CHAPTER IX
THE RED CROSS IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F.
At no time was it either the object or the ambition of the American Red Cross to build or equip or operate all the hospitals of the United States Army in France. For a more or less privately organized institution to have taken upon its shoulders, no matter how broad they might be, the entire hospitalization of an army of more than 2,000,000 men would have been suicidal. So our Red Cross in its wisdom did not even make the attempt; it was quite content to build and equip hospitals in the early days before the American Expeditionary Forces had completed their organization and so were themselves unable to work out their hospital problem as they were forced to do at a later time. The Red Cross did more; it conducted hospitals during the entire period of war—as you have just seen—and attempted to make these models, experiment stations, if you please, from which the medical experts of the army might derive inspiration and real assistance. But at no time did it seek to usurp any of the functions of the Surgeon-General's office of the army—on the contrary.
"When the army was ready to tackle the hospital problem in fine theory we should have gotten out," Colonel Burlingame told me; "but we did not. We were following out the first clause of our creed, which was to meet emergency whenever or wherever it arose and no matter at what cost. And at all times during the progress of the war the emergency compelled the Red Cross to at least maintain its hospitals. And so it did, with a total capacity up to the time of the signing of the armistice of some 14,000 beds. After that we dropped off pretty rapidly. Our pay-roll lists of personnel show that. On November 11, 1918, these contained the names of 1,771 men and women; by the first of the following March this total had dropped to a mere 270."
So it was that upon the heels of the first established Red Cross hospitals in France there came the huge hospitals of the United States Army in great size and profusion. Sometimes these were gathered in groups—as at Savenay or Allerey or Dijon or around about Brest or Bordeaux—and at other times they stood alone and at comparatively isolated points. Even these last were sizable institutions, huge even according to the hospital standards of our largest metropolitan cities in America; while, when you came to a point like Savenay—halfway between Nantes and St. Nazaire—you beheld a group of seven individual hospitals which, shortly after Armistice Day, attained a total capacity of 11,000 beds and were planned, in fact, for some 9,000 more, with a further capacity of another 10,000 feasible and remotely planned. Into this great group of institutions there came between August, 1917, and May, 1919, some 85,000 wounded American boys. Its maximum staff consisted of 500 officers, 500 nurses, and a general staff of 4,000 enlisted men.
When I visited the place—at the end of April, 1919—it still had some 6,500 patients, the most of whom were well out of danger and were enjoying the warm sunshine of a rarely perfect day in France. I found the headquarters staff ensconced in a group of permanent stone buildings which, in the days before the war, were part of a normal school standing alongside the highroad to Nantes. This, itself, formed a hospital for general cases. Some of those that were grouped with it in the open fields around about specialized in serious bed surgical cases, in contagious diseases, in tuberculosis, in mental cases. This last had handled 7,500 cases in the progress of the war.
In each of these hospitals—as in each and every one of the United States Army hospitals in France and the occupied areas of Germany—the Red Cross functioned. At Savenay it had not only erected recreation huts for the men of each of the individual hospitals, but a huge auditorium or amusement hall, permanently fabricated of brick and steel and glass, equipped with a complete theater stage, and capable of seating between 1,500 and 2,000 doughboys and their officers. This super-playhouse was in use every night of the week—for cinema, for drama, sung or spoken, for dances, and, from time to time, for meetings and for religious services.
To this entertainment phase of the American Red Cross in the hospitals we shall presently return. For the moment I shall ask you to consider the part it played in the essential job of supplying hospital supplies. It was not, of course, either practicable or possible for our Red Cross to supply all of these—or even any tremendously large part of them. But it could—and did—supply goodly quantities of all of them when they were most needed, and so worth ten times their value and quantity at any other time.
Time and time again it furnished materials, both for their regular and for their emergency necessities. Sometimes the army itself did not function properly—there were instances of red tape disgraceful and some, too, of red tape inevitable. And yet there were other times when all the tape cutters in the world could not have saved the situation, but the American Red Cross, with its emergency warehouses and its well-organized transportation system all the way across the face of France, did save it. A truckload, two, three; perhaps even four or five truckloads of beds or bedding—perhaps even a small camionette filled to the brim with dressings and drugs or surgical instruments could, and did, save precious lives—by the dozens and by the hundreds. Do you remember, in the preceding chapter, the several instances where our Red Cross played its part—and no small part at that—in the winning of the big fight at Château-Thierry? Those were not unusual instances; they were fairly typical.
There came one day when the commanding officers of the U. S. A. hospital center at Allerey—one of the largest in all France—sent for Captain James C. Ramage, the American Red Cross representative in the district. He told the Red Cross man that a tremendous convoy of wounded soldiers from the Soissons-Rheims district was expected within a few days and asked his help in securing a real bulk of medical supplies. Those were the days when the Surgeon General's department of the army was not always able to furnish even drugs and dressings when they were most needed.
Ramage lost no time in discussing the thing. He said that he would do his best and caught the first train into Paris; spent several days there in getting together the necessary supplies, personally supervised the loading of them into a freight car, and then performed the unheard-of feat of inducing the French railway authorities to attach the freight car to a fast passenger train bound down to Dijon. Camions were rushed from Allerey to Dijon, and two days later the necessary supplies were all at the hospital center—and well in advance of the coming of the wounded soldiers. On another night in that same summer of 1918, some 2,250 wounded Americans poured into that selfsame army hospital center of Allerey. The hospital warehouses were exhausted. The Red Cross's were not; do you remember what we said at the beginning—that the fullness of its job lay in its being forever ready to meet any emergency which might arise?
It was being ready that made it able that hot August night to turn into the crowded hospital in a space of time to be measured in minutes rather than in hours, 10,000 blankets, 10,000 sheets, 8,000 towels, 8,000 pairs of pajamas, 2,000 yards of Dakin tubing, 1,000 operating gowns, 1,000 helmets, and two whole carloads of surgical dressings.
