"Winding down through sleeping townPale stars of early dawn;Like ancient knight with squire by side,Driver and helper now we ride—The camion caravan."In between the rows of treesGlare of the mid-day sun;Creeping along the highway wide,Slowly in long defile, we ride—The camion caravan."Homeward toremorqueand rest,Pale stars of early night;Through stillness of the eventide,Back through the winding town we ride—The camion caravan."
"Winding down through sleeping townPale stars of early dawn;Like ancient knight with squire by side,Driver and helper now we ride—The camion caravan.
"In between the rows of treesGlare of the mid-day sun;Creeping along the highway wide,Slowly in long defile, we ride—The camion caravan.
"Homeward toremorqueand rest,Pale stars of early night;Through stillness of the eventide,Back through the winding town we ride—The camion caravan."
Sometime during the dark hours of the early morning we stopped in the courtyard of a hospital and I was taken into another examination room illuminated with painfully brilliant lights. I was placed on a table for an examination, which seemed rather hurried, and then the table was rolled away some distance down a corridor. I never understood that move until some weeks later when a Lieutenant medical officer told me that it was he who had examined me at that place.
"You're looking pretty fit, now," he said, "but that night when I saw you I ticketed you for the dead pile. You didn't look like you could live till morning."
His statement gave me some satisfaction. There is always joy in fooling the doctor.
Hartzell, who still accompanied me, apparently rescued me from the "dead pile" and we started on another motor trip, this time on a stretcher in a large, easier-riding ambulance. In this I arrived shortly after dawn at the United States Military Base Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris.
There were more hurried examinations and soon I was rolled down a corridor on a wheeled table, into an elevator that started upward. Then the wheeled table raced down another long corridor and I began to feel that my journeyings were endless. We stopped finally in a room where I distinctly caught the odour of ether. Some one began removing my boots and clothes. As that some one worked he talked to me.
"I know you, Mr. Gibbons," he said. "I'm from Chicago also. I am Sergeant Stephen Hayes. I used to go to Hyde Park High School. We're going to fix you up right away."
I learned from Hayes that I was lying in a room adjoining the operating chamber and was being prepared for the operating table. Some information concerning the extent of my injuries and the purpose of the operation would have been comforting and would have relieved the sensation of utter helpless childishness that I was experiencing.
I knew I was about to go under the influence of the anesthetic and that something was going to be done to me. I had every confidence that whatever was done would be for the best but it was perfectly natural that I should be curious about it. Was the operation to be a serious one or a minor one? Would they have to remove my eye? Would they have to operate on my skull? How about the arm? Would there be an amputation? How about the other eye? Would I ever see again? It must be remembered that in spite of all the examinations I had not been informed and consequently had no knowledge concerning the extent of my injuries. The only information I had received had been included in vague remarks intended as soothing, such as "You're all right, old man." "You'll pull through fine." "You're coming along nicely." But all of it had seemed too professionally optimistic to satisfy me and my doubts still remained.
They were relieved, however, by the pressure of a hand and the sound of a voice. In the words spoken and in the pressure of the hand, there was hardly anything different from similar hand pressures and similar spoken phrases that had come to me during the night, yet therewas everything different. This voice and this hand carried supreme confidence. I could believe in both of them. I felt the hand pressure on my right shoulder and the mild kindly voice said:
"Son, I am going to operate on you. I have examined you and you are all right. You are going to come through fine. Don't worry about anything."
"Thank you, very much," I said, "I like your voice. It sounds like my father's. Will you tell me your name?"
"I am Major Powers," the kindly voice said. "Now just take it easy, and I will talk to you again in a couple of hours when you feel better."
The speaker, as I learned later, was Major Charles Powers, of Denver, Colorado, one of the best-known and best-loved surgeons in the West. A man far advanced in his profession and well advanced in his years, a man whose life has not been one of continual health, a man who, upon America's entry of the war, sacrificed the safety of the beneficial air rarity of his native Denver to answer the country's call, to go to France at great personal risk to his health—a risk only appreciated by those who know him well. It was Major Powers who operated upon the compound fracture in my skull that morning.
My mental note-taking continued as the anesthetist worked over me with the ether. As I began breathing the fumes I remember that my senses were keenly making observations on every sensation I experienced. The thought even went through my mind that it would be rather an unusual thing to report completely the impressions of coma. This suggestion became a determination and I became keyed up to everything going on about me.
The conversation of the young doctor who was administeringthe anesthetic interested me unusually. He was very busy and business-like and although I considered myself an important and most interested party in the entire proceedings, his conversation ignored me entirely. He not only did not talk to me, but he was not even talking about me. As he continued to apply the ether, he kept up a running fire of entirely extraneous remarks with some other person near the table. I did not appreciate then, as I do now, that I was only one of very, very many that he had anesthetised that morning and the night before, but at the time his seeming lack of all interest in me as me, piqued me considerably.
