It was christened “Le Bienêtre du Blessé, Société Franco-Américaine pour Nos Combattants” (The Comfort, or Well-being, of the Wounded; French-American Society for Our Soldiers), and is to exist throughout the war and for six months after fighting ceases. Men in high places, according to custom, became its sponsors, the War Office gave it a “barrack” out at the Entrepôt des Dons, where all the big oeuvres have their storehouses and a central bureau. The Paris banking house of Munroe & Co. accepted the office of Treasurer and receives all donations. The address of this firm in New York is 30 Pine Street, and any one who is kind enough to answer this appeal with a donation will please send it there.
I will confess that I wandered in upon that preliminary meeting quite by mistake, being under the impression that I had been invited merely to have a cup of tea and some lively conversation, and that when I found a committee was in process of formation I would have escaped if I could. I had gone to France to write about the work of its women in the war and in the hope of doing something for that great country in my own way, but with the firm intention of not being drawn into any organization. Possibly no one ever lived who hates sitting at a committee table as I do. However, escape was impossible then or later; and, by degrees, I became infected with their own enthusiasm. After my visits to military hospitals in the war zone I promised Mme. d’Andigné willingly enough that I would do what I could to put the thing through in this country.
No oeuvre since the beginning of the war has been more important than this. When a man has lost a quart or so of blood, after an exhausting period in the trenches, or has undergone a severe operation, the nerves of his stomach are in a supersensitive condition. But in military hospitals the dietary kitchen contains nothing but milk and eggs. Many people have a violent antipathy for both. Personally, I would lie down and die before I would drink a glass of milk, and a recent illness made me appreciate the fact that all the doctors in the world could not have saved me if I had had no convalescent diet offered me but milk and eggs.
Military discipline is inexorable. There are many hundreds of these hospitals in the war zone, and there must be one rule for all. Thousands can drink milk and eat eggs whether they like them or not, and no exceptions may be made for those who would rather die of inanition than touch either. A delicately built man in a trench receives no favor; he must do his part or be dismissed as a Réformé Numero II., and in the hospital a man must take the same chances. At the date of this writing France is still expending two billion francs a month, and to impose a further tax in behalf of an advanced dietary kitchen would possibly lead to a misunderstanding with a large stolid class more than likely to confuse “delicacies” with “luxuries.”
The French are the most economical of races, and the peasantry and bourgeoisie have a fundamental antipathy to the word luxury. The lower classes particularly have been too long accustomed to living on the smallest possible amount and putting the rest into the family stocking to sympathize with capricious appetites. Other nations are not altogether dissimilar in this respect, and in all previous wars groups of ladies have supplied military convalescents with the delicacies which save so many lives and hasten recovery. But this war is on too vast a scale. Beneficent ladies take care of the hospitals in Paris and the provincial cities, but in that great district known as La Zone des Armées, crowded with hospitals, but where so many of the towns are half in ruins and largely evacuated by the inhabitants, where few if any of the shops are open, it becomes a problem at times to find an orange to satisfy the last craving of a dying man. No one who has not been in those gray barren towns and villages of the war zone can imagine how sad a tarrying place they are for wounded men too ill to be sent to Paris.
But if the military machine was forced to appear callous, individually it recognized the necessity for a supplementary kitchen, if many of its best men were to be saved to France. Last Spring the Service de Santé (Health Department of the Ministry of War) asked Mme. d’Haussonville to form a great oeuvre by whose means all the hospitals in the military zone could be supplied by voluntary subscription with the necessary delicacies. When one reads the list of these articles demanded one may see plainly enough that they are delicacies, not luxuries—chicken or beef broth, cocoa, farina for gruel, sugar, biscuit, rice, canned fruits, jellies, preserves, oranges, sardines and ham. Condensed milk, as it is in some cases more digestible than the primitive, is also a welcome article.
No one knew better than Mme. Haussonville the mournful necessity for these simple articles of diet, for she goes periodically into the war zone on tours of hospital inspection. In many places a million francs would not buy one of these things, although the nurses in chief (Infirmière Majors) often sally out in desperation and try to buy out of their own purses something that a sick man craves. One told me that she had only two days before tried in vain to buy a few lumps of sugar in Bar-le-Duc, a town of over 17,000 inhabitants before the war and noted for its preserves. But sugar is scarce in France and very dear.
It was in July that I visited the beautiful hospital, Savonières, near Bar-le-Duc, and it had just received a consignment from Le Bienêtre du Blessé. Mme. Faure, the Infirmière Major, told me that nothing had ever been more welcome, and that the spirits of the men had gone up with a rush. Above all things the French convalescent craves preserves, under the impression, no doubt, that it is his weary palate alone that longs to be tickled, but as a matter of fact his system craves the stimulation and energizing qualities of the sugar.
This hospital is on a splendid estate leased by the Government shortly after the beginning of the war. More or less sheltered by trees from the indefatigable taube, eight or nine “barracks” have been erected, and down their long sides are rows of cots that look as comfortable as they are neat. As many of the patients as could be moved were lying on long chairs under the great oaks and lime trees. At the entrance to the park was a row of low buildings built for the ever-necessary “bureau,” chemist shop, surgical dressings stores, &c., all run with the method and precision characteristic of the French. It was a quiet and sylvan scene when I saw it, but when guns at the front are thundering, reminding these men that their comrades in arms are falling momentarily, or taubes are drumming overhead searching out the barracks, it seems to me that sustained optimism must be a difficult feat. If the delicacies always craved by the sick will raise the spirits of men who have been wounded and perhaps mutilated in the service of their country, and break the sad monotony of their lives, those in the enjoyment of health and freedom cannot work too hard to raise the necessary money. And let it never be forgotten by those whose slogan in giving, as in other things, is “America first,” that had it not been for the military genius of the French at the battle of the Marne there would be no such thing as freedom in the world to-day.
I saw nothing more interesting at these hospitals than the bathtubs for the wounded brought straight from the front. Even officers who have been in the trenches for several days are not clean, to say the least of it, and the first thing to do before the operation is to give them a bath. If they are grand blessés they must receive as little handling as possible. Consequently they are transferred from their own stretcher to one that covers the top of a very large bathtub full of warm water. This stretcher is lowered mechanically from the head down without jarring the wounded man. As soon as he is both clean and refreshed the stretcher is elevated and he is transferred to still another and wrapped in a sheet; then when dry he is carried to the operating table.