IN A CHÂTEAU HOSPITAL
Early in the conflict, after the Germans
had been pushed back from their rush on
Paris, the French were in a bad way for many
of the necessities of a country at war. Among
the necessities that France lacked was
sufficient hospital accommodation for the sick and
wounded of her armies, and for the first year
of the war this shortage was partially supplied
by voluntary ambulances--the word ambulance
in French being employed for a field
hospital. Many rich Americans gave valuable
service at this time to their sister republic, the
American ambulances at Neuilly and Juilly
being among the most noted of the war hospitals.
It was not at all difficult to get staffs for
these hospitals, for thousands of young Americans
with red blood in their veins and the love
of romance in their hearts were only awaiting
the opportunity to do something useful
anywhere between Paris and the firing line.
Between the people of the United States and the
French there has always been a deep
sympathy, possibly engendered up to half a
century ago by their common antipathy to
England, a sentiment forever removed by mutual
sufferings and common interests and ideals in
this war. A witty writer one time said that
"good Americans, when they die, go to ----
Paris"; jokingly showing the love which the
people of the southern half of this continent
have for the French. But, no matter what the
reasons, the greatest republic in the world was
early in responding to the call, and so placed
her sister republic, France, under deep
obligations for assistance of surgeons, nurses, and
hospitals long before Mr. Wilson led the
United States to join with the other civilized
peoples in their fight against barbarism.
The British were very early up and doing
in the same manner, and not many months after
Kitchener's Contemptibles--a name now
revered in Britain--had made their heroic retreat
from Mons, many well-equipped hospitals
manned by Britons were doing excellent work
behind the French lines.
It was my good fortune to serve at the
beginning of 1915 in one of these, the Château
de Rimberlieu, just three miles from the point
at which the German lines came nearest to
Paris, and seven miles north of Compiègne
where a little over one hundred years ago
Napoleon for the first time met Marie Louise
of Austria when she came to replace the
unhappy Josephine.
I obtained the position after much searching
for an opportunity to be of service. Going
across from New York to London I had been
refused a position by the British unless
I could enlist, which personal reasons prevented
at the time. Then, after two days interviewing,
taxicabbing, viséing, pleading, and
explaining, I obtained a permit to go to France.
At Boulogne the authorities of the British Red
Cross and St. Johns Ambulance Association
told me they were oversupplied with surgeons
and I decided to go to Amiens, where I had a
surgical friend.
I could not get away till the following
morning, so I spent the afternoon wandering
about. The streets were filled with
a cosmopolitan throng of soldiers of all shades
of color--white, black, and brown--and of
various nationalities, British and Canadian
Tommies in their khaki, French poilus in their
blue-gray uniforms, Ghurkas from India in their
picturesque dress, and French Soudanese with
strange accouterments. The better hotels were
all occupied by the military authorities as
headquarters, and the harbor was filled with
hospital ships and transports. Walking about the
streets one had to look sharp to avoid being
run down by hurrying Red Cross ambulances
or lumbering motor lorries.
I strolled to the beach, where on the sands
Tommies were lounging, gazing longingly
across at the shores of England, dimly visible
in the distance. One of the soldiers turned to
me with a smile and said:
"I was just taking a last look at the old
'ome, sir. Of course, I 'opes to see it again
sometime if I don't 'appen to stop somethink." And
it was all said most cheerfully. I added
my wishes for his luck to his own.
On the slow train from Boulogne to Amiens
we passed many military camps with their
white tents in orderly rows. Here and there
oxen were being used by old men and women
on their farms, and in one little brook some
boys were fishing. I could hardly believe that
forty miles or less away two armies of millions
of men were contending for the mastery, with
civilization depending on the outcome. When,
later, I was much nearer to the front I was
struck again and again by the matter-of-fact
manner in which the French peasant accepts
his or her military surroundings. He works
coolly in fields into which at times enemy shells
are dropping, or over which long range guns
are firing into some semi-ruined town of
Northern France. Something which is always a
cause of wonder and admiration to the observer
is that, despite the fact that all the young
and able Frenchmen are in the trenches, the
women, old men and children who remain
succeed in cultivating the farmlands of France
right up to the lines.
