of the "Y" huts, and a little while after, E. H. Sothern and Winthrop Ames went over to see how much organized entertainment could be sent from America.
The result of their visit was The Over-There Theatre League, to which virtually every actor and actress in America volunteered to belong. By the end of the first year, about 300 entertainers were either in France or on their way there or back.
Three months was the average time the performers were asked to give, and they circled so steadily that there were always about 200 of them at work on the "Y" circuit.
The work of the Y. M. C. A. did not stop with affording entertainment to the soldiers in the camps. They rented a big hotel in Paris and another in London, and they established many canteens in these two cities, so that their patrols – secretaries whose job was to rescue stray, lonely soldiers in the streets – would always have a near and comfortable place to offer to the wanderers.
Then they preceded the army to Aix-les-Bains and Chambery, the two resorts in the Savoy Alps where American soldiers were sent for their eight-day leaves, and arranged for cheap hotel accommodations, guides, theatres, etc., and they took over the Casino entirely for the soldiers.
Their field canteens were just back of the fighting-line, and late at night it was the duty of the secretaries to store their pockets with cigarettes and chocolate and with letters from home, and shoulder the big tins of hot coffee made in the canteens and go into the front-line trenches to serve the men there. In fact, the "Y" men did everything with the army except go over the top.
The largest part of work of this type fell to the Y. M. C. A. because they had the most flexible organization ready at the beginning of American participation. But they had substantial help, which as time went on grew more and more in volume, from several other associations. The Knights of Columbus and the Salvation Army both did magnificent service, in canteens and trenches. And of course the Red Cross took over the sick soldier and entertained and supplied him, as a part of their co-army work.
There was one branch of the Red Cross which perhaps did more than any other one thing to keep up the hearts and spirits of the soldiers – it was called the Department of Home Communications, and it was directed by Henry Allen, a Wichita, Kansas, newspaper man.
Mr. Allen believed that a soldier's letters did more for him than any other one thing, and that, failing letters, he must at least have reliable news of his home folks from time to time. Further, that every soldier was easier in his mind if he knew that his home folks would have news of him, fully and authentically, no matter what happened to him.
So Mr. Allen posted his representatives in every hospital, in every trench sector, and through them kept track of every soldier. If a man was taken prisoner Mr. Allen knew it. If he was wounded Mr. Allen knew just where and how. The man's family was told of it immediately. Presently, where this was possible, Mr. Allen's representative was writing letters from the wounded men to their relatives, and was receiving all Mr. Allen's news of these relatives for the men in the hospital.
In addition to things of this kind, done by Red Triangle men, Red Cross men, and the Salvation Army and the Knights of Columbus, all these organizations worked together to effect distributions of comfort kits and sweaters, gift cigarettes and chocolate, and all the dozen and one things that made the soldiers find life a little more agreeable.
There was more than co-operation from the army itself. There was the deepest gratitude, openly expressed, from every member of the army, whether general or private, because it was a recognized fact that, though an army cannot do these things itself, it owes them more than it can ever repay.
CHAPTER XVI
INTO THE TRENCHES
AFTER months of training behind the lines the doughboys began to long for commencement. It came late in October. The point selected for the trench test of the Americans was in a quiet sector. The position lay about twelve miles due east from Nancy and five miles north of Lunéville. It extended roughly from Parroy to Saint-Die. Even after the entry of the Americans the sector remained under French command. In fact, the four battalions of our troops which made up the first American contingent on the fighting-line were backed up by French reserves. No better training sector could have been selected, for this was a quiet front. American officers who acted as observers along this line for several days before the doughboys went in found that shelling was restricted and raids few. Many villages close behind the lines on either side were respected because of a tacit agreement between the contending armies. French and Germans sent war-weary troops to the Lunéville sector to rest up. It also served to break in new troops without subjecting them to an oversevere ordeal, so that they might learn the tricks of modern warfare gradually.
Of course, even quiet sectors may become suddenly active, and care was taken to screen the movements of the soldiers carefully. It proved impossible, however, to keep the move a complete mystery, for when camion after camion of tin-hatted Americans moved away from the training area the villagers could not fail to suspect that something was about to happen. Perhaps these suspicions grew stronger when each group of fighting men sang loudly and cheerfully that they were "going to hang the Kaiser to a sour apple-tree."
The weather was distinctly favorable for the movement of troops. One of the blackest nights of the month awaited the Americans at the front. Rain fell, but not hard enough to impede transportation. Still, such weather was something of a moral handicap. Many of the newcomers would have been glad to take a little shelling if they could have had a bit of a moon or a few stars to light their way to the trenches. Instead they groped their way along roads which were soft enough to deaden every sound. A wind moaned lightly overhead and the strict command of silence made it impossible to seek the proper antidote of song. One or two men struck up "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching," as they headed for the front, but they were quickly silenced.
The march began about nine o'clock, after the soldiers had eaten heartily in a little village close to the lines. At the very edge of this village stood a cheerful inn and a moving-picture theatre. The doughboys looked a little longingly at both houses of diversion before they swung round the bend and followed the black road which led to the trench-line. The people of the village did not seem to be much excited by the fact that history was being made before their eyes. They had seen so many troops go by up that road that they could achieve no more than a friendly interest. They did not crowd close about the marchers as the people had done in Paris.
Seemingly the Germans had not been able to ascertain the time set for the coming of the Americans. The roads were not shelled at all. In fact, the German batteries were even more indolent than usual at this point. The relief was effected without incident, although a few stories drifted back about enthusiastic poilus who had greeted their new comrades with kisses.
