“Base Hospital No. ——
“Amex Force, France
“Dear Mother,
“You ought to see your soldier son now! He looks about as military as a smoked ham, and feels like—but my well-known delicacy halts me. Never mind, I’m all here—barring a few pieces of bone that don’t matter, and I have gained the honor of having been in the first wave of the first Americans to go over the top at Cantigny.
“Incidentally I have the bullet that hit me, and one boche helmet. I would have got more but my trip was short and sweet—some six hundred yards at most before some unmannerly person slammed me over the knee with a battle-ship, and I sat down to think it over. It struck me suddenly that there was very little of interest to be seen, and it would be a waste of time to go any further.
“From there to where I am now has been a series of more or less painful transfers through first aid posts, dressing stations and French hospitals, with a Red Cross train and a ninety kilometer ride in an ambulance. I don’t think you have ever known the joy of a ninety K. ride on the upper deck of a pitching ambulance. It’s an experience. I appreciated the sensations of a pup with a tin can tied to his tail.
“But all that is over and I’m settled at last, so far behind the lines that the street lights of the town aren’t shaded at all. You must not worry, Mother dear, for I’ll be as good as new in three months, and while broken legs are not the sort of thing you go around hunting for, they aren’t half as bad as a tooth ache, and mine is a particularly well trained one and doesn’t hurt at all.”
By the time the news reaches us here in America that one of our beloved has been wounded in France the worst is usually over and the patient is often out of danger. It takes several days for such news to reach Washington and be telegraphed to soldiers’ relatives, and if no second telegram comes closely on the first we may be truly thankful.
My son was wounded on the twenty-eighth of May, and it was nearly a month before I heard from him. If this had happened a year ago I should have been paralyzed with fear, not because of the wound, but because of dread of the after effects. One enormous advantage we have over our splendid allies is that we not only benefit from their experience in battle, but from their experience in the hospital. Wounds which for the first three years of the war were impossible to cure are now in the class called favorable.
It is this knowledge that helps to keep me in courage, and I hope it will help all the others. We are too far away to realize the war, but we know that our sons are in deadly peril from German shot and shell.
There has not been enough said about the magnificent work of the army surgeons in restoring men. One of their greatest achievements was the conquest of trench fever. In another chapter I shall tell that story. In this one I shall tell of the great fight they have made—a fight almost if not quite won—against a still more terrible malady, wound shock.