On January 27th he went with some French officers and men and a number of American officers to look into the work of the 6th French army training school, where artillery practice was in progress at Fère-en-Tardenois. He was standing behind a mortar, the center man of the five officers watching the gun crew fire the mortar, when a shell burst, or detonated, inside the gun.
The entire gun crew was blown to pieces. The four officers on either side of General Wood were killed. He himself received a wound in the muscles of the left arm and lost part of the right sleeve of his tunic. Six fragments of the shell passed through his clothing and two of them killed the officers on either side of him. He was the only man within a space of twelve feet of the mortar who was not instantly killed. Many were wounded, including two others of our own officers.
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After a night in the field first-aid hospital, where his arm was dressed, he motored approximately a hundred miles to Paris the next day and went into the French officers' hospital in the Hotel Ritz.
This hospital was in the old portion of the Ritz Hotel. General Wood was the first foreign officer to be admitted to it. It was full of wounded French officers and men from the different fronts; some of them from Salonika; some sent back from Germany, hopelessly crippled, and held as unfit for further service by the Germans; and many from the Western front.
Here he got very near the soul of the French Army and came in touch with that indomitable spirit which made that army fight best and hardest when things looked darkest. Thanks to an excellent physical condition he made a rapid recovery, described by French surgeons as found only among the very young. He was a guest of the French Government while at the hospital and received every possible courtesy. On the 16th of February after having talked with many of the French officers in the hospital and called, at their request, upon Clemenceau, President Poincaré, Joffre and {229} others, he left Paris entirely cured of his slight wound and proceeded to the headquarters of the French Army of the North at Vizay. There he met and talked with Generals D'Esperey and Gourand, visited Rheims and Bar-le-duc and spent the day of the 20th at Verdun.
During the next few days he visited the United States Army headquarters at Chaumont and Toul and was back in Paris on the 26th, when he received orders from the A. E. F. to return to the United States by way of Bordeaux. On the 21st of March he arrived in New York and was summoned four days later to appear before the Senate committee on military affairs to report his observations.
He was then examined by the Mayo examining board, pronounced absolutely fit physically and on April 12th resumed command of the 89th Division at Camp Funston, Kansas.
The training of this division was practically finished in late May and the 89th was thereupon ordered abroad for service.
After seeing some of the elements of the division off for the evacuation station at Camp Mills, Long {230} Island, New York, General Wood left Funston himself and proceeded to Mills to see to the reception of his division and look to its embarkation. He arrived at the Long Island camp on May 25th and there found an order from the War Department relieving him of his command of the 89th Division and instructing him to proceed to San Francisco to assume command of the Western Department. After finishing some necessary work he went to Washington on the 27th and saw the Secretary of War. Little is known of what took place at this conversation except that General Wood requested that he be reinstated in his command of the 89th Division and sent abroad, which was refused.