BANDAGES BY THE TENS OF THOUSANDS An atelier workshop of the A. R. C. in the Rue St. Didier, Paris, daily turned out surgical dressings by the mileBANDAGES BY THE TENS OF THOUSANDSAn atelier workshop of the A. R. C. in the Rue St. Didier, Paris, daily turned out surgical dressings by the mile
"'Stunt Night,' advertised in Base 69 Hut for March 13, brought a lot of inquiries," saysToot Sweet, in its issue dated April 1, 1919. "'Whadaye mean—stunts?' Probably the announcement of pies and doughnuts for prizes was responsible for the crowd that appeared that evening when a large part of the floor space was cleared and a couple of Red Cross hut workers started the stunts. The first stunt—with a large slice of apple pie as prizes—was to sit upon a piece of iron pipe, diameter six inches, place the heel of one shoe on the toe of another, and while thus insecurely balanced, light in one hand from a lighted candle in the other a cigarette. Shrieks and howls from the delighted mob who began betting on results encouraged a number of aspirants and the pie was finally won. Stunt after stunt followed in quick succession, all sorts of queer and absurd contortions varying from picking up folded newspaper from the floor with your teeth while holding one foot in the air with one hand to a 'puttee race,' when the contestants raced from one end of the hall, took off their puttees, and then put them on again, then raced back, with various obstacles in the way. Finally the boys began challenging each other to their favorite stunts, so that Private California might have been showing Private North Carolina a pet trick, while Sergeant Oklahoma and Corporal Louisiana gravely discussed the merits of their ideas on stunts. The winning team was presented with a large, juicy apple pie, vamped from the mess sergeant by a Red Cross girl.
"'Amateur night' was announced for the same hut two nights later by a stunning poster done in colors by one of the 309th Engineers. A box of homemade fudge wasthe prize for the best act. Seven of the best vaudeville acts ever seen in the huts appeared. The sergeant major of Base Hospital Number 69 was the master of ceremonies. A 'dummy' act, a 'wop mechanic' in song and monologue, a ballad singer, a 'song and minstrel man,' a mandolin and guitar player, who gave remarkable imitations of Hawaiian instruments, a 'tramp monologuist,' and a clog dancer composed the bill. Harry Henly, the 'song and minstrel man,' won the box of fudge which was displayed in all its glory and pink ribbons during the contest."
Sometimes there was not quite so much fun in the situation. The girls who ran the Red Cross hut in the tuberculosis hospital of the Savenay group, almost directly across the highroad from Number 69, had a far weightier problem upon their shoulders. To amuse there, was a vastly more difficult task. For they knew—as most of its patients knew—that the man who entered the portals of that particular hospital was foredoomed. If he had a fighting chance of conquering the "T. B." he was packed into the hospital ward of a transport and rushed home. If he did not have that fighting chance—well, why waste precious transport space? To Savenay with him. And to Savenay he went to spend his days—and end them—in a cheery, camplike place where there were croquet and less strenuous games and broad piazzas that looked down across the valley toward the embouchure of the Loire, while Red Cross girls came and went and did their womanly best to comfort and amuse a fellow—and make him forget; forget the back door of the little hospital where, night after night, four or five fellows went out—in pine boxes, never to return, and the rows of wooden crosses down in the American cemetery at the foot of the hill steadily grew.
Turn back with me, if you will, inland from Savenay to the curved streets of Vichy—little Vichy situated in the very foothills of the high Alps. It is January now, not April. We have turned backward in full earnest, andare breathing the air of those hard weeks and months that followed immediately upon the signing of the armistice.
Vichy, in its very compactness, with the flat yellows of its curious old buildings and its equally curious modern hotels, with the fifteenth-century tower in the background and the quiet River Allier slipping by, has the fascinating unreality of a stage setting—one of those marvelous effects with which the genius of a Belasco or a Joseph Urban from time to time delights in dazzling us. In spring or in summer we might find it prepared for carnival—with green-painted chairs and tables underneath the still greener foliage of its small park. But this is January and the park is deeply blanketed in snow. In such a serene midwinter setting it seems far more ready for silent drama than for the blare of carnival—the figures in olive drab are indeed quite the figures of pantomime—brown against the whiteness of the snow. The only touches of color in the picture—tiny splotches of green or blue or purple or yellow—are supplied by the tiny cloth bags that the men carry with them. They are preparing to entrain—the first step of many on the way back to the homeland—and the vari-colored bags, each marked with a crimson cross, are the comfort kits they genuinely cherish.
Before war was come upon France, Vichy was a resort to be reckoned with in the comings and goings of her elect. It was a watering place—and much more besides. There men and women ate as well as drank, bands played, beauties intrigued, wheels, flat-set, spun merrily, and entire fortunes were flicked away at the gaming tables; but war changed these things—as many, many others. It took the viciousness out of Vichy and brought back to it all of the gentleness which it must have possessed in the beginning. The small city, where formerly the ill and the bored made pilgrimages in search of health (health bubbling up to the lips in the faint concealments of a glass of sparkling water), became a city of wounded; all too often a city of death.
