OUR RED CROSS PERFORMS ITS SUPREME MISSION
After all is said and done, what is the supreme purpose of the Red
Cross?
I think that any one who has made even a cursory study of the
organization--its ideals and history--should have but little hesitancy
in finding an answer for that question. Despite its genuine achievement
in such grave crises as the San Francisco earthquake and fire, for
instance, its real triumphs have almost always been wrought upon the
field of war. And there its original mission was definite--the succoring
of the wounded. That mission was quite as definite in this Great War so
lately ended as in the days of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton.
The canteen work of our Red Cross in the past two years for our boys who
came and went across France and Germany was interesting and important;
its field work, which you have just seen, even more so. Yet its great
touch--almost, I should say, its touch divine--came not merely when the
boys traveled or when they went upon the field of battle, but rather
when the iron hand of war cruelly smote them down. Then it was that our
Red Cross was indeed the Greatest Mother in the World--the symbolic
spirit of its superb poster most amply realized, in fact.
* * * * *
The hospital work of the American Red Cross in France, particularly in
its medical phases as distinct from those more purely of entertainment,
was, in the several successive forms of organization of the institution
over there, known as the Medical and Surgical Division or Department,
although finally as the Bureau of Hospital Administration. In fact it
was almost the only department of our Red Cross in France which did not,
for one reason or another, undergo reorganization after reorganization.
This, in turn, has accounted for much of its efficiency. It was builded
on a plan which foresaw every emergency and from which finally the more
permanent scheme for the entire Red Cross was drawn.
"We divided our job into three great steps," the man who headed it most
successfully told me one day in Paris. "The first was to meet the
emergency that arose, no matter where it was or what it was; the second
was to perfect the organization, and the third and final step was to
tell about it--to make our necessary reports and the like."
A program which, rigidly set down, was rigidly adhered to. Remember, if
you will once again, that under the original organization of the
American Red Cross in France there were two great operating departments
side by side; one for military affairs, the other for civil. In those
early days the Department of Military Affairs grouped its work chiefly
under the Medical and Surgical Division which was headed by Colonel
Alexander Lambert, a distinguished New York physician who then bore the
title of Chief Surgeon of the American Red Cross. It was this early
division which planned the first of the great American Red Cross
hospitals in France, of which very much more in good time.
In January, 1918, this Medical and Surgical Division became known as the
Medical and Surgical Section of the Department of Military Affairs,
while Captain C. C. Burlingame, a young and energetic doctor who had met
with much success in the New England manufacturing village of South
Manchester, Connecticut, became its guiding head. Of Captain
Burlingame--he attained the United States Army rank of lieutenant
colonel before the conclusion of the war--you also shall hear much more.
It would be quite difficult, in fact, to keep him out of the pages of
this book, if such were the desire. One of the most energetic, the most
tireless, the most efficient executives of our Red Cross in France, he
accomplished results of great brilliancy through the constant use of
these very attributes. Within six months after his arrival in France he
had risen from first lieutenant to the army rank of captain, while his
real achievements were afterward recognized in decorations by the French
of their _Médaille d'Honneur_ and by the new Polish Government of its
precious Eagle.
In these weeks and months of the first half of 1918, Burlingame found
much of his work divided into several of the functions of the Department
of Civil Affairs--particularly among such sectors as the Children's
Bureau, the Bureau of Tuberculosis, and the Bureau of Refugees. This was
organization business. It took strength from that very arm of the Red
Cross which soon was to be called upon to accomplish so very much
indeed. And when, on the twenty-fourth of August, 1918, the Gibson
reorganization plan divorced the Medical and Surgical Section entirely
from the work of the Department of Civil Affairs and combined its entire
activities into a Medical and Surgical Department, Burlingame and his
fellows had a free hand for the first time, a full opportunity to put
their tripartite policy into execution.
For a time Colonel Fred T. Murphy was director of this newly created
department. On January 6, 1919, however, he was succeeded by Colonel
Burlingame, who had been so instrumental in framing both the policies
and carrying out the actual operations of the department. On that same
day the former Medical and Surgical Section of the Department of
Military Affairs became the Bureau of Hospital Administration. The
Bureau of Tuberculosis was transferred as such to this new department,
as was also the Children's Bureau. The Women's Bureau of Hospital
Administration which, under the old organization, was reporting to the
general manager, became the Bureau of Nurses, while the work for the
_mutilés_, which was being conducted by both the departments of Military
Affairs and Civil Affairs, was relegated to a new bureau.
I have given these changes in some detail not because they were in
themselves so vastly important, as because they tend to show how firm a
grasp Burlingame gained not only on the operations but upon the very
organization of his work. He did not reorganize; he perfected, and
finally was able to perfect even the Gibson general plan of organization
for our Red Cross in France which was recognized as the most complete
thing of its sort that had been accomplished.
For the purpose of better understanding the activities of this bureau,
it may be well to divide its activities into four great classes. The
first of these would group those activities conducted directly by the
Surgeon General's office of the United States Army, but to which our Red
Cross gave frequent aid in the line of supplies, supplementing those
normally furnished through the usual army channels. Sometimes not only
supplies but personnel was furnished. Such aid was given upon request of
army officers.