Emergency work! How it always does count!
The securing of these supplies in the beginning was, of itself, a master problem. It involved not alone purchase but manufacturing—manufacturing upon a really enormous scale. We saw at the beginnings of the Red Cross work in France the various workrooms in Paris which devoted themselves to the making of dressings—of one sort or another and in tremendous quantities. Yet the actual beginnings of this work antedated even the establishment of the Paris workrooms; immediately on the outbreak of the European War, a special department was established at the National Headquarters of the American Red Cross in Washington for giving advice concerning hospital garments and supplies for European relief and furnishing patterns and samples for the same. A New York City committee, organized for the same purpose by Mrs. Mary Hatch Willard, began the sending of old linens to French hospitals. This work grew into a unit known as the Surgical Dressings Committee of the United States, for the making of dressings by volunteers in this country, and finally led to the establishment of the first of the Paris workrooms. By the time that Pershing had first arrived in France this work in America had grown to a point where it employed more than two thousand committees and subcommittees. Its output increased so rapidly that in the week ending August 27, 1917, ninety-two hospitals were supplied and 155,261 dressings were made in the Paris workroom alone. And that, of course, was long before there were any American wounded. In the summer of 1917 the National Surgical Dressings Committee entered into coöperation with the American Red Cross and from that date its efficient distribution service in France became the Surgical Dressings Service Department of the American Red Cross.
Then came the imminent necessity of standardizing these surgical dressings—which was accomplished by a special board which Pershing appointed at the end of August, 1917. Its standards were followed, but its energies only dimmed at the time when it was actually seen that they were quite exceeding the necessities of the situation. And the volume of those selfsame energies is perhaps the better understood when it is realized that from October, 1917, to January 22, 1919, 147,230,777 cases of surgical dressings alone, both donated and manufactured, were received at the Red Cross warehouses in Paris.
Splints, of which an immense number were necessary even for the very short period in which we were actually engaged in the conduct of the war, formed a real Red Cross specialty. Our army hospitals were entirely dependent upon the American Red Cross for these necessities—the total orders for which in July and August of 1918, totaled some 15,000 to 20,000 weekly. For that entire year the output was 94,583 splints, the factories often working from eighteen to twenty hours a day to keep pace with the requisitions upon them. Our Red Cross also supplied all the nitrous oxide used in American hospitals of every type in France. The use of this ultra-modern anæsthetic, to the increasing exclusion of ether and of chloroform, forms one of the fascinating chapters of the medical conduct of the war. Although it had been employed as an anæsthetic in the United States for a number of years before the beginning of the war, its first use in Europe was when Colonel George W. Crile—the distinguished surgeon from Cleveland, Ohio—introduced it into operations in the then American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly—afterward the American Red Cross Military Hospital Number One. That was in 1915. Nitrous oxide as an anæsthetic immediately attracted the attention of a number of eminent British surgeons.
"It is good," said Colonel Crile, tersely.
And so it is—good. It is so good that Colonel Alexander Lambert, at that time chief surgeon of our American Red Cross, immediately made it the standard anæsthetic of its medical service. For, like so many other American surgeons, he quickly concurred in the opinion that nitrous acid, used in combination with oxygen, three parts to one, is the least dangerous as well as the best adapted for use when operating upon cases of chest surgery, abdomen wounds, or of shock. Under this anæsthetic the percentage of recovery is seventy-two per cent, as compared with fifty per cent for either chloroform or ether. Moreover, it has none of the disagreeable after effects which come almost invariably with the use of chloroform or ether. To quote Colonel Lambert:
"The use of nitrous-oxide anæsthetic to the exclusion of ether or chloroform in case of at least the seriously wounded seems to me not only advisable but beyond the advisability of discussion."
Its official use, therefore, was predicated. It was first supplied to the casualty-clearing stations; American and British coöperating for the sake of an exchange of ideas as to its best use. Our Red Cross supplied an apparatus of special design that had gradually been evolved from those already devised. This allowed the separate administration of the nitrous oxide, of oxygen, or of ether—which at times was used in small quantities—or of the three in various combinations. And all our American nurses were trained as anæsthetists in its use.
The making of the nitrous-oxide gas itself was one of many similar tasks assigned to the Manufacturing Department of our Red Cross, of which Major Arthur W. Kelly was department chief. He ordered a huge gas-making plant from America which, after some considerable delay, finally was set up at Montreau, fifty miles distant from Paris. In the meantime the Red Cross had discovered a man in the French Army who had had some experience in the making of nitrous oxide. He was released from active army service and at once started to work making an emergency supply, the limited quantities carried to France by Colonel Crile having become completely exhausted. This small plant had a daily capacity of about 4,000 gallons. But when the bigger machinery from America had finally been set up—in the midsummer of 1918—this output was increased to 75,000 gallons a day. This could easily have been doubled, had it not been for a single limiting factor—the extreme difficulty of securing 3,280 gallon cans in which the gas was transported. Finally the Red Cross secured some hydrogen tanks that had been captured from the Germans in their first July defeats. It was then and not until then that the nitrous-oxide plant began running at anything like its real capacity. And with the definite result that from September, 1917, to October 23, 1918, our Red Cross was able to supply our army with 699,420 gallons of this precious anæsthetic, its own hospitals with 405,620 gallons, and some miscellaneous institutions with an additional 251,110 gallons, while it saw Great Britain formally acknowledge nitrous oxide as an anæsthetic par excellence and even conservative France making the first steps toward its adoption.
A few of the medical and surgical requisitions of a typical American Army Division—the Second—upon our Red Cross are before me as I write. They are indicative of the overwhelming demands that were made upon it, not only from every corner of the front, but from every corner of France that was occupied by our fighting men—and what corner was not?