The FrenchArmy moved in; and, commandeering hotel after hotel, transformed them into its hospitals. On its heels came the American Army; it alone took more than eighty hotels for its own hospital purposes. That was the signal that our Red Cross would be needed, and without further urge it moved in. Wherefore the comfort bags in the hands of the doughboys as they moved across the park toward their waiting trains.
If memories were half as tangible things as war "souvenirs," those tiny bags of the crimson cross would have held other things than soap and razor blades and tooth paste and playing cards and tobacco and the like. They would have held definite memories of Vichy and all that it had meant to the wounded men of our army. Some of them would have carried the pictures of lights shining out through opened doors into the darkness of the night and litters coming in through those opened doors—litters bearing American men, when they were not American boys—men clad only in hospital robes, but whose first bandages were drenched with blood and spattered with the mud of No Man's Land. There would have been a multiplicity of pictures of this sort, for Vichy in the days of actual fighting never was an idle place. There were times there when, within a cycle of twenty-four hours, as many as six thousand men would be sent away from it—to make room for an equal number of incoming freshly wounded soldiers. In the early days of November that many came to it direct from the dressing stations, and the problem of our Red Cross there became a little bit more complex.
There might also have been pictures in those selfsame comfort bags of the Red Cross girls on the stone platforms of the railroad station—young women who in warm days served iced lemonade there and in cold, hot chocolate, or, when it was requested, hot lemonade; for the fact remains that lemonade was the only food or drink that many of the gassed cases could endure. And it was ready for them there—at all hours of the day or night, and at all days;even though to make that possible the girl workers would sometimes stay on duty for thirty-six hours at a stretch: without having the opportunity of divesting themselves of their clothing and so gaining a little real rest.
A final picture of Vichy might have well been a mental photograph of the "hut." This formerly had been the Elysée Palace—a gaming and amusement center of none too savory a reputation; yet with its central location on the main street, its ample lounging space, and its small theater, self-contained, it was ideal for the purposes of our Red Cross and so became a living heart of Vichy. It was the canteen or club in which some five thousand doughboys were wont to congregate each day—to write letters home, to play games, or the tireless piano, to read the newspapers or the magazines, to visit, to gossip—in every way possible to shorten days that passed none to quickly for any of them.
During the first months of its organization this Red Cross superhut did not include the entire "Palace." Gradually it spread, however, until the entire two floors of the place were busy with American Red Cross activities. And the doughboy passing from the comfortable clubrooms on the main floor—wherein, for the comfort of the convalescents, a full-fledged army commissary had been set up—upstairs found a "first-aid" room of a new sort. It was, in fact, an operating room, where expert surgery might be applied to torn and ripped and otherwise wounded uniforms. And the head surgeon was a woman—a smart, black-eyed French seamstress who could perform wonders not alone with torn buttonholes but who also possessed a facility with a hot sadiron that made her tremendously popular upon the eve of certain festal occasions.
"How would a dish of Yankee ice cream taste to-day? You know, the same sort that Blink & Smith serve down there in the Universal, at the corner of Main and First streets?"
Imaginesomething like that coming out of the blue, and to a boy who has been "fed up" on army cookery and who even has lost his taste for the delicacy of French cookery. You may take it direct from me that the hut there at Vichy held a kitchen and that it was a good kitchen. Can you imagine any first-rate American club that ever would fail in such an essential? And from that modest cuisine there in the pulsing heart of the bubbly town came truly vast quantities of the trivial foodstuffs that are forever dear to the stomach of the doughboy. Ice cream—of course—and small meat pies, each in its own little coat of oiled paper—and creamy custards—and, of course, once again—coffee and all manner of sandwiches, imaginable and unimaginable. And, because there were many of the doughboys who could not possibly make their way to the hut, even on crutches or in wheel chairs, a camionette drove away from its kitchen each day with seventeen gallons of ice cream tucked in it—all for the benefit of bedridden American soldier boys.
Remember, if you will, that this once disreputable Elysée Palace—in the glory of war aid becoming not only reputable but almost sanctified—held a theater; small, but completely equipped. Our Red Cross workers did not lose sight of that when they chose the place as a headquarters for their endeavors. Four days a week this became a moving-picture house—just like the Bijou or the Orpheum back home. On Wednesday French wounded—for whom comfort provisions were never too ample—were guests there of the American Red Cross, and eachpoilucarried away a little gift of American cigarettes—to any Frenchman the very greatest of all treasures. Saturdays were set aside for "competitive vaudeville" or an "amateur night"—very much as we saw it at Savenay. Gradually a stock company—capable at least of one-act plays—was evolved from the dramatic material immediately at hand—soldiers and Red Cross and hospital menand women workers—with the result that by Thanksgiving Day, 1918, a very creditable production entitled "The Battle of Vichy" was produced there in the hut, after which the company moved on toward the conquest of the neighboring "metropolitan" towns of Moulins and Châtel-Guyon.
Some one is going to come along some day and write the analysis of the innate desire of the American to dabble with play-acting. The plethora of war-time musical shows that became epidemic among the divisions of the A. E. F. and spread not merely to Paris—where one of these entertainments followed upon the heels of another—but eventually to New York and other cities of the country, affords interesting possibilities for the psychologist. It was a huge by-product of the war and one not entirely expected.
