CHAPTER VII
THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR
The triage had been set up just outside of a small church which placed its buttressed side alongside the market place of the village. It was a busy place. And just because you may not know what triage really is any better than I did when I first heard the term, let me hasten to explain that it is an emergency station set up by the Army Medical Corps just back of the actual firing line—that and something more; for the triage generally means a great center of Red Cross activities as well. And this particular one, in the little village of Noviant, close behind the salient of Saint Mihiel—to which reference was made in the preceding chapter—was the initiation point of a Red Cross captain; his name is John A. Kimball and he comes from Boston.
Captain Kimball told it to me one day in Paris, and I shall try to give much of it to you in his own words. He was just a plain, regular business fellow who, well outside of the immediate possibilities of army service, had closed his desk in Boston and had offered himself to the Red Cross. And to work for the Red Cross at the front was to face death as an actuality.
"The wounded already were coming in, in good numbers, on that unforgetable morning of the twelfth of September, when they brought him in—the first dead man that I had faced in the war," said he. "We had had our experiences with handling iodine and antitoxin and dressings, but this artillery captain was in need of none of these.... His feet stuck out underneath the blanket that was thrown over the stretcher and hid his body, his head, his arms, and his hands. I saw that his boots were new and that they had been recently polished, too. Of course they were muddy, but I remember beneath the caking of the clay that they were of new leather. One does remember details at such a time.
"I buried him. It was a new experience, and not a pleasant one. But war is no holiday; it is not filled with pleasant experiences. And sooner or later it brings to a man a test, which, if disagreeable, is all but supreme. This was my test. I rose to it. I had to. I buried the man, ran hastily through his papers first and then sealed them into a packet to send to those who held him dearer than life itself."
Because the Boston captain's experience was so typical of so many other Red Cross men who risked their all in the service at the front lines of battle, let us take time to consider it a little in detail. He came to France at the end of June, 1918. He stayed in Paris and chafed at the delay in being held back from the fighting front. In four weeks he received his reward. Having asked to be made a searcher among killed, wounded, and missing men, he was assigned to the Second Division at Nancy, which had just come out of the hard fighting at Soissons and was resting for a brief week before going into action again.
The Second Division is one of the notable Divisions of our fighting forces that entered France. Because one wishes to avoid invidious comparisons and because, after all, it is so really hard to decide whether this Division, this regiment, or that is entitled to go down into history ahead of its fellows, I should very much hesitate to say that the Second or the First or the Third or the Twenty-sixth or the Seventy-seventh or any other one Division was the ranking Division of our Regular Army. But I shall not hesitate to write that the Second stood in the front rank. Out of some 2,800 Distinguished Service medals that had been awarded in France up to the first of March, 1919, some 800 had gone to this Division. And yet it was but one of eighty Divisions involved in the conflict over there.