At Amiens my surgeon friend, who had over
twelve hundred war operations to his credit in
the past six months, much regretted that I
could not be used at the moment,--much
regretted; but still regretted. I began to feel
that the gods of ill luck were camping on my
trail. I went on to Paris. Here my letters of
introduction were looked at with anxiety and
I with suspicion, for in the early months of
the war some foreign surgeons were found to
be giving information to the enemy. At any
rate, though courtesies and promises were
showered upon me, I remained a useless guest
at my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli until I reached
an almost desperate stage, realizing that,
though surgeons were urgently needed, I could
not be of service.
Sickly visions of returning home after a
futile attempt to be of use came to me, when
suddenly luck changed. The director of the
Ambulance Anglo-Française in the Château
de Rimberlieu came to Paris in search of
assistance. Being an Englishman, he looked in
at the British Red Cross in the Avenue d'Ièna
where they told him of this forlorn Canadian
who had been haunting their offices, but of
whom they had lost track. By a bit of luck
their commanding officer met me that afternoon
on the Place de l'Opéra, and gave me the
director's address at the Hotel de Crillon. I
hurried at once to call upon him, and offered
to take any position from chauffeur to surgeon.
There is a biblical quotation that the meek are
blessed, for they shall inherit the earth. I
inherited the surgeoncy--not a lucrative
inheritance, it must be admitted, for it carried no
salary, no railway fares, no uniform, all of
which must be supplied by the inheritor.
After obtaining a _sauf conduit_ from the
military authorities to take me as far as Creille,
I left on the train that afternoon for
Compiègne, sixty miles to the north, accompanied
by an affable young Red Cross orderly, of
English parents and Paris birth, who in civil
life was a drygoods salesman. At Creille,
which was the beginning of the war zone, our
troubles began. I was in civilian dress, my
uniform not yet being completed. The French
military officers here were almost adamant.
My passport, director's letter, Red Cross
authority, all proved of no avail to get me
further. Rather strangely, the letter which
obtained the desired permission to proceed was
an ordinary letter of introduction from a
prominent French Canadian parliamentarian which
I had in my pocket.
Presto! The officer knew his name, and by
I went.
We arrived at Compiègne about midnight,
and for the first time we heard the sound of the
guns ten miles away. As we were now only
seven miles from the Château, we thought our
troubles were over. But we had reckoned
without the sous-prefet de police, who said in
the morning when we called that we could go
no further without a special permit.
"That chap's a bit of an awss," remarked my
young friend, expressing my sentiments to a
nicety.
However, about 10 a.m. the director whirled
into town in his 60-horsepower Rolls-Royce,
and learning of our troubles, he smilingly said
that he thought he could get around that
difficulty. He pulled from beneath the rear seat
a military overcoat and cap which I put on;
and out of the town we whirled, past sentries at
crossroads and railway crossings, to whom the
director yelled the password--it was "Clairemont"
that day. The password changes daily
at a certain hour, and anyone without the new
word when required is hailed before the
authorities. The director ran some slight risk
in thus smuggling me through the lines, but
nothing ever came of it; and I gave a sigh
of relief when we at last swung into the
spacious grounds of the château.
The house was a large stone building, used
in peace times as the summer home for the
family of the Count de Bethune, one of the
oldest titled families in France. His two
daughters, the Countess de Ponge and the Marquise
de Chabannes, lived in a small corner of the
building, and gave their time to help us in our
nursing work. They did everything in their
power, and it was much, to make life pleasant
for the patients and for the staff.
The building was ideal for a hospital with
room for a couple of hundred patients. The
reception hall was used as a general reception
room for patients, as well as a lounging room
for us in our spare time. Its immense,
exquisitely carved mahogany mantel was one of
the artistic ornaments that had not been
removed to avoid injury. The drawing and
reception rooms and the dining hall had been
transformed into wards, called the Joffre,
French, and Castelnau wards, as were also the
larger of the bedrooms on the next floor. The
surgeons, nurses, and staff occupied the
servants' quarters on the top floor. The
oak-paneled library and smoking room had become
the operating theater and the X-ray studio.
Our dining-room was the original servants'
dining-room in the basement. The French
officers and men who were cared for here
received, as they deserved to receive, the best we
had to give, the staff gladly taking second place
in all things. And at that our life was so much
easier than that of the boys in the trenches that
we often felt a bit ashamed of the difference.
The château was surrounded by some two
or three hundred acres of well-laid-out
gardens, artificial lakes, fountains, and woods.
These grounds had been cut up to a certain
extent by trenches, wire entanglements,
dugouts, funk-holes, and gun emplacements, all
in order and ready for use if the enemy should
drive the French back in this direction. The
fighting trenches were only three or four miles
to the north of us, this château being said to
be the nearest hospital to the lines in the whole
theater of war. We worked, slept, ate, and
killed time to the sound of the guns and shells,
the latter often bursting well within a mile of us.
The really interesting part of the hospital
was the personnel of the staff. There were four
surgeons, a French military medical officer,
Villechaise; Allwood, a Jamaican, an old
college friend of mine whom I had neither seen
nor heard of for twelve years until the day
I arrived at the château, when he came
forward to give an anesthetic for me to a case
which General Berthier had ordered me to
operate upon; King, a Scotsman; and myself.
And we four were practically the only
members of the staff who were not paying for the
privilege of being allowed to serve. The rest
of the staff were well-to-do society people who
not only financed the institution but also did
the nursing and orderly work, gave their
automobiles as ambulances, and their personal
servants and chauffeurs to act as servants in the
hospital.
Besides the Comtesse and the Marquise, we
had as nurses a niece of an ex-president of
France; a grand-niece of Lord Beaconsfield;
and another was a sister-in-law to Lord
Something-or-other in Scotland. The latter nurse
had as a pal Miss C----, who had stumped
her father's constituency for him during the
last general elections in England. She was a
clever girl of twenty-three, an exceptionally
good nurse, but oh, what a Tory. She had all
the assurance of her age, and Mrs. Pankhurst
in her palmiest moments could not put Lloyd
George "where he belonged" as could this
charming girl of twenty-three. The son of a
prominent Paris lawyer, a young, black-eyed
chap of seventeen who was doing his bit there
till he became old enough to join the army,
was one of her great admirers; and when he
was not scrubbing floors or performing some
other necessary work, he sometimes wrote poetry
to her. The last four lines of one of his
rhymes I remember:
May your years of joy be many,
Your hours of sorrow few;
Here's success in all ambitions
To the man who marries you.
A Mr. and Mrs. G----, of Cambridge, originally
of Belfast, were two of the most pleasant,
kindly, and useful people the hospital
possessed. Their automobile was now an
ambulance which their chauffeur handled at their
expense; they paid two hundred dollars per
month in cash; they were continually buying
luxuries for the patients and necessities for the
hospital. Mrs. G---- acted as nurse in a
most capable manner; and her husband as an
orderly. A Mr. and Mrs. R---- from Cairo,
Egypt, were also with us. In Cairo he was a
professor in the University; here he acted as
chauffeur on his own automobile ambulance,
and his wife looked after the checking and
arranging of the laundry for the whole hospital.
One afternoon I went into Compiègne with him
in his car, and he delighted some French
African troops by chatting to them in Arabic,
after which they followed him around like little
boys. Mr. R---- also paid a goodly sum
toward the upkeep of the hospital.
The director of whom I have already spoken,
and the directress, both were heavy donors to
the hospital, as well as giving automobiles and
servants as assistants. A godly clergyman
from York acted in the triple capacity of
chaplain, chauffeur on his own auto-ambulance,
which his parishioners had given him when he
left, and general chore boy. One of my finest
recollections of him is on a Sunday evening
when he held service, while outside the guns
roared and shells from the enemy burst a mile
or so to the north of us in plain view from
the windows of the room in which the
clergyman was interpreting the word of God. It
was a most impressive ceremony. My last
recollection of him, and it's just as fine, he had
thrown aside his tunic and was working with
pick and shovel digging a dump for the refuse
of the hospital, the sweat rolling down his
honest face.
The above people are only among the most
interesting of the staff. There were also a
sheep farmer from the north of England, a
journalist of London, a student from Oxford,
and many other ladies and gentlemen who gave
of their best, all of them, giving the French
soldier scientific, sympathetic, and kindly
attention. Those names mentioned will
illustrate the personnel of hospitals such as this,
for there were many of them on the western
front in the early months of the war. Ours
was a part of General Castelnau's army, and
while nominally under the Red Cross we were
under the discipline of the French army.