When the resources of the amateur Thespians of Vichy had become well-nigh exhausted, a New York professional actress—Miss Ida Phinney—who not only had real dramatic ability but considerable experience in staging and producing, was enlisted in the Red Cross service there. With her aid, the attractive little cinema theater—with its blue upholstery, its tiny boxes, and its complete and up-to-date stage equipment, even to the scenery—became a full-fledged playhouse. Stage hands and property men were assigned from the army, and Vichy began seriously to stage, costume, and produce and criticize plays. Soldiers with a knack for design took keen delight in advising as to "creations" for the wardrobes of the cast and themselves watched the garments grow into reality from inexpensive stuffs in the sewing room. A clever artist wrought a full set of stage jewelry—even to the heavy bracelets and the inevitable snake rings of the Oriental dancers—from stray scraps of shells and other metals that came to his hungry fingers, while the Red Cross sent a full complement of musical instruments down from Paris. And sothe Vichy A. E. F.-A. R. C. Playhouse came into the fullness of its existence—and night after night hung out the S. R. O. sign.
After all, whatisthe doughboy's idea of a good time? That is the very question our Red Cross asked itself—again and again. And because the correct answer could not be evolved in a moment, established not only after it had arrived in France a Bureau of Recreation and Welfare whose real job was, after plenty of practical experimentation, to establish the correct solution of the problem. For a long time this Bureau consisted of a small desk at the Paris headquarters, a Ford camionette, and Major Harold Ober. The camionette and Ober went from village to village along the lines from Bar-le-Duc to Gondrecourt with books, magazines, tobacco, writing material, and a small moving-picture show. These efforts many times furnished the only amusement to our early troops, billeted in quiet villages, where the quaintness of French pastoral life soon lost its novelty.
From that small beginning, Ober's work grew steadily. And because the Red Cross specialized more and more in that phase of army life which was its original purpose—hospitalization—Ober's task became in turn more and more devoted to the hospital centers, large and small—until the time came in practically every hospital ward in France—where the men were not so desperately ill as to make even music an irritant—that the "rag," and "jazz," or the latest musical comedy hit direct from Broadway were constant and welcome visitors to long rows of bedridden boys. In most cases these were phonographs, and because whenever I wish to be really convincing in the pages of this book, I fall back upon figures, permit me to mention that 1,243 phonographs, calling for 300,000 needles and 29,000 records, helped relieve the tedium of the American convalescents in the hospitals of France.
And, while we are still in figures, remember that there were times—unbelievable as it may seem to some folkwho were frequent visitors to our hospital wards over there—that the doughboy tired of music, canned or fresh, and turned gratefully to the printed page. To anticipate his needs in that regard, American residents in Paris and in London gave generously of their private libraries—a nucleus which soon was greatly increased by purchase. The books were sent around in portable boxes, a service which steadily grew until a library of from 1,000 to 10,000 books was maintained by the American Red Cross in each hospital—a total of some 100,000 all told, and of which a goodly proportion were histories, French grammars, dictionaries and technical works.
The demand for periodical literature was tremendous. In the months of December, 1918, alone, our Red Cross distributed nearly four million magazines and newspapers among our doughboys. Prominent among these last was theStars and Stripes, the clever and ingenious publication of the enlisted men themselves. A special "gift edition" of this remarkable weekly was obtained from the publishers for distribution in hospitals alone, and this ran into the hundreds of thousands each month—a high limitation which was reached only when the stock of print paper began to run low. The demand upon writing paper was hardly less than that upon print. The doughboy was a regular and prolific correspondent, and before January, 1919, our Red Cross had furnished him with seven million illustrated post cards, seven and a half million envelopes, and fourteen million sheets of writing paper.
But his eternal joy was in "shows." These might be two come-uppish lads, with gloves, going it in a roped arena, a flickering lantern displaying the well-known and untiring antics of Mr. Charles Chaplin or Mr. Douglas Fairbanks, the exquisite artistes of one of the opera houses in Paris in a composition that brought unforgetable joy to the ears and memories of the many, many lovers of music in our khaki—or a homemade production of the doughboyhimself. Of these the "movie" was, of course, the simplest to handle, and therefore by far the most universal. It began its A. E. F. career in France as a true "barnstormer." As early as July, 1917, a Red Cross man with a French motion-picture operator as an assistant had hied himself out from Paris, riding in one of the universal Ford camionettes, upon which had been mounted a generator and a projector. Upon arriving at an army camp, the show would be "put on"—with little fuss or delay. The smooth, whitewashed side of a stone building would make a bully screen and there was never even doubts of an audience or of its enthusiasms. For from wonderments at this additional strange contraption from theEtats Unis, the peasants and thepoilus, who were its very first admirers, grew rapidly into Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin and Billie Burke fans. This taste followed closely that all-conquering admiration for our chewing gum which overcame the French and left them quite helpless.
Eventually this "movie" institution of the Red Cross overseas grew to sizable proportions, under the direction of Lawrence Arnold, of New York. At least five and sometimes fourteen performances a week were given at each of our American hospitals in France—and with a complete change of program each week even to the Pathé weekly news, which was purchased and sent overseas by the Westchester County (N. Y.) Chapter of the American Red Cross as its own special contribution. But I think that the most interesting feature of this entire work—and the most human—was the ingenious scheme by which the projectors were so adapted as to throw the pictures upon the ceilings of the wards and so give an untold pleasure and diversion to the tedious hours of our boys who were so completely bedridden as not to be able to even sit erect. And there were many such.