The artillery beat the infantry into action. They had to have a start in order to get their guns into place, and some fifteen hours before the doughboys went into the trenches America had fired the first shot of the war against Germany. Alexander Arch, a sergeant from South Bend, Indiana, was the man who pulled the lanyard. The shot was a shrapnel shell and was directed at a German working-party who were presuming on the immunity offered by a misty dawn. They scattered at the first shot, but it was impossible to tell whether it caused any casualties. When the working-party took cover there were no targets which demanded immediate attention, and the various members of the gun crew were allowed the privilege of firing the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth shots of the war. After that, shooting at the Germans ceased to become a historical occasion, but was a mere incident in the routine of duty, and was treated as such.
The only unusual incident which seriously threatened the peace of mind of the infantrymen in their first night in the trenches was the flash of a green rocket which occurred some fifteen or twenty minutes after they arrived. They had been taught that a green rocket would be the alarm for a gas attack, but this particular signal came from the German trenches and had no message for the Americans. The Germans may have suspected the presence of new troops, for the men were just a bit jumpy, as all newcomers to the trenches are, and a few took pot-shots at objects out in No Man's Land which proved to be only stakes in the barbed wire or tufts of waving grass.
Although the Germans made the first successful raid, the Americans took the first prisoner. He was captured only a few nights after the coming of the doughboys. A patrol picked him up close to the American wire. He was a mail-carrier, and in cutting across lots to reach some of his comrades he lost his way and wandered over to the American lines. Although he was surprised, he was not willing to surrender, but made an attempt to escape after he had been ordered to halt. One of the doughboys fired at him as he ran and he was carried into the American trenches badly wounded. He died the next day.
Beginning on the night of November 2 and extending over into the early morning of November 3, the Germans made a successful raid against the American lines immediately after a relief. After a severe preliminary bombardment a large party of raiders came across. The bombardment had cut the telephone wires of the little group of Americans which met the attack and they were completely isolated. They fought bravely but greenly. Three Americans were killed, five were wounded, and twelve were captured. The Germans retired quickly with their prisoners.
American morale was not injured by this first jab of the Germans. On the other hand, it made the doughboys mad, and, better than that, made them careful. A German attempt to repeat the raid a few nights later was repulsed. The three men who were killed in this first clash were buried close to the lines, while minute-guns fired shells over the graveyard toward the Germans. General Bordeaux, who commanded the French division at this point, saluted before each of the three graves, and then turned to the officers and men drawn up before him and said:
"In the name of the division, in the name of the French Army, and in the name of France, I bid farewell to Private Enright, Private Gresham, and Private Hay of the American Army.
"Of their own free will they had left a prosperous and happy country to come over here. They knew war was continuing in Europe; they knew that the forces fighting for honor, love of justice and civilization were still checked by the long-prepared forces serving the powers of brutal domination, oppression, and barbarity. They knew that efforts were still necessary. They wished to give us their generous hearts, and they have not forgotten old historical memories while others forget more recent ones. They ignored nothing of the circumstances and nothing had been concealed from them – neither the length and hardships of war, nor the violence of battle, nor the dreadfulness of new weapons, nor the perfidy of the foe.
"Nothing stopped them. They accepted the hard and strenuous life; they crossed the ocean at great peril; they took their places on the front by our side, and they have fallen facing the foe in a hard and desperate hand-to-hand fight. Honor to them. Their families, friends, and fellow citizens will be proud when they learn of their deaths.
"Men! These graves, the first to be dug in our national soil and but a short distance from the enemy, are as a mark of the mighty land we and our allies firmly cling to in the common task, confirming the will of the people and the army of the United States to fight with us to a finish, ready to sacrifice so long as is necessary until victory for the most noble of causes, that of the liberty of nations, the weak as well as the mighty. Thus the deaths of these humble soldiers appear to us with extraordinary grandeur.
"We will, therefore, ask that the mortal remains of these young men be left here, be left with us forever. We inscribe on the tombs: 'Here lie the first soldiers of the Republic of the United States to fall on the soil of France for liberty and justice.' The passer-by will stop and uncover his head. Travellers and men of heart will go out of their way to come here to pay their respective tributes.
"Private Enright! Private Gresham! Private Hay! In the name of France I thank you. God receive your souls. Farewell!"
After the Germans had identified Americans on the Lunéville front it was supposed that they might maintain an aggressive policy and make the front an active one. The Germans were too crafty for that. They realized that the Americans were in the line for training, and so they gave them few opportunities to learn anything in the school of experience. In spite of the lack of co-operation by the Germans, the doughboys gained valuable knowledge during their stay in the trenches. There were several spirited patrol encounters and much sniping. American aviators got a taste of warfare by going on some of the bombing expeditions of the French. They went as passengers, but one American at least was able to pay for his passage by crawling out from his seat and releasing a bomb which had become jammed. When every battalion had been in the trenches the American division was withdrawn, and for a short time in the winter of 1917 there was no American infantry at the front.
Curiously enough, the honor of participation in a major engagement hopped over the infantry and came first to the engineers. It came quite by accident. The 11th Engineers had been detailed for work behind the British front. Early on the morning of November 30 four officers and 280 men went to Gouzeaucourt, a village fully three miles back of the line. But this was the particular day the Germans had chosen for a surprise attack. The engineers had hardly begun work before the Germans laid a barrage upon the village, and almost before the Americans realized what was happening German infantry entered the outskirts of the place while low-flying German planes peppered our men with machine-gun fire. The engineers were unarmed, but they picked up what weapons they could find and used shovels and fists as well as they retired before the German attack. According to the stories of the men, one soldier knocked two Germans down with a pickaxe before they could make a successful bayonet thrust. He was eventually wounded but did not fall into the hands of the enemy. Seventeen of the engineers were captured, but the rest managed to fight their way out or take shelter in shell-holes, where they lay until a slight advance by the British rescued them.