Under the second grouping one finds those great hospitals, in most cases
established by the American Red Cross while the medical and surgical
plans of our army were still forming and were in a most unsettled and
confused state. These were known, even after the Surgeon General had
taken them under his authority, as American Red Cross Military
Hospitals. They were then operated jointly by the United States Army and
our Red Cross; the army being usually responsible for the scientific
care and discipline of the organization, while our Red Cross took upon
its shoulders both the actual business management and the supplying of
the necessary materials.
The third and fourth groupings are smaller, although, in their way,
hardly less consequential. In the one were the American Red Cross
Hospitals which were operated purely for military purposes and for which
the American Red Cross assumed the full responsibility of operation,
while in the other were the hospitals, infirmaries, and dispensaries
which were operated by the Red Cross--in some few cases jointly with the
other organizations--for the benefit of civilians, including several
thousand American civilian war workers who found themselves in France
during the past two years.
* * * * *
If I have bored you with these details of organization it has been to
the direct purpose that you might the better understand how this
important phase of Red Cross operation functioned. Now, for the moment,
forget organization once again. Go back to the earlier days of our Red
Cross in France--the days of Grayson M.-P. Murphy and James H. Perkins
and their fellows.
None of these men either realized or fully understood either the
importance or the overwhelming size to which the hospital function of
the United States Army would attain before our boys had been in actual
warfare a full year. The army itself did not realize that. Remember that
for many weeks and even months after Pershing had arrived in Paris its
hospital plans were in embryo. In this situation our Red Cross found one
of its earliest opportunities, and rose to it. With Colonel Lambert--he
then was Major Lambert--in charge of its Medical and Surgical Division
it began casting about to see how it might function most rapidly and
most efficiently.
To the nucleus of the army that began pouring into France in the early
summer of 1917, it began the distribution of emergency stores--a task to
which we already have referred and shall refer again. It hastily secured
its own storerooms--in those days quite remote and distant from the
American Relief Clearing House and the other general warehouses of the
American Red Cross--and from these in July, 1917, sent to 1,116
hospitals, practically all of them French, exactly 2,826 bales of
supplies. In December of that same year it sent to 1,653
hospitals--including by this time many American ones--4,740 bales of
similar supplies. It was already gaining strength unto itself.
Surgical dressings formed an important portion of the contents of these
packages. Our Red Cross did not wait upon America for these; the huge
plan for standardizing and making and forwarding these from the United
States was also still in process of formation. It went to work in Paris,
and without delay, so that by the end of 1917 two impressive
manufacturing plants were at work there--one at No. 118 Rue de la
Faisandre, where 440 volunteer workers and a hundred paid workers were
averaging some 183,770 dressings a week, and a smaller establishment at
No. 25 Rue Pierre Charron, where a hundred volunteer and ninety paid
workers were at similar tasks. Eventually a third workroom was added to
these. And it is worth noting, perhaps, that immediately after the
signing of the armistice these three workrooms were turned into
manufactories for production of influenza masks, for which there was a
great emergency demand. In three weeks they turned out more than 600,000
of them.
* * * * *
The hospitalization phases of the Medical and Surgical Department of our
Red Cross over there were, of course, far more difficult than those of
the mere production or storage of dressings and other medical supplies.
And they involved a vast consideration of the human factors of the
super-problem of the conflict.
"In this war there were two kinds of fellows," Colonel Burlingame told
me one evening in Paris as we sat talking together, "the ones who went
over the top and those who didn't. It was up to the second bunch to look
out for the first--at every time and opportunity, which brings us
squarely to the question of the French hospitals, and the American
soldiers who woke up to find themselves in them. You see the Red Cross
was just as responsible for those fellows as for the ones who went
directly into our own hospitals over here. The French authorities told
me not to worry about those boys. 'We will take very good care of them,'
they said, and so they meant to do. 'Who will take care?' I asked them
in return.
"I went straight to one of the chief surgeons of their army. I put the
matter to him as plainly as I could. 'You are the best ever,' I said to
him, 'but--don't you see?--you are tired out. We want to help you. Can't
we? Won't you let us loan you nurses and other American personnel as you
need them?'
"Would they? Say, the French fell for that suggestion like ducks, and we
sent them thirty or forty girls, just as a beginning. Can you think of
what it would mean for one of our Yankee boys wounded in a French
hospital and perhaps ready to go on an operating table to lose an arm or
a leg and then finding no one who could speak his kind of language? And
what it would mean if a nice girl should come along--his own sort of a
nice girl--ready to let him spill his own troubles out to her--in his
own sort of jargon?"
I felt, myself, what it would mean. I had heard before of what the Red
Cross Bureau of Hospital Administration was accomplishing under the
technical designation of the Service of Professional Aid to the _Service
de Santé_--this last the medical division of the French Army
establishments. The first opportunity for this service came when General
Pershing told Marshal Foch that the American Army was there to be used
as the French high commander in chief saw fit to use it. Whereupon Foch
moved quickly and brigaded our men with his between Montdidier and
Soissons, which meant, of course, the evacuating of the casualties
through the French hospitals. The helpless condition of our American
boys who did not speak French--and very few of them did--can therefore
easily be imagined. They could not tell their wishes nor be advised as
to what was going to be done with them. It was then that Burlingame
sensed the situation in its fullness; that, with much diplomacy, he
first approached Dr. Vernet Kléber, the commander of the French-American
section of the French _Service de Santé_, saying that he realized that
its service had been taxed to the uttermost and proffering the use of
American Red Cross personnel. And Dr. Kléber accepted.