We have drifted for the moment quite away from Vichy and the lovely blue and white and gold theater of our RedCross in the heart of that ancient town. While it was headquarters, it was, after all, but part of the American Red Cross show there; because while our Red Cross recognized that the biggest part of its job was taking care of the enlisted man it was by no means blind to the necessities of his officers. Which led to the regeneration—moral and otherwise—of still another well-known gambling place in the town—the smart casino in the center of the park. This became, quite quickly and easily, an officers' club for the A. E. F. One room was reserved ordinarily for the French, while at least once a week the entire place was given over to a dance.
Dancing! Neither the enlisted man nor the officer ever seemed to tire of it. Each week also the enlisted men piled up the tables and the chairs in their hut and conducted a dance of their own, of which one of the chief features was ice cream—not fox-trotting. As in the huts and canteens elsewhere across France there were never nearly enough girls to serve as partners for the men. But there were no "wallflowers." The floor manager always carried a whistle. A number of times during the progress of each number he blew it—as a signal that the men lined along the walls were privileged to "cut in" on those already dancing. And on the occasions when some restless, impetuous boy blew a whistle of his own and seized the first partner available there was ever a delightful confusion.
Yet with all these things it could not be said that life in the hospital center was exactly an even round of social events; yet it rarely ever ceased for long to be dramatic. Take that November evening when twenty-seven hundred of our boys who had been prisoners of thebochecame slipping into Vichy. Their uniforms were filthy and ragged. Slung from their shoulders were the Red Cross boxes such as had sustained them not only during their incarceration in Germany but on their long journey out of that miserable place.
The limitedcapacity of these Red Cross boxes for our imprisoned men had precluded their containing much more than mere food necessities. And the boys in the ragged uniforms were hungry, not only for food of the "home-cooked" varieties, but for everyday human associations. They had both; even though the hut and the casino each worked steadily and for long hours six wonderful nights in succession. Nearly four thousand miles away from home, every effort was made to make this home-coming into Vichy from the neutral gateways of Switzerland a real one.
These prisoners, as well as the greater numbers of the wounded, arrived with practically no personal possessions. The army promptly re-equipped them with uniforms, but the job of the Home and Hospital Bureau of the Army and Navy Department, which had this particular part of the big Red Cross job as its very own province, was to anticipate and look after all of their personal necessities. This thing it did, and its representatives coöperated with the army officers in studying the most urgent requirements and finding the very gifts which would provide the greatest proportion of real comfort.
Come back, if you will, once again to statistics. I make no apologies for introducing the flavor of the official report into this narrative from time to time. Reports ofttimes are indeed dull things; but the reports of almost any department of the Red Cross have a real human interest—even when they seemingly deal with mere percentages and rows of figures. Take a hospital which solemnly reports that 175,872 hospital days have been given to the army in the short space of four months. That fact can hardly be dismissed as a dull statement. It carries with it pictures of white wards, of the capable hands of nurses, of the faces of brave boys in long lines along the ways of an institution which modestly confesses that it holds but a mere fifteen hundred beds.
Because the following excerpt from the report of a RedCross captain at Vichy carries with it a picture of the boys who straggled into the local headquarters asking for everything from socks to chewing gum, it is set down here:
"During the month of October (1918), 78,278 packages of tobacco, 7,480 tubes of tooth paste, 7,650 toothbrushes, 3,650 combs, 3,460 Red Cross bags, 2,850 packages of gum, 1,650 cakes of soap, 1,250 pipes, 1,560 handkerchiefs, 1,245 cakes of chocolate, 1,200 packages of shaving soap, 950 pencils, 1,000 boxes of matches, 900 shaving brushes, 500 packages of playing cards, 450 washcloths, 400 sweaters, 350 razors, 350 boxes of talcum powder, and various smaller amounts of pens, ink, malted milk, razor blades, checkers, thread, games, pipe cleaners, scissors, and drinking cups were distributed free; chiefly, so far as we know, to penniless boys. As this is written, this office is having a thousand applicants a day and, while all their wants cannot be met, no one leaves empty-handed...."
"No one leaves empty-handed...."
The boys who marched across the snow-blanketed park at Vichy that January morning with their crimson-crossed bags in their hands, were, after all, only typical of many thousands who had gone before. For three days they had anticipated their evacuation by asking for writing paper, for souvenir postals, for pocket song books, for gloves, sweaters, and the rest of the usual output of the Red Cross—the variety of whose resources would put a modern city department store to the blush. One youngster came to the headquarters on the last day holding his trench cap in his hand.
"It's too dirty for the trip home," he said. "Can't the Red Cross get me a new one?"
No, the Red Cross could not duplicate the work of the army's quartermasters, but it could, and would, help the boy out. So it gave him a cake of soap and showed him how he could clean his greasy cap quite thoroughly and then dry it on the office stove before starting on the march across the park.