"Are you feeling my pulse?" I said. I could not feel his hand on either of my wrists, but I asked the question principally to inject myself into the conversation in some way or other, preferably in some way that would call him to account, as I had by this time aroused within me a keen and healthy dislike for this busy little worker whom I could not see but who stood over me and carried on conversations with other people to my utter and complete exclusion. And all the time he was engaged in feeding me the fumes that I knew would soon steal away my senses.
"Now, never you mind about your pulse," he replied somewhat peevishly. "I'm taking care of this." It seemed to me from the tone of his voice that he implied I was talking about something that was none of my business and I had the distinct conviction that if the proceedings were anybody's business, they certainly were mine.
"You will pardon me for manifesting a mild interest in what you are doing to me," I said, "but you see I know that something is going to be done to my righteye and inasmuch as that is the only eye I've got on that side, I can't help being concerned."
"Now, you just forget it and take deep breaths, and say, Charlie, did you see that case over in Ward 62? That was a wonderful case. The bullet hit the man in the head and they took the lead out of his stomach. He's got the bullet on the table beside him now. Talk about bullet eaters—believe me, those Marines sure are."
I hurled myself back into the conversation.
"I'll take deep breaths if you'll loosen the straps over my chest," I said, getting madder each minute. "How can I take a full breath when you've got my lungs strapped down?"
"Well, how's that?" responded the conversational anesthetist, as he loosened one of the straps. "Now, take one breath of fresh air—one deep, long breath, now."
I turned my head to one side to escape the fumes from the stifling towel over my face and made a frenzied gulp for fresh air. As I did so, one large drop of ether fell on the table right in front of my nose and the deep long breath I got had very little air in it. I felt I had been tricked.
"You're pretty cute, old timer, aren't you?" I remarked to the anesthetist for the purpose of letting him know that I was on to his game, but either he didn't hear me, or he was too interested in telling Charlie about his hopes and ambitions to be sent to the front with a medical unit that worked under range of the guns. He returned to a consideration of me with the following remark:
"All right, he's under now; where's the next one?"
"The hell I am," I responded hastily, as visions of knives and saws and gimlets and brain chisels wentthrough my mind. I had no intention or desire of being conscious when the carpenters and plumbers started to work on me.
I was completely ignored and the table started moving. We rolled across the floor and there commenced a clicking under the back of my head, not unlike the sound made when the barber lowers or elevates the head-rest on his chair. The table rolled seemingly a long distance down a long corridor and then came to the top of a slanting runway.
As I started riding the table down the runway I began to see that I was descending an inclined tube which seemed to be filled with yellow vapour. Some distance down, the table slowed up and we came to a stop in front of a circular bulkhead in the tunnel.
There was a door in the centre of the bulkhead and in the centre of the door there was a small wicket window which opened and two grotesquely smiling eyes peered out at me. Those eyes inspected me from head to foot and then, apparently satisfied, they twinkled and the wicket closed with a snap. Then the door opened and out stepped a quaint and curious figure with gnarled limbs and arms and a peculiar misshapen head, completely covered with a short growth of black hair.
I laughed outright, laughed hilariously. I recognised the man. The last time I had seen him was when he stepped out of a gas tank on the 18th floor of an office building in Chicago where I was reclining at the time in a dentist chair. He was the little gas demon who walked with me through the Elysian fields the last time I had a tooth pulled.
"Well you poor little son-of-a-gun," I said, by way of greeting. "What are you doing way over here inFrance? I haven't seen you for almost two years, since that day back in Chicago."
The gas demon rolled his head from one side to the other and smiled, but I can't remember what he said. My mental note-taking concluded about there because the next memory I have is of complete darkness, and lying on my back in a cramped position while a horse trampled on my left arm.
"Back off of there," I shouted, but the animal's hoofs didn't move. The only effect my shouting had was to bring a soft hand into my right one, and a sweet voice close beside me.
"You're all right, now," said the sweet voice, "just try to take a little nap and you'll feel better."
Then I knew it was all over, that is, the operation was over, or something was over. Anyhow my mind was working and I was in a position where I wanted to know things again. I recall now, with a smile, that the first things that passed through my mind were the threadbare bromides so often quoted "Where am I?" I recall feeling the urge to say something at least original, so I enquired:
"What place is this, and will you please tell me what day and time it is?"
"This is the Military Base Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine just on the outskirts of Paris, and it is about eleven o'clock in the morning and to-day is Friday, June the seventh."