The thirty or forty nurses did not come at one time. But within
twenty-four hours, four of them--two nurses and two nurses' aids, and
all of them speaking French--were dispatched to the French hospital at
Soissons where the first American patients were being received. The
movement of the First and Second Divisions in the Beauvais and
Montdidier sectors right after increased very greatly this flow of
Yankee doughboys into French hospitals--and the American nurses were
thrown into them in far greater numbers. Soon a still more definite plan
was adopted, which resulted in American nurses, speaking French, being
installed in each and every French military hospital which received
American wounded. Under this arrangement our nurses were given French
military papers for free travel--at the very outset, one of the many
time-saving arrangements in a situation which all too frequently was a
race between time and death. Another time-saving scheme provided for the
reassignment of nurses used by the French _Service de Santé_ without the
necessity of approval in advance by Paris headquarters. This very
flexible and sensible plan relieved the situation of much red tape and
made for immediate results. And not the least of its advantages was the
fact that it actually did much to enhance the _entente cordiale_ of the
fighting forces of the two allied nations.
The first call for nurses under this new arrangement came in May, 1918,
when a nurse and an aid were sent to the French Military Hospital at
Besançon in the extreme east of France and south of the fighting zones.
The second came from La Rochelle, down on the Atlantic coast. After that
the calls were almost continuous, until our American nurses had been
sent to all corners of France; the service covering thirty-one
departments and eighty-eight cities.
Sometimes, when the calls were particularly urgent and the distances
not so great, the nurses were sent in camionettes, for time always was
an important factor. But more often the nurse and her aid rode by rail,
armed with the military permits that were so necessary a feature of
travel in France during the days of the actual conflict. One of these
girls wrote quite graphically of one of these journeys.
"It was quite dark; there wasn't a light in the car or in the
countryside," she said. "Off on the horizon we could see the guns
flashing. A very nervous man sat opposite me, pulled out his flashlight
about every five minutes, consulted his time-table and announced the
next station. Finally he alighted and the only way that we knew when we
had reached our station was because heads appeared at every window when
we stopped, asking the name of the stopping place. After the information
was given the passengers would pile out for that particular place and
step into the inky darkness. After which they might resign themselves to
spending the rest of the night curled up on one of the uninviting small
benches in the station."
The diet of the average doughboy and the average _poilu_--sick or
well--was almost always different. To accomplish this each Red Cross
nurse, upon being sent to her assignment, was given small sums of money
to spend for the comfort of her patients. In this way she was often able
to obtain such things as milk, eggs, or a chop for a Yankee boy who
wearied of the diet constantly given to the _poilu_.
These nurses, like those which were held by the Red Cross in reserve for
the emergency needs of our army in France, were in direct charge of the
Nurses' Bureau of Colonel Burlingame's department. Incidentally, this
bureau furnished some ten thousand nurses in France, of whom eight
thousand were army reserves.
* * * * *
The great need of this service in the French hospitals was shown in the
extensions of the plan. In several instances where a United States Army
hospital unit was stationed near a French one, the American patients
were gradually evacuated to it, our Red Cross nurses being retained on
duty as long as was necessary. There were, of course, many of these
American hospitals--some of which you shall come to see before you are
finished with the pages of this book. In all of these our Red Cross
functioned, both in the furnishing of many of their supplies as well as
in the giving of entertainment to their patients. Of all these things,
more in good time. Consider now, if you please, the distinctive Red
Cross hospitals themselves--some of which long preceded in France the
coming of the larger regulation hospitals of the United Sates Army.
The first of these great institutions of our own Red Cross to be secured
over there--it bore the distinctive serial title of Number One--was
located in the Neuilly suburban district of Paris. It was a handsome
modern structure of brick--a building which had been erected for use as
a boarding school or college. It was barely completed at the time of the
first outbreak of the Great War, and so was easily secured by a group of
patriotic Americans in Paris and,--then designated as the American
Ambulance Hospital,--placed at the service of the French, who then were
in grievous need of such assistance. When we came into the war, this
hospital, which contained between five and six hundred beds, was put
under the United States Army and the American Red Cross and turned over
to the Red Cross for actual operation.
American Red Cross Hospital Number Two--a private institution of the
highest class--was formerly well known to the American colony in Paris
as Dr. Blake's. Like the Number One, it was one of the chief means by
which the Stars and Stripes was kept flying in Europe throughout the
early years of the war. It not only contained three hundred beds, but a
huge Red Cross research laboratory, where a corps of bacteriologists was
quickly put to work under the general control of the Surgeon General's
office of the army and making valuable investigations, records, and
summaries for the American medical profession for many years to come.