The difficultiesof keeping up a full stock of Red Cross supplies of every sort in a land and in times when shipping space of all kinds was at a great premium should be obvious. Of necessity surgical supplies took precedence over luxuries of every sort. Then it was that such places as Vichy and Savenay and all the rest of them had to depend, not alone upon their normal receipts, but upon the resourcefulness of individual workers and the fruitfulness of the surrounding country. That was the reason why in one instance when Red Cross bags could not be shipped into Vichy, they were manufactured there by the thousands by French needlewomen. Indeed no doughboy should leave "empty-handed." Near by districts for a considerable number of miles roundabout were invaded by automobiles seeking the bright-colored cretonnes, which make the bags so very gay and, in turn, so much the more welcome.
On at least two other occasions the vicinage was similarly combed for emergency supplies—for the American celebrations of both Thanksgiving Day and Christmas, 1918. Much was made of both these glorious Yankee holidays. The time was propitious for real celebration. Peace was not only in the air, but at last actually accomplished. The hearts of men were softened. One could sing of "peace on earth" and not choke as the words came to his lips.
So it was that Christmas Day at Vichy was a particularly gay one—gay, despite even the pain and suffering that remained in all the great hospital wards there. For men—American men, if you please, could, and did, hide for the nonce their fearful suffering. Pain begone! The carols were in the air. The hundreds of gayly decorated electric-light bulbs were flashing on at dusk. And you might go from ward to ward and there count all of fifty Christmas trees—these, too, brilliantly decorated. And the decorators in all these instances had been Red Cross women and men—and wounded soldiers lying ill at ease in their hospital cots. They made a great job of all of it—a merry job as well. And when the supplies of suchconventional raw materials as tinsel and popcorn fell short they seemed to find something else that did quite as well.
For that hospital celebration among our wounded men at Vichy just 13,657 socks were filled, which bespeaks the exact number of doughboys that participated in the celebration. If they could have spoken, each of these humble articles of clothing might easily have told a double story—the tale of its own origin and the romance that came to it after that memorable Christmas Day; for they were American knit socks, and no factory—no inanimate, impersonal place, peopled with machines rather than with humans—had turned them forth. Each and every one of them were hand-knitted. And some of them had come from my lady's parlor, situated in an upper floor, perhaps, of a great and gaudy apartment house, and some had come from the prairie ranch, and some had come from cabins upon the steep and desolate mountainsides of the Alleghenies or the Rockies or the Sierras. From East and West and North and South they had come—but all had come from the United States; and I am perfectly willing to predict that every blessed one returned forthwith to the land of its birth.
The mate of each one of these 13,657 socks was rolled and placed in its toe. Then followed other things—shaving soap, cigarettes, tobacco, nuts, candy, handkerchiefs—by this time you ought to know the Red Cross list as well as I. While, by connivance with the head nurse of each of the wards, each blessed sock was individually tagged and addressed to its recipient. There is nothing, you know, like personal quality in a Christmas gift.
If, after the perusal of all these pages, you still insist upon being one of those folk who regard the triumph of our Red Cross in France as one of American organization, rather than of American individualism, and American generosity, permit me to explain to you that in the paragraphs of this chapter you have slipped from the work ofthe Bureau of Hospital Administration to that of the Home and Hospital Bureau of the Army and Navy Department. The distinctly medical and surgical phases of the Red Cross work in the A. E. F. hospitals across France was a major portion of the burden of Colonel Burlingame's job; the more purely recreative and comfort-giving phases came under Majors J. B. A. Fosburgh and Horace M. Swope, both of whom served as directors of the Army and Navy Departments during the Gibson régime. But the distinction between these two departments was almost entirely one of name. Each, after all, was American Red Cross and as American Red Cross worked—to a common and unselfish and entirely humanitarian end.
If I have lingered upon Vichy it has been because its story was so nearly the story of the Red Cross work in other A. E. F. hospitals across France. The narrative of each differs as a rule only in the most minor details. Sometimes, of course, the unexpected happened, as at Mesves, where our Red Cross under emergency served a double purpose. During the October, 1918, drive, when the American Army was functioning to its highest efficiency and in so functioning was, of necessity, making a fearful sacrifice of its human units, this hut was taken over by the Medical Corps of the army and fitted out as an emergency ward, with ninety-five cots. For six weeks it so served as a direct hospital function.
In the great Base Hospital No. 114 at Beau Deserte—just outside the embarkation ports of Bordeaux and Bassens—our Red Cross not only served from 1,200 to 1,500 cups of coffee a day in its huge hut, but actually maintained an athletic field, in addition to the billiard tables which were an almost universal feature of every Red Cross hut. And at another base hospital in that same Bordeaux district, several companies of evacuated men were being told off into groups of a hundred each—and each in charge of a top sergeant—ready to sail on the followingday. Then, just as the men were about to march to the gangplank of the waiting steamer, one of their number fell ill of the scarlet fever and the entire group had to be quarantined. It was one of the many jobs of the Red Cross force there to keep these restless and disappointed men amused and as happy as possible, and in turn necessary to use a little philosophy.
Philosophy?
One Red Cross girl down there at that particular time told me how she had experimented with it in that trying instance. Her eyes sparkled as she announced the results of the experiments.
