hope of reconstruction. Fine ancient façades with filigree stonework
delicate as thread lace; matchless old cathedral closes of the
fourteenth century designed and wrought in solid granite by a master
mason who was also a master builder; fortification walls dating back
to the days of the Cæsars; medieval turrets beneath which troubadour
soldier lovers sang; glorious architecture of the Louis the Fourteenth
period--ineffable masterpieces of structural art never to be reproduced
on earth, they lay in smashed and huddled fragments on the ground.
We entered a church, its roof caved in, massive columns rent, holy
statues razed, empty as an eggshell--the result of a single cannon shot.
“_Un coup de canon_--and there you are!” the colonel commented grimly.
We sped past the Big Canal and the Little Canal, tranquil stretches of
twilight water, colored like gorgeous rose windows by a liberated gleam
of the westering sun; reminiscent of Venice, with their overhanging
houses, now glooming ruins whose window holes stared like sightless
sockets of men blinded in battle; past the business and the residence
sections of the city, dead and desolate as the tombs of the Pharaohs;
and finally wound up to the summit of a hill whence, the colonel
explained, we could obtain a comprehensive view of the havoc the Huns
had wrought. And when we had gazed our fill on that tragic exhibition
of arrogance and hate, the colonel, like the fine artist he was, led us
into a lovely quiet garden close whose darkening air was sweet with the
scent of hyacinths, violets, crocuses and spring roses. And kneeling
down on the damp turf and getting out his clasp-knife he proceeded to
gather us each a nosegay in honor of the event.
“For,” he observed sagely, “flowers are better souvenirs than bits of
iron shells.”
When we wondered how he came to be possessed of a garden on this
deserted hill-top among the crumbling ruins he explained it was his
favorite point of observation. Knowing his love for the spot his men
had secretly made this garden for him and tended it carefully and kept
it in fresh bloom.
Returning to the citadel we dined once more in the famous mess room,
this time with the colonel and all his officers. It was nine o’clock
when we finally took leave of him, standing bareheaded in the rain to
assure us of the warm pleasure we had given him! It had been an amazing
day, crowded with images, emotions, events; and not least amazing was
this French colonel, commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun,
bubbling over with gayety and humor, filled with profound tenderness
and knowledge of life, a savant, learned in history and languages,
a distinguished warrior who had been tried in the fiery furnace of
battle, and yet simple-hearted as a child or one of his beloved poilus.
It was long after midnight when we arrived in Nancy. Those two tiny
fowls de luxe which cost eight dollars we had fallen on and devoured
in the night. The following day, on our return to Paris, we learned
that the battle to the north was still raging. But the Germans had been
checked. Our troops, the ones we had seen moving north, were in the
great struggle too. They were being heavily gassed and shelled.
“Worse than Verdun!” said my informant, an American who had just
returned from the British Front. “I saw several hundred of our fellows
who had been mustard-gassed, lying in a field hospital. They lay on
cots, their smarting eyes bandaged with soothing lotions, and they
talked to each other in low broken whispers. It gave one a choke in the
throat to see all those stalwarts lying flat, eyes bandaged, whispering
to the comrades they could not see. I tell you, it made me feel mighty
ugly toward the Hun! I wished some of our peace propagandists at home
might see that sight, hear those low, choking whispers!”
“What were they talking about? Home? Mother? Where is my wandering boy
to-night?”
The officer gave a grim laugh. “Not by a jolly jugful! They were trying
to fix the exact hour of the gas attack in order to reckon how soon
they’d be back in the trenches to tackle the Hun!”
This, then, was the spirit of the Americans who had entered the great
fight. It was the spirit of the poilus before Verdun. It was the spirit
of that indomitable colonel who had replied that one hundred and ten
thousand brave lives were not too many to give for such a cause. Verdun
of to-day was the heritage of these men in khaki who lay with bandaged
eyes and spoke in choked whispers. And the Verduns of to-morrow would
be theirs by the same sign: The conquering force of spirit controlling
the conquering force of arms.
