THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR
The _triage_ had been set up just outside of a small church which placed
its buttressed side alongside the market place of the village. It was a
busy place. And just because you may not know what _triage_ really is
any better than I did when I first heard the term, let me hasten to
explain that it is an emergency station set up by the Army Medical Corps
just back of the actual firing line--that and something more; for the
_triage_ generally means a great center of Red Cross activities as well.
And this particular one, in the little village of Noviant, close behind
the salient of Saint Mihiel--to which reference was made in the
preceding chapter--was the initiation point of a Red Cross captain; his
name is John A. Kimball and he comes from Boston.
Captain Kimball told it to me one day in Paris, and I shall try to give
much of it to you in his own words. He was just a plain, regular
business fellow who, well outside of the immediate possibilities of army
service, had closed his desk in Boston and had offered himself to the
Red Cross. And to work for the Red Cross at the front was to face death
as an actuality.
"The wounded already were coming in, in good numbers, on that
unforgetable morning of the twelfth of September, when they brought him
in--the first dead man that I had faced in the war," said he. "We had
had our experiences with handling iodine and antitoxin and dressings,
but this artillery captain was in need of none of these.... His feet
stuck out underneath the blanket that was thrown over the stretcher and
hid his body, his head, his arms, and his hands. I saw that his boots
were new and that they had been recently polished, too. Of course they
were muddy, but I remember beneath the caking of the clay that they were
of new leather. One does remember details at such a time.
"I buried him. It was a new experience, and not a pleasant one. But war
is no holiday; it is not filled with pleasant experiences. And sooner or
later it brings to a man a test, which, if disagreeable, is all but
supreme. This was my test. I rose to it. I had to. I buried the man, ran
hastily through his papers first and then sealed them into a packet to
send to those who held him dearer than life itself."
Because the Boston captain's experience was so typical of so many other
Red Cross men who risked their all in the service at the front lines of
battle, let us take time to consider it a little in detail. He came to
France at the end of June, 1918. He stayed in Paris and chafed at the
delay in being held back from the fighting front. In four weeks he
received his reward. Having asked to be made a searcher among killed,
wounded, and missing men, he was assigned to the Second Division at
Nancy, which had just come out of the hard fighting at Soissons and was
resting for a brief week before going into action again.
The Second Division is one of the notable Divisions of our fighting
forces that entered France. Because one wishes to avoid invidious
comparisons and because, after all, it is so really hard to decide
whether this Division, this regiment, or that is entitled to go down
into history ahead of its fellows, I should very much hesitate to say
that the Second or the First or the Third or the Twenty-sixth or the
Seventy-seventh or any other one Division was the ranking Division of
our Regular Army. But I shall not hesitate to write that the Second
stood in the front rank. Out of some 2,800 Distinguished Service medals
that had been awarded in France up to the first of March, 1919, some
800 had gone to this Division. And yet it was but one of eighty
Divisions involved in the conflict over there.
In the Second Division were comprised two of the most historic Regular
Army regiments of other days--the Ninth and the Twenty-third. The
records of each of these commands in Cuba and in the Philippines are
among the most enthralling of any in our military history. And the Ninth
was the regiment chosen to enter Peking at the close of the
Japanese-Chinese War and there to represent the United States
Government. These regiments before being sent to the Great War in Europe
were recruited up to the new fighting strength--very largely of boys
from the central and western portions of New York State. In addition to
these two regiments of the former Regular Army, the Second Division held
several of marines, which leaves neither room nor excuse for comment.
The marines too long ago made their fighting reputation to need any more
whatsoever added by this book.
The Second Division in the earlier days of the fighting of the American
Army as a unit had already made a distinguished reputation at both
Château-Thierry and at Soissons. It was at the first point that Major
General Bundy, who then commanded it, was reputed to have replied to a
suggestion from a French commanding officer that he had better retire
his men from an exceptionally heavy _boche_ fire that they were then
facing, that he knew no way of making his men turn back; literally they
did not know the command to retreat. Our amazing army was a machine of
many speeds forward, but apparently quite without a reverse gear.
* * * * *
When Kimball of Boston joined the Second as a Red Cross worker, General
Bundy was just retiring from its command, and was being succeeded by
Brigadier General John A. LeJeune, who took charge on the second of
August, at Nancy; for the Division was spending a whole week catching
its breath before plunging into active fighting once again. On the
ninth its opportunity began to show itself. It moved to the Toul front
in the vicinity of the Moselle River, and was put into a position just
behind the Saint Mihiel sector--that funny little kink on the battle
front that the Germans had so long succeeded in keeping a kink.
For a long time--in exact figures just a month, which to restless
fighting men is a near eternity--the sector was quiet. There were
practically no casualties; and this of itself was almost a record for
the Second, which in four months of real fighting replaced itself with
new men to a number exceeding its original strength. In that month the
Division prepared itself for the strenuous service on the fighting
front. It went into camp for eleven days at Colombes-les-Belles, within
hiking distance of the actual front, and there practiced hand-grenade
work while it made its final replacements. The work just ahead of it
would require full strength and full skill.
On the twenty-seventh of August it began slowly moving into the front
firing line. From the first day of September until the eighth it worked
its way through the great Bois de Sebastopol (Sebastopol Forest),
marching by night all the while, and covering from eight to nine miles a
night. And upon the night of the eleventh--the eve of one of the most
brilliant battles in American history--took over a section of the
trenches north of the little town of Limey.
"Your objective is Triacourt," the officers told the men that evening as
they were preparing for going over the top at dawn, "and the Second is
given two days in which to take it."
Triacourt fell in six hours.
Count that, if you will, for an American fighting Division.
* * * * *
The headquarters of the Second were at Mananville to the south of the
fighting lines. And halfway between Limey of the trenches (they ran
right through the streets of the little town) and Mananville was
Noviant where, as you already know, the _triage_ was established beside
the walls of the church and the Red Cross functioned at the front.
Remember that the _triage_ was nothing more nor less than a sorting
station, where wounded men, being sent back in a steady stream from the
front--three to six miles distant--were divided between four field
hospitals of the Regular Army service; one handling gassed cases,
another badly wounded, and the other two the strictly surgical cases.
Each of these divisions consisted roughly of from ten to fifteen doctors
and about one hundred enlisted men--no women workers were ever permitted
so near the front--and was equipped with from five to eight army trucks
of the largest size.
There has been sometimes an erroneous impression that the Red Cross was
prepared to assume the entire hospital functions of the United States
Army; I have even heard it stated by apparently well-informed persons
that such a thing was fact. It is fact, however, that if the enormous
task had been thrust upon the shoulders of our Red Cross it would have
accepted it. It has never yet refused a work from the government--no
matter how onerous or how disagreeable. As a matter of fact, the army,
for many very good and very sufficient reasons of its own, preferred to
retain direct charge of its own hospitals, both in the field and back of
the lines, and even took over the hospitals which the Red Cross first
established in France before the final policy of the Surgeon General's
office was definitely settled, which hardly meant a lifting of
responsibility from the shoulders of the American Red Cross. Its task,
as we shall see in the chapters which immediately follow this, was
almost a superhuman one. It needed all its energies and its great
resources to follow the direct line of its traditional activity--the
furnishing of comfort to the sick, the wounded, and the oppressed.
A wise man, one with canny understanding, if you will, who found himself
at the Saint Mihiel sector would have understood that a battle was
brewing. There was a terrific traffic on each of the roads leading up
toward the trenches from the railhead and supply depot at the rear--big
camions and little camionettes, two-man whippet tanks, French
seventy-fives (as what is apparently the best field cannon yet devised
will be known for a long time into the future), motor cars with
important-looking officers, ambulances, more big camions, more little
camionettes--all a seemingly unending procession. Fifth Avenue, New
York, or Michigan Avenue, Chicago, on a busy Saturday afternoon could
not have been more crowded, or the traffic handled in a more orderly
fashion.
The barrage which immediately preceded the actual battle began at one
o'clock on the morning of the twelfth. It lasted for nearly four hours
and not only was noisily incessant but so terrific and so brilliant that
one could actually have read a newspaper from its continuous flashes if
that had been an hour for newspaper reading.
"It was like boiling water," says Kimball, "with each bubble a
death-dealing explosion."
At five o'clock in the morning the men went over the top, and our Red
Cross man shook himself out of a short, hard sleep of three hours in a
damp shed near the _triage_ beside the church at Noviant, for it had
been raining steadily throughout the entire night, and went across to
that roughly improvised dressing station. His big day's work was
beginning. By six it was already in full swing. The first wounded men
were coming back from the fighting lines up at Limey and were being
sorted into the ambulances before they were started for the three big
evacuation hospitals in the rear--each of them containing from three
hundred to five hundred beds. The Boston man saw each wounded soldier as
he was placed in the ambulance. Into the hands of those men who asked
for them or who were able to smoke he gave cigarettes. And to those who
were far too weak for the exercise or strain that smoking brought, gave
a word of encouragement or perhaps a shake of the hand. And all in the
name of the Red Cross.
He could have put in a busy day doing nothing else whatsoever; but felt
that there were other sections of the battle front that needed the
immediate presence of the American Red Cross. So at about half after
seven he climbed in beside the driver of a khaki-colored army camionette
and headed straight for Limey, and the heart of the trouble. There was
another old and badly battered church in the town square there, and
there a new _triage_ already was being established; for the Yanks were
driving forward--with fearful impetus and at a terrific rate. So the
hospital went on, the sorting stages, with their indescribable scenes of
human suffering--more stretchers and still more in the hands of _boche_
prisoners coming in with their ghastly freight. Captain Kimball again
passed out his cigarettes and started forward. Now he was on the scene
of actual warfare. Dawn had broken. It had ceased to rain and the sky
was bright and blue with white, fluffy, sun-touched clouds drifting
lazily across it--just as the Boston boy had seen them drift across the
sky in peaceful days on Cape Cod when he had had nothing to do but lie
on his back and gaze serenely up at them.
"I plunged forward over the broken field," he told me, "and there I came
across my artillery captain. I called an aid and we took him back--he of
the bright new boots that had so recently been polished.... I got back
into the game. All the time our boys shot ahead and the racket was
incessant. Once, when I bumped my way across the German trenches, I
paused long enough to stick my nose down into one of their dugouts. It
was easy to see that the enemy had not anticipated the attack. For in
that dugout--it was wonderfully neat and nice, with its concrete walls
and floors and ceiling and its electric lights--was the breakfast still
upon the table; the bread, the sausages, and the beer. I could have
stayed there an hour and enjoyed it pretty well myself. But there were
other things to be done. I got out into the shell-plowed fields once
again. Across that rough sea of mud an engineer regiment was already
building a road, which meant that we could get a Red Cross ambulance
right to the very front. I walked back to Limey--or rather I stumbled
over the rough fields--and there found one which had come through from
Toul that morning, loaded to its very roof with bandages and chocolates
and cigarettes. And I found that Triacourt had fallen. It still lacked
some minutes of noon. The job for which our Division had been given two
days had been accomplished in six hours--but such hours.