Number Three, on the left bank of the Seine, was for a time known as the
Reid Hospital. It was at one time a home or dormitory for girl art
students in Paris. Later it was transformed into a hospital by Mrs.
Whitelaw Reid of New York, who gave it, furnished and equipped, to the
American Red Cross and arranged to pay practically all its running
expenses. It was a comparatively small establishment of eighty beds,
which were reserved almost entirely for officers, and personnel of our
Red Cross.
* * * * *
From this most modest nucleus there was both steady and rapid growth
until, at the time of the signing of the armistice, there were not three
but eight of the American Red Cross Military Hospitals: the three of
which you have just read; Number One in Neuilly; Number Two (Dr.
Blake's) in Rue Piccini; Number Three (the Reid Hospital) in the Rue de
Chevreuse; Number Five, the tent institution which sprang up on the
famous Bois de Boulogne race course at Auteuil; Number Six at Bellevue;
Number Seven at Juilly; Number Eight at Malabry (these last three in the
suburbs of Paris), and Number Nine in the Boulevard des Batignoles,
within the limits of the city itself.
The so-called American Red Cross hospitals were generally somewhat
smaller. They were Number 100 at Beaucaillou, St. Julien in the Gironde,
Number 101 at Neuilly, Number 102 at Neufchâteau, Number 103 also at
Neuilly, Number 104 at Beauvais, with an annex at Chantilly, Number 105
at Juilly, Number 109 at Evreux, and Number 113, the Czecho-Slovak
Hospital, at Cognac. In addition to these there was a further group of
smaller hospitals, which were operated in the same way as the American
Red Cross military hospitals. These included Number 107 at
Jouy-sur-Morin, Number 110 at Villers-Daucourt, Number 111 at
Château-Thierry, Number 112 in the Rue Boileau, Paris, Evacuation
Hospital Number 114 at Fleury-sur-Aire in the Vosges, Base Hospital
Number 41 at St. Denis, and Base Hospital No. 82 at Toul. While outside
of all of these lists were three small institutions in Paris, operated
in coöperation with the French, but far too unimportant to be listed
here.
There were twenty-six of these American Red Cross hospitals of one form
or another established in France through the war. Yet, impressive as
this list might seem to be at a first glance, it, of course, falls far
short of the great total of the regular base and evacuation hospitals
set up by the Medical Corps of our army throughout France and the
occupied districts of Germany. Yet even these, as we shall see
presently, were constantly dependent upon the functioning of our Red
Cross. And, after all, it was chiefly a question of the mere form of
organization.
"Form?" said Colonel Burlingame to me that same evening as we sat
together in Paris. "What do you mean by form? There is no such
thing--not in war, at any event. When they used to come to me with their
red tape tangles I would bring them up with a quick turn, saying: 'See
here, the Red Cross is not engaged in winning the war for the Allies, or
even for the good old U. S. A. We are here to help the United States win
the war.'"
Not such a fine distinction as it might first seem to be.
"That was our principle and we stuck by it," continued Burlingame. "And
any one who deviated from it got bumped, and bumped hard."
You could trust the young military surgeon for that, just as his own
superior officers could trust him to produce results, time and time
again. For instance there was that week in July when the news came to
him--through an entirely unofficial but highly authentic channel--that
the First and Second Divisions of the United States Army were going to
be used somewhere near Château-Thierry as shock troops against the
continued German drive. For weeks past he had been carefully watching
the big war map of France that hung upon the wall of his office,
indicating upon it with tiny pin flags the steady oncoming of the enemy.
And in all those weeks he had been making pretty steady and definite
plans against the hour when he would be called upon to act, and to act
quickly.
Already he had formed that habit of quick action. Once, it was the
seventeenth of June, I think, he had had good opportunity to use it. The
First and Second were already in action along the Marne, brigaded with
the French, and Burlingame was driving along the rear of their
positions. But he supposed that the Divisions were in reserve; he did
not realize that it was in actual fighting, not at least until he espied
a dust-covered and wounded American quartermaster sergeant staggering
down the road. The Red Cross man stopped his car and put the wounded man
into it.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"I got hit--with a machine gun," stated the sergeant. "That is, I was
with the machine gun. I'd never seen one of the d----d things before,
but we were fighting. I got a squad around me and we tackled it. We were
making the old bus hum when--well, they tickled me with a lot of
shrapnel."
Burlingame waited for no further explanations. He headed his car around
and at top speed raced back to Paris. As he rode he studied a pocket map
that he always had with him. Montmirial! That was the place he had set
out in his mental plans for this sort of emergency; in _just_ this sort
of an emergency.
The stop at Paris was short; just long enough to load some fifteen tons
of hospital supplies in the swiftest trucks Major Osborne's
Transportation Department could supply, to pick up the highly capable
Miss Julia Stimson--then chief nurse of the American Red Cross--then off
to the front once again. Beyond the fact that the emergency hospital
would be somewhere in the neighborhood of Montmirial, the destination of
the swift-moving caravan was quite uncertain. Burlingame and Miss
Stimson were both route makers and pace makers. They led the way right
up behind the front-line positions, to the chief surgeon of that portion
of the French Army with which the First Division was then brigaded. An
American colonel was talking to a Frenchman at the moment.
