HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS
Some of the compliments the mannerly French poured out upon the army
left the Americans feeling that they didn't quite deserve them. Others
they could take standing. Well to the front of the second lot were all
the good words for the medical corps. A leading writer for a big
Parisian afternoon paper took the first three columns of his first page
to say with undisguised emotion that the French government not merely
could, with profit, but should and must pattern after the American Army
Medical Service.
One good army hospital in France is like another and so let it be the
New York Post Graduate unit which was picked at random for the purpose
of a visit. We straggled off the train with two old peasant women whose
absorbed faces under their peaked white caps did not encourage us to
ask our way of them, and one poilu, bent under the astonishing
miscellany of the home-going French soldier. He lost his chance to
escape us by eyeing us with frank if friendly curiosity. Could he direct
us to the American Army Hospital, we asked, and he wrinkled his weather
worn nose. No, he hadn't been home since the Americans had come to war,
but, of course, there was only one building in town big enough and new
enough to be used by the Americans. If we should turn to the left and
then to the right and then to the left again we would come to the school
and there he thought we would find the Americans. We did. To the far end
of the little town we trudged till we came to a low stone building, gray
and white, of good stout masonry. We knew it was the American hospital
because over the arched entrance there hung a "bannière etoilée."
We neared the entrance to the tune of some trumpet blasts, not very well
played, and we peered from arch to inner court yard just in time to see
a swarm of khaki-half-clad soldiers running out from barracks. By the
time they reached the mess door they were khaki-clad. The officer who
came to take us about explained that on Sunday mornings everybody slept
late and dressed on the way to breakfast and that discipline was better
on week days. Then he told us that of all the privates in that unit not
one had ever been a soldier before. They had been picked for medical
service first and military service at such time as the officers had
learned enough to teach it to them. I remember later that one of the
soldiers objected privately to being drilled by a dentist.
Nine-tenths of the men were fresh out of college, the officer told us,
and half the other tenth were freshmen or sophomores. Many of the
enlisted men, we were told, had left incomes in the tens of thousands
and a few in the hundreds of thousands. The enlisted personnel included
one matinee idol, one young New York dramatic critic, two middling well
known young authors, a composer of good but saleable music, and a golfer
who gets two in the national rating.
The wards were not very different from those of a New York hospital
back home, except that they housed a strange mixture of patients. About
half were American soldiers and the rest were civilians from the country
round about. The French civilians were convinced that though the
American doctors might cure them with their marvelous medicines and
speckless cleanliness they would surely kill them with air. This
particular base hospital was fulfilling two functions for the civilian
population. It was seeking to take out adenoids and let in air. A great
New York specialist was attending to the adenoids and making progress.
It was not always possible to convince the patient that it would do him
any good to have his adenoids removed, but if the operation gave the
kind American doctor any pleasure he was willing to let him go ahead.
The air campaign was making slower progress. Dislike of air is centuries
old in France and it has become an instinct with the race. I rode in a
railroad car with a French aviator on a balmy day of early autumn and
his first act upon entering the compartment was to close both windows.
Everybody in this part of France has his bed placed inside a closet and
at night he closes the doors.
Worst of all were the extra precautions against air which the French
peasants took in case of illness. The young French doctors were at the
front and the old men who remained always began the treatment of a case
by advising the patient's relatives to close all the windows and start a
fire.
At the call of sick babies and old folk of the countryside came
aristocrats of the New York medical profession whose fees at home would
have bought the house in which the patient lived. Later, of course, the
doctors of the hospital will be more rushed by the necessities of the
soldiers.
"This is hardly more than a germ of what we plan," a doctor explained to
us. "Do you see those tents?" He pointed across a small field. "Those
are American engineers and they're going to do nothing for the next few
months but build additions to this hospital. Every time I go 'way for a
day I come back to find that they've added a thousand beds to the
capacity we're planning for. We will extend all the way across the
fields over to that road before they're done with us." He spoke in a
joyful voice as if nothing in the world was quite so inspiring as a huge
hospital filled with patients. That was the professional touch. I
remember the story one of the doctors told us about a young surgeon who
was sent up to the French front to help handle the cases after a big
drive. One of his first patients was a German prisoner who had been shot
just above the elbow and bayoneted in the stomach. The doctor had no
great trouble with the elbow and he did what he could for the abdominal
wound.
"I could save that man all right if it wasn't for that bayonet wound,"
he said to another American doctor close at hand, and then he added in a
reproachful voice as he pointed to the gash: "That's an awful dangerous
place to stab a man."
There were no wounded at the hospital at the time of our visit, but some
of the soldiers in the medical ward were very sick. There was one boy
there, who has since mended and gone away, whose recovery seemed
hopeless. The doctor in charge saw that something was troubling the
young soldier and so he came to him and told him that he was aggravating
his illness by this worry or desire.
"Whatever this thing is, you must tell me," said the doctor.
"Do you think I'm going to die?" the boy asked anxiously.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," the doctor answered a little evasively.
"I knew I was pretty sick," said the boy, catching the evasiveness of
the doctor's tone, "and if you think I'm going to die and won't ever get
back home again, there's just one thing I want to ask you to do for me."