It was at the request of the chief surgeon of this Division that one of its field hospitals—originally supplied direct from the army's own sources of supply—was amplified by the American Red Cross, by the use of Bessoneau tents and other equipment so as to become practically a mobile unit, capable of handling far heavier cases. The supplying of the equipment shown by these requisitions began while the division was still in the vicinity of Montdidier and continued until after it had moved to Meaux and was in active preparation for its great rôle at Château-Thierry. In addition to the Bessoneau tents, the following were the requisitions which were delivered to this single formation while it was under heavy pressure:
June 1: 1 tortoise tent and 100 collapsible cots.
June 3: 12 antitoxin syringes for anti-tetanus serum, 200 packages of absorbent cotton, 30 feet of glass tubing, and 25 operating gowns and caps.
June 4: 250 single blankets, 100 litters, 5,000 anti-tetanus serum, 2 autoclaves, 4 thermometers for autoclaves, 50 wash cloths, 1,000 pairs of socks, 50 towels, and 200 comfort kits.
June 6: 50 clinical thermometers, 2,000 temperature charts, 1 gallon of green soap, 36 bottles of ammonia, 5,000 Greeley units, 20 syringes, 15 liters of Lysol, 20 chart holders, 100 rubber sheets, 2 small instrument sterilizers, 500 nightshirts, 500 blankets, 1,000 sheets, 500 forks and spoons, 100 bedside tables, 100 folding chairs, 50 hot-water bottles, 36 maps, 50 hand basins, 20 bolts of gauze, 10 bolts of muslin, 100 beds, and 100 mattresses.
June 7: 200 litters, 250 blankets, 100 rolls of cotton, 200 rolls of gauze, 144 rubber gloves, 100 operating gowns and caps, 96 tubes of catgut, 500 Carrel pads, 100 gowns for nurses, 20 sterile water containers, 5,000 folded gauze compresses, and 5,000 small sponges.
I rather feel that this record of a single week of the demands of one Division upon our Red Cross will show quite enough the burden which it was forced to bear; and bore most joyously as a part of the opportunity for service which was given unto it in France. In a single day and night during that same great offensive of 1918, 128 different requisitions—each comprising from one to fifty items—were started out on the road from Paris; while on the twentieth of August of that same summer—the day which marked the beginning of the St. Mihiel drive—120,000 front-line emergency parcels and more than fifteen carloads of surgical dressings were shipped to the scene of activity. From the Paris headquarters of the Red Cross alone, supplies were shipped that summer to sixty-six base hospitals, two naval-base hospitals, fifty-four camp hospitals, twenty-one convalescent hospitals, twenty army divisions, seven evacuation hospitals, nine field hospitals, eight hospital centers, nine mobile hospitals, six medical supply depots, and the central medical department laboratory—all of the United States Army in France. This great record does not, of course, include the supplies sent to the Red Cross's own hospitals or those sent to the A. E. F. hospitals from the nine zone headquarters of the American Red Cross; nor even emergency supplies sent to eighteen detached American Army units, far away from their bases of supplies. In a single month and from one warehouse, our Red Cross made the following shipments to formations operated entirely by our army: 77,101 surgical instruments, 2,820 beds and cots, 24,733,126 surgical dressings, and 15,300 pounds of drugs.
It also supplied specialties, and all for the comfort of our wounded boys over there. Take ice—that simple product of our modern civilization—so indispensable to the American. It is second nature with us to-day and yet little used by the French. Ice is as much an essential to our up-to-date hospitals as drugs or nurses or the beds themselves. Properly packed, it cools the fever and so greatly eases the sufferings of wounded men as they toss upon their cots. Its beverage use is too universal to even need comment here.
"My, that's good!" more than one sick boy murmured, as the nurse held a spoonful of it to his hot lips. "It's just like home."
Yet, while our government planned ice-making machinery for each of its hospitals, large or small, they were not always ready as quickly as the rest of the plant. There again our Red Cross stepped into the breach, supplying small portable ice-making plants not only to the field hospitals for which they were originally designed, but even for larger installations. Each of these portable plants consisted of a gasoline engine of fifteen horse power, water-cooled and attached to a compressor, which in turn was connected to the water piping in the brine tanks. The capacity of each of these was about two tons and a half each twenty-four hours. And each was accompanied by two Ford camionettes—builded with special ice boxes—to carry its product to the wards roundabout.
Second only to ice in importance as a hospital auxiliary was light. In the early years of the war, the surgeons of the allied nations worked under great difficulties at night and undoubtedly many lives were sacrificed because of the lack of proper lighting facilities. I have heard of the doctors ripping off a wounded man's clothing by the light of one star shell and waiting for the next to give them enough brilliancy to examine his injuries.
For at least ten or a dozen years past our larger American circuses have used portable electric-lighting plants on their various itinerant trips across the land—with a fair degree of success. Those circuses gave our Red Cross in France an inspiration. Lieutenant Harry C. Hand, a director in its Central Department of Requirements, in studying the markets for the proper sort of equipment, used them as models and so evolved, as a plant most practical for Red Cross needs, a three-and-a-half kilowatt outfit consisting of a gasoline engine, an electric generator, and a switchboard. This outfit, mounted upon a stout camion, would light 135 incandescent lamps of twenty-five watts each. On its travels it carried in its lockers the lamps, extension cords, sockets, and the like to make them available for almost instant service. And the Red Cross in the heart of the war emergency had five of these outfits at its service in France.
One other allied factor in this hospital supply service deserves attention before we finally turn away from it. I have referred from time to time to the vast quantities of drugs which our Red Cross distributed to both its own and other hospital centers. It was obvious that this distribution had to be centralized, and because of the delicate and extremely valuable nature of this particular form of supplies be kept quite separate and distinct from the others. So "The Red Cross Pharmacy," as it was generally called, came into existence, at a former apartment building at No. 10 Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, and quickly came to such importance that it was made the headquarters of the Section of Hospital Supplies, which in turn was a division of the larger Bureau of Hospital Administration.