"We're here," reported Burlingame.
"Who's we?" asked the Yankee officer.
"The emergency hospital of the American Red Cross," was the instant
reply.
The French staff located the outfit immediately, in an ancient château
at Jouy-sur-Morin near by, which immediately became A. R. C. Military
Hospital Number 107--and in a single memorable day evacuated some 1,400
American wounded.
It took real work and lots of it to set up such a hospital as this; also
an appreciable amount of actual equipment. First there came the tents
and the cots--the most important parts of a mobile evacuation
hospital--afterward, in orderly but quick sequence, the portable
operating room, with four tables designed for the simultaneous work of
four operating teams; each consisting of a chief surgeon, an assistant,
two orderlies, and two women nurses. The tables were, of course, but the
beginning of the operating-room equipment alone. There had to be huge
quantities of instruments, anæsthetizing tools; and the like.
"Not merely half a dozen forceps," says Burlingame, "but dozens upon
dozens of them."
"How could you get them all together?" I asked him.
"It was easy. We figured it all out--when we still had less than fifty
thousand American soldiers in France. So that when we had a call for an
operating-room outfit we did not have to stop and wonder what we should
send out for a well-equipped one. All that was done well in advance,
with the result that in the high-pressure months of May and June, 1918,
we began to reap the benefits of all the dirty work and the drudgery of
the fall of 1917."
* * * * *
I interrupted myself--purposely. I was talking of that first week in
July when the word came that the First and Second Divisions--no longer
brigaded with the French, but standing by themselves as integral factors
of the United States Army--were going into action at Château-Thierry.
The results of that action need no recounting here. They have passed
into the pages of American history along with Saratoga and Yorktown and
Gettysburg and Appomattox. They are not germane here and now to the
telling of this story of our Red Cross in action. It is germane,
however, to know that within fifteen minutes of the receipt of the news
of the beginning of the Château-Thierry fight, Burlingame of the
American Red Cross was in his swift automobile and on his way there.
Information already had reached him that our troops were to be pushed
northward from Château-Thierry and the sectors about Rheims and
southeastward from Montdidier. Acting upon this somewhat meager
information he headed his machine straight toward Soissons. A wild ride
it was, every mile of it; for Burlingame well knew that every moment
counted in the crucial battle against the Germans.
From time to time he would meet motor cars or camions or little groups
of soldiers who, in response to his signalings, would stop and frankly
tell him what they knew about the position or the movement of our army.
But all this information was also meager, and much of it was
contradictory. Finally, however, at an obscure crossroads he stumbled
upon a group of more than ordinary intelligent Yanks who gave him news
which seemed so accurate and so vital that he halted his car and pulled
out his road maps. He located himself quickly. And it was not a long
guess that decided him then and there to establish a hospital.
Remember, if you will, that this man Burlingame is exceedingly long on
common sense, quick thinking, and quick acting; short, if you please, on
that abominable thing known as red tape. Sensing the situation with a
keenness that, in the light of after events, was uncanny, he decided
that, when the clash came, it would come midway between Soissons and
Château-Thierry, a little to the east of the point where he had halted
his car. And there it came. "It was bound to be a hard bump," said he,
and so it was.
He at once got in touch with the American Red Cross warehouses at
Beauvais and at Paris and ordered medical and surgical and hospital
supplies in abundance forwarded to Chantilly--the point where he had so
quickly decided he would locate the emergency evacuation hospital. He
ordered eight surgeons, sixteen nurses, and twelve enlisted men, who
were on duty at A. R. C. Hospital Number 104, at Beauvais, to proceed at
once to Chantilly, where they were met by additional Red Cross personnel
sent on direct from Paris. He made arrangements with the Ambulance St.
Paul, which was then located at Chantilly, to establish the material and
men and women being rushed from Paris and from Beauvais as an annex to
its formation. Thus, in a mere twelve hours, was established an American
hospital along the French lines of communication.
And none too quickly. On the following morning the big fighting set in
to the north of Château-Thierry. And within a few hours the American
wounded began pouring into the old French château town of Chantilly. In
three weeks just 1,364 of our boys had been accommodated in our
emergency Red Cross hospital there; after which there was a shifting of
positions and of armies with a removal of the victorious Americans to
other sectors, and only French were left in the neighborhood. Which, in
turn, rendered it quite easy for our Red Cross to turn over the entire
equipment to our French allies, who stood in great need of it.
Château-Thierry was in fact the first really great test of the American
Red Cross. It was its first opportunity to perform its chief and most
vital service--the succoring of the wounded men of the United States
Army. It met that test. As a single example of the many ways in which it
met the test consider the request for three thousand blankets, in
addition to several thousand pillows, pajamas, dressings, surgical
instruments, and medicines that poured in upon the Bureau of Hospital
Administration at Paris at four o'clock on the afternoon of the
eighteenth of July. Osborne's department was a little short of motor
cars at that particular moment; the continued emergency at
Château-Thierry, with the multifold demands that it brought upon every
function of the Red Cross, had fairly exhausted his garages. There might
be cars in, in a few hours, said the transportation dispatchers. But
Burlingame's men took no such chances. They poured down from out of the
Regina headquarters and, taking their places in the middle of the Rue de
Rivoli, halted and commandeered taxicabs as they hove in sight.