Then I went back to sleep with an etherised taste in my mouth like a motorman's glove.
There were fourteen wounded American soldiers in my ward—all men from the ranks and representing almost as many nationalistic extractions. There was an Irishman, a Swede, an Italian, a Jew, a Pole, one man of German parentage, and one man of Russian extraction. All of them had been wounded at the front and all of them now had something nearer and dearer to them than any traditions that might have been handed down to them from a mother country—they had fought and bled and suffered for a new country,theirnew country.
Here in this ward was the new melting pot of America. Not the melting pot of our great American cities where nationalistic quarters still exist, but a greater fusion process from which these men had emerged with unquestionable Americanism. They are the real and the new Americans—born in the hell of battle.
One night as we lay there, we heard an automobile racing through a street in this sleepy, warm littlefaubourgof Paris. The motor was sounding on its siren a call that was familiar to all of us. It was the alarm of a night attack from the air. It meant that German planes had crossed the front line and were on their way with death and destruction for Paris.
A nurse entered the room and drew the curtains of the tall windows to keep from our eyes the flash and the glitter of the shells that soon began to burst in the sky above us as the aerial defences located on the outer circle of the city began to erect a wall of bursting steel aroundthe French capital. We could hear the guns barking close by and occasionally the louder boom that told us one of the German bombs had landed. Particles of shrapnel began falling in the garden beneath the windows of our ward and we could hear the rattle of the pieces on the slate roof of a pavilion there. It is most unpleasant, it goes without saying, to lie helpless on one's back and grapple with the realisation that directly over your head—right straight above your eyes and face—is an enemy airplane loaded with bombs. Many of us knew that those bombs contained, some of them, more than two hundred pounds of melilite and some of us had witnessed the terrific havoc they wrought when they landed on a building. All of us knew, as the world knows, the particular attraction that hospitals have for German bombs.
The aerial bombardment subsided after some ten or fifteen minutes and soon we heard the motor racing back through the streets while a musician in the car sounded on a bugle the "prologue" or the signal that the raid was over. The invaders had been driven back. All of us in the ward tried to sleep. But nerves tingled from this more or less uncomfortable experience and wounds ached and burned. Sleep was almost out of the question, and in the darkened ward I soon noticed the red glow of cigarette after cigarette from bed to bed as the men sought to woo relief with tobacco smoke.
We began to discuss a subject very near and very dear to all wounded men. That is, what they are going to do as soon as they get out of the hospital. It is known, of course, that the first consideration usually is, to return to the front, but in many instances in our ward, this was entirely out of the question.
So it was with Dan Bailey who occupied a bed twobeds on my right. His left leg was off above the knee. He lost it going over the top at Cantigny.
"I know what I'm going to do when I get home," he said, "I am going to get a job as an instructor in a roller skating rink."
In a bed on the other side of the ward was a young man with his right arm off. His name was Johnson and he had been a musician. In time of battle, musicians lay aside their trombones and cornets and go over the top with the men, only they carry stretchers instead of rifles. Johnson had done this. Something had exploded quite close to him and his entire recollection of the battle was that he had awakened being carried back on his own stretcher.
"I know where I can sure get work," he said, glancing down at the stump of his lost arm. "I am going to sign up as a pitcher with the St. Louis Nationals."
Days later when I looked on Johnson for the first time, I asked him if he wasn't Irish, and he said no. Then I asked him where he lost his arm and he replied, "At the yoint." And then I knew where he came from.
But concerning after-the-war occupations, I endeavoured that night to contribute something in a similar vein to the general discussion, and I suggested the possibility that I might return to give lessons on the monocle.
The prize prospect, however, was submitted by a man who occupied a bed far over in one corner of the room. He was the possessor of a polysyllabic name—a name sprinkled with k's, s's and z's, with a scarcity of vowels—a name that we could not pronounce, much less remember. On account of his size we called him "Big Boy." His was a peculiar story.
He had been captured by three Germans who were marching him back to their line. In telling me the storyBig Boy said, "Mr. Gibbons, I made up my mind as I walked back with them that I might just as well be dead as to spend the rest of the war studying German."
So he had struck the man on the right and the one on the left and had downed both of them, but the German in back of him, got him with the bayonet. A nerve centre in his back was severed by the slash of the steel that extended almost from one shoulder to the other, and Big Boy had fallen to the ground, his arms and legs powerless. Then the German with the bayonet robbed him. Big Boy enumerated the loss to me,—fifty-three dollars and his girl's picture.
Although paralysed and helpless, there was nothing down in the mouth about Big Boy—indeed, he provided most of the fun in the ward. He had an idea all of his own about what he was going to do after the war and he let us know about it that night.
