establishment of three great motor-transport centres: Camp Holabird,
about twenty miles from Baltimore, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay;
Camp Jessup, at Atlanta, Ga., and Camp Normoyle. The huge assembly and
repair shops erected at these camps are perhaps the most complete plants
of their kind in existence, being of permanent construction and adapted
to the needs of the army for many years to come. At each of these camps
storage facilities have been provided for the vast number of motor
vehicles which will not be required under peace conditions, but which
will be kept in constant readiness for use in an emergency. Practically
all motor vehicles destined for service overseas passed through Camp
Holabird, where they were uncrated, assembled, put in thorough running
order, inspected, registered, and finally loaded aboard ship for
transport to France. During the last summer of the war, when the shipment
of motor vehicles was at its height, Camp Holabird was worth journeying
a considerable ways to see, there being literally acres of vehicles,
ranging all the way from huge artillery repair trucks, veritable
machine-shops on wheels, to “flivvers” which unsuccessfully attempted
to conceal their identity beneath coats of olive-drab. The paint-shops
were, incidentally, one of the most interesting features of the camps,
the paint being sprayed on the vehicles by means of air-brushes and a
hose in little more time than it takes to tell about it. Thanks to this
ingenious method, it did not take very much longer to paint a motor car
or a truck than it does to polish a pair of shoes. Then there were the
trimming-shops, where tops, curtains, boots, and cushions were turned
out by the thousand; the supply depots, whose huge steel and concrete
buildings were stacked to the ceilings with incredible quantities of
tires, tubes, lamps, and other accessories; the repair-shops, with their
forges, lathes, and travelling cranes; and the spare-parts department,
where, thanks to a remarkably ingenious card-index system, there could
be obtained without confusion or delay any duplicate part that might be
called for, whether it was a new rear axle for a mobile repair-shop or
a tiny cotter-pin for a motorcycle. Though these great shops had been
in operation only a few months when the war ended, and though their
personnel had been obtained anywhere, everywhere, almost at a moment’s
notice, they were probably, everything considered, the best organized and
most efficient plants of their kind in the world.
The Motor Transport Corps naturally resolves itself into two main
branches: Park Service and Field Service. The first of these branches
is subdivided, in turn, into four general types of parks: Reception,
Organization, Replacement, and Repair. The Reception Park was usually
established at, or near, a base port for the purpose of receiving motor
vehicles for shipment abroad. Here the vehicles were uncrated, assembled,
registered, and put in running condition. This done, the vehicle was sent
on to an Organization Park, where vehicles and men first met, the latter
coming from one of the Motor Transport Corps schools; here the various
units were organized, and the personnel and material held in readiness
for assignment. The function of a Replacement Park is, as its name
signifies, to fill any deficiencies in equipment or personnel. Though
this scheme of organization was quite generally adhered to in the A. E.
F., each camp in the United States devoted to motor-transport activities
may be said to have combined the functions of Reception, Organization,
and Replacement Parks under a single head.
[Illustration: MOBILE MACHINE-SHOP OPERATING IN A VILLAGE UNDER SHELL
FIRE.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
[Illustration: SUPPLY OF MOTOR TIRES.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
[Illustration: A MOTOR-CAR WRECKED RETURNING FROM THE FRONT LINES.
This means a job for the wrecking crew.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
The present organization of the Field Service units of the Motor
Transport Corps is as follows: the personnel of a motor-transport
company consists of a first lieutenant, a second lieutenant, eight
sergeants, forty-four privates (ten first-class), and two cooks; the
equipment consists of a light open motor-car, a motorcycle with
side-car, twenty-nine cargo trucks, including one for light repair
and one for company supply, two tank trucks, and a rolling kitchen. A
motorcycle company has a first lieutenant, a second lieutenant, six
sergeants, a corporal, thirty privates, first-class, and a cook, together
with thirty-two motorcycles with side-cars, and two cargo trucks. A
headquarters motor command is in charge of a captain, who has two first
lieutenants, a second lieutenant, five sergeants, four corporals, and two
privates, first-class; the rolling-stock includes two heavy motor-cars,
two light closed cars, one light open car, one cargo truck, and two
motorcycles with side-cars. Though there are no tables of organization
for the larger units of the Motor Transport Corps, a Supply Train is
composed of a headquarters motor command and not less than two or more
than six motor-transport companies.
So much space has been devoted in the newspapers and magazines to the
exploits of the combatant arms of the service that the public has heard
little, if anything, of the less spectacular but no less arduous and
important work of the men who wore the purple hat-cords of the M. T. C.