With a half dozen of the Parisian "one lungers" screeching their very
souls out in the second speeds, they visited four of the Paris
warehouses in quick succession. A truck was brought up out of the
offing. By eight o'clock it was loaded, and by midnight it was at the
firing line and being unloaded of its precious supplies.
On another night during the same battle, a veteran army surgeon major
arrived in Paris at one o'clock in the morning. He found the medical
offices of the Red Cross open--there were no hours in those strenuous
days when one found them closed--and demanded supplies. The man was
faint from lack of sleep. He was put in bed for 120 minutes--not one
minute less, not one minute more. When he was awakened, his supplies
were at the door. They had been gathered in a motor truck from three
warehouses immediately roundabout. Later this army man returned to
Paris and reported that the work of our Red Cross that night had made it
possible for every man in his Division to have a chance for recovery.
Had it not been for the supplies, he added, sixty per cent of them might
have died.
* * * * *
But it was in the quick establishment of hospitals that I think that
Burlingame's function of the Red Cross attained its most satisfactory as
well as its most dramatic results. Take Number 110 at Coincy, also no
great distance from Château-Thierry. It, too, sprang up as a direct
result of that famous battle. A radical change of location of our troops
in that territory and increasing activities in the neighborhood of
Fère-en-Tardenois made an American evacuation hospital at or near that
point an immediate necessity. Burlingame, in the same trusty motor which
carried him so many miles over the battle-scarred and shell-holed and
traffic-worn highroads of France, went out with Colonel Stark, of the
Regular Army force, to find a site for it. They decided on a little town
of Coincy, on the direct main line of evacuation from the American
sector.
The only things that stood in favor of Coincy were its location and the
fact that it had water. There was little else left there; not a château
or a ruined church or even a barn in which to locate, temporarily at
least, a hospital. Moreover, there was no time for picking or choosing
in that country through which the _boche_ in the beginnings of his final
retreat had just passed. In the center of some partly demolished
buildings, Stark and Burlingame found a pump, still in working order.
This, they decided, would make a splendid site for their new hospital.
The road which ran close by the ruins was the main road to the
front--not far away, as the constant booming of artillery attested--and
the fact that the railroad also was fairly near simplified the problem
of evacuations. These two factors, together with that of the water,
which was both pure and abundant--the French already had marked the
pump, "_Eau potable_"--decided the question.
So the two men staked a claim to the ruin. Before they returned to the
car Burlingame picked up a piece of board. He fished a bit of charred
wood out of the débris. It served as chalk. With it he began slowly
marking the board: "A. R. C. Hospital No. ----." He hesitated for just a
moment. What the deuce was the number of that last hospital? Well, no
matter. Number 110 would do. And Number 110 it became and so remained
even after the hospital was ancient--whole weeks ancient--and finally
had been moved to Villers-Daucourt.
"And so with a little burned wood, a piece of busted wall, and a cow
yard, the most advanced American hospital in the battle of the Vesle
started in," says Burlingame. "We took our burned-wood sign, fastened
over the pump--and, _voilà_, there was Red Cross Hospital Number 110.
And then we hustled to the first military telephone and began phoning
Paris and other Red Cross headquarters to hustle the stuff out to it.
'Send it up the road from Fère-en-Tardenois,' I told them, 'until you
come to the cow yard with the sign. Only look out you don't miss the
sign.'... And all the time it was raining like hell."
* * * * *
One other of these Red Cross hospitals deserves especial mention in the
pages of this book--the tented institution upon the race course at
Auteuil just outside the fortifications of Paris. This institution,
situated within the confines of the lovely Bois-de-Boulogne, also was
established to meet the hospital necessities arising at the crux of the
German drive of 1918. It was first planned to take cases far advanced
toward recovery and so to relieve the badly overcrowded Red Cross
hospitals at Neuilly and other points in the metropolitan district of
Paris. And because of this type of cases, and the fact that summer was
close at hand, it was felt that tent structures properly builded and
floored could be used, and so much time saved.
That at least was the plan in May when the race course was commandeered
through the French authorities and work begun. In twenty-one days the
hospital was completed with six hundred beds, while draughtsmen were
preparing to increase its capacity to twenty-four hundred beds.
But as the _boche_ came closer and closer to Paris, that original plan
was quickly swept aside, and even the Red Cross made quick plans to
transfer its general headquarters to Tours or some other city well to
the south of France. Auteuil became, not a convalescent resort, but a
military emergency hospital of the first class--American Red Cross
Hospital Number Five, if you please. It soon reached great proportions.
In the five months that marked its career--from May 30 until the end of
October, 1918--it received 8,315 patients who had a total of 183,733
days of hospital treatment and 2,101 operations. Nearly five per cent of
all the surgical cases of our army in France passed through its portals.
