With The Doughboy In France Part 18

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 antic.i.p.ate and look after all of their personal necessities. This thing it did, and its representatives cooperated 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 s.p.a.ce 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 inst.i.tution which modestly confesses that it holds but a mere fifteen hundred beds.

Because the following excerpt from the report of a Red Cross 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 talc.u.m 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 difficulties of keeping up a full stock of Red Cross supplies of every sort in a land and in times when s.h.i.+pping s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 such conventional 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 partic.i.p.ated 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 of the 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 regime. 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 Ba.s.sens--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 following day.

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 n.i.g.g.e.r preacher in our squad?'"

CHAPTER X

"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES IN YOUR OLD KIT BAG"

"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 sc.r.a.ps 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 on his 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 sc.r.a.p 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 I _don't_ get 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.