Then there were the things for which the Medical Corps frankly made no provision, which could have no place in a strictly military programme, such as food delicacies of great cost, special articles of clothing, and amusements. Every hospital convalescent ward had its phonograph, its checker-boards, its chess-sets, and its dominoes. That was the Red Cross.
The Red Cross had three hospitals of its own in Paris. The first of these was at Neuilly, the hospital which had been the American Ambulance Hospital from the beginning of the war, given over on the third anniversary of its inauguration. Here French and American soldiers, American civilians who worked with the army, and Red Cross officers and men were cared for. The second had been Doctor Blake's Hospital, and when it became a Red Cross hospital, it was made to include the gigantic laboratory where investigations were made, and where the American Red Cross had the honor to ferret out the cause of trench-fever. This fever had been one of the baffling tragedies of the war, because in the press of caring for their wounded, other hospitals had been unable to give it sufficient research.
The third was the Reid Hospital, equipped and supplied by Mrs. Whitelaw Reid.
In the long period when all this hospital organization was at the command of civilian France, inestimably fine work was done. It was a sort of poetic tuition fee for the instruction in war surgery which was meanwhile going on from veteran French surgeons to the American newcomers. At the end of the first year, the Medical Corps was itself ready for any stress, and it had mightily relieved the stress it had already found.
CHAPTER XV
IN CHARGE OF MORALE
IF the army as a whole was a story of old skill in new uses, certainly the most extraordinary single upheaval was that of the Y. M. C. A. Though it had grown into many paths of civil life, in peace-times, that could not have been foreshadowed by its founders, probably the wildest speculation of its future never included the purveying of vaudeville and cigarettes to soldiers in France.
Yet just that was what the Y. M. C. A. was doing, within less than a year from the American Army's arrival in France, and its only lamentation was that it had nowhere near enough cigarettes and vaudeville to purvey.
It accepted the offer of the United States Government to watch over the morale of the soldiers abroad, partly because it was so excellently organized that it could handle a task of such vast scope, and partly because both French and British Armies had got such fine results from similar organizations that the American Y. M. C. A. felt itself to be historically elected.
The Y. M. C. A. had cut its wisdom-teeth long before it became a part of the army. Its directors had accepted the fact that a young man is apt to be more interested in his biceps than in his soul, and that if he can have athletics aplenty, and entertainment that really entertains, he'd as lief be out of mischief as in it.