And when under the sudden and almost unexpected pressure that was placed
upon it, it found itself seriously short of personnel--the men and women
already working it fatigued almost to the point of exhaustion--nurses
and other workers were drawn from the Children's Bureau, the
Tuberculosis Bureau, and other functions of the American Red Cross. They
were not registered nurses, to be sure, with neat little engraved
diplomas in their trunks, but they were both willing and efficient. And
that, at that time, was all that was necessary. I think that I have
already referred to our Red Cross in France as a mobile institution.
When the Auteuil plan was first brought to the attention of the officers
of the Medical Corps of our army they were inclined to scoff at it. To
them it seemed vast, visionary, impracticable. And as Burlingame went
steadily ahead with his plan--in those days, remember, it was to be
chiefly a rest camp--there were folk even in the ranks of the Red Cross
who criticized it. Then it was that Burlingame answered criticism, not
by drawing in on his plans, but by greatly extending them, by planning
to build a full surgical evacuation hospital out there on the race
course in the park. The criticisms grew, and finally Perkins, whom you
already know as the head of the Red Cross organization in France, called
the young doctor to him.
"They say that we already have two excellent Red Cross surgical
hospitals here in Paris and that they are quite enough," suggested
Perkins.
"We shall need more," insisted the hospital expert of his organization.
"The medical sharps in the army don't think that it is necessary," added
the Commissioner.
"Then they are wrong," said Burlingame. "We are going to need
Auteuil--and we are going to need it mighty badly."
"Then go to it, Major," said Perkins.
And Burlingame went to it, with the results that we have just seen,
while those very army men who came to scoff at Auteuil remained to
praise it--in unmeasured terms.
"It was a godsend," said Colonel Samuel Wadhams, medical officer on
General Pershing's staff. "I don't know what we would have done without
it."
Done without it? I sometimes wonder what the American Army really would
have done without the hospitals of the American Red Cross. Although far
fewer in number than its own, they performed a valorous service indeed.
In the six great eventful months from the first of June to the first of
December, 1918, these Red Cross hospitals together furnished an excess
of 1,110,000 days of hospital care to our troops, which was
approximately the same as giving to every battle casualty in the A. E.
F. five days of care. It admitted to its hospitals a total of 89,539
sick and wounded men, and cared for them--not merely adequately, but
with a real degree of comfort--at a total cost of 9.57 francs (a
fraction less than two dollars) a day.
* * * * *
Back of, and closely allied to, these distinctive Red Cross hospitals
were several groups of auxiliary institutions, which also had been
financed and equipped and were under the care of our American Red Cross.
The first of these groups was that of the military dispensaries, the
value of whose work can be roughly estimated by the fact that Number
Two, down at Brest, cared for 1,751 cases in the first month of its
existence. The others of the so-called permanent dispensaries were at
Bordeaux, Lorient, Nantes, Neuilly, Paris, and St. Nazaire, while
temporary ones were operated from time to time and as the emergency
demanded at Dijon, Senlis, Verberie, Compiègne, and La Rochelle.
Nine American Red Cross infirmaries were operated at base ports and
along the lines of communication for our doughboys. These served--and
served efficiently--men taken ill on trains, or casuals passing through.
During October, 1918, one of them treated 659 cases, while another in
three weeks had 850 cases, while with the increase of deportation of our
sick and wounded the work of our Red Cross infirmaries was greatly
increased. In November, 567 cases passed through the one at Brest and in
the following month 6,549 cases through the Bordeaux infirmary. In
addition to these two most important base ports, infirmaries were also
operated at Dijon, Bourges, Angers, Nantes, Tours, Limoges and St.
Nazaire.
A still more interesting line of Red Cross work closely allied to its
hospitals was in the convalescent homes which it established at various
places in France, almost invariably at points which had especial charm
of scenery or climate to recommend them. There were eleven of these; at
St. Julien, at Biarritz, at Morgat, at St. Cloud, at Vetau, at Le
Croisic, at Rochefort-en-Terre, at Villegenic-le-Buisson, at
Hisseau-sur-Cosson, at Avignac, and at Antibes. In some cases these were
established in resort hotels, temporarily commandeered for the purpose
and in others in some of the loveliest of the châteaux of France. It so
happened, however, that our convalescent home at Antibes, at the very
point where the Alps come down to meet the sea, was in a hostelry--the
Hôtel du Cap d'Antibes. Through the courtesy of a young Red Cross woman
who was housed there for a time as a patient I am able to present a
picture of the life there--a picture which seems to have been fairly
typical of all those immensely valuable homes.
* * * * *
"It is a quiet place," she writes, "truly peace after war--and there the
tired nurses and workers find the rest they need. Those who want to be
really gay must go to Nice, Cannes, or Monte Carlo. In the morning
nearly every one goes out on the rocks with a rug and a book for a sun
bath. But if you had as fascinating a perch as my favorite one it would
have to be an absorbing tale that could hold your attention. For, from
the warm wave-worn rock that made a comfortable seat, I could look out
across a broad sweep of blue water to a ragged range of dark-blue
mountains against the paler blue sky. To the left is a little point of
rocks where some one had built a villa in the shape of a Moslem mosque,
which raised crescent-tipped domes and towers from among a grove of
dark-green firs and gray-green cactus. To the right, where the mountain
peninsula joins the mainland, the coast sweeps toward me in long, tawny
curves. Villas make tiny dots among the green of the hills and along the
shore, while at a distance, but I know that near by one finds in them a
variety of shades of cream and buff, yellow and pink, and above the last
bit of coast to the extreme right rise snow-capped Alps.