Throughout all of the hard months of the war this section boasted that each night found the requisitions for that day filled. There were no left-overs; not even when a single day's work meant fifty-six huge orders entirely completed, and little rest for a staff which averaged forty-one men and women.
The pharmacy was well systematized. In its basement were the receiving, the packing, and the shipping departments, while upon its broad main floor the drugs and antiseptics were actually stored, the second floor being given to dental supplies, surgical instruments, rubber goods, sutures, serums, laboratory equipment, and the like. Each of these various departments was in charge of a specialist, a man of many years' experience in the line which he headed.
By June, 1918, the pharmacy in the Rue de Tilsitt had become of such importance that it was re-created into a Section of Supplies, with Major George L. Burroughs, of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston, as its sectional chief. Within a month he had found the demands upon his department so much increased that he was forced in turn to increase its facilities—by the addition of two warehouses. In another six weeks a new burden was placed upon his shoulders—the distribution of all alcohol, ether, oxygen, and nitrous acid issued by our Red Cross, which meant, of course, more space needed—so the unused powder magazine at Fort D'Ivry and the riding academy at No. 12 Rue Duphot—both loaned by the French Government authorities—were added to the quarters of the pharmacy.
Some idea of the amount of work undertaken and accomplished by this Red Cross pharmacy may be gained when it is understood that in the six months ending January, 1919, 75,016 pounds of drugs were issued from it. There were in that time 3,954,178 tablets, 21,566 phials of serum, 271 surgical units, 15,108 pairs of rubber gloves, and 22,059 feet of adhesive plaster, in addition to many hundreds of packets of other drug supplies.
Seemingly we have drifted away from our American boys, sick or wounded and in hospitals. In reality, of course, we have not. Every one of these provisions, large or small, was aimed directly at their comfort, while each deserved to be rated as a necessity rather than comfort—comfort, at least, as the average luxury-loving American knows it. It was comfort rather than luxury that I found our boys enjoying there at Savenay—long, comfortable huts, builded hurriedly but furnished with great care, great taste, and great attractiveness. Savenay, itself, was a good deal of a mud-hole, a fearfully wretched place underfoot. The Red Cross huts shone brilliantly in contrast. Here, as in the canteens all over France, the boys might congregate—practically at all hours—and amuse themselves as their fancies dictated; or, if fancy grew a bit bored, it was part of the job of the directress—one of whose essential qualifications was resourcefulness and another versatility—to find some new form of amusement. It was not enough to hand out the cigarettes—one or two packs a week—or the pipes and the playing cards and the tobacco, pretty much as requested—there had to be shows. The American passion for play-acting is something to be reckoned with.
Perhaps you do not quickly understand how versatile those very shows might readily become. Let me quote from Toot Sweet—the little fortnightly newspaper which our American Red Cross printed for the boys convalescing there at Savenay. That is, the Red Cross furnished the printing press, the type, and the rest of the paraphernalia for the making of the publication; the boys, themselves, supplied the brains that made it so very readable at all times.
"'Stunt Night,' advertised in Base 69 Hut for March 13, brought a lot of inquiries," says Toot Sweet, in its issue dated April 1, 1919. "'Whadaye mean—stunts?' Probably the announcement of pies and doughnuts for prizes was responsible for the crowd that appeared that evening when a large part of the floor space was cleared and a couple of Red Cross hut workers started the stunts. The first stunt—with a large slice of apple pie as prizes—was to sit upon a piece of iron pipe, diameter six inches, place the heel of one shoe on the toe of another, and while thus insecurely balanced, light in one hand from a lighted candle in the other a cigarette. Shrieks and howls from the delighted mob who began betting on results encouraged a number of aspirants and the pie was finally won. Stunt after stunt followed in quick succession, all sorts of queer and absurd contortions varying from picking up folded newspaper from the floor with your teeth while holding one foot in the air with one hand to a 'puttee race,' when the contestants raced from one end of the hall, took off their puttees, and then put them on again, then raced back, with various obstacles in the way. Finally the boys began challenging each other to their favorite stunts, so that Private California might have been showing Private North Carolina a pet trick, while Sergeant Oklahoma and Corporal Louisiana gravely discussed the merits of their ideas on stunts. The winning team was presented with a large, juicy apple pie, vamped from the mess sergeant by a Red Cross girl.
"'Amateur night' was announced for the same hut two nights later by a stunning poster done in colors by one of the 309th Engineers. A box of homemade fudge was the prize for the best act. Seven of the best vaudeville acts ever seen in the huts appeared. The sergeant major of Base Hospital Number 69 was the master of ceremonies. A 'dummy' act, a 'wop mechanic' in song and monologue, a ballad singer, a 'song and minstrel man,' a mandolin and guitar player, who gave remarkable imitations of Hawaiian instruments, a 'tramp monologuist,' and a clog dancer composed the bill. Harry Henly, the 'song and minstrel man,' won the box of fudge which was displayed in all its glory and pink ribbons during the contest."
Sometimes there was not quite so much fun in the situation. The girls who ran the Red Cross hut in the tuberculosis hospital of the Savenay group, almost directly across the highroad from Number 69, had a far weightier problem upon their shoulders. To amuse there, was a vastly more difficult task. For they knew—as most of its patients knew—that the man who entered the portals of that particular hospital was foredoomed. If he had a fighting chance of conquering the "T. B." he was packed into the hospital ward of a transport and rushed home. If he did not have that fighting chance—well, why waste precious transport space? To Savenay with him. And to Savenay he went to spend his days—and end them—in a cheery, camplike place where there were croquet and less strenuous games and broad piazzas that looked down across the valley toward the embouchure of the Loire, while Red Cross girls came and went and did their womanly best to comfort and amuse a fellow—and make him forget; forget the back door of the little hospital where, night after night, four or five fellows went out—in pine boxes, never to return, and the rows of wooden crosses down in the American cemetery at the foot of the hill steadily grew.
