"And so, war—hideous and relentless—intrudes even on the peace of beautiful places, as it always will for most of us as long as we live. But even if the memories of what lay behind them came back to the nurses who had their leave at Cap d'Antibes, the days there were mostly happy ones. Nothing that the Red Cross has done has been more worth while than this place that they have had for the nurses who needed rest and recuperation. There were the creature comforts of hot water, good food, and soft beds; there was sunshine after an eternity of rain; peace after war."
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.