It was their endurance and resourcefulness which made possible the
transfer by road to the St. Mihiel and Argonne sectors, in nineteen days,
of more than half a million men, and this in spite of the unprecedented
congestion as a result of the preparations in progress for the great
offensives. It was the tireless, iron-hard drivers of the M. T. C. who
got forward the food for the men and the food for the guns. It was the
despatch-riders of the corps who, jeering at death, delivered the vital
messages which were intrusted to them, tearing down the steel-swept,
shell-pocked roads at express-train speed on their roaring motorcycles.
No mud was too deep, no shell-storm too violent, no road too dangerous to
stop the men of the M. T. C. They went wherever their wheels could find
traction—and in some places where they could not. They did not possess
so much as a bowing acquaintance with either fatigue or fear. They were
the newest corps in the army and they made their own traditions. They
were as unconventional in their methods of doing things as the old-time
army teamster, the stage-coach driver, and the pony-express rider, whose
qualities they have inherited and whose lineal descendants they are. When
in doubt they stepped on the accelerator, for the motto of the Motor
Transport Corps is “_Get There!_”
X
MENDERS OF MEN
Beneath the crest of the British Royal Artillery appears the word
“_Ubique_”—“Everywhere.” It is a motto which might more fittingly be
applied to the Medical Department of our own army, however, for that
corps has its representatives in every branch of the service—on land,
afloat, and in the air. It directed the designing and production of our
first gas-masks and from it was drawn the nucleus of our original Gas
Defense Service. It provided the medical staffs for the hospital ships
and for the army transports. By means of the ingenious system of tests
which it devised, it selected our flying-men, determined on the form of
aviation work for which they were mentally and physically fitted, and,
by a system of unceasing observation, kept them constantly in condition
to fight the Boche in the skies. It organized an ambulance service which
won the admiration of the world. No battery or battalion went into
action without its quota of medical officers, who shared all the perils
and privations of their comrades of the line and worked longer. Only
two units in the American Army were granted by the French the coveted
distinction of wearing the _fourragère_: one of them was an Air Service
squadron, the other a unit of the Sanitary Corps of the Army Medical
Department. Our medical officers were actually the first in the field
and the first to sustain wounds; the first American killed after the
declaration of war was a medical officer.
A list of the Medical Department’s activities would include the Dental
Corps, the Sanitary Corps, the Veterinary Corps, the Nurse Corps;
laboratories for the study and prevention of infectious diseases;
organizations for the isolation and the special care of the tuberculous,
the insane, the victims of war neuroses; convalescent centres and
sanatoria; a division of psychology for gauging the mental capabilities
of the army’s enlisted personnel; a division of physical reconstruction
for the rehabilitation of the sick and wounded; a hospital division
which planned and equipped hospitals to meet the constantly increasing
needs of the army; a motion-picture industry which enabled the staffs
of the various hospitals to see depicted on a screen the latest methods
of surgery and medicine and which also illustrated to the soldier the
danger of breaking sanitary regulations; the publication of a chain of
hospital papers to strengthen the morale of the soldier patients; a
system, working in co-operation with the War Risk Insurance Bureau and
the Adjutant-General’s Office, designed to expedite the settlement of
war claims, and a remarkable statistical classification of the sick and
wounded, including a complete medical history of each individual case.
To this array of extraordinary activities must be added, of course, the
features usual to any well-organized medical department: services of
internal medicine and surgery working in the closest harmony in every
hospital unit; divisions of head surgery (including eye, ear, nose, and
throat), orthopedics, urology, and Roentgenology; and finally that vast
organization for the care of the wounded whose operations began with
the stretcher-bearers out in No Man’s Land and ended only when the men
had passed out of the great general hospitals in the homeland with the
wound-chevrons on their sleeves.
When, in the past, we have been suddenly confronted by the necessity
of making war, we have had to do our organizing after the beginning of
hostilities. And, though the titanic conflict had been in progress for
more than two years and a half before we entered it, we ran true to
form, being as unprepared for war from a medical standpoint as we were
from an ordnance, an artillery, or an aviation, point of view. Barring
the superficial experience gained by some of our medical officers
during the mobilization on the Mexican border, our medical preparations
were all made after war had been declared. This unpreparedness was
not the fault of the heads of the Medical Department, mind you; it
was not due to carelessness or lack of foresight, but was, instead,
the logical result of a deliberate policy of those who held that to
be prepared for war was to invite war. When the war-cloud broke, it
became necessary, therefore, to build overnight, and virtually from
the ground up, a mammoth and highly complex organization. When war was
declared, the Medical Department, including the Medical Corps, the
Dental Corps, the Veterinary Corps, and their respective reserves, had
barely 700 commissioned officers on duty in the United States and its
possessions. Though the regular Medical Corps included many officers
whose achievements had contributed very largely to the prevention of
disease and the amelioration of suffering in all parts of the world—it
has been said of former Surgeon-General Gorgas that he “made the Canal
possible and the tropics habitable”—and though these officers were
skilled in preventive medicine, field sanitation, and other phases of
the work of the army surgeon, there was, after all, only a handful
of them. It became necessary, therefore, to provide, on the instant,
not only for an enormously augmented personnel but also for new and
unconsidered conditions. An ambulance service had to be organized and
vehicles for it had to be designed and manufactured; hospital trains had
to be built—there was only one in the United States when the war began;
antiseptic methods in field surgery had to be devised as a substitute for
the complete surgical cleanliness possible only under peace conditions;
a system had to be devised and put in operation which would insure the
prompt collection of the wounded on the battle-field and their rapid
evacuation; measures had to be taken for the reconstruction of the
severely wounded and their training for future efficiency in civil life.