"What's that?" said the doctor.
"Couldn't you fix it up for me just once to have ham and eggs and apple
pie for breakfast?"
The most important thing in the case of all the sick men was to keep
them from brooding about home. The doctors made a point of getting
around and talking to the patients to cheer them up. One of them
complained of homesickness.
"Yes," said the doctor, "I suppose we all have people back there that we
miss."
"You can just bet I do," said the sick soldier, "I've got the finest
wife in the world in Des Moines and two children and a Ford."
The health of the staff was excellent, but sometimes they felt homesick,
too. The enlisted men gave a show the night I was at the hospital and
during the course of the performance everybody wept or at least got
moist eyed because the play was about New York. It was laid in a year as
nameless as the place where the hospital is located. All the program
said was: "The bachelor apartments of Schuyler Van Allen on a fine June
night a few weeks after the end of the war." Schuyler had just come back
from Europe and he found his apartment with everything just as it was on
the night he had sailed for France. There was the daily paper he had
left behind with the date May 8, 1917, and he looked at the old sheet
and mused as he read some of the headlines:
"Kaiser Calls on Troops to Stand Firm," read Schuyler. "The Kaiser," he
said to himself, and then he added: "I wonder whatever became of him."
The audience laughed at that, but in a moment the doctors and the nurses
and the patients who weren't sick enough to stay in bed wept. It was all
because Schuyler looked out of the window and said to his friend: "Oh,
it's great to be on Fifth Avenue again. I want to see it in every light
and at every hour of the day. It was fairly blazing tonight with the
same old hurrying crowd jamming the traffic at Forty-second Street and
the same old mob pushing and shoving its way into the Grand Central
subway station." The mention of the subway was too much for the
audience. By this time the nurse who sat in front of me was dabbing
violently at her eyes with her pocket handkerchief. She was breaking my
heart and I leaned forward and asked: "What part of New York do you come
from?"
"I wasn't ever in New York," she said. "I come from Lima, Ohio."
Like the medical corps, the engineers were peculiarly American and
peculiarly efficient as well. We first came upon them when we saw a
tall, stringy man looking out of the window of a little locomotive which
pulled a train up to a point at the French front. We thought he was an
American because his jaws were moving back and forth slowly and
meditatively. Inquiry brought confirmation.
"Sure, I'm an American," said the man in the blue jumpers. "I guess I've
kicked a hobo off the train for every telegraph pole back on the old
Rock Island, but this is the toughest railroading job I've struck yet."
The man in the locomotive was a member of an American regiment of
railroad engineers which had taken over an important military road. They
had the honor to be the first American troops at the French front who
came under fire. The engineers were willing to admit that while washouts
and spreading rails were old stories to them, they did get a bit of a
thrill the first time they found their tracks torn up by shellfire. But
the aeroplanes were worse.
"One night," said our friend the engineer, "there was one of those
flying machines just followed along with us and every time we fired the
engine and the sparks flew up she'd drop a bomb on us or shoot at us
with her machine gun. We tried to hit it up a bit, but she kept right up
with us. They didn't hit us, but once they got so rough we just slowed
down and laid under the engine for a spell until they decided to quit
picking on us."
This regiment of railroad engineers was the huskiest outfit I saw in
France. It was carefully selected from the railroads running into
Chicago. Of the men originally selected only about one-seventh were
taken because the railroads found so many men who were eager to go. One
company boasted one hundred and twenty-five six-footers and all were
two-fisted fighters. The discipline of the regiment, of course, was not
that of an infantry unit. I watched an animated discussion between a
captain and his men as to where some material should be placed when the
regiment first moved into a new camp.
"You've got the wrong dope about that, Bill," said a private to his
captain very earnestly. The officer looked at him severely.
"I've told you before about this discipline business, Harry," he said.
"Any time you want to kick about my orders you call me mister." It is
hard for a railroad man to realize that a couple of silver bars have
changed a yardmaster into a captain.
The regiment set great store by the number thirteen. It was put into
service on a Friday the thirteenth and it left its American base in two
sections of thirteen cars each. The locomotives' headlight numbers each
totaled thirteen and the thirteenth of a month found the regiment
arriving at its European port of entry. The thirteenth of the next month
found the regiment starting for its French base and when the camp was
reached a group of interpreters was waiting.
"How many are you?" asked the colonel.
"Myself and twelve companions," replied one of the Frenchmen.
The regiment will never forget the first night at its French base. It
arrived at midnight but crowds thronged the darkened streets and gave
the big Americans an enthusiastic greeting, although it was forbidden to
talk above undertones. Since they could not hurrah for the soldiers,
the villagers hugged them, and from black windows roses were pelted on
shadowy figures who tramped up the street to the low rumble of a muffled
band.
"Great people, these French, so demonstrative," said a captain, who was
once a trainmaster in a Texas town.
"I was in the theater the other night," he said, "and a couple of
performers on the stage started to sing 'Madelon.' Well, I'd heard it
before and I knew the chorus, so when they got that far along I joined
in. Well, there was a young girl sitting next me and when she saw that I
knew the song she just threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.
"And now," said the captain, "everybody in the regiment's after me to
teach 'em that song."