"All of you guys have told what you're going to do," he said, "now I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm going back to that little town of mine in Ohio and go down to the grocery store and sit there on a soap box on the porch.
"Then I'm going to gather all the little boys in the neighbourhood round about me and then I'm going to outlie the G. A. R."
There was one thing in that ward that nobody could lie about and that was the twitches of pain we suffered in the mornings when the old dressings of the day before were changed and new ones applied.
The doctor and his woman assistant who had charge of the surgical dressings on that corridor would arrive in the ward shortly after breakfast. They would be wheeling in front of them a rubber-tired, white-enamelled vehicle on which were piled the jars of antiseptic gauzeand trays of nickel-plated instruments, which both the doctor and his assistant would handle with rubber-gloved hands. In our ward that vehicle was known as the "Agony Cart," and every time it stopped at the foot of a bed you would be pretty sure to hear a groan or a stifled wail in a few minutes.
We had various ways of expressing or suppressing the pain. You who have had a particularly vicious mustard plaster jerked off that tender spot in the back, right between the shoulders, have some small conception of the delicate sensation that accompanies the removal of old gauze from a healing wound.
Some of the men would grit their teeth and grunt, others would put their wrists in their mouths and bite themselves during the operation. Some others would try to keep talking to the doctor or the nurse while the ordeal was in progress and others would just simply shout. There was little satisfaction to be gained from these expressions of pain because while one man was yelling the other thirteen in the ward were shouting with glee and chaffing him, and as soon as his wounds had been redressed he would join in the laughs at the expense of those who followed him.
There was a Jewish boy in the ward and he had a particularly painful shell wound in his right leg. He was plucky about the painful treatment and used to say to the doctor, "Don't mind me yelling, doc. I can't help it, but you just keep right on."
The Jew boy's cry of pain as near as I can reproduce it went something like this, "Oy! Oy!! Oy!!! YOY!!! Doctor!"
The Jew boy's clear-toned enunciation of this Yiddish lullaby, as the rest of the ward called it, brought many a heartless, fiendish laugh from the occupants of theother beds. We almost lost one of our patients on account of that laugh. He nearly laughed himself to death—in fact.
This near victim of uncontrollable risibilities was an Italian boy from the East Side of New York. A piece of shrapnel had penetrated one of his lungs and pleurisy had developed in the other one. It had become necessary to operate on one of the lungs and tape it down. The boy had to do his best to breathe with one lung that was affected by pleurisy. Every breath was like the stab of a knife and it was quite natural that the patient would be peevish and garrulous. The whole ward called him the "dying Wop." But his name was Frank.
When the Jew boy would run the scale with his torture cry, the "dying Wop" would be forced to forget his laboured breathing and give vent to laughter. These almost fatal laughs sounded something like this:
"He! Hee!! Hee!!! (on a rising inflection and then much softer) Oh, Oh, Oh! Stop him, stop him, stop him!" The "He-Hee's" were laughs, but the "Oh-oh's" were excruciating pain.
Frank grew steadily worse and had to be removed from the ward. Weeks afterward I went back to see him and found him much thinner and considerably weaker. He occupied a bed on one of the pavilions in the garden. He was still breathing out of that one lung and between gasps he told me that six men had died in the bed next to him. Then he smiled up at me with a look in his eyes that seemed to say, "But they haven't croaked the 'dying Wop' yet."
"This here—hospital stuff——" Frank told me slowly, and between gasps, "is the big fight after all. I know—I am fighting here—against death—and am going to win out, too.
"I'm going to win out even though it is harder to fight—than fighting—the Germans—up front. We Italians licked Hell out of them—a million years ago. Old General Cæsar did it and he used to bring them back to Rome and put 'em in white-wing suits on the streets."
For all his quaint knowledge of Cæsar's successes against the progenitors of Kulturland of to-day, Frank was all American. Here was a rough-cut young American from the streets of New York's Little Italy. Here was a man who had almost made the supreme sacrifice. Here was a man who, if he did escape death, faced long weakened years ahead. It occurred to me that I would like to know, that it would be interesting to know, in what opinion this wounded American soldier, the son of uneducated immigrant parents, would hold the Chief Executive of the United States, the man he would most likely personify as responsible for the events that led up to his being wounded on the battlefield.
"Frank," I asked, "what do you think about the President of the United States?"
He seemed to be considering for a minute, or maybe he was only waiting to gather sufficient breath to make an answer. He had been lying with his eyes directed steadfastly toward the ceiling. Now he turned his face slowly toward me. His eyes, sunken slightly in their sockets, shone feverishly. His pinched, hollow cheeks were still swarthy, but the background of the white pillow made them look wan. Slowly he moistened his lips, and then he said:
"Say—say—that guy—that guy's—got hair—on his chest."