Beginning, as I have already said, with a peace-time personnel of barely
700 officers, and a peace-time organization, the Medical Department
expanded as the army expanded, until, when the Armistice was signed,
it was serving 4,000,000 American soldiers at home and overseas and
had, in addition, spread its safeguards over millions more of the civil
population on both sides of the Atlantic. Several years prior to the war
there had been organized a Medical Reserve Corps which included in its
membership many prominent physicians and surgeons. The National Guards
of the several States also had their respective medical organizations.
The Medical Department at the outbreak of the war consisted, therefore,
of nine corps: the Medical Corps, the Medical Reserve Corps, the Medical
Corps of the National Guard, the Dental Corps, the Dental Reserve
Corps, the Dental Corps of the National Guard, the Veterinary Corps,
the Veterinary Reserve Corps, and the Veterinary Corps of the National
Guard, to which were added before the war had been in progress a month
a Medical Corps, National Army, a Veterinary Corps, National Army, a
Sanitary Corps, and an Ambulance Corps, making a total of thirteen
distinct services in the Medical Department. By the act of August 7,
1917, however, all of the above were merged into the Medical Corps,
United States Army, thereby greatly simplifying administration. But it
was quickly realized that, even by calling to the colors every medical
officer in the Reserve Corps and the National Guard, the personnel would
still fall far short of the number required to provide for the proper
care and treatment of the enormous armies which were rapidly being placed
in the field, for already the Secretary of War had made his celebrated
remark: “Why stop with an army of 5,000,000 men?” Some conception of the
problem confronting the surgeon-general may be had when I explain that
the Medical Department was expected to furnish each infantry division
with approximately 111 officers and 1,400 enlisted men. In addition,
an enormous number of medical officers was required for the camp, base,
and general hospitals which were springing up like mushrooms, almost
in a night, throughout the land. In order to obtain these officers it
became necessary, therefore, to appeal to the medical profession of the
United States and to the various medical societies, the American Medical
Association taking a particularly energetic and enthusiastic part in the
work of recruiting. The response of the medical men of America was as
prompt as it was gratifying. Specialists whose names were as familiar to
the public as those of Cabinet officers and who for a single operation
received fees equal to the annual salary of an ambassador; obscure
country practitioners who made their daily rounds in mud-bespattered
buggies and who, as often as not, received their pay—when they received
it at all—in produce; prosperous middle-aged physicians with established
and lucrative city practices; struggling young internes; lecturers on
medicine and surgery at universities and colleges, put aside their
private affairs and offered their services to the nation. So universal
was the response, indeed, that numerous communities found themselves
facing the prospect of being wholly without medical attendance, for all
their physicians were in or were trying to get into khaki.
The same patriotic enthusiasm was shown by the dental profession. At the
outbreak of the war there were only 86 dental officers in the Regular
Army, this number being based upon the ratio of one dentist to each
thousand enlisted men. And, though the importance of a clean, healthy
mouth was fully recognized as being essential in maintaining the health
of the individual soldier, no Dental Reserve Corps existed at this time.
It was evident from the very beginning, therefore, that, in order to
care for the teeth of millions of fighting-men, it would be necessary
to strain to the very limit the resources of the dental profession.
Moreover, before the war had been in progress half a year, it was found
necessary to raise the authorized quota of one dentist to every thousand
men to one dentist to every 500 men. But the dentists lagged not a whit
behind their fellows of the medical profession, so that when Germany
threw up her hands and cried “Kamerad!” there were 6,284 officers in the
Dental Corps.
When the Secretary of State intimated to the German Ambassador that his
immediate departure for the Fatherland would cause no tears, there were
barely 400 members of the Army Nurse Corps, 170 of whom were reserve
nurses, having been called into active service as a result of the
mobilization on the border. Yet when the war ended, the corps carried on
its rolls the names of 21,480 nurses, nearly half of whom were serving
overseas. As long as a veteran of the Great War lives, the work of these
young women will be referred to with something akin to reverence. They
displayed a courage, self-sacrifice, and devotion beyond all praise.