"We drove without delay into Triacourt--a fearfully slow business every
foot of it, with every inch of the hastily constructed road crowded with
traffic. But we got through and in the early afternoon were in the main
street of the little town which the French had watched hungrily for four
years and seemingly had been unable to capture. The women and children
of the place came out into the sun-lighted street and rubbed their eyes.
Was it all a dream; these men in tin helmets and uniforms of khaki and
of olive drab? No, it could not be a dream. These were real men,
fighting men. These were the Americans, the Americans of whom rumors had
even run back of the enemy lines. They found their voices, these women,
for the Germans had taken the men of Triacourt as prisoners.
"'_Bons Américains!_' they shrieked, almost in a single cry. And we
saluted gravely."
Over the heads of the two Red Cross men--the captain and the driver of
the little camionette--an aftermath of the battle in the form of an air
fight between _boche_ planes and American was in progress; young Dave
Putnam, one of the most brilliant of our aces, was making the supreme
sacrifice for his country. To the north the Germans were dragging up a
battery and preparing to shell the little town that they had just lost;
but not for long. Batteries of American .155's were appearing from the
other direction and were working effectively. And at dusk a report came
into Division Headquarters that a company of one of the old Regular Army
regiments had captured an entire German hospital--patients, nurses,
doctors, and even two German Red Cross ambulances; while the tingling
radio and the omnipresent telephone began to bring into Division
Headquarters the story of one of the most remarkable American victories
of the entire war. And our Red Cross began the first of a four days'
stay in a damp dugout in the lee of a badly smashed barn.
* * * * *
Kimball's story is quite typical of many others. But before I begin upon
them--what the motion-picture director would call the "close-ups" of
what is perhaps the most picturesque form of all the many, many
picturesque features of our Red Cross in action, consider for a moment
how it first got into action upon the field of battle. I have referred
several times already to the excessive strain which the great German
offensives which began in March, 1918, placed upon its facilities, while
they still were in a stage of development. When we read of the work of
the Transportation Department and of the Bureau of Supplies, we saw how
both of these great functions had suddenly been confronted with a task
that demanded the brains and brawn of supermen and how gloriously and
brave-heartedly they had arisen to the task. The field service of our
Red Cross--its first contact with the men of our army in actual
conflict--was second to neither of these.
Remember, if you will, that it was but a mere nine months after the
American Red Cross Commission to Europe landed in France that its
organization was put to its greatest test. The news of the long-expected
and well-advertised German offensive reached Paris on the very evening
of the day on which it started, March 21, 1918. Paris caught the news
with a choking heart. The _coup_, which even her own military experts
had frankly predicted as the turning point of the entire war, actually
had come to pass. No wonder that the once gay capital of the French
fairly held its breath in that unforgetable hour--that every other
community of France, big or little, did the same--and fairly fought for
news of the day's operations. Yet news gave little comfort. It was bad
news, all of it; fearfully and unmistakably bad. Each succeeding courier
seemed to bring enlarged statements of the enemy's immensity and
seemingly irresistible force. It was indeed a real crisis.
* * * * *
In that hour of alarm and even of some real panic, our American Red
Cross showed neither. It kept its cool and thinking head. Major James H.
Perkins, then ranking as Red Cross Commissioner to Europe and a man whom
you have met in earlier pages of this book, called a conference of his
department heads on that very evening of the twenty-first of March. He
told them quietly that they were to make known every resource at their
command and to have each and every one of their workers--men or
women--ready for call to any kind of service, night or day.
"Let every worker feel that on him or her individually may rest the fate
of the allied cause," was the keynote of the simple orders that issued
from this conference.
It was in the days that immediately followed that the flexibility and
the emergency values of the American Red Cross organization--qualities
that it had diligently set forth to attain within itself--came to their
fullest test. The discipline and willingness of practically every worker
was also under test, while for the very first time in all its history
overseas it was given large opportunity to carry to the men of the
allied lines a great material message.
How well was that material message carried?
Before I answer that point-blank question, let me carry you back a
little time before that night of the spring equinox. Let me ask you to
remember, if you will, that the super-structure of Red Cross effort in
that critical hour had been laid many weeks before; in fact very soon
after its original unit of eighteen men under command of Major Murphy
had first arrived in France. It had experimented with the French, in
definite and successful efforts to relieve the hard-pressed civilian
population of that distressed country. It had worked, and worked hard,
in the broad valleys of the Somme and the Oise, which had been
devastated by the _boche_ when he made his famous "strategic" retreat to
the Hindenburg Line in March, 1917--just one year before.
The Germans had left behind them an especial misery in the form of a
vast region of burned and blown-up homes, broken vehicles and farm
machinery, defiled wells, hacked and broken orchards, and ruined soil. I
have stood in both of these valleys myself after German retreats and so
can bespeak as personal evidence the desolation which they left behind.
I, myself, have seen whole orchards of young fruit trees wantonly ruined
by cutting their trunks a foot or more above the level of the ground.
And this was but a single form of their devilment.
Yet as the Germans retreated "strategically" there in the spring weeks
of 1917, there followed on their very heels the heavy-hearted but
indomitable refugees who in yesteryear had known these hectares as their
very own. Returning, they found but little by which they might recognize
their former habitats. Devastation ruled, life was practically extinct.
The farm animals, even the barnyard fowls and the tiny rabbits--the joy
of a French peasant's heart--had been killed or carried away. Not even
the bobbins of the cast-out sewing machines or the cart wheels were left
behind by an enemy who prided himself on his efficiency, but who had few
other virtues for any decent pride.
Seemingly stouter-hearted folk than the French might have quailed at
such wholesale destruction; but the refugees did not complain. Instead,
they set patiently to work--many of them still within the range of the
enemy's guns--to rehabilitate themselves. Their burdens and their
problems were staggeringly great; their resources pitifully small. Thus
our Red Cross found them, and to give them effective aid--not only in
the valleys of the Somme and the Oise, but in the other devastated areas
of France--formed the Bureau of Reconstruction and Relief under Edward
Eyre Hunt. Of Mr. Hunt's work, the record will be made at another time.
In order, however, that you may gain the proper perspective on the
beginnings of the field service of our Red Cross with our army in
action, permit me to call attention in a few brief sentences to some
salient features of the Bureau of Reconstruction and Relief.
It located warehouses at convenient places--Ham, Noyon, Arras, and
Soissons--all of them within gunshot of the Hindenburg Line. These were
stocked with food, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, building
materials, seed, farm implements, even with rabbits, chickens, goats,
and other domesticated animals. A personnel of several field workers was
sent into the district to supervise the distribution of these
commodities, which was done partly through authorized French committees
and municipal officers in the devastated towns. These coöperated with
devoted groups of British, French and American workers, who established
themselves in small groups and who worked to inspire the liberated areas
with faith and courage and hope. Looming large among all these
coördinated agencies were the Smith College Unit--composed of graduates
of the Northampton institution--and the group of workers from the
Society of Friends--both of whom, in the fall of 1917, became integral
parts of the Red Cross.
These two coördinated agencies, together with the _Secours d'Urgence_,
the _Village Reconstitue_, the Civil Section of the American Fund for
the French Wounded, the Philadelphia Unit, and the _Comité Américaine
pour les Régiones Dévastées_, had their various operations well under
way by the early summer of 1917. When it entered the field, our American
Red Cross offered assistance in every way to these organizations,
thereby giving a new impetus to their work. Agricultural societies were
organized for the common rehabilitation of the areas, American tractors
and plows were furnished by the French Government, while the Red Cross
workers helped with and encouraged the planting, furnishing large
quantities of seeds as they did so, while small herds of live stock,
also given by the Red Cross, appeared here and there upon the French
landscape.
The workers did even more. They turned to and helped patch up buildings
that, with a minimum amount of labor, could again be made habitable,
erected small barracks in some places, and assisted generally in
renewing life and the first bare evidences of civilization in the towns
of the desolated sections.
* * * * *
In March, 1918, these desecrated lands were just springing to life once
again. God's sun was breaking through the clouds of winter and gently
coaxing the wheat up out of the rough, brown lands, gardens again dotted
the landscape--the Smith College Unit itself had supervised and with its
own hands helped in the planting of more than four hundred and fifty of
these--the little villages and the bigger towns were showing increasing
signs of life and activity; then came the blow. The clouds gathered
together once again. And in the misty morning of the twenty-first of
March began a week of horror and devastation--a single seven days in
which all the patient, loving labor of nearly a twelvemonth past was
erased completely. The Germans swept across the plains of Picardy once
again--the French and British armies and the terror-stricken civilians
along with the American war workers were swept before them as flotsam
and jetsam, all in a mad onrush. Yet all was not lost. One field worker,
a stout-hearted little woman in uniform, sat in the seat of a swaying
motor truck and as the thing rolled and tossed over a road of
unspeakable roughness wrote in her red-bound diary, this:
[Illustration: AS SEEN FROM ALOFT
The aëroplane man gets the most definite impression at the A. R. C.
Hospital at Issordun, which was typical at these field institutions]
"The best of all remains--the influence of neighborliness, friendship,
kindness, and sympathy--these are made of the stuff which no chemistry
of war can crush. We face more than half a year's work torn to pieces.
But I do believe that the fact of this sacrifice will deepen its
effect."
Such was the spirit of our Red Cross workers overseas.
They now had full need for such spirit. The monotony of working from
daylight to dusk in lonely farms and villages, where patience was the
virtue uppermost, was now to be replaced by a whirl of events which
succeeded one another with kaleidoscopic rapidity, demanding service
both night and day of a character as varied as the past had been
colorless.
* * * * *
The headquarters of the American Red Cross for the Somme district on the
morning of the twenty-first of March, 1918, were at Ham--the little
village once made famous by the imprisonment and escape of Louis
Philippe. They were in charge of Captain William B. Jackson, who
afterwards became major in entire charge of the Army and Navy Field
Service. Here at Ham was also the largest Red Cross warehouse in the
entire district. Another warehouse stood at Nelse, a few miles distant,
to the rear. To the north was Arras, with still another American Red
Cross storehouse, while to the south was the Soissons warehouse.
