With The Doughboy In France Part 14

In these weeks and months of the first half of 1918, Burlingame found much of his work divided into several of the functions of the Department of Civil Affairs--particularly among such sectors as the Children's Bureau, the Bureau of Tuberculosis, and the Bureau of Refugees. This was organization business. It took strength from that very arm of the Red Cross which soon was to be called upon to accomplish so very much indeed. And when, on the twenty-fourth of August, 1918, the Gibson reorganization plan divorced the Medical and Surgical Section entirely from the work of the Department of Civil Affairs and combined its entire activities into a Medical and Surgical Department, Burlingame and his fellows had a free hand for the first time, a full opportunity to put their tripart.i.te policy into execution.

For a time Colonel Fred T. Murphy was director of this newly created department. On January 6, 1919, however, he was succeeded by Colonel Burlingame, who had been so instrumental in framing both the policies and carrying out the actual operations of the department. On that same day the former Medical and Surgical Section of the Department of Military Affairs became the Bureau of Hospital Administration. The Bureau of Tuberculosis was transferred as such to this new department, as was also the Children's Bureau. The Women's Bureau of Hospital Administration which, under the old organization, was reporting to the general manager, became the Bureau of Nurses, while the work for the _mutiles_, which was being conducted by both the departments of Military Affairs and Civil Affairs, was relegated to a new bureau.

I have given these changes in some detail not because they were in themselves so vastly important, as because they tend to show how firm a grasp Burlingame gained not only on the operations but upon the very organization of his work. He did not reorganize; he perfected, and finally was able to perfect even the Gibson general plan of organization for our Red Cross in France which was recognized as the most complete thing of its sort that had been accomplished.

For the purpose of better understanding the activities of this bureau, it may be well to divide its activities into four great cla.s.ses. The first of these would group those activities conducted directly by the Surgeon General's office of the United States Army, but to which our Red Cross gave frequent aid in the line of supplies, supplementing those normally furnished through the usual army channels. Sometimes not only supplies but personnel was furnished. Such aid was given upon request of army officers.

Under the second grouping one finds those great hospitals, in most cases established by the American Red Cross while the medical and surgical plans of our army were still forming and were in a most unsettled and confused state. These were known, even after the Surgeon General had taken them under his authority, as American Red Cross Military Hospitals. They were then operated jointly by the United States Army and our Red Cross; the army being usually responsible for the scientific care and discipline of the organization, while our Red Cross took upon its shoulders both the actual business management and the supplying of the necessary materials.

The third and fourth groupings are smaller, although, in their way, hardly less consequential. In the one were the American Red Cross Hospitals which were operated purely for military purposes and for which the American Red Cross a.s.sumed the full responsibility of operation, while in the other were the hospitals, infirmaries, and dispensaries which were operated by the Red Cross--in some few cases jointly with the other organizations--for the benefit of civilians, including several thousand American civilian war workers who found themselves in France during the past two years.

If I have bored you with these details of organization it has been to the direct purpose that you might the better understand how this important phase of Red Cross operation functioned. Now, for the moment, forget organization once again. Go back to the earlier days of our Red Cross in France--the days of Grayson M.-P. Murphy and James H. Perkins and their fellows.

None of these men either realized or fully understood either the importance or the overwhelming size to which the hospital function of the United States Army would attain before our boys had been in actual warfare a full year. The army itself did not realize that. Remember that for many weeks and even months after Pers.h.i.+ng had arrived in Paris its hospital plans were in embryo. In this situation our Red Cross found one of its earliest opportunities, and rose to it. With Colonel Lambert--he then was Major Lambert--in charge of its Medical and Surgical Division it began casting about to see how it might function most rapidly and most efficiently.

To the nucleus of the army that began pouring into France in the early summer of 1917, it began the distribution of emergency stores--a task to which we already have referred and shall refer again. It hastily secured its own storerooms--in those days quite remote and distant from the American Relief Clearing House and the other general warehouses of the American Red Cross--and from these in July, 1917, sent to 1,116 hospitals, practically all of them French, exactly 2,826 bales of supplies. In December of that same year it sent to 1,653 hospitals--including by this time many American ones--4,740 bales of similar supplies. It was already gaining strength unto itself.

Surgical dressings formed an important portion of the contents of these packages. Our Red Cross did not wait upon America for these; the huge plan for standardizing and making and forwarding these from the United States was also still in process of formation. It went to work in Paris, and without delay, so that by the end of 1917 two impressive manufacturing plants were at work there--one at No. 118 Rue de la Faisandre, where 440 volunteer workers and a hundred paid workers were averaging some 183,770 dressings a week, and a smaller establishment at No. 25 Rue Pierre Charron, where a hundred volunteer and ninety paid workers were at similar tasks. Eventually a third workroom was added to these. And it is worth noting, perhaps, that immediately after the signing of the armistice these three workrooms were turned into manufactories for production of influenza masks, for which there was a great emergency demand. In three weeks they turned out more than 600,000 of them.