Among them were capable, experienced executives who wore on the breasts
of their trim blue jackets ribbons showing that they had seen previous
service in Cuba, in the Philippines, and on the Mexican border. Others,
hundreds upon hundreds of them, came from the hospitals of the larger
cities. But by far the greater number of them were graduate nurses who
left assured and lucrative private employment for the fatigues, the
discomforts, and ofttimes the dangers, of army work. Nurses with wide
executive experience were brought into the service as chief nurses of
the great army hospitals, some of which had from 300 to 600 nurses on
their staffs while the influenza epidemic was at its height. Their work
in this emergency requires no comment, for they were untiring in their
efforts, taking no heed of the number of hours they worked and frequently
staying at their posts until they dropped from exhaustion. During the
epidemic 127 nurses died in this country and 35 overseas from influenza
or pneumonia resulting from it. Though a number of American nurses have
been decorated by foreign governments, our own government has seen fit to
recognize the heroism of only four: Miss Beatrice McDonald, who received
the D. S. C. for staying by her patients when the hospital in which she
was on duty was bombed by German airmen, though severely wounded herself,
Miss Helen G. McClelland, Miss Isabelle Stambaugh, and Miss Julia
Stimson, who received the D. S. M.
Meanwhile the enlisted personnel had increased enormously. At the
outbreak of the war there were in the Medical Department approximately
6,900 men. During the nineteen months of hostilities this force steadily
expanded, the recruits including medical students, pharmacists, and
others of a medical turn of mind. Not every one in the corps had had
experience in medicine or kindred subjects, however; the chief orderly
at the hospital in which I was in France had been one of the editors
of _Vanity Fair_, another had been engaged in the importing business,
and one of the enlisted men at Fort McHenry Hospital, Baltimore, was a
motion-picture actor whose features are known to “movie” fans all over
the United States. The Medical Corps reached its maximum strength in
November, 1918, when its records showed a total of 264,181 officers and
men. Thus it will be seen that the personnel of the Medical Corps alone
at the close of the Great War was much greater than that of the entire
Regular Army before the beginning of hostilities.
The Medical Corps naturally divides itself into two main branches:
the Division of Surgery and the Division of Internal Medicine. The
latter, as its name indicates, deals almost entirely with non-surgical
diseases and conditions; in other words, medicine as distinguished from
the knife. One of the principal functions of the Division of Internal
Medicine consisted in obtaining, training, if necessary, and assigning
to duty in the various hospitals and camps expert examiners in diseases
of the heart and lungs, these officers being charged with the duty of
determining the fitness of recruits for military service and their
condition on discharge, with special reference to heart disease and
tuberculosis. This latter phase of their work assumed such important
proportions, however, that it was eventually taken over by a separate
division. Another function of the division was to obtain mature and
highly trained internists of long experience to serve as Chiefs of
Medical Service in base and general hospitals, these officers, who
included many of the ablest physicians in the United States, being
responsible for the professional care of all medical patients. For a time
a school was maintained to train these medical chiefs, practically all
of whom were fresh from civil practice, in the details of army-hospital
administration. Younger men, usually with little or no hospital
experience and, therefore, less highly qualified, were assigned to serve
under the medical chiefs as ward surgeons in direct charge of sick
soldiers. A small number of highly experienced men were also brought
into the service as medical consultants, their duties being to visit
the various hospitals and to maintain helpful and sympathetic relations
between the medical staffs and the surgeon-general in Washington. The
above is, of course, merely a hasty sketch of the great work done by the
medical internists. The vast majority of them were desperately anxious
for service in France and moved heaven and earth to obtain overseas
assignments, being bitterly disappointed when they found that the needs
of the army required that they should remain on duty in the homeland.
By comparison with those of their fellows who were serving within sound
and often within range of the guns, domestic service seemed quiet and
prosaic. But, as a matter of fact, there was nothing commonplace about
it at any time. The nearest approach to it was after the Armistice, when
the main impulse and motive for military service, the winning of the war,
became a thing of the past. But during the continuance of the war the
medical officer, whether his duties kept him on the firing-line itself,
in the camp and base hospitals in the rear, far from the thunder of the
cannon, or at the cantonments on this side of the Atlantic, never had
reason to complain of his work being monotonous or uninteresting, for
every day, almost every hour, indeed, brought new experiences and new
problems. I doubt if there is a single officer who wore the uniform of
the Medical Corps who will not willingly admit that his army work better
fitted him for civil practice and afforded him a deeper understanding of
the needs of suffering humanity.