BEHIND CHÂTEAU-THIERRY
This is a story of causes. And those causes produced certain effects. I
hope you will be patient with the causes--which, like all causes, are
more or less dull--and read on until you come to the effects. There I
can promise you some excitement.
When, in the midst of the March offensive, so disastrous in its initial
phase, General Foch took command of the various Allied armies in
France with the intention of merging those several distinct and often
conflicting units into a single compact whole, one and indivisable,
which should be at least as supple and cohesive as that of the foe,
nobody on the outside even dimly realized how fundamental, how
far-reaching would be the changes involved. For after three years and
a half of fighting as separate entities each nation had rutted deeply
into its own peculiar manner of waging war. England held one sector;
Belgium another; France another; and when American overseas soldiers
landed in France they were assigned another portion of the line in
Lorraine.
And of his own particular sector each nation was supreme lord, of
both the front and the back areas, the advanced and the rear war
zones. That was his terrain, his stronghold. Therein he could do as
he pleased, make war as seemed to him best, without let or hindrance.
Thus England built up one policy of war strategy, of transportation
and hospitalization; France another; America a third. There were three
autonomies, three great war chiefs, three grand headquarters. Each
autonomy fought in a water-tight compartment, so to speak--water-tight
so far as concerned the others; but unfortunately not water-tight to
the boche.
So rigorously was this sense of independence held by each country, so
distinctly did each nation cover its zone and its zone alone, that the
fresh divisions held in reserve in back areas in case of a possible
grand attack could not be stationed save in their own respective
territories. French reserves could not be stationed in the British
zone; British reserves could not be stationed in the French zone. Even
if every sign pointed to a powerful massed action in one particular
sector, all the neighboring sector could do was to hold mobile troops,
together with trains and camions, in its own area ready to move.
Naturally this caused great delay; precious time was lost in conveying
troops.
For example, on March twenty-first, when the Fifth British Army fell
back, fighting valiantly, before the furious onslaught of a Hun host
of quadruple strength, and a temporary breach was made in the line
which opened the road to Paris, the French generals, Pelle and Humbert,
rushed up their reserves from Picardy and Champagne. These two generals
had received special instructions from the French High Command to study
the different hypotheses of attack on the British Front and to hold
themselves responsible for all consequences. An agreement had been
entered into by the British and the French commanders, fixing the sixth
day of battle as the one when the French should intervene if necessary
and come to the assistance of their British allies. But so fast and
furious waxed the offensive, so urgent appeared the crisis to the
onlooking French generals, that it was not six days but scarcely more
than that number of hours when the blue casques of the French began to
appear in the frightful mêlée and the German flood in full drive began
to be stemmed.
But it was a narrow squeak. And a good part of its narrowness consisted
in the fact that fresh troops could not be held in readiness behind
the danger zone, but had to be transported by camion, without their
organizations behind them, often without sufficient guns or ammunition,
from a long distance, and then hurled without a minute’s rest into
the very heart of the maelstrom. Had the French reserves been massed
near at hand in the British back areas so that they could have gone
immediately into action, there is no doubt that thousands of British
soldiers, now German prisoners, hundreds of wounded in hospitals, not
to speak of the loss of guns, supplies and evacuation hospitals along
the entire front line of that sector, would have been saved to the
Allied arms. It was a bitter, grim lesson, and its price was high. But
not too high to pay for a unified command.
Now in the present engagements the Germans are meeting French, British,
Americans and Italians, all within a few miles upon the same sector.
They are intermingled and interwoven, as the need arises, regiment by
regiment, company by company, and even man by man. The old partitions
have been completely torn down.
One of the most distinctive features of the old régime was the
hospitalization system. Here as elsewhere each nation carried on in its
own fashion. The British evolved one type of organization; the French
another; the Americans a third; so that there existed side by side
three separate networks of systems, each elaborate, ramified, complete,
which never touched each other. In the British sector, for example, the
seriously wounded are evacuated as rapidly as possible back to England,
where are located most of their big base hospitals. In the French
system the evacuation hospitals are dotted all along the sector a few
miles behind the firing line, with their large base and convalescent
hospitals scattered throughout the interior, in the Midi or down on the
Riviera, far from the rude northern winds. And when the Americans were
assigned their sector in Lorraine they organized their system along
similar lines.