Turn back with me, if you will, inland from Savenay to the curved streets of Vichy—little Vichy situated in the very foothills of the high Alps. It is January now, not April. We have turned backward in full earnest, and are breathing the air of those hard weeks and months that followed immediately upon the signing of the armistice.
Vichy, in its very compactness, with the flat yellows of its curious old buildings and its equally curious modern hotels, with the fifteenth-century tower in the background and the quiet River Allier slipping by, has the fascinating unreality of a stage setting—one of those marvelous effects with which the genius of a Belasco or a Joseph Urban from time to time delights in dazzling us. In spring or in summer we might find it prepared for carnival—with green-painted chairs and tables underneath the still greener foliage of its small park. But this is January and the park is deeply blanketed in snow. In such a serene midwinter setting it seems far more ready for silent drama than for the blare of carnival—the figures in olive drab are indeed quite the figures of pantomime—brown against the whiteness of the snow. The only touches of color in the picture—tiny splotches of green or blue or purple or yellow—are supplied by the tiny cloth bags that the men carry with them. They are preparing to entrain—the first step of many on the way back to the homeland—and the vari-colored bags, each marked with a crimson cross, are the comfort kits they genuinely cherish.
Before war was come upon France, Vichy was a resort to be reckoned with in the comings and goings of her elect. It was a watering place—and much more besides. There men and women ate as well as drank, bands played, beauties intrigued, wheels, flat-set, spun merrily, and entire fortunes were flicked away at the gaming tables; but war changed these things—as many, many others. It took the viciousness out of Vichy and brought back to it all of the gentleness which it must have possessed in the beginning. The small city, where formerly the ill and the bored made pilgrimages in search of health (health bubbling up to the lips in the faint concealments of a glass of sparkling water), became a city of wounded; all too often a city of death.
The French Army moved in; and, commandeering hotel after hotel, transformed them into its hospitals. On its heels came the American Army; it alone took more than eighty hotels for its own hospital purposes. That was the signal that our Red Cross would be needed, and without further urge it moved in. Wherefore the comfort bags in the hands of the doughboys as they moved across the park toward their waiting trains.
If memories were half as tangible things as war "souvenirs," those tiny bags of the crimson cross would have held other things than soap and razor blades and tooth paste and playing cards and tobacco and the like. They would have held definite memories of Vichy and all that it had meant to the wounded men of our army. Some of them would have carried the pictures of lights shining out through opened doors into the darkness of the night and litters coming in through those opened doors—litters bearing American men, when they were not American boys—men clad only in hospital robes, but whose first bandages were drenched with blood and spattered with the mud of No Man's Land. There would have been a multiplicity of pictures of this sort, for Vichy in the days of actual fighting never was an idle place. There were times there when, within a cycle of twenty-four hours, as many as six thousand men would be sent away from it—to make room for an equal number of incoming freshly wounded soldiers. In the early days of November that many came to it direct from the dressing stations, and the problem of our Red Cross there became a little bit more complex.
There might also have been pictures in those selfsame comfort bags of the Red Cross girls on the stone platforms of the railroad station—young women who in warm days served iced lemonade there and in cold, hot chocolate, or, when it was requested, hot lemonade; for the fact remains that lemonade was the only food or drink that many of the gassed cases could endure. And it was ready for them there—at all hours of the day or night, and at all days; even though to make that possible the girl workers would sometimes stay on duty for thirty-six hours at a stretch: without having the opportunity of divesting themselves of their clothing and so gaining a little real rest.
A final picture of Vichy might have well been a mental photograph of the "hut." This formerly had been the Elysée Palace—a gaming and amusement center of none too savory a reputation; yet with its central location on the main street, its ample lounging space, and its small theater, self-contained, it was ideal for the purposes of our Red Cross and so became a living heart of Vichy. It was the canteen or club in which some five thousand doughboys were wont to congregate each day—to write letters home, to play games, or the tireless piano, to read the newspapers or the magazines, to visit, to gossip—in every way possible to shorten days that passed none to quickly for any of them.
During the first months of its organization this Red Cross superhut did not include the entire "Palace." Gradually it spread, however, until the entire two floors of the place were busy with American Red Cross activities. And the doughboy passing from the comfortable clubrooms on the main floor—wherein, for the comfort of the convalescents, a full-fledged army commissary had been set up—upstairs found a "first-aid" room of a new sort. It was, in fact, an operating room, where expert surgery might be applied to torn and ripped and otherwise wounded uniforms. And the head surgeon was a woman—a smart, black-eyed French seamstress who could perform wonders not alone with torn buttonholes but who also possessed a facility with a hot sadiron that made her tremendously popular upon the eve of certain festal occasions.
"How would a dish of Yankee ice cream taste to-day? You know, the same sort that Blink & Smith serve down there in the Universal, at the corner of Main and First streets?"
Imagine something like that coming out of the blue, and to a boy who has been "fed up" on army cookery and who even has lost his taste for the delicacy of French cookery. You may take it direct from me that the hut there at Vichy held a kitchen and that it was a good kitchen. Can you imagine any first-rate American club that ever would fail in such an essential? And from that modest cuisine there in the pulsing heart of the bubbly town came truly vast quantities of the trivial foodstuffs that are forever dear to the stomach of the doughboy. Ice cream—of course—and small meat pies, each in its own little coat of oiled paper—and creamy custards—and, of course, once again—coffee and all manner of sandwiches, imaginable and unimaginable. And, because there were many of the doughboys who could not possibly make their way to the hut, even on crutches or in wheel chairs, a camionette drove away from its kitchen each day with seventeen gallons of ice cream tucked in it—all for the benefit of bedridden American soldier boys.
