The headquarters of the Second were at Mananville to the south of the fighting lines. And halfway between Limey of the trenches (they ran right through the streets of the little town) and Mananville was Noviant where, as you already know, the triage was established beside the walls of the church and the Red Cross functioned at the front. Remember that the triage was nothing more nor less than a sorting station, where wounded men, being sent back in a steady stream from the front—three to six miles distant—were divided between four field hospitals of the Regular Army service; one handling gassed cases, another badly wounded, and the other two the strictly surgical cases. Each of these divisions consisted roughly of from ten to fifteen doctors and about one hundred enlisted men—no women workers were ever permitted so near the front—and was equipped with from five to eight army trucks of the largest size.
There has been sometimes an erroneous impression that the Red Cross was prepared to assume the entire hospital functions of the United States Army; I have even heard it stated by apparently well-informed persons that such a thing was fact. It is fact, however, that if the enormous task had been thrust upon the shoulders of our Red Cross it would have accepted it. It has never yet refused a work from the government—no matter how onerous or how disagreeable. As a matter of fact, the army, for many very good and very sufficient reasons of its own, preferred to retain direct charge of its own hospitals, both in the field and back of the lines, and even took over the hospitals which the Red Cross first established in France before the final policy of the Surgeon General's office was definitely settled, which hardly meant a lifting of responsibility from the shoulders of the American Red Cross. Its task, as we shall see in the chapters which immediately follow this, was almost a superhuman one. It needed all its energies and its great resources to follow the direct line of its traditional activity—the furnishing of comfort to the sick, the wounded, and the oppressed.
A wise man, one with canny understanding, if you will, who found himself at the Saint Mihiel sector would have understood that a battle was brewing. There was a terrific traffic on each of the roads leading up toward the trenches from the railhead and supply depot at the rear—big camions and little camionettes, two-man whippet tanks, French seventy-fives (as what is apparently the best field cannon yet devised will be known for a long time into the future), motor cars with important-looking officers, ambulances, more big camions, more little camionettes—all a seemingly unending procession. Fifth Avenue, New York, or Michigan Avenue, Chicago, on a busy Saturday afternoon could not have been more crowded, or the traffic handled in a more orderly fashion.
The barrage which immediately preceded the actual battle began at one o'clock on the morning of the twelfth. It lasted for nearly four hours and not only was noisily incessant but so terrific and so brilliant that one could actually have read a newspaper from its continuous flashes if that had been an hour for newspaper reading.
"It was like boiling water," says Kimball, "with each bubble a death-dealing explosion."
At five o'clock in the morning the men went over the top, and our Red Cross man shook himself out of a short, hard sleep of three hours in a damp shed near the triage beside the church at Noviant, for it had been raining steadily throughout the entire night, and went across to that roughly improvised dressing station. His big day's work was beginning. By six it was already in full swing. The first wounded men were coming back from the fighting lines up at Limey and were being sorted into the ambulances before they were started for the three big evacuation hospitals in the rear—each of them containing from three hundred to five hundred beds. The Boston man saw each wounded soldier as he was placed in the ambulance. Into the hands of those men who asked for them or who were able to smoke he gave cigarettes. And to those who were far too weak for the exercise or strain that smoking brought, gave a word of encouragement or perhaps a shake of the hand. And all in the name of the Red Cross.
He could have put in a busy day doing nothing else whatsoever; but felt that there were other sections of the battle front that needed the immediate presence of the American Red Cross. So at about half after seven he climbed in beside the driver of a khaki-colored army camionette and headed straight for Limey, and the heart of the trouble. There was another old and badly battered church in the town square there, and there a new triage already was being established; for the Yanks were driving forward—with fearful impetus and at a terrific rate. So the hospital went on, the sorting stages, with their indescribable scenes of human suffering—more stretchers and still more in the hands of boche prisoners coming in with their ghastly freight. Captain Kimball again passed out his cigarettes and started forward. Now he was on the scene of actual warfare. Dawn had broken. It had ceased to rain and the sky was bright and blue with white, fluffy, sun-touched clouds drifting lazily across it—just as the Boston boy had seen them drift across the sky in peaceful days on Cape Cod when he had had nothing to do but lie on his back and gaze serenely up at them.
"I plunged forward over the broken field," he told me, "and there I came across my artillery captain. I called an aid and we took him back—he of the bright new boots that had so recently been polished.... I got back into the game. All the time our boys shot ahead and the racket was incessant. Once, when I bumped my way across the German trenches, I paused long enough to stick my nose down into one of their dugouts. It was easy to see that the enemy had not anticipated the attack. For in that dugout—it was wonderfully neat and nice, with its concrete walls and floors and ceiling and its electric lights—was the breakfast still upon the table; the bread, the sausages, and the beer. I could have stayed there an hour and enjoyed it pretty well myself. But there were other things to be done. I got out into the shell-plowed fields once again. Across that rough sea of mud an engineer regiment was already building a road, which meant that we could get a Red Cross ambulance right to the very front. I walked back to Limey—or rather I stumbled over the rough fields—and there found one which had come through from Toul that morning, loaded to its very roof with bandages and chocolates and cigarettes. And I found that Triacourt had fallen. It still lacked some minutes of noon. The job for which our Division had been given two days had been accomplished in six hours—but such hours.
"We drove without delay into Triacourt—a fearfully slow business every foot of it, with every inch of the hastily constructed road crowded with traffic. But we got through and in the early afternoon were in the main street of the little town which the French had watched hungrily for four years and seemingly had been unable to capture. The women and children of the place came out into the sun-lighted street and rubbed their eyes. Was it all a dream; these men in tin helmets and uniforms of khaki and of olive drab? No, it could not be a dream. These were real men, fighting men. These were the Americans, the Americans of whom rumors had even run back of the enemy lines. They found their voices, these women, for the Germans had taken the men of Triacourt as prisoners.
"'Bons Américains!' they shrieked, almost in a single cry. And we saluted gravely."