On that same morning--one cannot easily efface it from any picture of
any continued activity of the Great War--the Smith College Unit workers
had gone from their headquarters at Grecourt, both on foot and in their
four Ford cars, to their various tasks in the seventeen small villages
in the immediate vicinity. Two or three of these young women journeyed
to Pommiers, a little town in the area, whose school had been reopened
by them, and which also served the children of several surrounding
villages. And because so many of the children had to walk so far to
their lessons the Red Cross served them each day with a substantial
school lunch--of vermicelli, chocolate, and milk. A few others of the
college graduates went a little farther afield--to supervise planting
operations in near by towns--yet not one of these girls was one whit
above turning to and working on the task with her own hands, while some
helped the Red Cross workmen's gangs roofing houses and stables,
repairing shops and fitting outbuildings, in some crude form, for human
habitation.
Into the very heart of those varied activities that March morning
marched the red-faced British Town Major of Ham with the blunt and crisp
announcement to the Red Cross man that the town must be evacuated
without delay; the retreat already was well under way, the vast hegira
fairly begun.... The Red Cross force there at Ham did not hesitate. It
first sent word to all the workers in the villages roundabout; then,
having quickly mobilized in the town square its entire transportation
outfit--three trucks, a camionette, and a small battered touring
car--gave quiet, prompt attention to its own immediate problem of
evacuation work.
It functioned fast and it functioned extremely well. Back and forth
across the River Somme--over the rough bridges hurriedly builded by
Americans for the British Army--it transported hundreds and hundreds of
children and infirm refugees. All that day, all that night, and well
into the next morning it worked, driving again and again into the
bombarded towns in the region to bring out the last remaining families.
The Germans were already on the edge of the town when one Red Cross
driver made his last trip into Ham--on three flat tires and a broken
spring! Yet despite these physical disabilities succeeded in carrying
six wounded British soldiers out to safety.
To our Red Cross the Smith College girls reported, with great
promptitude. And throughout the entire succeeding week--a deadly and
fearfully depressing seven days of continued retirement before the
advancing Germans--showed admirable courage and initiative; the sort of
thing that the military expert of to-day classes as _morale_ of the
highest sort. These women worked night and day setting up, whenever the
retreat halted even for a few hours, temporary canteens and dispensaries
and evacuating civilians and carrying wounded soldiers through to safe
points behind the lines. And because many of these last were American
soldiers they formed the first point of field contact between our Red
Cross and our army and so are fairly entitled to a post of high honor in
the pages of this book.
* * * * *
"Send me another sixty of those Smith College girls," shouted an
American brigadier general from his field headquarters in the fight at
Château-Thierry. "This forty isn't half enough. I want a hundred."
The college graduate in charge of the temporary canteen there who
received this request laughed.
"Tell him," she said, "that there have been no more than sixteen at any
one time."
But sixteen human units of individual efficiency can move mountains.
Take the Smith girl who drove a Red Cross car through the tangle of war
traffic at a crossroads near Roye, while the fighting waged thick around
about that little town. She found her Fordette stalled and tangled in
several different lines of communication; between ammunition trucks,
supply camions, loads of soldiers, batteries--all, like herself, stopped
and standing idle and impotent.
The girl sensed the situation in an instant. She must have been a New
Yorker and have remembered the jams of traffic that she had seen on
Forty-second Street; at Broadway and again at Fifth Avenue. At any rate
she acted upon the instant. She descended from the seat of her little
car, and, standing there at the crossing of the roads with an American
flag in her fingers, directed traffic with the precision and good sense
of the skilled city traffic cop. She held up staff cars, directed whole
regiments of artillery, shouted orders to convoys, and for several hours
kept the important corner from becoming another hopeless tangle of
traffic. Her orders were not disputed, either by private or general. All
ranks smiled at her, but all ranks saluted and obeyed her orders.
It was in situations such as this that the rare combination of military
discipline, the flexibility to permit of human initiative that the Red
Cross sought to attain in its inner self, showed itself. The plan of
withdrawal which had been carefully mapped out at headquarters was
implicitly followed--almost to its last details. Yet the personnel of
the organization was both permitted and encouraged to work at its
highest efficiency both in evacuating human beings and salvaging the
precious supplies. For instance, after that first day of the great
retreat, when all the Red Cross workers in the area had reported to
their chiefs at Nelse and at Roye--both well to the rear of Ham--they
were dispatched to work up and down the entire constantly changing
front. Geographically, Soissons was the hub of the wheel on which these
emergency Red Cross activities turned so rapidly. They all swung back in
good order, each unit, by motor-courier service, keeping in
communication with its fellows. Roye was the center of the secondary
line of the Red Cross front which for the moment stretched from Amiens
in the northwest to Soissons in the southeast. When it was driven from
this line the entire Red Cross force in the vicinity retired, still in
good order, to a brand-new one, stretching across Amiens, Montdidier,
and Noyon. From the small American Red Cross warehouse at this last
town, a stock of valuable supplies was quickly evacuated to Lassigny, a
short distance still farther to the rear. Noyon quickly became a center
of feverish activity and the focus of Red Cross efforts on the third day
of the battle. From it Red Cross cars worked, both day and night,
evacuating men and women and goods.
The line held across Montdidier, Noyon, and even Lassigny for a bare
twenty-four hours more; for on the fourth day of the retreat all three
had to be abandoned, and new quarters established on a line closer to
Paris than any of the others; it passed through both Beauvais and
Compiègne, where emergency Red Cross headquarters were once again
established; but for the last time. This line was destined to be a
permanent one. The retreat was slowing down, slowly but very surely
halting. And our Red Cross with our Yanks and their Allies were "digging
in."
* * * * *
The impressions which the great German drive made upon the minds of our
workers who fell back before it will remain with them as long as thought
and memory cling--the vast conglomeration of men, tired, dirty,
unshaven; men and animals and inanimate things, moving quickly, slowly,
intermittently, moving not at all, but choking and halting all
progress--with the deadly perversity of inanimate things; men not merely
tired, dirty and unshaven, but sick and wounded almost unto death,
moaning and sobbing under the fearful onslaughts of pain unbearable,
sometimes death itself, a blessed relief, and marked by a stop by the
roadside, a hurriedly dug grave, prayers, the closing earth, one other
soul gone from the millions in order that hundreds of millions of other
souls may live in peace and safety. Such traffic, such turmoil, such
variety, such blinding, choking dust. Army supply trains, motor trucks,
guns, soldiers, civilians, on foot and mounted, of vehicles of every
variety conceivable and many unconceivable; motor cars upon which the
genius of a Renault or a Ford had been expended; wheelbarrows, baby
carriages, sledges, more motor cars, ranging in age from two weeks to
fourteen years, dog carts, wagons creaking and groaning behind badly
scared mules and worse scared negroes who wondered why they had ever
left the corn brake--for this. Such traffic, such life. And then--again
and again death, more graves, more prayers, more men's souls poured into
the vague unknown.
And in the midst of death, life. Here in this wagon is a haggard-looking
woman. The babe which she clasps to her breast is but four hours old;
but the woman is a hundred--seemingly. She stretches her long, bare arms
out from the flapping curtains at the rear of the Red Cross camionette.
A group of _poilus_, in extremely dirty uniforms, catches her eyes. She
shrieks to them in her native French.
"My _poilus_," she cries, "you shall return. God wills it. You shall
return--you and my little son," and falls, sobbing incoherently, into
the bottom of the bumping ambulance.
An old woman with her one precious possession saved--a bewhiskered
goat--hears her, and crosses herself. A three-ton motor truck falls into
a deep ditch and is abandoned, with all of its contents. This is no hour
for salvage. The dust from all the traffic grows thicker and thicker.
Yet it is naught with the blinding white dust which arises from this
shell--which almost struck into the heart of one of the main lines of
traffic. The racket is terrific; yet above it one catches the shrieking
cry of the young mother in the camionette. Her reason hangs in the
balance. And as the noise subsides a detachment of _poilus_ falls out
beside the roadside and begins opening more graves. The _boche's_ aim
was quite as good as he might have hoped.
* * * * *
In and out of these streams--this fearful turmoil of traffic, if you
please, our Red Cross warped and woofed its fabric of human godlike love
and sympathy. With its headquarters established with a fair degree of
permanency both at Compiègne and Beauvais, it increased its attention to
the soldiery. It set up a line of canteens and soup kitchens along the
roadside all the way from Beauvais, and these served as many as 30,000
men a day with hot drinks, cigarettes, and food of a large variety, and
showed a democratic spirit of service in that they gave, without
question or without hesitation, to Frenchmen, to Britons, to Italians,
and to Americans alike. The men and the girls in the canteens were blind
to things, but their ears were ever alert, and they heard only the
voices of the tired and the distressed asking for food and drink.
At Compiègne the Red Cross took over the largest hotel, which, like the
rest of the town, had been evacuated so hurriedly that parts of a
well-cooked meal still remained upon the tables of the great
_salle-à-manger_. Instantly it rubbed its magic lamp and transformed the
hostelry into a giant warehouse, infirmary, and, for its own workers, a
mess hall and barracks. And as the endless convoys rolled by its doors
and down into the narrow, twisting, stone-paved streets of Compiègne,
these workers stood at the curb opening up case after case of canned
foodstuffs and tossed or thrust the cans into the waiting fingers of the
half-starved drivers of the trucks and camions.
Individual initiative--that precious asset of every American--had its
fullest opportunity those days at Compiègne. It mattered not what a man
had been or what he might become; it was what he made of himself that
very hour that counted. A minister who had come over from America to do
chaplain service for the army bruised his poor unskilled fingers time
and time again as he struggled, with the help of a clerk from the Paris
offices, with the stout packing cases. Departmental and bureau lines
everywhere within the Red Cross had been abolished in order to meet the
supreme emergency. Rank melted quickly away before the demand for manual
labor. The Red Cross showed the flexibility of its organization, and
Compiègne was, in itself, a superb test.
It was down at the railroad station in that same fascinating, mediæval
city of old France that a portable kitchen, hauled out on the great
north road up from Paris, with three American business men fresh from
their desks in New York, hanging perilously on to its side like
volunteer fire laddies of long ago going on old "Rough and Ready" to a
regular whale of a blaze, was set up on the exact spot where one Jeanne
d'Arc once had been taken prisoner. Its mission of salvation was far
more prosaic; yet, in its own humble way, it too functioned, and
functioned extremely well. It served food and hot drinks to more than
ten thousand soldiers each day.