"If one is restless there are rocks to climb and fascinating paths to
explore. One leads over the rocks, around a wall, and up through a
jungle-like tangle of neglected gardens and walks into the estate
belonging to the King of the Belgians. The villa, begun before the war,
is unfinished now, but a truly adventurous spirit will go on past it and
be well rewarded. In what was once a formal garden, hyacinths and many
colored anemones are blooming in the long grass; roses nod gayly from
the walls, and almond blossoms lift their delicate pink flowers against
that glorious sky. In a grove of olive trees near by, narcissus and
daffodils are scattered in thick clumps here and there. There is a
fragrance in the air that is like spring at home.
"Noon at Cap d'Antibes brings every one together for lunch and after
that some go back to the rocks, others to their rooms, and still more
take the afternoon bus to Cannes. You can shop there and get your films
developed and your hair washed, but of course there are far greater
attractions. From three until four an American band plays in the
pavilion and all the world walks down the promenade to hear--'Smiles,'
'The Long, Long Trail,' and 'Over There.' Just such a band played just
such tunes last summer at lunch time on the White House lot in
Washington--only there the audience was composed of hundreds and
hundreds of women and girls--war workers--with a few men in uniform,
while at Cannes it is the other way about. The place simply swarms with
American boys on leave or convalescence, officers and men, and besides
their familiar khaki there is plenty of horizon blue and the
mustard-colored coats of Moroccans, with red fezzes atop. There are
French women, of course, and then a handful of Red Cross and 'Y' girls,
nurses, and foreign sisters.
"There are a variety of places to go for tea--from the conventional,
cosmopolitan rooms of the Carlton or Rumplemeyer's to the 'Y' canteen
where one can get good hot chocolate and bread and jam for forty-five
centimes. This 'Y,' by the way, is considered their star establishment.
There are reading and billiard rooms, movies and dancing; and on
Sundays, services are held where one used to play roulette.
"There is also a Y. M. C. A. club for officers, and here there is
dancing to be had as well as tea. But at five o'clock the girls for the
Cap must run, or they will miss the bus going back. No one wants to do
that, and miss, too, the pleasant ride along the coast with the sunset
glowing back of the Esperal Mountains and shimmering in a thousand
colors across the ripples of the quiet sea; especially when the
alternative to missing the bus is an hour's ride on a French 'tram.' So,
singing as a rule, the busload swings along the smooth white road with
twenty-five or thirty girls, as like as not, in the places where fifteen
are supposed to be.
"That same big bus is used several times a week to take parties for the
long ride along the Riviera, to Nice, Monte Carlo, and Menton--one of
the supremely beautiful drives of the world. There is an hour's stop in
Nice, another in Monte Carlo for lunch, and then, after a glimpse of the
Italian border, the party turns back. The Hotel Cap d'Antibes, with its
many lights, looks very pleasant after the long, cold ride--it is always
cold on the Riviera after the sun goes down--and dinner, always good,
tastes especially so to the hungry tourists.
"The Cap is too isolated to be gay in the evening; but, after all, most
of the women there have come to rest and recuperate, so they are glad of
a quiet game of bridge, a book before the open fire, or a short walk in
the magic of southern moonlight. The energetic younger ones usually pull
back the rugs and dance--a hen party, to be sure; fun just the same, if
one judges by the faces of the girls. There is generally singing, too.
One nurse while I was there had a very lovely voice (you kept thinking
how much pleasure she must have been able to give the men in her ward)
and after she had sung the verse of some popular song, every one joined
the chorus. And it was at one of these singsongs, in the big
white-paneled drawing-room, with the yellow light falling on many faces
about the piano, that I had a glimpse of a gray hospital ward and one of
those tragic commonplaces that make up the life of a nurse in times of
war.
"The singer had been singing a favorite song of the British Tommies with
a strong cockney accent:
"'Oi want go 'ome,
Oi want to go 'ome,
Now that Belgium is Belgium again,
Now that France has got Alsace-Lorraine,
Carry me over the sea,
Where the Allymand cannot get me,
Oh my, I'm too young to die,
I want to go 'ome,'
when a girl near me, who had been rather silent, spoke for the first
time:
"'That song reminds me of a boy I used to have in my ward. He had a
broken back and it was just a question of time, but he didn't know that.
He sang that song until I thought I couldn't stand it.'
"The singing was still to be heard as I slipped into my coat a few
minutes later and went out of doors. Down on the rocks the water slipped
against them softly, overhead were a million stars in the dark sky.
"And so, war--hideous and relentless--intrudes even on the peace of
beautiful places, as it always will for most of us as long as we live.
But even if the memories of what lay behind them came back to the nurses
who had their leave at Cap d'Antibes, the days there were mostly happy
ones. Nothing that the Red Cross has done has been more worth while than
this place that they have had for the nurses who needed rest and
recuperation. There were the creature comforts of hot water, good food,
and soft beds; there was sunshine after an eternity of rain; peace after
war."