Remember, if you will, that this once disreputable Elysée Palace—in the glory of war aid becoming not only reputable but almost sanctified—held a theater; small, but completely equipped. Our Red Cross workers did not lose sight of that when they chose the place as a headquarters for their endeavors. Four days a week this became a moving-picture house—just like the Bijou or the Orpheum back home. On Wednesday French wounded—for whom comfort provisions were never too ample—were guests there of the American Red Cross, and each poilu carried away a little gift of American cigarettes—to any Frenchman the very greatest of all treasures. Saturdays were set aside for "competitive vaudeville" or an "amateur night"—very much as we saw it at Savenay. Gradually a stock company—capable at least of one-act plays—was evolved from the dramatic material immediately at hand—soldiers and Red Cross and hospital men and women workers—with the result that by Thanksgiving Day, 1918, a very creditable production entitled "The Battle of Vichy" was produced there in the hut, after which the company moved on toward the conquest of the neighboring "metropolitan" towns of Moulins and Châtel-Guyon.
Some one is going to come along some day and write the analysis of the innate desire of the American to dabble with play-acting. The plethora of war-time musical shows that became epidemic among the divisions of the A. E. F. and spread not merely to Paris—where one of these entertainments followed upon the heels of another—but eventually to New York and other cities of the country, affords interesting possibilities for the psychologist. It was a huge by-product of the war and one not entirely expected.
When the resources of the amateur Thespians of Vichy had become well-nigh exhausted, a New York professional actress—Miss Ida Phinney—who not only had real dramatic ability but considerable experience in staging and producing, was enlisted in the Red Cross service there. With her aid, the attractive little cinema theater—with its blue upholstery, its tiny boxes, and its complete and up-to-date stage equipment, even to the scenery—became a full-fledged playhouse. Stage hands and property men were assigned from the army, and Vichy began seriously to stage, costume, and produce and criticize plays. Soldiers with a knack for design took keen delight in advising as to "creations" for the wardrobes of the cast and themselves watched the garments grow into reality from inexpensive stuffs in the sewing room. A clever artist wrought a full set of stage jewelry—even to the heavy bracelets and the inevitable snake rings of the Oriental dancers—from stray scraps of shells and other metals that came to his hungry fingers, while the Red Cross sent a full complement of musical instruments down from Paris. And so the Vichy A. E. F.-A. R. C. Playhouse came into the fullness of its existence—and night after night hung out the S. R. O. sign.
After all, what is the doughboy's idea of a good time? That is the very question our Red Cross asked itself—again and again. And because the correct answer could not be evolved in a moment, established not only after it had arrived in France a Bureau of Recreation and Welfare whose real job was, after plenty of practical experimentation, to establish the correct solution of the problem. For a long time this Bureau consisted of a small desk at the Paris headquarters, a Ford camionette, and Major Harold Ober. The camionette and Ober went from village to village along the lines from Bar-le-Duc to Gondrecourt with books, magazines, tobacco, writing material, and a small moving-picture show. These efforts many times furnished the only amusement to our early troops, billeted in quiet villages, where the quaintness of French pastoral life soon lost its novelty.
From that small beginning, Ober's work grew steadily. And because the Red Cross specialized more and more in that phase of army life which was its original purpose—hospitalization—Ober's task became in turn more and more devoted to the hospital centers, large and small—until the time came in practically every hospital ward in France—where the men were not so desperately ill as to make even music an irritant—that the "rag," and "jazz," or the latest musical comedy hit direct from Broadway were constant and welcome visitors to long rows of bedridden boys. In most cases these were phonographs, and because whenever I wish to be really convincing in the pages of this book, I fall back upon figures, permit me to mention that 1,243 phonographs, calling for 300,000 needles and 29,000 records, helped relieve the tedium of the American convalescents in the hospitals of France.
And, while we are still in figures, remember that there were times—unbelievable as it may seem to some folk who were frequent visitors to our hospital wards over there—that the doughboy tired of music, canned or fresh, and turned gratefully to the printed page. To anticipate his needs in that regard, American residents in Paris and in London gave generously of their private libraries—a nucleus which soon was greatly increased by purchase. The books were sent around in portable boxes, a service which steadily grew until a library of from 1,000 to 10,000 books was maintained by the American Red Cross in each hospital—a total of some 100,000 all told, and of which a goodly proportion were histories, French grammars, dictionaries and technical works.
The demand for periodical literature was tremendous. In the months of December, 1918, alone, our Red Cross distributed nearly four million magazines and newspapers among our doughboys. Prominent among these last was the Stars and Stripes, the clever and ingenious publication of the enlisted men themselves. A special "gift edition" of this remarkable weekly was obtained from the publishers for distribution in hospitals alone, and this ran into the hundreds of thousands each month—a high limitation which was reached only when the stock of print paper began to run low. The demand upon writing paper was hardly less than that upon print. The doughboy was a regular and prolific correspondent, and before January, 1919, our Red Cross had furnished him with seven million illustrated post cards, seven and a half million envelopes, and fourteen million sheets of writing paper.
But his eternal joy was in "shows." These might be two come-uppish lads, with gloves, going it in a roped arena, a flickering lantern displaying the well-known and untiring antics of Mr. Charles Chaplin or Mr. Douglas Fairbanks, the exquisite artistes of one of the opera houses in Paris in a composition that brought unforgetable joy to the ears and memories of the many, many lovers of music in our khaki—or a homemade production of the doughboy himself. Of these the "movie" was, of course, the simplest to handle, and therefore by far the most universal. It began its A. E. F. career in France as a true "barnstormer." As early as July, 1917, a Red Cross man with a French motion-picture operator as an assistant had hied himself out from Paris, riding in one of the universal Ford camionettes, upon which had been mounted a generator and a projector. Upon arriving at an army camp, the show would be "put on"—with little fuss or delay. The smooth, whitewashed side of a stone building would make a bully screen and there was never even doubts of an audience or of its enthusiasms. For from wonderments at this additional strange contraption from the Etats Unis, the peasants and the poilus, who were its very first admirers, grew rapidly into Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin and Billie Burke fans. This taste followed closely that all-conquering admiration for our chewing gum which overcame the French and left them quite helpless.