The hospitalization phases of the Medical and Surgical Department of our Red Cross over there were, of course, far more difficult than those of the mere production or storage of dressings and other medical supplies.

And they involved a vast consideration of the human factors of the super-problem of the conflict.

"In this war there were two kinds of fellows," Colonel Burlingame told me one evening in Paris as we sat talking together, "the ones who went over the top and those who didn't. It was up to the second bunch to look out for the first--at every time and opportunity, which brings us squarely to the question of the French hospitals, and the American soldiers who woke up to find themselves in them. You see the Red Cross was just as responsible for those fellows as for the ones who went directly into our own hospitals over here. The French authorities told me not to worry about those boys. 'We will take very good care of them,'

they said, and so they meant to do. 'Who will take care?' I asked them in return.

"I went straight to one of the chief surgeons of their army. I put the matter to him as plainly as I could. 'You are the best ever,' I said to him, 'but--don't you see?--you are tired out. We want to help you. Can't we? Won't you let us loan you nurses and other American personnel as you need them?'

"Would they? Say, the French fell for that suggestion like ducks, and we sent them thirty or forty girls, just as a beginning. Can you think of what it would mean for one of our Yankee boys wounded in a French hospital and perhaps ready to go on an operating table to lose an arm or a leg and then finding no one who could speak his kind of language? And what it would mean if a nice girl should come along--his own sort of a nice girl--ready to let him spill his own troubles out to her--in his own sort of jargon?"

I felt, myself, what it would mean. I had heard before of what the Red Cross Bureau of Hospital Administration was accomplis.h.i.+ng under the technical designation of the Service of Professional Aid to the _Service de Sante_--this last the medical division of the French Army establishments. The first opportunity for this service came when General Pers.h.i.+ng told Marshal Foch that the American Army was there to be used as the French high commander in chief saw fit to use it. Whereupon Foch moved quickly and brigaded our men with his between Montdidier and Soissons, which meant, of course, the evacuating of the casualties through the French hospitals. The helpless condition of our American boys who did not speak French--and very few of them did--can therefore easily be imagined. They could not tell their wishes nor be advised as to what was going to be done with them. It was then that Burlingame sensed the situation in its fullness; that, with much diplomacy, he first approached Dr. Vernet Kleber, the commander of the French-American section of the French _Service de Sante_, saying that he realized that its service had been taxed to the uttermost and proffering the use of American Red Cross personnel. And Dr. Kleber accepted.

The thirty or forty nurses did not come at one time. But within twenty-four hours, four of them--two nurses and two nurses' aids, and all of them speaking French--were dispatched to the French hospital at Soissons where the first American patients were being received. The movement of the First and Second Divisions in the Beauvais and Montdidier sectors right after increased very greatly this flow of Yankee doughboys into French hospitals--and the American nurses were thrown into them in far greater numbers. Soon a still more definite plan was adopted, which resulted in American nurses, speaking French, being installed in each and every French military hospital which received American wounded. Under this arrangement our nurses were given French military papers for free travel--at the very outset, one of the many time-saving arrangements in a situation which all too frequently was a race between time and death. Another time-saving scheme provided for the rea.s.signment of nurses used by the French _Service de Sante_ without the necessity of approval in advance by Paris headquarters. This very flexible and sensible plan relieved the situation of much red tape and made for immediate results. And not the least of its advantages was the fact that it actually did much to enhance the _entente cordiale_ of the fighting forces of the two allied nations.

The first call for nurses under this new arrangement came in May, 1918, when a nurse and an aid were sent to the French Military Hospital at Besancon in the extreme east of France and south of the fighting zones.

The second came from La Roch.e.l.le, down on the Atlantic coast. After that the calls were almost continuous, until our American nurses had been sent to all corners of France; the service covering thirty-one departments and eighty-eight cities.

Sometimes, when the calls were particularly urgent and the distances not so great, the nurses were sent in camionettes, for time always was an important factor. But more often the nurse and her aid rode by rail, armed with the military permits that were so necessary a feature of travel in France during the days of the actual conflict. One of these girls wrote quite graphically of one of these journeys.

"It was quite dark; there wasn't a light in the car or in the countryside," she said. "Off on the horizon we could see the guns flas.h.i.+ng. A very nervous man sat opposite me, pulled out his flashlight about every five minutes, consulted his time-table and announced the next station. Finally he alighted and the only way that we knew when we had reached our station was because heads appeared at every window when we stopped, asking the name of the stopping place. After the information was given the pa.s.sengers would pile out for that particular place and step into the inky darkness. After which they might resign themselves to spending the rest of the night curled up on one of the uninviting small benches in the station."

The diet of the average doughboy and the average _poilu_--sick or well--was almost always different. To accomplish this each Red Cross nurse, upon being sent to her a.s.signment, was given small sums of money to spend for the comfort of her patients. In this way she was often able to obtain such things as milk, eggs, or a chop for a Yankee boy who wearied of the diet constantly given to the _poilu_.