"It worked, it really worked," she said. "I found a group of colored men, and upon that group used all the scientific new thought that I might possibly bring to my aid, and with real success. The men were mollified and a bit contented, so that one of them—I think that back in the Middle West he had been a Pullman porter—finally came to me and said:
"'Missy, I's a-found our hoodoo. Sure what could we expect when we've got a cross-eyed nigger preacher in our squad?'"
"Wounded yesterday; feeling fine to-day."
How many times that message—varying sometimes in its exact phrasing, but never in its intent—was flashed from France to the United States during the progress of the war never will be known. It was a lie—of course. Would any sane mother believe it, even for a minute? But it was the lie glorified—the lie idealized, if you will permit me to use such an expression. And it was the only lie that I have ever known to be not only sanctioned, but officially urged, by a great humanitarian organization. For the Red Cross searchers in the American hospitals in France were not allowed to write to the folks at home in any other tenor. Little scraps of messages muttered, perhaps, between groans and prayers, were hastily taken down by the Red Cross women in the hospitals, and by them quickly translated into a message of good cheer for the cable overseas. Any other sort was unthinkable.
Here was a typical one of these:
"Wounded yesterday in stomach—feeling fine. Tell mother will be up in a day or two."
Would you like to look behind the scenes in the case of this particular message? Then come with me. We are "behind the scenes" now—in the dressing room which closely adjoins the operating room in a big American evacuation hospital not far from Verdun. They had done with him on the operating table—for the moment. One operation had been performed, but another was to follow quickly. In the meantime, the soldier boy—he really was not much more than a boy—sat straight upward onhis cot and watched them as they pulled the tight, clinging gauze from his raw and tender flesh. All he said during the process was:
"Do you think that I could rest a minute, doc, before you do the second one?"
He got his momentary rest. And as he got it, sat, with a cigarette between his tightly clinched teeth, and dictated the letter home which you have just read.
Another Red Cross girl walking through one of the wards of that same hospital near Verdun stopped at the signal of a wounded man who lay abed. He was a very sick-looking man; his face had the very pallor of death. And his voice was very low and weak as he told the Red Cross woman that he wanted her to write a letter for him to his wife back in a little Indiana town.
"Tell that I'm wounded—just a little wounded, you understand. Got a little shrapnel in my legs, but that I'll be home by Christmas. Did you get all of that?"
The girl nodded yes. She took the notes on a bit of scrap paper mechanically; for all the time her eyes were on the face of the man. All the time save once—when they fell upon the smooth counterpane of his bed, then returned to the man's face once again. She knew that he was lying, and because she was new, just come over from America—she did not know that the Red Cross held one particular lie to be both glorified and sanctified—she folded up the memorandum, told the wounded man that she would write the letter—and went out.
She went straight to the records room of the place. Yes, it was true. Her suspicions as to the unnatural smoothness of that counterpane were confirmed there. The man had had shrapnel in both legs, but that was not all. Both had been amputated—well above the knees.
The Red Cross girl went back to him, her eyes blazing with anger. Her anger all but overcame her natural tenderness.
"I can't,I can't," she expostulated. "I can't send that letter."
"Why can't you?" he coolly replied.
She faced him with the truth.
"Well, what of it?" said he. "If I do get home, I'll get home by Christmas—and that will be time enough for her to know the truth. She'll be ready for it, then. But—" he lowered his voice almost to a whisper—"I'm not going to get home. The doctor's told me that, but he don't have to tell me; I know it. And if Idon'tget home she'll never be the wiser——. You write that letter, just as I told it to you."
Here was by far the saddest phase of the Red Cross work for our soldier boys—and almost the most important. It was one thing for the girl in the steel-gray uniform, with the little crimson crosses affixed to her shoulders, to play and make merry with the wounded men who were getting well; but it was a different and vastly more difficult part of the job to play fair, let alone make merry, with those who were not going to get well; who, at the best, were to shuffle through the rest of their lives maimed or crippled or blind. Yet what an essential part of the big job all that was! And how our girls—moved by those great fountains of human love and sympathy and tenderness that seemingly spring forever in women's hearts, rose to this supreme test over there! And after they had so arisen how trivial seemed the mere handing out of sandwiches or coffee or cigarettes! This was the real touch of war—the touch supreme. After it, all others seemed almost as nothing.
Early in the progress of the conflict our Red Cross foresaw the great necessity that would be coming for its acting as a medium of communication between the doughboy and his folks—three thousand miles or more away. The United States Army had made little or no provision to meetthis need; it had far larger and far more immediate problems ahead of it. And so about the best that it could be expected to do would be to notify the folks at home that their boy had made sacrifice—supreme or very great—for his country; at the best, a sort of emotionless proceeding upon its part. In the meantime there was hardly a waking hour that those selfsame folks were not thinking of the boy in khaki. While if anything happened to him—serious even, but not quite serious enough to justify the setting of the somewhat cumbersome machinery of the army's elaborate system of notification into motion—both he and the folks were helpless. France is indeed a long, long distance away from the United States. Three thousand miles is a gap not easily spanned.
