One other of these Red Cross hospitals deserves especial mention in the pages of this book—the tented institution upon the race course at Auteuil just outside the fortifications of Paris. This institution, situated within the confines of the lovely Bois-de-Boulogne, also was established to meet the hospital necessities arising at the crux of the German drive of 1918. It was first planned to take cases far advanced toward recovery and so to relieve the badly overcrowded Red Cross hospitals at Neuilly and other points in the metropolitan district of Paris. And because of this type of cases, and the fact that summer was close at hand, it was felt that tent structures properly builded and floored could be used, and so much time saved.
That at least was the plan in May when the race course was commandeered through the French authorities and work begun. In twenty-one days the hospital was completed with six hundred beds, while draughtsmen were preparing to increase its capacity to twenty-four hundred beds.
But as the boche came closer and closer to Paris, that original plan was quickly swept aside, and even the Red Cross made quick plans to transfer its general headquarters to Tours or some other city well to the south of France. Auteuil became, not a convalescent resort, but a military emergency hospital of the first class—American Red Cross Hospital Number Five, if you please. It soon reached great proportions. In the five months that marked its career—from May 30 until the end of October, 1918—it received 8,315 patients who had a total of 183,733 days of hospital treatment and 2,101 operations. Nearly five per cent of all the surgical cases of our army in France passed through its portals. And when under the sudden and almost unexpected pressure that was placed upon it, it found itself seriously short of personnel—the men and women already working it fatigued almost to the point of exhaustion—nurses and other workers were drawn from the Children's Bureau, the Tuberculosis Bureau, and other functions of the American Red Cross. They were not registered nurses, to be sure, with neat little engraved diplomas in their trunks, but they were both willing and efficient. And that, at that time, was all that was necessary. I think that I have already referred to our Red Cross in France as a mobile institution.
When the Auteuil plan was first brought to the attention of the officers of the Medical Corps of our army they were inclined to scoff at it. To them it seemed vast, visionary, impracticable. And as Burlingame went steadily ahead with his plan—in those days, remember, it was to be chiefly a rest camp—there were folk even in the ranks of the Red Cross who criticized it. Then it was that Burlingame answered criticism, not by drawing in on his plans, but by greatly extending them, by planning to build a full surgical evacuation hospital out there on the race course in the park. The criticisms grew, and finally Perkins, whom you already know as the head of the Red Cross organization in France, called the young doctor to him.
"They say that we already have two excellent Red Cross surgical hospitals here in Paris and that they are quite enough," suggested Perkins.
"We shall need more," insisted the hospital expert of his organization.
"The medical sharps in the army don't think that it is necessary," added the Commissioner.
"Then they are wrong," said Burlingame. "We are going to need Auteuil—and we are going to need it mighty badly."
"Then go to it, Major," said Perkins.