Eventually this "movie" institution of the Red Cross overseas grew to sizable proportions, under the direction of Lawrence Arnold, of New York. At least five and sometimes fourteen performances a week were given at each of our American hospitals in France—and with a complete change of program each week even to the Pathé weekly news, which was purchased and sent overseas by the Westchester County (N. Y.) Chapter of the American Red Cross as its own special contribution. But I think that the most interesting feature of this entire work—and the most human—was the ingenious scheme by which the projectors were so adapted as to throw the pictures upon the ceilings of the wards and so give an untold pleasure and diversion to the tedious hours of our boys who were so completely bedridden as not to be able to even sit erect. And there were many such.
We have drifted for the moment quite away from Vichy and the lovely blue and white and gold theater of our Red Cross in the heart of that ancient town. While it was headquarters, it was, after all, but part of the American Red Cross show there; because while our Red Cross recognized that the biggest part of its job was taking care of the enlisted man it was by no means blind to the necessities of his officers. Which led to the regeneration—moral and otherwise—of still another well-known gambling place in the town—the smart casino in the center of the park. This became, quite quickly and easily, an officers' club for the A. E. F. One room was reserved ordinarily for the French, while at least once a week the entire place was given over to a dance.
Dancing! Neither the enlisted man nor the officer ever seemed to tire of it. Each week also the enlisted men piled up the tables and the chairs in their hut and conducted a dance of their own, of which one of the chief features was ice cream—not fox-trotting. As in the huts and canteens elsewhere across France there were never nearly enough girls to serve as partners for the men. But there were no "wallflowers." The floor manager always carried a whistle. A number of times during the progress of each number he blew it—as a signal that the men lined along the walls were privileged to "cut in" on those already dancing. And on the occasions when some restless, impetuous boy blew a whistle of his own and seized the first partner available there was ever a delightful confusion.
Yet with all these things it could not be said that life in the hospital center was exactly an even round of social events; yet it rarely ever ceased for long to be dramatic. Take that November evening when twenty-seven hundred of our boys who had been prisoners of the boche came slipping into Vichy. Their uniforms were filthy and ragged. Slung from their shoulders were the Red Cross boxes such as had sustained them not only during their incarceration in Germany but on their long journey out of that miserable place.
The limited capacity of these Red Cross boxes for our imprisoned men had precluded their containing much more than mere food necessities. And the boys in the ragged uniforms were hungry, not only for food of the "home-cooked" varieties, but for everyday human associations. They had both; even though the hut and the casino each worked steadily and for long hours six wonderful nights in succession. Nearly four thousand miles away from home, every effort was made to make this home-coming into Vichy from the neutral gateways of Switzerland a real one.
These prisoners, as well as the greater numbers of the wounded, arrived with practically no personal possessions. The army promptly re-equipped them with uniforms, but the job of the Home and Hospital Bureau of the Army and Navy Department, which had this particular part of the big Red Cross job as its very own province, was to anticipate and look after all of their personal necessities. This thing it did, and its representatives coöperated with the army officers in studying the most urgent requirements and finding the very gifts which would provide the greatest proportion of real comfort.
Come back, if you will, once again to statistics. I make no apologies for introducing the flavor of the official report into this narrative from time to time. Reports ofttimes are indeed dull things; but the reports of almost any department of the Red Cross have a real human interest—even when they seemingly deal with mere percentages and rows of figures. Take a hospital which solemnly reports that 175,872 hospital days have been given to the army in the short space of four months. That fact can hardly be dismissed as a dull statement. It carries with it pictures of white wards, of the capable hands of nurses, of the faces of brave boys in long lines along the ways of an institution which modestly confesses that it holds but a mere fifteen hundred beds.
Because the following excerpt from the report of a Red Cross captain at Vichy carries with it a picture of the boys who straggled into the local headquarters asking for everything from socks to chewing gum, it is set down here:
"During the month of October (1918), 78,278 packages of tobacco, 7,480 tubes of tooth paste, 7,650 toothbrushes, 3,650 combs, 3,460 Red Cross bags, 2,850 packages of gum, 1,650 cakes of soap, 1,250 pipes, 1,560 handkerchiefs, 1,245 cakes of chocolate, 1,200 packages of shaving soap, 950 pencils, 1,000 boxes of matches, 900 shaving brushes, 500 packages of playing cards, 450 washcloths, 400 sweaters, 350 razors, 350 boxes of talcum powder, and various smaller amounts of pens, ink, malted milk, razor blades, checkers, thread, games, pipe cleaners, scissors, and drinking cups were distributed free; chiefly, so far as we know, to penniless boys. As this is written, this office is having a thousand applicants a day and, while all their wants cannot be met, no one leaves empty-handed...."
"No one leaves empty-handed...."
The boys who marched across the snow-blanketed park at Vichy that January morning with their crimson-crossed bags in their hands, were, after all, only typical of many thousands who had gone before. For three days they had anticipated their evacuation by asking for writing paper, for souvenir postals, for pocket song books, for gloves, sweaters, and the rest of the usual output of the Red Cross—the variety of whose resources would put a modern city department store to the blush. One youngster came to the headquarters on the last day holding his trench cap in his hand.
"It's too dirty for the trip home," he said. "Can't the Red Cross get me a new one?"