But it was the job of the American Red Cross to span that gap; not only to bring news of the boy to the home folks, but, in many, many instances, to bring news of them to him. The one thing was nearly as valuable as the other. And while in the elaborate organization of the American Red Cross they were operated as separate functions and bureaus, their work in reality was so interwoven that in the pages of this book we shall consider them virtually as one, and shall begin a serious consideration of this important phase of Red Cross work by calling attention to a very few of the ramifications of a hospital searcher's job. First and foremost her task was to tell those same home folks all that she could pen, or typewrite, about their own particular soldier—exactly where he was at that time and just how he progressed. The ordinary method of handling the vast volume of these messages was in the form of short, concise, personal reports which passed through the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and were forwarded by it to the National Headquarters at Washington, where they were made up into letters and forwarded to the families. There were, of course, many variations in this method; for instance, when it was advisable for Paris to write direct to the boy's parents, and in those other cases, which you have alreadyseen, where the letter to America went direct from the Red Cross worker's room at the hospital. The choice between these methods was left quite largely to the individual worker who, in turn, weighed each situation and its necessities, individually and separately.
It was only in these last instances that the lie was sanctioned and even permitted, and even then only upon the absolute demand of the wounded man, himself. He had all the rights in such a situation, and the Red Cross bowed to and respected those rights—in every case.
The Red Cross reports through headquarters were accurate—invariably, and, at first sight, generally unemotional. Here is one of them that is quite typical:
"Private Edward Jones—20th Regiment, Company H—has been wounded in both legs. Wounds painful, but amputation not necessary. In excellent spirits—sends love to family."
Short, to be sure. But to a newsless family three thousand—perhaps six thousand—miles away, with its necessary detail, tremendously satisfying.
Return with me if you will for a final visit to Vichy. No group of Red Cross workers anywhere held a more sacred responsibility than the women who were stationed there. Day in and day out they passed through the white lanes of wards in the military hospitals and each day looked—and looked deeply—into the hearts of the American boys that lined them. Heart and soul these women of the steel-gray uniforms were at the service of our wounded soldier men—at their very beck and call, if you please. And when of a morning a bed here or a bed there was empty, the searchers understood, and prepared to write a letter—a scant matter of sympathetic record at the best—that somewhere back in America would at least relieve the tension of waiting.
Some of the messages that these searchers sent were—as you already know—full of gladness; thank God forthem! Others warned gently—the boy was coming home with his face forever scarred or his limbs or his eyes gone. Still others told—and told again and again—of the brave and the battling soul that finally had slipped away into the eternal mystery of the Valley. Each of these last held between its tiny pages a single flower—plucked at the last moment from the funeral wreath.
Let me quote from one of these letters of a Red Cross searcher.
"I am constantly on duty here," she says, "and visit your brother Harry almost daily. He has been unfortunate enough to have been wounded in the right leg, which the doctors found necessary to amputate just below the knee. I know this will be a great shock to you, but let me hasten to add that Harry is in the best of condition otherwise. The wound is healing marvelously clean and quickly. He is in the healthiest and happiest frame of mind and exceptionally cheerful. Harry wants me to tell you that the last dressing of the wound was yesterday. He expects to be up and trying his crutches within ten days. He received your September money order of ten dollars for which he thanks you very much. I have just cashed it for him.... I am sorry to be the bearer of this sad news, but am happy that I can assure you of his early recovery and his splendid courage."
Men who were able to write for themselves were supplied with paper and encouraged to do so. Others who were far too ill or confined prone in surgical apparatus—their very hands caught and held taut in a cruel network of pulleys and weights and drain tubes—dictated their letters home—and invariably lied as to their condition. All was "going well." The patient sufferer had but one report to pass his lips. "Tell them that I'm feeling fine," was the message that he ordered home.
Sometimes by piecing together information culled from a variety of sources, the searcher was enabled to reconstruct the picture of the last hour of some soldier's life. Comradeswould recount the story of his death at the front or describe the moment of his capture by the enemy. In fact persistent questioning revealed such facts as finally cleared up the doubt as to the fate of a certain Yankee corporal. It happened that the boy had disappeared in April, 1918. It was a number of months afterward that a patient was discovered at a port of embarkation who said:
"Yes, he was killed when the Germans were attacking and a heavy barrage was coming over. They came around back of us and threw hand grenades from the rear. Corporal —— pulled his pistol and yelled: 'Here they come, boys! Give it to them!' He was awfully generous. He used to get a lot of scrapbooks and pass them around to the boys. When he got a box from home he shared it. He was a mighty generous fellow about lending money, too."
The women who made those scrapbooks and packed those boxes of "goodies" can have no memento from his grave over there, but here was the sweet memory of his courage and his generosity. Think of the comfort that her woman's soul must have found in that frank, outspoken boyish tribute and the relief at finally having had at least the definite information of the truth! So it was that our Red Cross searchers gave constant and almost invaluable aid in revising and verifying the casualty lists of the army; and many who were accounted missing—that dread term that means nothing and yet can mean so much—could, because of their work, be accurately enrolled as dead or as prisoners.
As far back as the summer of 1917 five women had been definitely assigned to this activity—not at Vichy then, but at the American army hospitals which already were beginning to multiply in France. By December of the following year this staff numbered nearly two hundred women, who worked either in the hospitals or in the American Red Cross headquarters in Paris. And while these worked in the hospitals, the Red Cross officers in the field—men serving as searchers, chaplains, or Home Communicationrepresentatives—were working in close coöperation with the statistical officers of the army. These were stationed in training camps and concentration camps and with various combat divisions. Ten men were assigned direct by the Red Cross to the Central Records Office of the Adjutant General's Department of the A. E. F.
