"Couldn't you fix it up for me just once to have ham and eggs and apple pie for breakfast?"
The most important thing in the case of all the sick men was to keep them from brooding about home. The doctors made a point of getting around and talking to the patients to cheer them up. One of them complained of homesickness.
"Yes," said the doctor, "I suppose we all have people back there that we miss."
"You can just bet I do," said the sick soldier, "I've got the finest wife in the world in Des Moines and two children and a Ford."
The health of the staff was excellent, but sometimes they felt homesick, too. The enlisted men gave a show the night I was at the hospital and during the course of the performance everybody wept or at least got moist eyed because the play was about New York. It was laid in a year as nameless as the place where the hospital is located. All the program said was: "The bachelor apartments of Schuyler Van Allen on a fine June night a few weeks after the end of the war." Schuyler had just come back from Europe and he found his apartment with everything just as it was on the night he had sailed for France. There was the daily paper he had left behind with the date May 8, 1917, and he looked at the old sheet and mused as he read some of the headlines:
"Kaiser Calls on Troops to Stand Firm," read Schuyler. "The Kaiser," he said to himself, and then he added: "I wonder whatever became of him."
The audience laughed at that, but in a moment the doctors and the nurses and the patients who weren't sick enough to stay in bed wept. It was all because Schuyler looked out of the window and said to his friend: "Oh, it's great to be on Fifth Avenue again. I want to see it in every light and at every hour of the day. It was fairly blazing tonight with the same old hurrying crowd jamming the traffic at Forty-second Street and the same old mob pushing and shoving its way into the Grand Central subway station." The mention of the subway was too much for the audience. By this time the nurse who sat in front of me was dabbing violently at her eyes with her pocket handkerchief. She was breaking my heart and I leaned forward and asked: "What part of New York do you come from?"
"I wasn't ever in New York," she said. "I come from Lima, Ohio."
Like the medical corps, the engineers were peculiarly American and peculiarly efficient as well. We first came upon them when we saw a tall, stringy man looking out of the window of a little locomotive which pulled a train up to a point at the French front. We thought he was an American because his jaws were moving back and forth slowly and meditatively. Inquiry brought confirmation.
"Sure, I'm an American," said the man in the blue jumpers. "I guess I've kicked a hobo off the train for every telegraph pole back on the old Rock Island, but this is the toughest railroading job I've struck yet."