No, the Red Cross could not duplicate the work of the army's quartermasters, but it could, and would, help the boy out. So it gave him a cake of soap and showed him how he could clean his greasy cap quite thoroughly and then dry it on the office stove before starting on the march across the park.
The difficulties of keeping up a full stock of Red Cross supplies of every sort in a land and in times when shipping space of all kinds was at a great premium should be obvious. Of necessity surgical supplies took precedence over luxuries of every sort. Then it was that such places as Vichy and Savenay and all the rest of them had to depend, not alone upon their normal receipts, but upon the resourcefulness of individual workers and the fruitfulness of the surrounding country. That was the reason why in one instance when Red Cross bags could not be shipped into Vichy, they were manufactured there by the thousands by French needlewomen. Indeed no doughboy should leave "empty-handed." Near by districts for a considerable number of miles roundabout were invaded by automobiles seeking the bright-colored cretonnes, which make the bags so very gay and, in turn, so much the more welcome.
On at least two other occasions the vicinage was similarly combed for emergency supplies—for the American celebrations of both Thanksgiving Day and Christmas, 1918. Much was made of both these glorious Yankee holidays. The time was propitious for real celebration. Peace was not only in the air, but at last actually accomplished. The hearts of men were softened. One could sing of "peace on earth" and not choke as the words came to his lips.
So it was that Christmas Day at Vichy was a particularly gay one—gay, despite even the pain and suffering that remained in all the great hospital wards there. For men—American men, if you please, could, and did, hide for the nonce their fearful suffering. Pain begone! The carols were in the air. The hundreds of gayly decorated electric-light bulbs were flashing on at dusk. And you might go from ward to ward and there count all of fifty Christmas trees—these, too, brilliantly decorated. And the decorators in all these instances had been Red Cross women and men—and wounded soldiers lying ill at ease in their hospital cots. They made a great job of all of it—a merry job as well. And when the supplies of such conventional raw materials as tinsel and popcorn fell short they seemed to find something else that did quite as well.
For that hospital celebration among our wounded men at Vichy just 13,657 socks were filled, which bespeaks the exact number of doughboys that participated in the celebration. If they could have spoken, each of these humble articles of clothing might easily have told a double story—the tale of its own origin and the romance that came to it after that memorable Christmas Day; for they were American knit socks, and no factory—no inanimate, impersonal place, peopled with machines rather than with humans—had turned them forth. Each and every one of them were hand-knitted. And some of them had come from my lady's parlor, situated in an upper floor, perhaps, of a great and gaudy apartment house, and some had come from the prairie ranch, and some had come from cabins upon the steep and desolate mountainsides of the Alleghenies or the Rockies or the Sierras. From East and West and North and South they had come—but all had come from the United States; and I am perfectly willing to predict that every blessed one returned forthwith to the land of its birth.
The mate of each one of these 13,657 socks was rolled and placed in its toe. Then followed other things—shaving soap, cigarettes, tobacco, nuts, candy, handkerchiefs—by this time you ought to know the Red Cross list as well as I. While, by connivance with the head nurse of each of the wards, each blessed sock was individually tagged and addressed to its recipient. There is nothing, you know, like personal quality in a Christmas gift.
If, after the perusal of all these pages, you still insist upon being one of those folk who regard the triumph of our Red Cross in France as one of American organization, rather than of American individualism, and American generosity, permit me to explain to you that in the paragraphs of this chapter you have slipped from the work of the Bureau of Hospital Administration to that of the Home and Hospital Bureau of the Army and Navy Department. The distinctly medical and surgical phases of the Red Cross work in the A. E. F. hospitals across France was a major portion of the burden of Colonel Burlingame's job; the more purely recreative and comfort-giving phases came under Majors J. B. A. Fosburgh and Horace M. Swope, both of whom served as directors of the Army and Navy Departments during the Gibson régime. But the distinction between these two departments was almost entirely one of name. Each, after all, was American Red Cross and as American Red Cross worked—to a common and unselfish and entirely humanitarian end.
If I have lingered upon Vichy it has been because its story was so nearly the story of the Red Cross work in other A. E. F. hospitals across France. The narrative of each differs as a rule only in the most minor details. Sometimes, of course, the unexpected happened, as at Mesves, where our Red Cross under emergency served a double purpose. During the October, 1918, drive, when the American Army was functioning to its highest efficiency and in so functioning was, of necessity, making a fearful sacrifice of its human units, this hut was taken over by the Medical Corps of the army and fitted out as an emergency ward, with ninety-five cots. For six weeks it so served as a direct hospital function.
In the great Base Hospital No. 114 at Beau Deserte—just outside the embarkation ports of Bordeaux and Bassens—our Red Cross not only served from 1,200 to 1,500 cups of coffee a day in its huge hut, but actually maintained an athletic field, in addition to the billiard tables which were an almost universal feature of every Red Cross hut. And at another base hospital in that same Bordeaux district, several companies of evacuated men were being told off into groups of a hundred each—and each in charge of a top sergeant—ready to sail on the following day. Then, just as the men were about to march to the gangplank of the waiting steamer, one of their number fell ill of the scarlet fever and the entire group had to be quarantined. It was one of the many jobs of the Red Cross force there to keep these restless and disappointed men amused and as happy as possible, and in turn necessary to use a little philosophy.
Philosophy?
One Red Cross girl down there at that particular time told me how she had experimented with it in that trying instance. Her eyes sparkled as she announced the results of the experiments.
"It worked, it really worked," she said. "I found a group of colored men, and upon that group used all the scientific new thought that I might possibly bring to my aid, and with real success. The men were mollified and a bit contented, so that one of them—I think that back in the Middle West he had been a Pullman porter—finally came to me and said:
"'Missy, I's a-found our hoodoo. Sure what could we expect when we've got a cross-eyed nigger preacher in our squad?'"