First come the evacuation hospitals, as close up behind the Front as
possible, in order to catch the wounded man within two, three or four
hours of the time he falls on the field. Here he is operated on without
delay, rendered fit for transportation, and then shipped to some big
base farther back in the rear. As the hospital formation recedes
from the advance zone of the army, and therefore from acute danger
and unstable tenure arising from likelihood of capture, shelling and
bombing raids, the bases grow in size and elaboration, until at some
points they are vast beehives, community centers with a capacity of ten
to twenty thousand beds. Between the two extremes of the formation,
the evacuation hospitals just behind that invisible and most uncertain
quantity called the front line and the big solid base situated some
hundreds of kilometers away--between these two types there exists the
greatest difference.
The base, as its name implies, is solid, immobile, permanent, steady as
the Rock of Gibraltar or the skyscrapers of New York. The evacuation
hospital, on the contrary, creeping up as close as possible behind the
fighting forces is light, mobile, supple, easy to move, consisting
largely of tents, stuff that can be loaded swiftly on trucks and motor
lorries and carried away. If during a big push the line begins to sway
perilously, to strain, to crack, with breaches showing here and there,
and the order comes to retire, the evacuation hospital can fold up its
tents like the Arab and silently steal away, not on camels but their
modern substitutes, camions, with the orderlies on the rear truck,
thumb to nose, wagging derisive fingers at the oncoming boche, who if
he does break through will find--just nothing at all.
That is one difference between evacuation and base hospitals. And there
are others. The bases do good straight honest and honorable surgical
and medical work of the type that is known in America. They have a fine
régime, and this régime is rarely overturned. They are, therefore,
prosaic. But an evacuation hospital is dramatic, picturesque, full of
potentialities and surprises, with tragedy, comedy and broad farce
competing for first place every hour in the day.
Here during a big offensive, when Allied and enemy wounded are
pouring in in a continuous stream, surgeons, nurses and personnel
work like fiends under a tremendous pressure, twelve, twenty-four,
even forty-eight hours at a stretch. Here are to be witnessed in the
operating room running fights with death as tense and thrilling as
anything upon the battlefield. Sometimes the wounded man is exactly
upon the great divide, hovering between life and death, an extra hair’s
weight capable of sending him to either side; shrapnel in his chest,
his lungs full of blood, breathing like a trumpeter, suffering from
shock, exhaustion, lack of food--and still able to smile up into the
surgeon’s eyes and say faintly: “I’m all right, sir. Take that other
poor guy. He’s worse off than me.”
In cases like these, three minutes more or less in the length of the
operation spells all the difference between time and eternity. The
surgical team works with the perfect union of a football eleven. In
their white aprons, caps and masks they look like priests performing
a rite. The sweat stands out on their foreheads. Their expert fingers
move like lightning, yet precise, unhurried, sure.
In an operation of this kind, with life and death in the saddle and
both riding hard, I have seen the assistant hold a watch on the
operating team, as if it were a horse race, and call aloud the minutes,
thus: “Three! Five! Seven! Ten!” Two minutes too long, and the patient
may expire on the table, or die of pneumonia from the added strain of
ether on the lungs. Here margins are short and time more precious than
the weight of iron in rubies.
Here also is to be seen what is known as the new war surgery. The
wounded men are X-rayed before entering the operating room, and the
exact position of the foreign body indicated by an indelible cross
on the patient’s skin. Consequently the surgeons need not go delving
and exploring and guessing all over the landscape, but make a clean
straight dive for the intruder. As the greatest danger in all these
wounds is that of infection from the gas-gangrene germ, which infests
the soil of France and therefore every particle of the soldier’s
clothes, and as in addition the wounded are often forced to lie twelve,
twenty-four or even thirty-six hours on the field on account of a
violent enemy barrage, these wounds are often badly infected by this
germ before ever they reach the evacuation hospital, near as that
may be. In order, then, to prevent the further spread of the poison
throughout the body the wound is laid wide open, the crushed and
torn tissues shorn clean away, and a big clean wound created. This
is thoroughly cleansed, packed with gauze soaked in Carrel solution,
after which the entire area is wrapped in compresses, solidly bandaged,
strapped or splinted--and the patient is ready to be shipped a hundred
miles.