That was the opinion of the "dying Wop."
After Frank's removal from our ward, the rest of us frequently sent messages of cheer down to him. Thesemessages were usually carried by a young American woman who had a particular interest in our ward. Not strange to say, she had donned a Red Cross nursing uniform on the same day that most of us arrived in that ward. She was one of the American women who brought us fruit, ice cream, candy and cigarettes. She wrote letters for us to our mothers. She worked long hours, night and day, for us. In her absence, one day, the ward went into session and voted her its guardian angel. Out of modesty, I was forced to answer "Present" instead of "Aye" to the roll-call. The Angel was and is my wife.
As Official Ward Angel it was among the wife's duties to handle the matter of visitors, of which there were many. It seemed, during those early days in June, that every American woman in France dropped whatever war work she was doing and rushed to the American hospitals to be of whatever service she could. And it was not easy work these women accomplished. There was very little "forehead-rubbing" or "moving picture nursing." Much of it was tile corridor scrubbing and pan cleaning. They stopped at no tasks they were called upon to perform. Many of them worked themselves sick during the long hours of that rush period.
Sometimes the willingness, eagerness and sympathy of some of the visitors produced humourous little incidents in our hospital life. Nearly all of the women entering our ward would stop at the foot of "Big Boy's" bed. They would learn of his paralysed condition from the chart attached to the foot of the bed. Then they would mournfully shake their heads and slowly pronounce the words "Poor boy."
And above all things in the world distasteful to Big Boy was that one expression "Poor boy" because assoon as the kindly intentioned women would leave the room, the rest of the ward would take up the "Poor boy" chorus until Big Boy got sick of it. Usually, however, before leaving the ward the woman visitor would take from a cluster of flowers on her arm, one large red rose and this she would solemnly deposit on Big Boy's defenceless chest.
Big Boy would smile up to her a look which she would accept and interpret as one of deep, undying gratitude. The kindly-intentioned one surrounding herself with that benediction that is derived from a sacred duty well performed, would walk slowly from the room and as the door would close behind her, Big Boy's gruff drawling voice would sing out in a call for the orderly.
"Dan, remove the funeral decorations," he would order.
Dan Sullivan, our orderly, was the busiest man in the hospital. Big Boy liked to smoke, but, being paralysed, he required assistance. At regular intervals during the day the ward room door, which was close to Big Boy's bed, would open slowly and through the gap four or six inches wide the rest of the ward would get a glimpse of Dan standing in the opening with his arms piled high with pots and utensils, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
THE NEWS FROM THE STATESTHE NEWS FROM THE STATES
SMILING WOUNDED AMERICAN SOLDIERSSMILING WOUNDED AMERICAN SOLDIERS
With one hand he would extract the cigarette, insert hand and arm through the opening in the door until it hovered above Big Boy's face. Then the hand would descend and the cigarette would be inserted in Big Boy's mouth just as you would stick a pin in a pin-cushion. Big Boy would lie back comfortably and puff away like a Mississippi steamboat for four or five minutes and then the door would open just a crack again, the mysterious hand and arm would reach in once more and thecigarette would be plucked out. That was the way Big Boy got his "smokes."
If Big Boy's voice was gruff, there was still a gruffer voice that used to come from a man in the corner of the ward to the left of my bed. During the first four or five days I was an inmate of the ward, I was most interested in all the voices I heard because I lay in total darkness. The bandages extended down from the top of my head to my upper lip, and I did not know whether or not I ever would see again. I would listen carefully to all remarks within ear-shot, whether they be from doctors, nurses or patients. I listened in the hope that from them I might learn whether or not there was a possibility of my regaining vision. But all of their remarks with regard to my condition were ambiguous and unsatisfactory. But from this I gained a listening habit and that was how I became particularly interested in the very gruff voice that came from the corner on my left.
Other patients directing remarks into that corner would address them to a man whom they would call by name "Red Shannahan." I was quick to connect the gruff voice and the name "Red Shannahan," and as I had lots of time and nothing else to do, I built up in my mind's eye a picture of a tall, husky, rough and ready, tough Irishman, with red hair—a man of whom it would be conceivable that he had wiped out some two or three German regiments before they got him. To find out more about this character, I called over to him one day.
"Red Shannahan, are you there?" I said.
"Yes, Mr. Gibbons, I'm here," came the reply, and I was immensely surprised because it was not the gruff voice at all. It was the mild, unchanged voice of a boy, a boy whose tones were still in the upper register. The replyseemed almost girlish in comparison with the gruffer tones of the other patients and I marvelled that the owner of this polite, mannerly, high-pitched voice could be known by any such name as "Red Shannahan." I determined upon further investigation.
"Red Shannahan, what work did you do before you became a United States soldier?" I asked.
"Mr. Gibbons," came the reply, almost girlishly, "I am from Baltimore. I drove the wagon for Mr. Bishop, the canary bird and gold fish man."
All that had happened to this canary bird fancier and gold fish tamer was that he had killed two Germans and captured three before they got him.
Among those who came to visit us in that ward, there appeared one day a man I had not seen in many years. When I knew him last he had been a sport-loving fellow-student of mine at college and one of the fastest, hardest-fighting ends our 'Varsity football squad ever had. Knowing this disposition of the man, I was quite surprised to see on the sleeve of his khaki service uniform the red shield and insignia of the Knights of Columbus.
I was well aware of the very valuable work done by this institution wherever American soldiers are in France, but I could not imagine this former college chum of mine being engaged in such work instead of being in the service. He noticed my silence and he said, "Gib, do you remember that game with the Indians on Thanksgiving Day?"
"Yes," I replied, "they hurt your leg that day."
"Yes," replied my old college mate, whom we might as well call MacDougal inasmuch as that was not his name. "Yes, they took that leg away from me three years later."
I knew then why MacDougal was with the K. C. andI wondered what service he would perform in our ward in the name of his organisation. I soon found out. Without introduction, MacDougal proceeded to the bedside of Dan Bailey, the Infantryman with one leg off, who was lying in a bed on my right. MacDougal walked back and forth two or three times past the foot of Bailey's bed.
"How does that look?" he said to Bailey. "Do I walk all right?"
"Looks all right to me," replied Bailey; "what's the matter with you?"
MacDougal then began jumping, skipping and hopping up and down and across the floor at the foot of Bailey's bed. Finishing these exercises breathlessly, he again addressed himself to the sufferer with one leg.
"How did that look?" he said. "Did that look all right?"
"I don't see anything the matter with you," replied Bailey, "unless it is that you're in the wrong ward."
Then MacDougal stood close by Bailey's bedside where the boy with one leg could watch him closely. MacDougal took his cane and struck his own right leg a resounding whack. And we all knew by the sound of the blow that the leg he struck was wooden.
In that peculiar way did MacDougal bring into the life of Dan Bailey new interest and new prospects. He proved to Dan Bailey that for the rest of his life Dan Bailey with an artificial limb could walk about and jump and skip and hop almost as well as people with two good legs. That was the service performed by the Knights of Columbus in our ward.
There was one other organisation in that hospital that deserves mention. It was the most exclusive little clique and rather inclined towards snobbishness. I was a memberof it. We used to look down on the ordinary wounded cases that had two eyes. We enjoyed, either rightly or wrongly, a feeling of superiority. Death comes mighty close when it nicks an eye out of your head. All of the one-eyed cases and some of the no-eyed cases received attention in one certain ward, and it was to this ward after my release from the hospital that I used to go every day for fresh dressings for my wounds. Every time I entered the ward a delegation of one-eyed would greet me as a comrade and present me with a petition. In this petition I was asked and urged to betake myself to the hospital library, to probe the depths of the encyclopædias and from their wordy innards tear out one name for the organisation of the one-eyed. This was to be our life long club, they said, and the insistence was that the name above all should be a "classy" name. So it came to pass that after much research and debate one name was accepted and from that time on we became known as the Cyclops Club.
A wonderful Philadelphia surgeon was in charge of the work in that ward. Hundreds of American soldiers for long years after the war will thank him for seeing. I thank him for my sight now. His name is Dr. Fewell. The greatest excitement in the ward prevailed one day when one of the doctor's assistants entered carrying several flat, hard wood cases, each of them about a yard square. The cases opened like a book and were laid flat on the table. Their interiors were lined with green velvet and there on the shallow receptacles in the green velvet were just dozens of eyes, gleaming unblinkingly up at us.
A shout went up and down the ward and the Cyclopians gathered around the table. There was a grandgrab right and left. Everybody tried to get a handful. There was some difficulty reassorting the grabs. Of course, it happened, that fellows that really needed blue or grey ones, managed to get hold of black ones or brown ones, and some confusion existed while they traded back and forth to match up proper colours, shades and sizes.
One Cyclopian was not in on the grab. In addition to having lost one eye, he had received about a pound and a half of assorted hardware in his back, and these flesh wounds confined him to his bed. He had been sleeping and he suddenly awoke during the distribution of the glassware. He apparently became alarmed with the thought that he was going to be left out of consideration. I saw him sit bolt upright in bed as he shouted clear across the ward:
"Hey, Doc, pass the grapes."