* * * * *
The variety of opportunity, of service to be rendered, was hardly less
than stupendous. For instance, when word came to Compiègne from Ressons
that the French would finally be compelled to evacuate their hospital
there and lacked the proper transportation facilities, our Red Cross
stepped promptly into the breach and moved out the precious supplies. It
did not ask whether or not there were American boys there in the wards
of the French hospital--there probably were, the two armies being
brigaded together pretty closely at that time; it sought no fine
distinctions--in that time, in that emergency, the French were us, we
were the French--and so sent its trucks hurrying up to Ressons, equipped
with a full complement of workers. And these worked until the retreating
Allies had established a third line in the rear of them and the
advancing Germans were but two hours away.
All this while the transformed hotel at Compiègne remained a huge center
for these multifold forms of Red Cross relief. It, too, formed a
clearing house for assistance. Its ears were alert to the vast
necessities of the moment. They listened for opportunities of service.
There were many such. A refugee brought word that an old couple in a
farmhouse full ten miles distant had no way of retreating before the
onrushing Germans. Without a minute's delay a camionette was dispatched
to the spot and it brought the weeping, grateful pair and most of their
personal belongings to safety; while other cars were sent in various
directions to seek out the opportunities of performing similar
services.... As this situation eased itself, this transportation
equipment was turned toward the carrying of supplies and tobacco to the
weary men of isolated batteries and units along the ever changing battle
front. It was an almost unceasing task, and the few short hours that the
Red Cross workers forced themselves into an all-necessary sleep were all
spent in the caves and _abris_ of Compiègne; for the _boche_ aviators
had an unpleasant habit of making frequent nocturnal visits to it.
* * * * *
At Beauvais, simultaneous with the establishment of the headquarters at
Compiègne, the American Red Cross opened both military and civilian
hospitals, together with a rest station of some three hundred beds for
slightly wounded soldiers and for casuals; as men detached from their
units are generally known. Over a bonfire in a small hut the workers
cooked food and served it hot to the soldiers and the refugees. In fact
this town had been made a clearing station for these last. Each incoming
train brought more and more of these pitiful folk into the town, where
they were halted for a time before being sent on other trains to the
districts of France quite remote from any immediate possibility of
invasion. In the few hours which refugees spent in Beauvais our Red
Cross made some definite provision for their comfort. It secured a huge
building, obtained several tons of hay, and after establishing a rough
form of bus service with its motor cars, transported them from the
station to its hastily transformed barracks for a night's rest, and
then, on the following morning, back to the railway station and the
outgoing trains to the south and west. And with the barracks and the hay
cots went blankets and food, of course. It was crude comfort; but it was
infinitely better than spending the night on the stone floor of a damp
and unheated railroad station.
At Niort, where a small store of Red Cross supplies had been sent to a
designated delegate, the delegate on an hour's notice fed four hundred
refugees, while at Clermont the American Red Cross supplied food to a
nunnery that had opened its doors to refugees. So it went. The variety
of services was indeed all but infinite; while through the entire
nightmare of activity, the workers were thrust upon their own
initiative--that precious American birthright,--time and time again.
Their only orders were short ones; they were to help any one and every
one in need of assistance.
How the French viewed this aid and how they came to rely upon it, is
best illustrated, perhaps, by the testimony of a hardware merchant of
Soissons whose house had been shelled. Without hesitation he came direct
to the Red Cross headquarters for help, saying:
"I come to you first because it has become natural for us to go to the
Americans first when we are in need."
And from a refugee station near Péronne, a Red Cross worker reported:
"They are all looking to me, as a representative of the American Red
Cross, to act as a proper godfather."
As the days passed, the work in this vital area was greatly expanded and
increased. The refugees gradually were evacuated through to Paris and
beyond, while the service in the valleys of the Somme and the Oise
became more strictly military in character. It became better organized,
too. But I feel that this last is not the point. We Americans are rather
apt to place too great a stress upon organization. And the fact remains
that the Red Cross in its first military emergency, with very little
organization, indeed, attained a proficiency in service far greater than
even its most optimistic adherents had ever dreamed it might attain.
* * * * *
I have turned the course of my book for a time away from the direct
service of our Red Cross to our own army because I wanted you to see
how and where that direct-service field was founded. From that
beginning, at the start of the German drive, it grew rapidly and
steadily and, as I have just said, with certain very definite benefits
of organization. The drive halted, became a thing of memory, was
supplanted by another drive--of a different sort and in the opposite
direction--a drive that did not cease and hardly halted until the
eleventh day of November, 1918. That was the drive so brilliantly marked
with those epoch-making tablets of the superb romance of our American
adventure overseas--Château-Thierry, Veaux, Saint Mihiel, the
Argonne--many other conflicts, too.
In all of these the American Red Cross played its part, and seeks no
greater testimony than that so generously volunteered by the very men
who received its benefits--the doughboys at the front. They know, and
have not been hesitant to tell. My own sources of information are for
the most part a bit official--the records made by the Red Cross workers
in the field. These tell more eloquently than I can of the work that was
done there and so I shall quote quite freely from them.
"My billet has stout cement walls, a mighty husky ceiling and a dirt
floor," writes Lieutenant J. H. Gibson of Caldwell, Idaho, who was
attached to the Thirty-third Division. "The furniture consists of my cot
and sundry goods boxes, camouflaged with blankets to make seats, and I
have frequent callers. Generally they are casuals--men who have lost
their organizations and don't know where to go or what to do. I had
three of them the first day, footsore, weary, and homesick. I rustled
them a place to get mess, loaded them into my car, and drove them to the
nearest railroad railhead, where I found a truck belonging to their
Division, stopped it, and got them aboard."
Under date of October 13, 1918, Lieutenant Gibson further wrote:
"This has been another of those days spent most in quarters, busy with
paper work. I find a thundering lot of letter writing necessary in
connection with my Red Cross duties. I am the Home Communication and
Home Service Representative for the Division in addition to being
division 'scrounger.' When any of the folks back home want information
about their soldier boys I am supposed to furnish it and, _vice versa_,
when any of the soldier boys have home problems I am expected to help
them. While I am resting I act as Division shopper, for fighting men
need things just the same as ordinary mortals, and I take their orders,
have the goods bought through the Red Cross in Paris, and distribute
them, collecting the money. When the Division is in action I administer
comfort to the wounded in addition to gathering data as to the deaths.
Between times I scout roads, carry dispatches, and help the sanitary
train generally. If the devil has work only for idle hands he can pass
me by.
"At dressing stations we endeavor to do two things; to re-dress the
wounds and to administer some nourishment. The men wounded have received
first aid treatment on the field or at the battalion-aid post and they
walk or are carried on litters to the dressing station. There we put
them into ambulances or trucks and they go out to the evacuation
hospitals. My part of the job was the nourishment end, and so I got a
detail of men, improvised a fire, stole a water bucket from another
Division which had more than it needed, opened up some rations, and soon
was serving hot coffee, bread, and jam to the wounded, endeavoring the
while to kid a grin into the face of each. The last was the easiest job
for our fellows were sure gritty. I think I batted a thousand per cent
on the smile end of the game."
Under date of October 24, 1918:
"Back from Paris. I rolled out fairly early and got my boxes opened. The
boys certainly appreciate the Red Cross shopping service and fairly
swarmed in after the articles we had procured for them. There was
everything imaginable in the lot--watches, boots, cigars, cigarettes,
and candy being the prime favorites. One buddy had a mandolin and
another some French grammars. I was overwhelmed and had to get an
assistant detailed, for in addition to making deliveries I had to take
orders. Every one wanted to order something. About sixty-five additional
orders were placed to-day and I didn't even have time to open my mail."
A week later:
"I spent the day at my billet, busy with the correspondence which my
position with the Red Cross necessitates and which, by the way, is a
little difficult to handle in view of the fact that I am minus every
convenience. Letter files, index cards, guides, and cabinets are about
as scarce as hen's teeth. It is wonderful, however, just what a man can
do without. A small goods box will make a very passable letter file, and
a cigar box, the kind that fifty come in, can be made into a reasonably
useful card-index tray. I was wise enough to bring a small typewriter
from the states and it has proven absolutely indispensable.... The men
are in rest billets and the delouser and shower baths are busy cleaning
them up. The men come in squads to the building which houses the
equipment, strip off their clothing which goes to the delouser, where
they are dry-baked at a temperature sufficiently high to kill the nits.
While this is being done they are thoroughly scrubbing themselves, and
when they are through with the bath, their clothes are finished and
ready to be put on. The Red Cross never did a better thing than when it
furnished this equipment to my division."
Permit me to interrupt Lieutenant Gibson's narrative to explain in
somewhat greater detail the operation of these Red Cross portable
cleansing plants which added so greatly to the comfort of the doughboys,
not only in the field, but, in many cases, in rest billets or camps far
back from it. It so happened that many times the men in the front lines
would go weeks and even a full month without the opportunity of a decent
bath. Such is war. It is a known fact that the boys of the Third
Division once spent a full five weeks in the trenches without even
changing their clothes, after which they were sent behind to a Red Cross
cleansing station and bathed and refitted with clean clothing before
being sent back again--with what joy and refreshment can easily be
imagined.
The type of portable shower used in many cases was generally known as
the "eight-headshower" or field douche. It consisted of a simply
designed water tank with fire box, in which might be burned coal or
wood, a pipe line with eight sprays, and flooring under the sprays. The
thing was easily adjusted. In a building with water supply it was a
simple matter indeed to connect the tank with the water supply; while in
the open field, where there might be neither water pressure nor water
connection, the precious fluid could be poured into the tank with
buckets. The apparatus was durable and reasonably "fool-proof."
During the Château-Thierry drive nine of these portable showers were set
up by our Red Cross, and in one week, seven thousand men were brought
back from the firing line, bathed, given clean clothes, and sent back
refreshed mentally and morally as well as physically. Sixty men an hour
could easily be bathed in one of these plants, and two gallons of water
were allowed to each man.
The delouser, as the army quickly came to know the sterilizing plant,
almost always accompanied the portable shower upon its travels. It, too,
was a simple contraption; a great cylinder, into which the dirty
clothing was tightly crammed until it could hold not one ounce more, and
live steam poured in, under a pressure of from sixty to one hundred and
fifteen pounds to the square inch. This was sufficient to kill all the
vermin; and, in some cases, the bacteria as well, although this last was
not guaranteed. The delouser, with a capacity of fifty suits a day,
could almost keep pace with one of the shower baths, and both could be
set up or taken down in ten minutes.
A shower bath mounted on a Ford was one of the best friends of the
Eighty-first Division as it played its big part in the defeat of the
Hun. It made its first appearance in September, when the Division was
stationed in the Vosges, with headquarters at St. Dié. After a few hard
days in the trenches the men would return to their headquarters, well to
the rear of the lines, and beg for some sort of bathing facilities--and
these, apparently, were not to be found.
Captain Richard A. Bullock was our Red Cross man with the Eighty-first.
It bothered him that the men of his Division could not have so simple a
comfort when they asked for it and needed it so much. He determined to
try and solve the problem, and so found his way down to the big American
Red Cross warehouse and there acquired one of the portable field
equipments such as I have just described. It was a comparatively easy
trick to mount the device on a Ford, after which Bullock paraded the
entire outfit up and down the lines of the Eighty-first and as close to
the front-line trenches as fires were ever permitted. In a mighty short
time he could get the bath in order and showering merrily, and when all
the men who wanted to bathe had been accommodated the contraption would
move on.
* * * * *
For the camps where larger numbers of men must be bathed, the Red Cross,
through its Mechanical Equipment Service of its Army and Navy
Department, provided even larger facilities, although still of
standardized size and pattern. This was known as the pavilion bath and
disinfecting plant and could easily take care of 150 an hour. Where the
sterilization of their clothing was not necessary this number was very
greatly increased. In fact at one time a record was made in one of the
large field camps of bathing 608 men in two hours through a single one
of these plants. In another, which was in operation at the Third
Aviation Center, 3,626 men bathed in one week in a total of twenty-eight
operating hours and some 4,200 men in the second week. It was estimated
that the plants could, if necessary, be operated a full twenty-four
hours a day; but even on the part-time basis it was an economical
comfort. It required the services of a sergeant and three
privates--whose time cost nothing whatsoever--to operate it, and, based
on fuel costs, each man bathed at an expense, to the Red Cross, of less
than one cent.
They were handled with military simplicity and expedition. The men, told
off into details, entered the first room--the entire outfit was housed
in a standardized Red Cross tent of khaki--where they removed their
clothes and placed them within the sterilizer, then went direct into the
bath. While they bathed their garments were cleansed, sterilized, and
dried, and the two functions were so synchronized that the clothes were
ready as quickly as the men--and the entire process completed within the
half hour.
* * * * *
Return, if you will, for a final minute with Gibson of the Red Cross, up
with the Thirty-third Division at the front. I find a final entry in his
diary record of his activities nearly three weeks after the signing of
the armistice; to be exact, on November 29. It runs after this fashion:
"A couple of days before Thanksgiving I accompanied the Division Graves
Registration Officer to the woods north of Verdun where our Division had
been heavily engaged during the month of October and where we had quite
a list of missing. The fighting had been intense through these woods,
portions of them changing hands five or six times in the course of three
weeks, and naturally it was impossible to keep careful track of all the
brave fellows who fell. Delving into the earth, uncovering rotten
corpses, and searching for proper marks of identity is as gruesome and
as horrible a job as could be imagined and I must confess my nerve was a
bit shattered at the close of the second day...."
Yet not all the work of the Division men of the Red Cross was gruesome
and horrible. The war had its humors as well as tragedies, major and
minor. For instance, how about the job of the Red Cross man with the
Seventy-seventh Division, when he found himself asked to become stage
manager for a troupe of seventeen girls--real girls, mind you, none of
them the make-believe thing with bass voices and flat feet. He, like
many of his fellows, found that the hardest part of his job came after
the signing of the armistice, when time hung heavy indeed upon the hands
of the doughboys and to keep them occupied was a task worthy of the best
thoughts of men--and angels. The mere job of serving coffee and
chocolate from the canteens, establishing reading rooms, and
distributing cigarettes, magazines, and newspapers ceased to be
sufficient. The boys were fairly "fed up" with these things. And with
the continued rain and mud and damp of Manonville getting upon the
nerves of the Seventh, they demanded something new and mighty good in
the way of amusement.
Captain Biernatzki was the Red Cross man with the Division. He quickly
sensed the situation, and, taking his little motor car, drove to Toul
not far distant, and, as you already know, a Red Cross center of no
small importance. He began at once signing up dramatic talent among the
American Red Cross girls there in the canteens and the hospitals, and
after securing motor transportation for the entire troupe, bore it north
to his own Division. The officers of the Seventh were in on the plan and
heartily supported it, and as an earnest of their support had the
visiting ladies of the Red Cross Road Company No. 1 lunch at a special
and wonderful mess on the occasion of their Thespian début.
"One of the girls was a wonderful singer," said Biernatzki afterward in
describing the incident. "Another proved a marvel in handling the men,
making them sing and keeping them laughing, and there were one or two
others, too, who did their bit in a most creditable manner. One of our
troupe had brought a clothes basket full of fudge which was thrown out
to a forest of waving palms, while the remaining members of the party
were sufficiently decorative and charming to put the finishing touches
to the affair by their mere presence."
It seems a far cry from the Red Cross extending succor to a man wounded
on the field of battle toward staging a show in a big rest camp, yet I
am not sure that the last, in its way, did not do its part toward the
winning of the war quite as much as the first.
Of course our American Red Cross was not primarily represented in
canteen work in the actual zones of fighting; this function, by the
ruling of the United States Army and the War Department, you will
perhaps remember, was given almost entirely to the Young Men's Christian
Association and to the Salvation Army. There were, however, a few
exceptions to this general rule. For instance, at Colombes-les-Belles,
an important aviation station, ten or twelve miles south of Toul, I saw
a very complete Red Cross equipment at a field camp which at no time was
far removed from the front-line fighting. It consisted of a canteen,
which served as high as from two thousand to three thousand men a day,
and even as late as March, 1919, was still serving from seven to eight
hundred; an officers' club, to which was attached an officers' mess,
feeding some seventy men a day, and a billeting barracks for the nine
Red Cross women stationed at the place. There also was a huge hangar
which, with a good floor and appropriate decorations, had been
transformed into a corking amusement center. This last was not under the
direct charge of the American Red Cross, yet our Red Cross girls were
the chief factors in making it go. They danced there night after night
with our boys. In fact, in order to have sufficient partners, it was
necessary to scour the country for twenty miles roundabout with motor
cars and bring in all the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. girls that were
available. It seems that it really is part of a Red Cross girl's job to
be on her feet eight hours a day and then to dance full ten miles each
night.
This Colombes-les-Belles canteen originally had been established in the
very heart of the grimy little village, but when the Twenty-eighth
(Pennsylvania) Division came to the place on the thirteenth of January,
1919, it took the old canteen structure for division headquarters, but
squared the account by building the Red Cross a newer and bigger canteen
group in the open field.
"I can't give too much praise to the Red Cross personnel that have been
assigned to this particularly isolated spot," the colonel in charge of
the flying field told me on the occasion of my visit to it. "I know that
the women must have been fearfully lonely out here; but they have never
complained. On the contrary, they have given generously and unstintingly
of their own time and energies in order that time should not hang
heavily upon the hands of the men. The problem of amusement for the
aviator is a peculiarly difficult one. He has actually only two or three
hours of service each day, and the rest of his waking hours he must be
kept ready and fit, mentally as well as physically, for his job, which
requires all that a man may possess of nerve and judgment and quick wit.
The Red Cross women quickly came to sense this portion of our problem
and in helping in its assistance they have been of infinite assistance."
* * * * *
Yet, while service in a field camp such as this at Colombes-les-Belles
represents a high degree of fidelity and persistence and, in many, many
cases, real courage as well, the real test of high courage for the Red
Cross man, as well as for the soldier, came in the trenches or the open
fighting, which, in the case of our Yanks, was brought in the final
weeks and months of the war to supplant the intrenched lines of the
earlier months. Here was a man, a canteen worker for the American Red
Cross, who suddenly found it his job to hold the hand of a boy private
of a Pennsylvania regiment while the surgeon amputated his arm at the
shoulder. War is indeed a grim business. The Red Cross workers in the
field saw it in its grimmest phases; but spared themselves many of its
worst horrors by virtue of forgetting themselves and their nerves in
the one possible way--in hard and unrelenting work, night and day. They
found unlimited possibilities for service--now as canteen workers and
now as ambulance drivers, again as stretcher bearers, as assistants to
the overburdened field surgeons, as couriers or even as staff officers,
and fulfilled these possibilities with a quickness, a skill, and a
desire that excited the outspoken admiration of the army men who watched
them.
* * * * *
I said a good deal at the beginning of this chapter about the Second
Division and the work of young Captain Kimball, of Boston, with it. The
Second--which was very well known to the home nation across the
seas--had an earnest rival in the First, made up almost entirely of
seasoned troopers of the Regular Army. And Captain George S. Karr, who
was attached to the First, had some real opportunities of seeing the
work of the Red Cross in the field, himself.
"It was when our Division was on the Montdidier front and preparations
were being made for the American offensive against Cantigny," says
Captain Karr. "One of the commanding officers called at the outpost
station where I made my headquarters and asked if I could get him three
thousand packages of cigarettes, the same number of sticks of chocolate,
lemons, and tartaric acid for the wounded who would be coming in within
the next few hours. It was necessary to deliver these in Chrepoix, where
the outpost was located, within twenty-four hours.
"Lieutenant Bero of the outpost station and I went to the Red Cross
headquarters at Beauvais, but found that we would have to get the things
from Paris and that that would be practically impossible within the time
limit. However, we decided to make a try for it, and so left Beauvais in
a small camion at 10:30 o'clock in the evening. At a railroad station on
the way we had a collision that did for our camion completely.
Fortunately there were no serious injuries. We left the disabled car by
the roadside about halfway to Paris and begged a ride on a French truck
that happened along. We reached Paris at 4:30 Sunday morning. Red Cross
officers had to be aroused and tradesmen routed out--no easy task on a
Sunday morning--but we had to have the supplies, and so did it. By 9:30
we had a new camion, already loaded with cigars and cigarettes from the
Red Cross warehouse, and lemons and tartaric-acid tablets from the shops
of Paris.
"About a quarter of the way back we had trouble with the new camion and
had to call for help again. This unpleasant and delaying experience was
twice repeated; so that, in fact, the entire load was thrice transferred
before it was finally delivered. But--please notice this--the entire
camion load of supplies was delivered at Chrepoix--two hours later than
the allotted time, to be sure, but still in plenty of time to serve the
purpose. Several days later I found two boys in one of the hospitals who
told me of their experiences in the Cantigny attack. They spoke of the
lemonade and said that they had never before known that lemons and
tartaric acid could taste so good to a thirsty man.... I think that our
trip was worth while."
In July of that same year, 1918, while serving hot drinks, cigarettes,
and sandwiches to the American wounded in the field hospital at
Montfontain, Captain Karr was severely wounded in the hip by the
explosion of an aërial bomb.
* * * * *
In the space of a single chapter--even of enlarged length such as
this--it would be quite impossible to trace serially or chronologically
the development of the vast field service of our Red Cross. In fact I
doubt whether that could be done well within the confines of a book of
any ordinary length. So I have contented myself with showing you the
beginnings of this work, back there in the districts of the Somme and
the Oise at the beginning of the great German drive and have let the men
who knew of that service the best--the men who, themselves, participated
in it--tell you of it, largely in their very own words. And so shall
close the long chapter with the war-time story of a man who, like
Kimball of Boston, is fairly typical of our Red Cross workers in the
field.
The name of this valedictorian is Robert B. Kellogg, and he arrived in
France--at Bordeaux, like so many of his fellow workers--on the
sixteenth day of July, 1918, reporting at Paris upon the following
evening. He came at a critical moment. The name of Château-Thierry was
again being flashed by cable all around the world; only this time and
for the first time there was coupled with it the almost synonymous
phrases of "American Army" and "victorious army." Kellogg--he soon after
attained the Red Cross rank of captain--was told of the great need of
additional help in handling the wounded which already were coming into
Paris in increasing numbers from both Château-Thierry and Veaux, and
asked if he could get to work at once. There was but one answer to such
a request. That very night he went on duty at Dr. Blake's hospital, out
in the suburban district of Neuilly, which had been taken over by the
American Red Cross some months before, but which now was being used as
an emergency evacuation hospital. For be it remembered that those very
July days were the crux of the German drive. In those bitter hours it
was not known whether Paris, itself, would be spared. The men and women
in the French capital hoped for the best, but always feared and
anticipated the worst.
For four fearful nights Captain Kellogg worked there in the Neuilly
hospital, carrying stretchers, undressing the wounded, taking their
histories, and at times even aiding in dressing their wounds. It was a
job without much poetry to it. In fact it held many intensely
disagreeable phases. But it was, at that, a fairly typical Red Cross
job, filled with perplexities and anxieties and long, long hours of hard
and peculiarly distasteful labor. Yet of such tasks is the real spirit
of Red Cross service born.
Four to the ambulance came the wounded into that haven of Neuilly. Many
of them were terribly wounded indeed; and practically none of them had
had more attention than hurriedly applied first-aid dressing. But the
appalling factor was not alone the seriousness of the wounds, but the
mere numbers of the wounded. They came in such numbers that at times
during those four eventful July evenings the floors of all the rooms of
the hospital--even the hallways and the garage--literally were covered
with stretchers. No wonder that the regular personnel of the place, even
though steadily increased for some months past, was unable to cope with
the crisis. Without the help of Kellogg and eight or nine other
emergency helpers from other ranks of the American Red Cross it is quite
possible that it would have collapsed entirely.
* * * * *
Captain Kellogg's emergency task at Neuilly ended early in the morning
of the twenty-second; but there was no rest or respite in sight for him.
That very day a Red Cross captain stopped him at headquarters and asked
him if he was free.
"I guess so," grinned Kellogg.
"Then come out to Crépy and help us out," said the other American Red
Cross man. "We're in a good deal of a mess there."
"All right," was the reply. "I'm ready whenever you are."
He grinned again. He realized his own predicament. He had not yet been
assigned to any definite department; in fact, although he had given up
his precious American passport, he had not yet received the equally
precious "Red Cross Worker's Card," which was issued to all the war
workers in France and which was of infinite value to them in getting
about that sentry-infested land. He had no more identification papers
than a rabbit and realized that he might easily find himself in a deal
of trouble. Yet within the half hour he had packed his small _musette_
and grabbing up two blankets was on his way in an automobile toward the
front. He reached Crépy at about six o'clock that evening and reported
to Major Brown, of the Red Cross.
"He was called major," says Kellogg, as he describes the incident, "but
he wore nothing to indicate his rank and I never did find out just what
he was. He left for Paris the following day to get supplies, but he
never returned, nor did I hear from him again. There was nothing for us
to do that night and absolutely no provision for us. We obtained coffee
from a French Army kitchen and slept in a wheat field in the rain, with
our sole shelter a bit of canvas tied to the rear of our car."
There may be folk who imagine that war is all organization--certain
historians seemingly have done their best to create such an illusion.
But the men who have been upon the trench lines and in the fields of
open battle know better. They know that even well-organized armies, to
say nothing of the Red Cross and other equally well-organized and
disciplined auxiliaries, cannot function at the fullness of their
mechanical processes in the super-emergency of battle. There it is that
individual effort regains its ancient prestige and men are men, rather
than the mere human units of a colossal organization. Yet brilliant as
individual effort becomes, all organization is rarely lost. And so
Kellogg, in the deadening rain of that July night, found the situation
at Crépy about as follows: Two American evacuation hospitals--Numbers
Five and Thirteen--and a French one, located in the thick woods some
four miles distant from the town, which in turn was used as an
evacuating point for all of them--this meant that the patients were
brought in ambulances from these outlying hospitals to Crépy and there
placed on hospital trains, bound for Paris and other base-hospital
centers. The theory of such operation is both obvious and good. But in
the super-emergency of the third week of July, 1918, theory broke down
under practice. The evacuation hospitals in the woods received newly
wounded men in such numbers that they were obliged to clear those who
had received their first aid dressings with an unprecedented rapidity.
And this rapidity was quite too fast for the limited facilities of the
hospital trains; which meant congestion and much trouble at the Crépy
railhead--which was the precise place where Captain Kellogg of our
American Red Cross found himself early in the morning of the
twenty-third day of July.
"There was I," continues Kellogg, as he relates the narrative of his
personal experiences, "with Brown gone to Paris and no instructions
whatsoever left for me. But I didn't need any instructions--not after
that first bunch of wounded fellows came up there to the railhead--at
just a little before noon. There were perhaps three hundred of them, and
while they were waiting for the hospital trains they lay there in the
open--and it was raining--their stretchers in long rows, resting on the
cinders alongside the railroad tracks. I had secured a supply of
cigarettes, sweet chocolate, cookies, and bouillon cubes from a stock
left by Brown. I made a soup for the men and, with the help of some of
the litter bearers, distributed it and did what else I could for their
comfort. When the train came in and it was time to move the wounded upon
it, we found that we did not have nearly enough stretcher bearers. So I
went into the town and recruited a number of volunteers among the
soldiers--including several officers. That night I left my supplies in
the office of the French Railway Transport officer in the station and,
with a stretcher for a bed, found a place to sleep in what had been left
of a bombed house."
Let Captain Kellogg continue to tell his own story. He is doing pretty
well with it:
"The next day, Field Hospital No. 120 arrived and set up part of its
tents--sufficient to give protection for all patients thereafter who had
to wait for the trains. Medical and orderly attention was amply provided
after that, but the food supply, even for the officers and personnel of
the hospital company, was very limited and the soup that I was able to
make from the bouillon cubes proved a blessing.
"For several days the wounded passed through this point at the rate of
several hundred a day, and every man received what he wanted from the
Red Cross stock available. Hospital trains from other points sometimes
stopped at Crépy. When this happened I always boarded them and, with the
help of two enlisted men, distributed cigarettes and cookies. On about
my fifth day there the number of wounded being evacuated through that
railhead and the officers and personnel of its field hospital company
were ordered to one of the neighboring evacuation hospitals. Because of
the greatly reduced number of workers, our tasks were therefore rendered
much harder, even though the number of wounded had been somewhat
decreased. Our own comfort was not particularly increased. We moved into
a small tent which was fairly habitable, although it was both cold and
rainy nearly every day. I remember one night when it rained with such
violence that the tent floor became flooded. I awoke to find the
stretcher on which I was sleeping an island and myself lying in a pool
of water. On two occasions we were bombed at night."
All these days Kellogg was trying to get Red Cross headquarters at Paris
on the long-distance telephone. But all France was particularly
demoralized those last days of July; and the telephone service, never
too good under any circumstances, was gloriously bad. So after several
attempts to talk with headquarters and get some sort of instructions and
help, he decided that he would have to go there; which was easier said
than done. For remember that this Red Cross man had no credentials; in
fact, no identification papers of any sort whatsoever. While travel in
France in those days, and for many, many days and months thereafter, was
rendered particularly difficult and almost impossible by strict
regulations which compelled not only the constant display of
identification papers but a separate and definite military travel order
for each trip upon a railroad train. Which in turn meant that it would
be fairly suicidal for Kellogg to attempt to go into Paris by the only
logical way open to him--by train. It was more than doubtful if he would
have been able to even board one of them. For at every railroad station
in France stood blue-coated and unreasoning _poilus_ whose definite
authority was backed by the constant display of a grim looking rifle in
perfect working condition.
So Kellogg walked to Paris, not every step of the way, for there were
times when friendly drivers of camions gave him the bumping pleasure of
a short lift. But even these were not frequent. Travel from Crépy to
Paris at that particular time happened to be light. Still, after a night
at Senlis, in which he slept stretched across a table in a café, he did
manage to clamber aboard a truck filled with French soldiers and bound
straight for their capital.
* * * * *
One might reasonably have expected an ordinary sort of man to have been
discouraged by such an experience, but a good many of our Red Cross men
over there were quite far removed from being ordinary men. And so
Kellogg, after a few days of routine office work at headquarters,
insisted upon his being given an outpost job once again. And soon after
was dispatched to the little town of La Ferte upon the Marne, not many
miles distant from Château-Thierry. This time he had his working papers;
to say nothing of the neat document which told "all men by these
presents" that he was a regular second lieutenant of the American Red
Cross. His upward progress had begun.
He waited several days at the American Red Cross warehouse at La Ferte,
during which time he had the opportunity of studying _boche_ aërial
bombardments--at extremely short range. Then he was forwarded to the
outpost at Cohan, conducted by Lieutenants Powell and Leighton as
partners. I may be pardoned if I interrupt Kellogg's narrative long
enough to insert a sentence or two about Powell. In some ways he was the
most remarkable of Red Cross men. Handicapped by a deformity, he stood
less than four feet and a half high, yet he was absolutely without fear.
Hard test showed that. The officers and men of the Twenty-eighth
Division with whom he had stood during the acid-test days on the drive
at Château-Thierry called him, pertinently and affectionately, "General
Suicide."
Cohan stood about five miles back from the front-line trenches and so
was under frequent artillery fire. The Red Cross outpost there was in a
partly demolished structure, one of the rooms of which had been used as
a stall and contained the body of a dead horse which could not be gotten
out through the door. It served that same Twenty-eighth Division with
whom Powell made so enviable a reputation.
The confusion that had prevailed at Crépy was, happily, missing at
Cohan. Powell and Leighton not only had an excellent stock of Red Cross
supplies, which were replenished twice a week from the La Ferte
warehouse, and a camionette in good order, but they had a systematic and
orderly method of distribution. As Kellogg worked with them he studied
their methods--it was a schooling of the very best sort for him. And he,
seemingly, was an apt scholar. On the twenty-first of August a Red Cross
man named Fuller, with supplies bound for the neighboring outposts of
Dravigny and Chéry, stopped at Cohan and asked Kellogg to ride on with
him. The course of study of "the game" was about completed. Kellogg had
been in actual Red Cross service for a full month--which in those days
made him a regular veteran. Fuller held a note from his commanding
officer which stated that if a driver could be assured the camionette
upon which he rode would be assigned to Chéry and Dravigny.
Thus was Red Cross Kellogg's next job set out for him. He had never
driven a Ford. But other folks have mastered such a handicap and Kellogg
had driven many real automobiles, and so went easily to the new job,
with such rapidity and skill that before the next night he was in sole
charge of the little camionette and driving it with professional speed
over the steel-torn battlefields and roads of the entire Château-Thierry
district.
Dravigny and Chéry shocked and fascinated him. At the first of these two
towns our Red Cross men in charge were quite comfortably situated. They
occupied a house in very fair preservation which was situated in a
lovely garden and had large and bright rooms for living and for working.
But Kellogg remembers Chéry Chartreuve as a "hell hole."
"I can think of no better words with which to describe it," he says.
"Not a building with all four walls and a roof remained in all the
town. The débris of fallen walls and discarded military equipment
clogged the streets. Refuse and filth were everywhere. The sanitary
arrangements--well, there hadn't been any. The odor of dead horses
filled the air. Flies? There are no words to describe the awfulness of
the flies. Our own artillery--.75's and .155's--surrounded the town in
addition to occupying positions at each end of it and in its center. The
roar of these guns was continuous, the concussion tremendously
nerve-racking, while the presence of this artillery made the village a
target for the enemy guns. It was shelled day and night. And during the
nights the _boche_ seemed to take an especial delight in filling the
town with gas.
"Sleep was almost impossible. We had in one night five gas alarms, in
each case the concentration being sufficiently strong to necessitate the
gas masks. The dressing station was next to our sleeping quarters. It
was covered with gassed and exhausted doughboys who had crept in there
in search of shelter. At frequent intervals the ambulances would arrive
with fresh loads of wounded. The whistle and explosion of shells was
constant. A battery of .155's in our back yard nearly lifted us from our
cots each time it was fired. Once I got a dose of gas sufficient to
cause the almost complete loss of my voice and a throat trouble that
lasted for weeks."
Yet under conditions such as these, if not even worse, Kellogg and his
fellows worked--all day and usually until ten or eleven o'clock at
night. Their supplies went to the boys in the lines. This was not only
ordinarily true, but at Chéry, particularly so. The Seventy-seventh
Division had moved in close to the town, and on the twenty-ninth of
August, while the Red Cross workers were pausing for a few minutes to
catch up a snack of lunch, a shell landed plumb in front of their
outpost building. Its fragments entered the doors and windows and
perforated several of their food containers. Sugar, coffee, cocoa--all
spilled upon the floor.
The room was filled with men--soldiers as well as Red Cross--at the
moment. None was hurt. With little interval a second shell came. This
time two men who had taken refuge in a shed that formed a portion of the
building were killed. There was seemingly better shelter across the
street. To it the doughboys began running. Before they were well across
the narrow way, the third _boche_ visitor descended. It was a deadly
thing indeed. Thirty-eight American lives were its toll. Eleven lay dead
where they dropped. The others died before they could reach the
hospital, while the escape of the Red Cross men was little short of
providential.
The station had to be abandoned at once. The Red Cross moved back to
Dravigny in good order, and what was left of miserable Chéry Chartreuve
was speedily obliterated by the Germans.
* * * * *
The record of Captain Kellogg's experiences with our Red Cross in France
reads like a modern _Pilgrim's Progress_. Our Christian who found
himself in khaki was quickly moved across the great checkerboard of war.
On one day he was reëstablishing the Chéry outpost at the little town
of Mareuil, from which point the Seventy-seventh could still be served,
but with far less danger; on the next he was far away from the
Seventy-seventh and at the little French town of Breny, at the service,
if you please, of the Thirty-second Division, United States Army. The
Seventy-seventh had been chiefly composed of New York State boys; they
wore the Statue of Liberty as an army insignia upon their uniforms. The
Thirty-second came from the Middle West--from Wisconsin and Michigan
chiefly. It had been in the lines northwest of Soissons--the only
American Division in the sector--and there had coöperated most
efficiently with the French. Its regiments were being used there as
shock troops to capture the town of Juvigny and territory beyond which
seemingly the tired French Army was quite unable to take. They were
accomplishing their huge task with typical American brilliancy, but also
in the American war fashion of a heavy loss of precious life. Because of
the isolation of the Thirty-second from the usual American bases of
supply it became peculiarly dependent upon our Red Cross for its tobacco
and other creature comforts, responsibility which our Red Cross regarded
as real opportunity. In addition to the ordinary comforts it ordered
some four thousand newspapers each day from Paris, which were
enthusiastically received by the doughboys. And you may be assured that
these were not French newspapers. They were those typically Parisian
sheets in the English language, the _New York Herald_, the _Chicago
Tribune_, and the _London Mail_.
Thereafter and until long weeks after the signing of the armistice
Kellogg remained with the Thirty-second, but did not cease his
_Pilgrim's Progress_. For the Division moved; here and there and
everywhere. For several weeks it was at Vic-sur-Aisne, while Red Cross
Kellogg--who by this time was a real Ford expert--was making hot
chocolate in a huge cave that once had been an American division
headquarters. Then it moved to a new sector, not far from Bar-le-Duc,
and Kellogg moved with it. In the meantime he had performed temporary
work at Neufchâteau--always an important division headquarters of the
American Red Cross--at Bar-le-Duc and at Rosnes; but these jobs were
merely stop-gaps--the real task was forever at the front lines. And
when, on the twenty-fourth of September, Kellogg came up with his
Division at Wally, he was ready for hard fighting once again. So was the
Thirty-second. It was moving forward a little each day and in fact was
already considered "in reserve" on September 26--the day of the
beginning of the great Argonne offensive. Two days later, with a
borrowed army truck and an American Red Cross camionette--both filled
with supplies to their limit--Kellogg and two of his Red Cross
associates moved forward nine miles to the Avecourt Wood and there
joined the Sixty-fourth Brigade of the Division. The brigade commander
furnished them with an old dugout--which for nearly four years past had
formed a part of the French trench system. After their supplies had been
dumped into the place there was just room left for the bedding rolls of
the Red Cross men, and even these overlapped one another. It rained
steadily for several days and the mud upon the floor of the dugout
became entirely liquefied. At night water came in through the doorway
and trickled in innumerable sprays down from the roof. The men lived in
mud knee-deep. Oh, it was some fun being a Red Cross man at the front in
those days of actual fighting! But the fun was some distance removed
from those popular reports of "the Battle of Paris" which used to come
trickling back to America for the edification and joy of the folk who
stayed behind. It was prunes and preserves being a Red Cross worker in
France in those autumn days of 1918. Only the trouble was that no one
ever could find the prunes or the preserves.
On the thirtieth day of September, the Thirty-second moved from the
Avecourt Woods to those of Montfaucon and assumed a military position of
"support."
"The intervening country had been No Man's Land for four years and the
condition of the roads can only be imagined," says Captain Kellogg. "We
followed the troops, who left at about eleven o'clock that morning, but
were soon caught in that tremendous congestion that existed on all the
roads during the first days of the drive. By dark we were still on the
road, having progressed less than two miles. We finally became
hopelessly stuck, being stalled, and were obliged to remain stuck
throughout the night. During the day we had given out many packages of
cookies to the tired and hungry men along the road. Many times since the
soldiers have spoken to me in appreciation of those cookies. That night
was one of the most uncomfortable experiences that I had in France. It
was so cold that we could not keep warm. This, coupled with the
occasional whine of incoming shells, prevented sleep, although
frequently we threw down our bedding rolls at the side of the road and
attempted it.
"In the morning we found a number of ambulances among the other stalled
vehicles. For more than forty-eight hours they had been on the road with
their wounded and neither drivers nor patients had been able to obtain
much of anything to eat or drink. We supplied them with cookies and gave
them what water we had in our canteens. Two of the wounded had died
during the night. Two others were unconscious and another was delirious.
The congestion ahead of us on the road that morning seemed as bad as
ever. Finally we managed to get out of that road entirely, making a
fresh start by a longer but less crowded way. At dusk that first day of
October found us still quite a distance from our Division. We spent that
night with some Signal Corps men in the cellar of a shell-shocked
building in Varennes. The following morning we succeeded in reaching our
destination and located ourselves with several enlisted men of the
Forty-third Balloon Company in a dugout which until a few days before
had been occupied by German officers.
"This place was interesting. Reached by a steep flight of steps, it was
sunk fully fifty feet below the surface. It consisted of three rooms and
a kitchen, the walls of each nicely boarded and the whole comfortably,
if roughly, finished.
"The combat regiments and battalions of our army were all around us in
the woods. We continued serving them. On the morning of the third I
drove back to Froidos for fresh supplies. Upon my return I found that
the troops of our Sixty-fourth Brigade were already on the road, moving
toward the town of Véry. We knew what this meant--that in the morning
they were going into the front lines and probably over the top. We
quickly unloaded cookies and cigarettes from the car and, standing by
the roadside in the dark, handed a supply of each to every soldier who
passed by.
"The troops went into the lines at Epinonville before daybreak on the
morning of the fourth of October. Lieutenant McGinnis of the Red Cross
and I arrived there about noon. Never shall I forget it. The battle
lines lay just a little way ahead of us. Machine guns still occupied the
town which then was under violent bombardment. In fact during the entire
three weeks that we made our headquarters at Epinonville there was not a
single day or night that the town was not subjected to shell fire.
"Our boys had made a first attack early in the morning of the fourth.
All that morning the wounded had been returning--in large numbers. Some
of them were brought to regimental dressing stations of the 128th
Infantry, but the majority were handled at that of the 127th. It was
here that we did most of our work during the next few days. The station
was in a sort of dugout, made of boards and builded into a sidehill. In
the ditch beside it a sizable salvage pile had materialized already,
clothing and bandages--both blood-soaked, rifles, shoes, helmets, mess
kits, here and there a hand or a foot. On the ground, lying on
stretchers, were a number of wounded men waiting for the ambulances that
would take them to the field hospitals. All about were soldiers;
slightly wounded, gassed, shell-shocked, or just plain sick or
exhausted. Down the road could be seen a bunch of prisoners just
captured that morning. On its opposite side lay the bodies of several of
our fellows who had just died, while across the fields beyond stretched
slow-moving, irregular processions of litter bearers, bringing in their
burdens of wounded men.
"Such were the scenes and conditions that greeted us in Epinonville.
There was work a-plenty awaiting us, and we lost no time in taking
possession of a shack for our outpost of the American Red Cross. We
quickly unpacked our supplies and moved into it. McGinnis had a rather
formidable job of making some twenty gallons of cocoa, while I, equipped
with cookies, cigarettes, and canteens filled with water, did what I
could for the wounded in and around the dressing station.
"Late in the afternoon it became necessary for me to return to our
dugout in the woods for supplies which we had been unable to bring in on
the first trip. So, leaving McGinnis to take care of the dressing
stations, I started back, taking with me a load of wounded men for whom
no ambulance was available. Our route took us over a dilapidated plank
road through the narrow valley between Epinonville and Véry. We had
covered perhaps half of this road when Fritz began a bombardment of the
valley which lasted fully fifteen minutes. A French artillery outfit was
moving ahead of us at a snail's pace and we could not pass it because of
the narrowness of the road. Some of the shells were breaking close at
hand, showering the car with shrapnel and fragments, but there was no
way I could remove the wounded to a place of safety. There was nothing
to do but pray for luck and keep going as fast as the slow-moving
artillery ahead would permit. Several men within our sight were hit
during those fifteen minutes, but fortune favored us. Not one of our men
was even scratched and I delivered my load safely at the _triage_ at
Véry.
"Arriving at Epinonville late that evening I worked at the dressing
station most of the night, serving hot cocoa, cookies, and cigarettes to
the wounded and the men who were working for their comfort. During these
first days there was hardly any food, and the doctors worked
continuously day and night with only such sleep as they could snatch for
a few minutes at a time.
"During the sixteen days that the Division was in the front line after
we went into Epinonville, our first attention was given to the dressing
stations and the wounded. As fast as new stations were opened at farther
advanced points, we reached them with our cocoa and cookies. The
ordinarily simple task of making cocoa became, under the conditions
which we faced, a huge job. We usually made enough at a time to fill our
four five-gallon thermos containers and almost always we had to do the
work ourselves. Water was always scarce and to get enough of it was a
problem. Wood had to be cut and fires made and handled with the utmost
caution so that no smoke would show.
"Other conditions aside from the danger that constantly threatened were
equally difficult. The weather was awful--cold and rainy, with deep mud
everywhere. Eating was an uncertain and precarious proposition. The
shack that we called home was--well, you would hesitate to put a dog in
it in normal times.
"Our most interesting work generally was done under the cover of
darkness. For instance, there came a night when we particularly wanted
to reach Company K of our 128th Infantry. One of its cooks offered to go
with us as guide, and so, with our car loaded with hot cocoa, cookies,
cigarettes, sweet chocolate, and chewing tobacco, we left Epinonville
shortly after dusk. A mile or so out we diverged from the road, our
route then taking us across the shell-torn fields, with only a faint
footpath to follow. Of course no light was possible and a blacker night
there never was. Tommy--the company cook--and McGinnis walked
immediately in front of the car indicating the course I should take. We
continued thus until we had penetrated beyond some of our machine-gun
positions. Ahead of us and back of us and all around us shells were
bursting. The sing of machine-gun bullets was in the air. Our mission
seemed hopeless, but we knew that those boys of Company K had been lying
in the shell holes and the shallow dugouts for two long days with little
to eat, drink, or smoke. We determined to reach them. Star shells were
lighting the fields ahead of us, and finally we dared not proceed
farther with the car for fear it would be seen and draw fire. Figuring
that we could get a detail of boys to come back for the cans of cocoa
and other things, we left the car in the lee of a hill and went ahead on
foot, taking with us what we could carry in our pockets and sacks. K
Company had shifted its position, however, and we could not locate it.
We distributed the stuff we had with us to the soldiers we passed and
then returned to the car. Here we sought out the officers of the outfits
lying nearest us and gained their permission to let the men--a few at a
time--come to the car, where we served them until our stock was
exhausted. Most of these men were from the 127th. Some were from a
machine-gun battalion. These boys for several days had been dependent
upon their 'iron rations.' Mere words cannot express their appreciation
of our hot cocoa and other things. I recall that our chewing tobacco
made a great hit with them. They could not smoke after dark and welcomed
something that would take the place of smoking."
Enough of the incidental detail of the Red Cross worker. I think that
you have now gained a fair idea of what his job really was; of not alone
the danger that it held for him at all times, but the manifold
discomforts, the exposure, the almost unending hours of hard, hard work.
Multiply Red Cross Kellogg by Red Cross Jones and Smith and Brown and
Robinson--to the extent of several hundreds--and you will begin to have
only a faint impression of the magnitude of concerted work done by the
men of our American Red Cross in the battlefields of France in those
fall and summer months of 1918. A good deal has been written about the
Red Cross woman--before you are done with this book I shall have some
more things to say about them, myself. A word of praise at least is the
due of the Red Cross man. They are not the shirkers or the slackers that
some thoughtless folk imagined them--decidedly not. They were
men--generally well above the army age of acceptance, even as
volunteers--who found that they could not keep out of the immortal fight
for the freeing of the liberty of the world.
Take the case of Lieutenant Kellogg's right-hand man--now Captain
McGinnis. He was a Coloradian and nearly fifty years of age when the
United States entered the World War. He is not a particularly robust
man, and yet when we finally did slip into the great conflict, it was
this Red Cross McGinnis who recruited an entire company of infantry for
the Colorado National Guard and was commissioned a first lieutenant in
it. When the National Guard was made a part of the Federal Army,
McGinnis was discharged. He was too old, they said.
The man was nearly broken-hearted; but his determination never wavered.
He was bound to get into the big fight. If the army would not have him
there might perhaps be some other militant organization that would.
There was. It was the Red Cross--our own American Red Cross if you
please. And what McGinnis, of Colorado, meant to our Red Cross you
already have seen.
Multiply the McGinnises as well as the Kelloggs and you begin once again
to get the great spirit and power of the Red Cross man. Danger, personal
danger? What mattered that to these? They consecrated soul and spirit,
and faced danger with a smile or a jest, and forever with the sublime
optimism of a youth that will not die, even though hair becomes gray and
thin lines seam the countenance. And now and then and again they, too,
made the supreme sacrifice. The American Red Cross has its own high-set
honor roll.
After the signing of the armistice, Kellogg's beloved Thirty-second
Division was one of those chosen for the advance into the Rhineland
countries. It had fairly earned this honor. For in those
not-to-be-forgotten twenty days of October that it had held a front-line
sector, it had gained every objective set for it. Therefore it was
relieved from active duty on the twentieth and sent back to the Véry
Woods in reserve. But Kellogg and his fellows were not placed "in
reserve"--not at that moment, at any rate.
They found "their boys" tired and miserable, living in the mud in "pup
tents" and greatly in need of Red Cross attention and assistance.
Finally, on the twenty-eighth and under the insistence of their
commanding officers, Kellogg and McGinnis went back to Bar-le-Duc for
five days of rest. They needed it. There was a Red Cross bathing outfit
at Bar-le-Duc, and the two men needed that also. It had been more than
six weeks since they had even had an opportunity to bathe.
Armistice Day found the Thirty-second in actual fighting once again and
Kellogg and McGinnis with it--by this time one might almost say "of
course." It was located in and about Ecurey and kept up the fighting
until the fateful eleven o'clock in the morning set for the cessation of
hostilities. The Division remained at Ecurey for just a week after the
signing of the armistice. Then it began its long hike toward the east,
passing through Luxembourg and down to the Moselle at the little village
of Wasserbillig, where it arrived on the twenty-ninth day of November.
Kellogg, McGinnis, and some other of our Red Cross men--to say nothing
of a big Red Cross truck--kept with it. While it had been assumed by the
Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross that it would be
impossible to serve the boys on their long march into the occupied area
and so no provision was made for the forwarding of comfort supplies, as
a matter of actual fact there was a good deal that could be done--and
was done.
In such a situation was Red Cross opportunity, time and time and time
again. And if Paris for a little was neglectful of the fullness of all
of it, our Red Cross men who were at the Rhine were not--not for one
single moment. They were on the job, and, with the limited facilities at
hand, more than made good with it. One single final incident will show:
On the morning that the Thirty-second swung down into Wasserbillig from
the pleasant, war-spared Luxembourg country and first entered Prussian
Germany, the Red Cross men with it found that two of their
fellows--Lieutenants R. S. Gillespie and Robert Wildes--were already
handling the situation. These men had previously been engaged in similar
work at Longwy, and had been sent forward with a five-ton truck, loaded
with foodstuffs, for such returning prisoners--and there were many of
them--as the Thirty-second might encounter on its eastward march. Under
Lieutenant Gillespie's direction a canteen already was in operation at
the railroad station there in Wasserbillig. Equipped with a small supply
of tin cups, plates, and the like--to say nothing of several stoves--it
was serving soup, bread, jam, beans, bacon, corned beef, and coffee. The
prisoners (soldiers and civilians--men, women, and children, and many of
them in a pitiable condition) came through from Germany on the trains up
the valley of the Moselle. They had a long wait, generally overnight, in
Wasserbillig. And there the American Red Cross fed them by the hundreds,
and in every possible way ministered to their comfort.
It saw opportunity, and reached to it. It saw a chance of service, and
welcomed it. The record of its welcome is written in the hearts and
minds and memories of the boys who marched down the valley of the
Moselle, through Treves and Cochem, to Coblenz. From those hearts and
minds and memories they cannot easily be erased.
[Illustration: TICKLING THE OLD IVORIES
Many an ancient piano did herculean service in the A. R. C. recreation
huts throughout France]