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 offorgetting 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 abouthalfway 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—tellyou 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 thathaven 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 smallmusetteand grabbing up two blankets was on his way in an automobile toward thefront. 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 theirfirst 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 soupthat 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 aseparate 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 unreasoningpoiluswhose 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 studyingbocheaërial 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'snarrative 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 realautomobiles, 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 thebocheseemed 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 eachtime 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 thirdbochevisitor 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 modernPilgrim'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 thelittle 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, theNew York Herald, theChicago Tribune, and theLondon Mail.
Thereafter and until long weeks after the signing of the armistice Kellogg remained with the Thirty-second, but did not cease hisPilgrim'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 meantimehe 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 forfour 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 flightof 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 thetriageat Véry.
"Arriving at Epinonville late that evening I worked atthe 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 hadpenetrated 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 thosefall 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 supremesacrifice. 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 beimpossible 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 writtenin 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.
TICKLING THE OLD IVORIES Many an ancient piano did herculean service in the A. R. C. recreation huts throughout FranceTICKLING THE OLD IVORIESMany an ancient piano did herculean service in the A. R. C. recreation huts throughout France
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 veryattributes. 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 theirMédaille d'Honneurand 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 themutilés, 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 becausethey 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 ofcivilians, 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 waitupon 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 theirarmy. 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 theService 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 FrenchService de Santé, saying that he realized that its service had been taxed to the uttermost and proffering theuse 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 FrenchService de Santéwithout 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 theentente cordialeof 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 andthe 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 averagepoilu—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 thepoilu.
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 stationednear 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 armyand 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 111at 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. Forweeks 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; injustthis 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 emergencyhospital 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 inadvance, 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 along guess that decided him then and there to establish a hospital.