When it became possible for me to leave that hospital, I went to another one three blocks away. This was a remarkable institution that had been maintained by wealthy Americans living in France before the war. I was assigned to a room on the third floor—a room adjoining a sun parlour, overlooking a beautiful Old World garden with a lagoon, rustic bridges, trees and shrubbery.
In early June, when that flood of American wounded had come back from the Marne, it had become necessary to erect hospital ward tents in the garden and there a number of our wounded were cared for. I used to notice that every day two orderlies would carry out from one of the small tents a small white cot on which there lay an American soldier. They would place the cot on the green grass where the sunlight, finding its way through the leafy branches of the tree, would shine downupon the form of this young—this very young—fighter from the U. S. A.
He was just two months over seventeen years of age. He had deliberately and patriotically lied one year on his age in order that he might go to France and fight beneath our flag.
He was wounded, but his appearance did not indicate how badly. There were no bandages about his head, arms or body. There was nothing to suggest the severity of his injuries—nothing save his small round spot on the side of his head where the surgeons had shaved away the hair—just a small round spot that marked the place where a piece of German hand-grenade had touched the skull.
This little fellow had forgotten everything. He could not remember—all had slipped his mind save for the three or four lines of one little song, which was the sole remaining memory that bridged the gap of four thousand miles between him and his home across the sea.
Over and over again he would sing it all day long as he lay there on the cot with the sunlight streaming all over him. His sweet boyish voice would come up through the leafy branches to the windows of my room.
I frequently noticed my nurse standing there at the window listening to him. Then I would notice that her shoulders would shake convulsively and she would walk out of the room, wet eyed but silent. And the song the little fellow sang was this:
"Just try to picture meBack home in Tennessee,Right by my mother's kneeShe thinks the world of me.She will be there to meet meWith a hug and kiss she'll greet me,When I get back, when I get backTo my home in Tennessee."
"Just try to picture meBack home in Tennessee,Right by my mother's kneeShe thinks the world of me.She will be there to meet meWith a hug and kiss she'll greet me,When I get back, when I get backTo my home in Tennessee."
American doctors and American nurses, both by their skill and care and tenderness, nursed that little fellow back to complete recovery, made him remember everything and shortly afterward, well and cured, he started back, safe and sound, to his home in Tennessee.
Nothing I can ever say will overstate my estimation of the credit that is deserved by our American doctors and nurses for the great work they are doing. I am not alone in knowing this. I call to witness any Canadian, Englishman or Frenchman, that, if he is wounded, when in the ambulance, he usually voices one request, "Take me to an American hospital."
I knew of one man who entered that United States Military Base Hospital near Paris, with one bullet through the shoulder, another through an arm, an eye shot out and a compound fracture of the skull, and those American doctors and nurses by their attention and skilfulness made it possible for him to step back into boots and breeches and walk out of the hospital in ten days.
It so happens that I am somewhat familiar with the details in that case because I am the man.
Through the steady growth of Marshal Foch's reserves, by the speedy arrival of American forces, the fourth German offensive of 1918, the personally directed effort launched by the Crown Prince on May 27th, had been brought to a standstill.
The German thrust toward Paris had been stopped by the Americans at Château-Thierry and in the Bois de Belleau. It would be an injustice not to record the great part played in that fighting by the French Army attacked, but it would be equally unjust not to specify as the French have gallantly done, that it was the timely arrival of American strength that swung the balance against the enemy. For the remainder of that month of June and up to the middle of July, the fighting was considered local in its character.
The German offensive had succeeded in pushing forward the enemy front until it formed a loop extending southward from the Aisne to the Valley of the Marne. This salient was called the Château-Thierry pocket. The line ran southward from a point east of Soissons to Château-Thierry, where it touched the Marne, thence eastward along both sides of the river to the vicinity of Oeuilly where it recrossed the Marne and extended northward to points beyond Rheims.
Château-Thierry was thus the peak of the German push—the apex of the triangle pointing toward Paris. The enemy supplied its forces in this peak principally by the road that ran southward from Soissons andtouched the Marne at Château-Thierry. To the west of this road and just south of the city of Soissons, is the forest of Villers-Cotterets. The enemy occupied the northern and eastern limits of the forest and the remainder of it was in the hands of the French.
This forest has always been considered one of the sentinels of Paris. It was located on the right flank of the German salient. It was a menace to that flank, and offered a most attractive opportunity for an Allied counter offensive from that direction. The Germans were not unmindful of this.
The enemy knew that in the forest of Villers-Cotterets it would be possible for Marshal Foch to mobilise his much-feared reserves by taking advantage of the natural screen provided by the forest. That Foch reserve still remained a matter for enemy consideration in spite of the fact that the successive German offensive since March 21st had met with considerable success with regard to the acquisition of territory. The Germans, however, had been unable to ascertain whether Foch had been forced to bring his reserves into the fight.
The situation demanded a full realisation by the enemy of the possible use of this reserve at any time and they knew that their lines in Villers-Cotterets Forest offered an ever present invitation for the sudden application of this reserve strength. Their lines at that point were necessarily weak by the superiority of the Allied position and, as a consequence, the Germans guarded this weak spot by holding in reserve behind the line a number of divisions of the Prussian Guard.
For the same reason, the enemy maintained constant observation of the French position. Their planes would fly over the forest every day taking photographs. They sought to discover any evidences indicating that Fochmight be preparing to strike a blow from that place. They made careful note of the traffic along the roads through the forest. They maintained a careful watch to ascertain whether new ammunition dumps were being concealed under the trees. Their observers tried to ascertain whether any additional hospital arrangements had been made by the French at that point. Any of these things would have indicated that the French were preparing to strike through the forest but the Germans found nothing to support their suspicions.
Nevertheless, they maintained their lines at maximum strength. A belief existed among the German High Command that an attack might be made on July 4th, out of consideration to American sentiment. When the attack did not develop on that day, they then thought that the French might possibly spring the blow on July 14th, in celebration of their own national fête day. And again they were disappointed in their surmises.
This protracted delay of an impending blow worried the enemy. The Germans realised full well that they were fighting against time. Their faith in the capacity of their submarines to prevent American strength from reaching the line, had been abandoned. They now knew that every day that passed meant just that many more American soldiers arriving in France, and the consequent strengthening of the Allied forces during a season when the Germans, through their repeated offensives, were suffering terrible losses and were consequently growing weaker.
So, on July 14th, when the Allied counter-offensive had still failed to materialise, the German forces, by the necessity for time, moved to a sudden and faulty decision. They convinced themselves that they had overestimated the Allied strength. They accepted the beliefthat the reason Foch had not attacked was because he did not have sufficient strength to attack. With this, then, as a basis for their plans, they immediately launched another offensive, hoping that this might be the one in which they could deliver the final blow.
This action began on Monday morning, July 15th, and extended from Château-Thierry eastward along the valley of the Maine, northward to Rheims and thence eastward. By a remarkable coup, one small patrol of French and Americans deprived the enemy of the element of surprise in the attack. On the morning of the previous day, this patrol successfully raided the enemy lines to the east of Rheims and brought back prisoners from whom it was learned that the Germans intended striking on the following morning. The objectives of the offensive were the French cities of Épernay and Châlons. The accomplishment of this effort would have placed the Rheims salient in the hands of the enemy and brought the German lines southward to positions straddling the Marne, down the valley of which they would thus be able to launch another offensive on a straight road to Paris.
The Germans needed considerable strength for this new effort. To muster the shock divisions necessary for the attack, they had to weaken their lines elsewhere. The first reserves that they drew for this offensive were the Prussian Guard divisions which they had been holding in readiness in back of the weak spot in their line in the Villers-Cotterets Forest. Those divisions were hurriedly transported across the base of the V-shaped salient and thrown into the attack to the east and the southwest of Rheims.
The Germans found the Allied line prepared to receive them. Their attacking waves were mowed downwith terrific machine gun fire from French and American gunners, while at the same time heavy artillery barrages played upon the German back areas with deadly effect in the massed ranks of the reserves. The fighting was particularly vicious. It was destined to be the Germans' last action of a grand offensive nature in the entire war.
On the line east of Rheims, the German assault was particularly strong in one sector where it encountered the sturdy ranks of the Rainbow Division of United States National Guardsmen, drawn from a dozen or more different states in the Union. Regiments from Alabama and New York held the front line. Iowa and Ohio were close in support. In the support positions, sturdy youngsters from Illinois, Indiana, and Minnesota manned the American artillery.
The French general commanding the sector had not considered it possible that this comparatively small American force could withstand the first onslaught of the Germans. He had made elaborate plans for a withdrawal to high ground two or three miles southward, from which he hoped to be able to resist the enemy to greater advantage. But all day long, through the 15th and the 16th and the 17th of July, those American lines held, and the advancing waves of German storm troops melted before our guns. Anticipating a renewal of the attack on the next day, General Gouraud issued an order on the evening of July 17th. It read:
"To the French and American Soldiers of the Army.