Our Army at the Front

by Heywood Broun

Broadly speaking, the base hospitals of the army are organizations recruited and equipped in America by the Red Cross, and transported to France, where they become units of the army, under army discipline and direction, and supplied by the Medical Corps stores except in cases where these are inadvertently lacking, or unprovided for by the strictness of military supervision. In any case, where sufficient supplies are not forthcoming from the Medical Corps, they are given by the Red Cross.

This is the Red Cross on its military side. In its civilian work, which is extensive, and in its recreational work it carries on under its own name and by its own authority. Where it divides territory with the Y. M. C. A., the division is that the Y. M. C. A. takes the well soldier and the Red Cross the sick one, whenever either has time on his hands.

But the Medical Corps plus the Red Cross created between them a branch of the American Army in France which, from the moment of landing, was the boast of the nation.

For a year before America entered the war Colonel Jefferson Kean, director-general of the military department of the American Red Cross, had been organizing against the coming of American participation. Within thirty days after America's war declaration Colonel Kean announced that he had six base hospitals in readiness to go to the front, and within another thirty days these six units were on their way, equipped and ready to step into the French hospitals, schools, and what-not, waiting to receive them, and to do business as usual the following morning.

The six were organized at leading hospitals and medical schools: the Presbyterian Hospital of New York, with Doctor George E. Brewer in command; the Lakeside Hospital, Cleveland, with Doctor George W. Crile; the Medical School of Harvard University, with Doctor Harvey Cushing; the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, with Doctor Richard Harte; the Medical School of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, with Doctor Frederick Besley, and Washington University Hospital, Saint Louis, with Doctor Frederick T. Murphy.

A little while later the Postgraduate unit went from New York, the Roosevelt Hospital unit from there, and the Johns Hopkins unit from Baltimore. Many others followed in due time.

These hospital units, recruited and organized under the Red Cross, took their full complement of surgeons, physicians, and nurses. All these became members of the army as soon as they landed in France, and they were supplemented, either there or before they crossed, with members of Medical Corps, enlisted just after America entered the war.

The military rank of the physicians and surgeons conformed in a general way to the unofficial rank of the same men when they had worked together in the hospitals from which they came. There were, of course, some exceptions to this rule, but not enough to make it no rule at all.

It was true of the medicoes, as it was of the engineers, that they took military discipline none too seriously, because they brought a discipline of their own. Wherever, in civilian pursuits, the lives of others hang on prompt obedience, there is a strictness which no military strictness can outdo. This was true of the personnel of any hospital in America, before there was thought of war. It was equally true, of course, after the units were established behind the fighting-lines. But there was a certain lack of prompt salute and a certain freedom with first names which not the stoutest management from the military arm of the service could obliterate from the base hospitals. The Medical Corps enlisted men were naturally not sinners in this respect. The routine work of the base hospitals all fell to them. It was usually a sergeant of the army—though he was never a veteran—who attended the reception-rooms, kept account of symptoms, clothes, and first and second names, and did the work of orderly in the hospital. It was the privates who kept the mess and washed the dishes and changed the sheets.

The nurses went under military discipline and into military segregation—sometimes a little nettlesome, when the hospitals were far from companionship of any outside sort.