Understand very clearly, if you will, please, once again, that while in very rare cases our Red Cross did announce casualties, that, after all, was not its real province. To engage in that would have been a mere duplication of the army's own work. Mortality letters were not sent direct to the nearest of kin; they were forwarded to the A. E. F. Central Records Office in France for final disposition, so that their release through the mails would not anticipate the official announcement from the War Department; while the other information, in most instances, was reported to the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and was later disseminated here in the United States from the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington.
The lists of the missing soldiers were furnished by the army. Duplicates of these were then immediately distributed to the Red Cross searchers and representatives, who at once sought clues to the individual stories to be builded about the name of each man. Sometimes through arrangements with the army authorities thebocheprisoners were interviewed, and these occasionally furnished facts with reference to American prisoners in Germany and gave definite information about aviators who had apparently disappeared within the enemy lines.
Incorporated in these lists of the missing were also the names of all soldiers and sailors concerning whom inquiries had been made of our Red Cross either here in America or over there in France. In the one case these inquiries and in the other through the Paris headquarters in the Hotel Regina. In one month 1,955 cables were sent across the Atlantic from the United States requiring immediate information regarding wounded or missing men. In December,just following the armistice, the Paris office received more than a thousand individual requests for news of the doughboys. Almost literally these came in floodtides; but none was ignored or forgotten. It made little difference, either, as to whether any of them was addressed. The Red Cross cleared its mail with a good deal of efficiency and promptness. Its huge central post-office in Paris was a marvel of precision—and it had at all times a difficult job. Yet it so happened that it was in charge of a man without any previous experience in such a task—Senator Henry Brevoort Kane, of Rhode Island. It chanced that Senator Kane displayed an immediate adaptability for the job—and with this, combined with great patience and persistence, he made a real success of it.
Perhaps the most satisfactory part of the searcher's job was in many ways the search for missing men—by interviewing the boys in the hospitals about their friends and intimates, getting tremendously tiny details about these in camp or in battle, or even in the hospitals themselves, and from these details evolving the web of evidence—Conan Doyle or E. Phillips Oppenheim could hardly have had a more fascinating time of it than did some of our Red Cross women in unraveling the tangle of confusion which they found wound about this boy or that, or the other fellow. Many an agonizing situation, indeed, was cleared up through the efforts of these women. And such times were almost the sole relief from a task that frequently was dreary and almost always distressing.
If you would the better understand the real task that these women faced, permit me to quote from a letter written by one of them:
"The most entertaining part of my work is writing letters home for the wounded boys. In answer to my letters the replies that come back are more than adequate reward. The letters come from farmhouses in Vermont, from factory towns in Connecticut, from busy Massachusetts cities, and from lonely Western ranches. They are pathetic, sad,funny; but all of them are overflowing with surprises and gratitude for the person in the mysterious 'over there' who had taken the trouble to visit and write home for her 'particular boy' after he was wounded. These letters for the boys were usually written to a woman—mothers, sisters, or 'girls' the favorites first, of course, although occasionally 'aunty' or 'teacher' came in for a message of reassurance.
"The first letter I had to write was for a boy who had lost his right eye. He wanted me to write his girl, whose photographs I had seen several times. She had very fluffy hair and usually seemed to stand in an apple orchard. After this he made a rather staggering suggestion: Would I please read all of Alice's letters so that I should know what kind of a girl she was and so answer her letters better! Realizing that a Red Cross worker should flinch at nothing and trying not to think of Alice's feelings in the matter, I took the letters out of a bag at the head of his bed and plunged into the first one.
"To my intense relief they all began 'Dear Bill,' and ended 'Your true friend, Alice.' Her only reference to matters of the heart was the hope that he would not fall in love with any of those pretty Red Cross nurses over there. For the most part Alice seemed to prefer impersonal topics, such as the potato crop, the new class, and the party at the grange Saturday night. Bill thought she was a mighty fine writer and, I think, was a little worried lest I be unable to compose a letter worthy of her. He was worried, too, about the best way to tell her that he had lost an eye. 'You know,Idon't care. The left one is working better than it ever did and I know it won't make no difference in the way she thinks of me, but she'll feel pretty bad for me, I know that, and I want you to please tell her about it real gentle.' We finally decided to tell her in this letter that he had been seriously injured in his right eye and then, in the next letter, which he would write himself, he would tell her it was gone.
"In due timeI received a grateful note from Alice in a very long, elegant, and exceedingly narrow envelope inclosing a correspondence card covered with high-schoolish-girlish writing. 'Thank you so much,' she wrote, 'for your letter giving me news of Bill, who I was getting so anxious about, as I had not heard from him for so long. I am glad he is getting better and that he really is not suffering.'
"Another grateful letter came from the mother of Michael Holihan. Mike had been badly wounded and at first no one thought he could possibly pull through, for he had a piece of shrapnel in the liver. He survived the operation, however, and became very anxious to write his mother. 'Now you just please write her what I tell you,' he said. 'Mother is pretty old now and she is always worrying, but I got it all thought out just what I am going to say to make her stop.' This is what he dictated: