After the evacuation hospital comes the base hospital. Only those cases which promise quick recovery are kept very long near the front. As the war continues those beds will be needed for the freshly wounded, and the chances are that our men wounded in this battle will soon be sent, in fine hospital trains, to the vicinity of Paris, or towns farther south.
I visited an emergency base hospital established and maintained by Johns Hopkins Hospital, and I should be very well satisfied to hear that my son was being cared for there. This hospital is situated in a pleasant wooded spot not many miles from the ancient town which is our general headquarters. It has a main building of brick, an old French country house, but most of the hospital wards are in temporary wooden buildings.
Johns Hopkins itself, with its millions of dollars invested in buildings, has no better equipment than this temporary base hospital in France. It has no better doctors or nurses, and as for its head nurse it has the best head nurse Johns Hopkins ever produced, Miss Bessie Baker.
I know other hospitals, one in a medieval town in central France, several in a pleasant suburb of Paris, and one, perhaps the most picturesque of all, in southern France a few miles from the large seaport which admits many of our ships weekly. This hospital is housed in an old French château that in its garden plan reminded me a little of the White House in Washington. The front garden is small and formal, with a wonderful hedge of white and red camellias. But back of the château the large garden slopes in a series of blossoming terraces down to a great river which flows into the sea a few miles beyond. I can not think of a lovelier or more restful place in which to spend a convalescence.
The quality of nursing in our hospitals overseas is so high that it has excited the admiration of the French and British soldiers. They beg to be sent to “the American hospital.” I have heard French officers say that they would be glad to have the entire hospital system in France turned over to the control of the Americans.
The fact is that we have worked out a far gentler system of caring for the wounded, for changing dressings and the like, than any other nation. The British are scientific but Spartan. The French have had few trained nurses until this war. Our nurses are the best in the world.
I shall not fret about my wounded soldier, and I hope other women will make up their minds to bear ordinary bad news from over there with calmness and courage. We can not possibly escape suffering and pain. It is in the world for us to bear, and until the war is won women all over the world must live in a sisterhood of sorrow and anxiety.
When the word comes, “He is wounded,” just remember that he is also being taken care of by the most tender and humane means any government in the world ever devised for its soldiers. Even if the dreadful message comes, “Wounded and missing,” do not despair. Even that is being looked after by a large department of the Red Cross. Every missing soldier is traced, and if he is found to be a prisoner his needs are provided for—medicine, food, clothing, letters—the Red Cross sees that he gets them promptly.
Besides all its work of relief for sick and wounded soldiers, the Red Cross has a department of medical research which has performed wonders in preventive medicine, and it is still at work, brilliantly and tirelessly, to find ways of fighting pain and death.