From this it will be seen that it is at the outset of the game, after
the man is first wounded, that the time element is most precious. Upon
the speed with which an ambulance can deliver a soldier to the nearest
evacuation hospital, divest him of his dirty, infected clothes and
lay him on the life-saving operating table depends largely the speed
of his recovery and return to the lines. Delays there are bound to
be--violent shelling of trenches, back areas or crossroads, which may
block every form of transportation for hours. And it is to counteract
these unavoidable delays that evacuation hospitals are creeping closer
and closer up to the Front, risking bombardment and air raids in order
to save a greater percentage of life and limb.
Behind these hospitals, then, stand the big solid bases, imposing,
safe and sane. In front of them is still another formation. Briefly,
it is something like this: A soldier is wounded on the field, in the
trenches, in a wood. If alone, he applies his own first aid. If he
has given it away to a comrade, he uses his belt for a tourniquet,
his bootlaces--anything. If he cannot get at his wound or if he is
knocked unconscious, he lies until he is picked up by friend or foe.
If he is not picked up he “goes West,” joining the great host of
immortal comrades, and all is well. That is the first step, where each
individual attends to himself, is attended to by others or is lost.
The second step consists of getting him to a dressing station,
usually in some _abri_, where he is bandaged, given a hot drink, an
injection of anti-tetanus serum, and an iodine cross is marked on his
forehead to indicate that he has received the same. If he is suffering
acutely he is in addition given a morphia tablet. After this he is
transported by ambulance to the divisional field hospital, where if
he is in good condition he is not even unloaded but sent straight on
to the evacuation hospital a few miles farther back. Thus he receives
personal, regimental and divisional first aid before ever he strikes
the evacuation hospital.
All of which, if he is lucky, he may get inside of two or three hours,
and be safely tucked away in his cot coming out from under ether,
raving not of home and mother but of going over the top, shouting in
stentorian accents: “Shoot ’em to hell, boys! The dirty skunks! Shoot
’em to hell!” to the infinite delight of his comrades in the tent ward,
who cheer him on: “That’s the stuff, buddy! Attaboy! Eat ’em alive!”
Finally, after much batting of wobbly eyelids, he opens his eyes feebly
upon the white-capped nurse at the foot of the bed and murmurs in weak
flat tones of pleasure: “Well, hello, chicken! How’d you ever git here?
Gosh! That’s a foul taste in my mouth. Say, can a guy spit in this
place?” And if he has come through thus far alive the chances are he
will stick. He is the stuff that survives.
This sketches in the large the hospital formation that the American
Army built to care for its wounded behind the Lorraine sector under the
old régime. All of the units, the string of evacuation hospitals, base
hospitals and transportation facilities were designed and constructed
on the principle of America’s holding that particular sector.
And then, presto, General Foch took command.
That simple statement merits an entire paragraph all to itself, for
it wiped out the old order and engendered a whole new realignment of
policies and plans--in hospitalization especially. For manifestly if
American troops were to be shifted here and there, up and down the
Western Front as the need rose--as they must indeed be shifted if the
Allied army was to be as swift and mobile as that of the foe--then
a hospital formation away over east in the Lorraine country was not
going to be a great advantage to American troops fighting up north
round Montdidier and Château-Thierry. Nor could the American Army
all at once, by the wave of a magic wand, conjure into being another
system. And even if it could there would still remain the question of
conflicting French and American traffic over already congested lines.
Yet something had to be done to cover this situation, and done at
once, for our troops were already on the move. The French command, in
collaboration with the American command, solved it in the only possible
fashion. It was decreed that when American troops fought in a French
sector the wounded should be evacuated along with the French through
the French system; when they fought with the British their wounded
should be evacuated with the British to England. And so the affair
stood.
Americans went up to the British Front in Flanders. They went to the
French Front in Picardy and Champagne. They stayed at home on their own
Front in Lorraine. And the wounded began to be evacuated by all three
systems. So far, so good. And yet, not altogether good. Good perhaps
from a purely military point of view; not so good from a human point
of view. For the Americans in the French hospitals were lonesome. There
was no use blinking the fact. They did not do well. Hearing never a
word of their own language, unable to make their wants known, unable
also to comprehend the soft babble of words by which the gentle French
sisters tried to express their sympathy, they sickened, not so much
from their wounds as from pure nostalgia and longing for the familiar
home tongue.
And one man died. But while he was ill in that strange hospital in a
foreign land he kept a little journal which he called The Philosophy
of Loneliness. From that little book of scribbled notes it appeared
that this young soldier grieved and grieved for lack of someone to
speak to him in his own tongue. And at last, when his isolation
became intolerable, he decided to rise up and go in search of human
companionship. But the tall woman in black, with the black veil,
like one of the Fates, kept thrusting him back into bed. Her hands
were gentle but strong. He told her, quite simply, that he only
wanted somebody to talk to. She replied with a torrent of strange
unintelligible sounds. And then he shouted aloud, in order to drown her
babble and hear some good honest American speech.
It was no use; she could not comprehend; she held him down, gently but
firmly, pouring out over his fainting soul the soft strange babble of
sounds. He swooned under the torment. The next day he tried again.
Again the tall black-veiled figure thrust him down with hands that were
gentle but strong. Again the hated sounds. Again he swooned. The third
day, very weak but resolute, he recorded in his journal his intention
to try once more, and strove to rise. But over him, as ever, was that
black unyielding figure, holding him down; and so she held him, gentle,
ruthless, unknowing, babbling into his ears those strange sounds until
he died.
In comment upon this incident Major Perkins, Chief Commissioner for
Europe of the Red Cross, said: “When I read the few pitiful pages
of that journal of one of our men who had gone to his end in utter
loneliness of soul I decided that something must be done. Either
Americans must have their own hospitals or else we must put American
nurses into French hospitals.”
Accordingly American women, nurses, visitors and aids, were assigned to
fifty-two French hospitals containing American men. One day it chanced
in a certain French hospital that one of these aids, a bright, pretty
girl, was working in a ward. And as she moved here and there, busy at
her tasks, she sang softly under her breath the following cheerful
ditty:
“_Where do we go from here, boys?
Oh, where do we go from here?_”
“I don’t want you to go anywhere from here!” came an abrupt voice
from a bed behind her. Turning she beheld a wounded American, a pale
newcomer, regarding her from inflamed, bloodshot eyes.
“Well,” she replied, laughing, “I don’t intend to go anywhere this very
minute. What’s the matter with your eyes? Gassed?”
“Nothing,” he replied laconically. “I’ve not slept for seventy-two
hours. They shelled us up there for three days. That’s where I got
mine. I’ve been lying here watching you for an hour and trying to make
up my mind which I wanted to do most--go to sleep or go on looking at
you. And I decided I’d rather go on looking at you. I don’t know,” he
added wistfully, “whether you consider that much of a compliment or
not?”
“I consider it the finest compliment I ever had in my life, bar
none--from a man who hasn’t slept for seventy-two hours.”
“Yes, but I haven’t seen an American girl for five months. And so I
figured it would rest my eyes more to look at you than it would to go
to sleep.”
This is not an extraordinary case. Nine men out of ten would have felt
the same. Their eyes were starved for the sight of American girls. But
one woman spread out among many men did not go far. It was like trying
to spread a small pat of butter over an acre of bread. However, it was
the best that could be done. French hospitals could not be crammed
with American workers. There was no place to put them. Their plants
were already swamped with overwork.