FRANCE AND THE MEDICOES
The history of the A. E. F. will be in most respects the history of
resources cunningly turned to new ends, of force redirected, with some
of its erstwhile uses retained, and of a colossal adventure in making
things do. Where the artillery was weak, the A. E. F. eked out with the
coast-artillery. Where the engineer corps was insufficient, the
railroads were called on for special units, frankly unmilitary. A whole
citizenry was abruptly turned to infantry. But one branch of the
service, though scarcely worthy of much responsibility when the war
began, was, nevertheless, the one most thoroughly prepared. The prize
service was the Medical Corps, and it was in this state of astonishing
preparedness because immediately before it became the Medical Corps, it
had been the Red Cross, and the Red Cross knows no peace-times.
The question of what is Medical Corps and what is Red Cross has always
been a facer for the superficial historian.
Broadly speaking, the base hospitals of the army are organizations
recruited and equipped in America by the Red Cross, and transported to
France, where they become units of the army, under army discipline and
direction, and supplied by the Medical Corps stores except in cases
where these are inadvertently lacking, or unprovided for by the
strictness of military supervision. In any case, where sufficient
supplies are not forthcoming from the Medical Corps, they are given by
the Red Cross.
This is the Red Cross on its military side. In its civilian work, which
is extensive, and in its recreational work it carries on under its own
name and by its own authority. Where it divides territory with the Y. M.
C. A., the division is that the Y. M. C. A. takes the well soldier and
the Red Cross the sick one, whenever either has time on his hands.
But the Medical Corps plus the Red Cross created between them a branch
of the American Army in France which, from the moment of landing, was
the boast of the nation.
For a year before America entered the war Colonel Jefferson Kean,
director-general of the military department of the American Red Cross,
had been organizing against the coming of American participation. Within
thirty days after America's war declaration Colonel Kean announced that
he had six base hospitals in readiness to go to the front, and within
another thirty days these six units were on their way, equipped and
ready to step into the French hospitals, schools, and what-not, waiting
to receive them, and to do business as usual the following morning.
The six were organized at leading hospitals and medical schools: the
Presbyterian Hospital of New York, with Doctor George E. Brewer in
command; the Lakeside Hospital, Cleveland, with Doctor George W. Crile;
the Medical School of Harvard University, with Doctor Harvey Cushing;
the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, with Doctor Richard Harte; the
Medical School of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, with
Doctor Frederick Besley, and Washington University Hospital, Saint
Louis, with Doctor Frederick T. Murphy.
A little while later the Postgraduate unit went from New York, the
Roosevelt Hospital unit from there, and the Johns Hopkins unit from
Baltimore. Many others followed in due time.
These hospital units, recruited and organized under the Red Cross, took
their full complement of surgeons, physicians, and nurses. All these
became members of the army as soon as they landed in France, and they
were supplemented, either there or before they crossed, with members of
Medical Corps, enlisted just after America entered the war.
The military rank of the physicians and surgeons conformed in a general
way to the unofficial rank of the same men when they had worked together
in the hospitals from which they came. There were, of course, some
exceptions to this rule, but not enough to make it no rule at all.
It was true of the medicoes, as it was of the engineers, that they took
military discipline none too seriously, because they brought a
discipline of their own. Wherever, in civilian pursuits, the lives of
others hang on prompt obedience, there is a strictness which no
military strictness can outdo. This was true of the personnel of any
hospital in America, before there was thought of war. It was equally
true, of course, after the units were established behind the
fighting-lines. But there was a certain lack of prompt salute and a
certain freedom with first names which not the stoutest management from
the military arm of the service could obliterate from the base
hospitals. The Medical Corps enlisted men were naturally not sinners in
this respect. The routine work of the base hospitals all fell to them.
It was usually a sergeant of the army--though he was never a
veteran--who attended the reception-rooms, kept account of symptoms,
clothes, and first and second names, and did the work of orderly in the
hospital. It was the privates who kept the mess and washed the dishes
and changed the sheets.
The nurses went under military discipline and into military
segregation--sometimes a little nettlesome, when the hospitals were far
from companionship of any outside sort.