General Berthier, who had charge at that time of
the medical arrangements of that sector of the
line, visited us daily, inspecting the whole
institution, ordering this, advising that, and
perhaps insisting upon something else. More
ether and hydrogen peroxide were used by the
French military surgeons in wounds than
appealed to my ideas; but one little trick they
had of sterilizing basins by rinsing them out
with alcohol and touching a match to it--"flammer,"
they called it--was both rapid and
thorough where steam sterilizers were not too
common.
Sometimes we were also inspected by civilian
surgeons on behalf of the military authorities.
Dr. Tuffier, a famous Paris surgeon, who
is as well known on this continent as in
Europe, came to make one of these periodical
inspections. I had first met him at a surgical
congress in Chicago before the war; then in
Paris I had called upon him.
"Ho, ho!" he said with a smile, "I have meet
you one time in Chicago; then I have meet you
in Paris; now I meet you here. Perhaps the
nex' time it may be at the Nort' Pole that we
meet"; and with a friendly slap on the
shoulder he passed on. He had been very courteous
to me in Paris, but had not given me the
position that I desired so much. In fact I had
found myself sometimes wishing that the
French authorities had given me less politeness,
but more opportunity to be of service.
In our spare hours of the day we watched
the shells bursting in our neighborhood. By
night we often sat and smoked in the dark
while we watched the flashing of shells and
guns and the flares sent up in the lines to
prevent surprise attacks. We often saw aeroplanes
being bombarded as they sailed to and fro
along the lines directing the fire of the
artillery. One soon got to recognize by ear the
puff, puff, puff of the anti-aircraft shells
bursting about the planes. Why the enemy did
not shell our institution I know not, for we
were well within range.
In passing, it may be mentioned that no
Red Cross flag flew from our roof, and when
I inquired the reason I was told that it would
only serve as a target for German shells.
Our work alternated, as it always does on
the battle front, between days of strenuous
labor and days of ease. When the work was
heavy all went to it with a will. In the hours
of leisure the ladies, who in civil life knew
nothing of danger and strife, begged and
sometimes vainly insisted on being permitted to
go with the ambulances as far as the trenches.
We were all civilians and knew little of
discipline and our lack of it at times was
troublesome to the French military authorities, and
some irritation arose because of it. For
example,--lights were ordered not to be shown
in the windows after dark till all the shutters
were closed and curtains drawn. This rule
was occasionally so carelessly obeyed that the
military would at times sneeringly call our
hospital "the lighthouse."
One afternoon there drove up to our
entrance a cream-colored limousine, and out
stepped an English society girl, saying that
she had come to nurse. Some of those who
were already there were friends of hers, but
the authorities decreed that we had enough
assistance and that she must return to Paris the
following morning. In the morning she
started in the limousine, ostensibly to return to
Paris, taking the sister-in-law of Lord
Something-or-other as company for a short run.
When outside the grounds she told the
chauffeur to turn toward the lines instead of
toward Paris. With the military pass which she
had obtained through influence in Paris, they
passed sentry after sentry till they were only
a few hundred yards from the trenches. Here
they were overtaken by a pursuing military
motor cyclist who ordered them put under
arrest, and they were taken before a high-up
officer who told them he was forced to confiscate
their automobile and send the ladies under
arrest to the rear.
But beauty in distress--and one of them was
a real beauty--made him relent. They were
allowed to proceed rearward after a severe
reprimand and a considerable fright. A few
weeks later I met the lady of the automobile
in a train near Paris and she told me that
she had just sent up a big box of real
cigarettes--not French ones--to the officer who
should have confiscated her car, but didn't. I
did not inquire how she had obtained his address!
There was another occasion when a plot was
hatched to duck a disagreeable officer in the
artificial lake at the lower end of the grounds.
Fortunately the saner heads prevailed and
averted any further complications. And "it
would have served the creature bally well right,
for what right had he anyhow to insist so
strongly on his old rules," as one of the
hotheads expressed it.
It was a trifle irritating at times to have
a nurse, in reply to your order to give such
and such a patient massage, say that she would
do it presently, as she was just going for a
short tramp in the grounds. _Mais, que voulez
vous?_ as the French say with that delightful
shrug. Were they not paying to be there, and
should not that fact have given them some
rights over those horrid rules of discipline?