The sites selected for the hospitals were either French hospitals which
were given over, or schools or big public buildings remade into
hospitals by the engineers. Each site was arranged so that it could be
enlarged at will. And the railways which connected the outlying
hospitals with the rest of the American communications were laid so that
other hospitals could be easily placed along their line. There was a
splendid elasticity in the Medical Corps plan.
One base hospital was much like another, except for size. Those near the
line differed somewhat from those farther back, but their scheme was
uniform. At any rate, the history of their doings was similar enough to
have one history do for them all. Take, for example, one of the New York
units which landed in August and was placed nearer the coast than the
fighting. It was put in trim by the engineers, then sanitated by the
humbler members of the Medical Corps. The great wards were laid out, the
kitchens were built, windows were pried open--always the first American
job in France, to the great disgust and alarm of the French--and baths
were put in.
The chief surgeon had specialized in noses and throats at home. When the
hospital was ready, naturally the soldiers were not in need of it--being
still in training in the Vosges--so the services of the hospital were
opened to the civilian population of France.
By November there was not an adenoid in all those parts. The death-rate
almost vanished. Into this rural France, where there had been no
hospital and only a nursing home kept by some Sisters of Mercy who saw
their first surgical operation within the base hospital, there came this
skilful organization, handled by men whose incomes at home had been
measured in five figures, and all the healing they had was free.
Multiply this by twenty, and then by thirty, before the pressing need
for care for soldiers directed the Medical Corps back to first channels,
and there will be some gauge of what this service did for France.
And the gratitude of France was more than commensurate. Praise of the
American Medical Service flowed unceasingly from officials and
civilians, statesmen and journalists. There were constant demands made
upon the French Government that it should pattern its own medical forces
exactly upon the American, making it the branch of the medical
specialist and not of the politician or the military man.
The individual officers of the Medical Corps had much to learn, however,
from the French and the British. Though they knew hygiene, prophylaxis,
antisepsis, and surgery as few groups of men have ever known it, they
became scholars of the humblest in the surgery of the battle-field.
Every officer of the Medical Corps was kept on a round of visits behind
French and British fronts during the fairly peaceful interim between
their landing and the American occupation of a front-line sector.
The Red Cross was the great auxiliary of the Medical Corps. It kept up
its recruiting in America, both for nurses and physicians, and for
supplies.
And in supplies it played its greatest part. The Red Cross maintained
enormous warehouses, separate entirely from army control, which
contained provisions to meet every possible shortage. It was known by
the Red Cross that never in the history of the world had there been a
medical corps of any army that had not finally broken down. No matter
how painstaking the provision, the need was always tragically greater.
And so surgical dressings, sets of surgical instruments, medicines,
antiseptics, and anaesthetics piled up in the great A. R. C.
store-houses.
Then there were the things for which the Medical Corps frankly made no
provision, which could have no place in a strictly military programme,
such as food delicacies of great cost, special articles of clothing, and
amusements. Every hospital convalescent ward had its phonograph, its
checker-boards, its chess-sets, and its dominoes. That was the Red
Cross.
[Illustration: Red Cross Hospital at Neuilly, formerly
the American Ambulance Hospital]
The Red Cross had three hospitals of its own in Paris. The first of
these was at Neuilly, the hospital which had been the American Ambulance
Hospital from the beginning of the war, given over on the third
anniversary of its inauguration. Here French and American soldiers,
American civilians who worked with the army, and Red Cross officers
and men were cared for. The second had been Doctor Blake's Hospital, and
when it became a Red Cross hospital, it was made to include the gigantic
laboratory where investigations were made, and where the American Red
Cross had the honor to ferret out the cause of trench-fever. This fever
had been one of the baffling tragedies of the war, because in the press
of caring for their wounded, other hospitals had been unable to give it
sufficient research.
The third was the Reid Hospital, equipped and supplied by Mrs. Whitelaw
Reid.
In the long period when all this hospital organization was at the
command of civilian France, inestimably fine work was done. It was a
sort of poetic tuition fee for the instruction in war surgery which was
meanwhile going on from veteran French surgeons to the American
newcomers. At the end of the first year, the Medical Corps was itself
ready for any stress, and it had mightily relieved the stress it had
already found.