And we men were the same on occasions, for
discipline cannot be had outside of the trained
army.
But the breaches of discipline were small
in comparison to the really excellent work that
the hospital was carrying on, so they were
overlooked, and, as they occurred only at wide
intervals, they but served to give a touch of
humor to the life which was monotonous
enough at times. The French realized full
well the sacrifices that were made daily by these
aristocrats who had given up their luxurious
homes, their autos, their servants and their
money, to live in the servants' quarters of this
old château, and to wait hand and foot upon
wounded poilus, with at any moment of the
day or night the chance of a shell coming
through the roof and stirring things up. No
praise is too high for the self-sacrificing work
of these men and women, all voluntary workers
and untrained in this type of labor. The
women were members of the V.A.D., Voluntary
Aid Detachment, which has been the target
at times of coarse jibes and criticisms,
spoken by those who do not know whereof they
speak. I have worked with members of this
corps of women workers in hospitals in
England and France, and I know that, taking it
all in all, their work is beyond praise, and their
nobility of character beyond estimate. This is
vouched for by many a lonely, hard-hit common
soldier, sick in a strange land, far from
his home and his loved ones.
A field telephone line ran from the château
up to the rear trenches. The cases were
brought out of the trenches to a sheltered spot
and one of our ambulances was telephoned for.
One of us medical men accompanied the
ambulances on these journeys, and they were
often very interesting. On one of the trips on
which I accompanied the ambulance we came
to a ruined village, Gury by name, from which
the civilian population had been sent away.
It was occupied by French soldiers not in the
front line. This village had just been shelled
rather heavily by the Huns, one hundred and
fifty shells having been dropped into it. After
the first shell, which hit one of the houses but
injured no one, the soldiers took shelter in the
cellars and when the smoke had cleared away,
just before our arrival, it was found that the
only damage done was the killing of a cow
and a pigeon! The soldiers were hilariously
laughing at this waste of shells. An officer
showed us the remains of a brass bed in a
wrecked house, saying that he had been
sleeping in that when the shelling began.
We were then taken to see a battery of the
famous .75's--_soixante quinze_--perhaps the
finest field gun on the western front, with
which they said they were going to pay back
the Germans for their audacity. They were
like so many boys at play! The guns were set
up in a cavity in the ground, a roof built over
them on which sod had been placed in such a
manner that from enemy planes it appeared
like the surrounding fields. Dugouts led down
from the gun position so that the artillerymen
could come up from their disturbed slumbers
at a moment's notice and send across a few
rounds of their death-dealing shells. Round
about were laid out flower beds with the
flowers forming in French the words:
_Gloire aux Allies_--Glory to the Allies.
_Honneur aux Soixante quinze_--Honor to
the .75's.
Wherever man lives he must have something
to care for and to love, and these flowers gave
the poilus an outlet for their affection.
Every few miles away from us in all directions
except the north were other hospitals of
the same type as our own. One very good
example, ten miles away at Fayel, was under the
direction of Countess H---- G----, a cousin
of King George. She came sometimes to visit
some acquaintances in our institution, and I
spent a very pleasant afternoon on her first
visit showing her our grounds, trenches, gun
positions, wire entanglements, and other things
of interest. She was as kindly mannered and
democratic as anyone could desire, though she
was King George's cousin and wore a number
of ribbons for previous service in South
Africa. Since that time she has served with the
Italians in Italy and has been decorated by
King Victor Emmanuel.
In Compiègne was another very interesting
hospital presided over by that wonderful
Frenchman, Alexis Carrel, of the Rockefeller
Institute of New York. Here he has done
research work that has made his name familiar
in every scientific circle the world over. And
here in Compiègne, in this newer field, his
researches have brought forth new methods of
treating wounds which have been adopted in
hospitals throughout the war zone. His
hospital was a government institution, not one
of the voluntary ambulances of which our
château was an example.
At the time of writing, two years from my
period of service at the Château de Rimberlieu,
it is still doing good service as a hospital,
though now it is entirely directed by the
French military authorities. But a number
of the original people are still there,
performing the same generous deeds which they
performed in my time, though they are performing
them many miles from the scene of fighting,
for early in 1917 at this point the French
happily pushed back the invaders for many miles.