These nurses, like those which were held by the Red Cross in reserve for the emergency needs of our army in France, were in direct charge of the Nurses' Bureau of Colonel Burlingame's department. Incidentally, this bureau furnished some ten thousand nurses in France, of whom eight thousand were army reserves.

The great need of this service in the French hospitals was shown in the extensions of the plan. In several instances where a United States Army hospital unit was stationed near a French one, the American patients were gradually evacuated to it, our Red Cross nurses being retained on duty as long as was necessary. There were, of course, many of these American hospitals--some of which you shall come to see before you are finished with the pages of this book. In all of these our Red Cross functioned, both in the furnis.h.i.+ng of many of their supplies as well as in the giving of entertainment to their patients. Of all these things, more in good time. Consider now, if you please, the distinctive Red Cross hospitals themselves--some of which long preceded in France the coming of the larger regulation hospitals of the United Sates Army.

The first of these great inst.i.tutions of our own Red Cross to be secured over there--it bore the distinctive serial t.i.tle of Number One--was located in the Neuilly suburban district of Paris. It was a handsome modern structure of brick--a building which had been erected for use as a boarding school or college. It was barely completed at the time of the first outbreak of the Great War, and so was easily secured by a group of patriotic Americans in Paris and,--then designated as the American Ambulance Hospital,--placed at the service of the French, who then were in grievous need of such a.s.sistance. When we came into the war, this hospital, which contained between five and six hundred beds, was put under the United States Army and the American Red Cross and turned over to the Red Cross for actual operation.

American Red Cross Hospital Number Two--a private inst.i.tution of the highest cla.s.s--was formerly well known to the American colony in Paris as Dr. Blake's. Like the Number One, it was one of the chief means by which the Stars and Stripes was kept flying in Europe throughout the early years of the war. It not only contained three hundred beds, but a huge Red Cross research laboratory, where a corps of bacteriologists was quickly put to work under the general control of the Surgeon General's office of the army and making valuable investigations, records, and summaries for the American medical profession for many years to come.

Number Three, on the left bank of the Seine, was for a time known as the Reid Hospital. It was at one time a home or dormitory for girl art students in Paris. Later it was transformed into a hospital by Mrs.

Whitelaw Reid of New York, who gave it, furnished and equipped, to the American Red Cross and arranged to pay practically all its running expenses. It was a comparatively small establishment of eighty beds, which were reserved almost entirely for officers, and personnel of our Red Cross.

From this most modest nucleus there was both steady and rapid growth until, at the time of the signing of the armistice, there were not three but eight of the American Red Cross Military Hospitals: the three of which you have just read; Number One in Neuilly; Number Two (Dr.

Blake's) in Rue Piccini; Number Three (the Reid Hospital) in the Rue de Chevreuse; Number Five, the tent inst.i.tution which sprang up on the famous Bois de Boulogne race course at Auteuil; Number Six at Bellevue; Number Seven at Juilly; Number Eight at Malabry (these last three in the suburbs of Paris), and Number Nine in the Boulevard des Batignoles, within the limits of the city itself.

The so-called American Red Cross hospitals were generally somewhat smaller. They were Number 100 at Beaucaillou, St. Julien in the Gironde, Number 101 at Neuilly, Number 102 at Neufchateau, Number 103 also at Neuilly, Number 104 at Beauvais, with an annex at Chantilly, Number 105 at Juilly, Number 109 at Evreux, and Number 113, the Czecho-Slovak Hospital, at Cognac. In addition to these there was a further group of smaller hospitals, which were operated in the same way as the American Red Cross military hospitals. These included Number 107 at Jouy-sur-Morin, Number 110 at Villers-Daucourt, Number 111 at Chateau-Thierry, Number 112 in the Rue Boileau, Paris, Evacuation Hospital Number 114 at Fleury-sur-Aire in the Vosges, Base Hospital Number 41 at St. Denis, and Base Hospital No. 82 at Toul. While outside of all of these lists were three small inst.i.tutions in Paris, operated in cooperation with the French, but far too unimportant to be listed here.

There were twenty-six of these American Red Cross hospitals of one form or another established in France through the war. Yet, impressive as this list might seem to be at a first glance, it, of course, falls far short of the great total of the regular base and evacuation hospitals set up by the Medical Corps of our army throughout France and the occupied districts of Germany. Yet even these, as we shall see presently, were constantly dependent upon the functioning of our Red Cross. And, after all, it was chiefly a question of the mere form of organization.

"Form?" said Colonel Burlingame to me that same evening as we sat together in Paris. "What do you mean by form? There is no such thing--not in war, at any event. When they used to come to me with their red tape tangles I would bring them up with a quick turn, saying: 'See here, the Red Cross is not engaged in winning the war for the Allies, or even for the good old U. S. A. We are here to help the United States win the war.'"

Not such a fine distinction as it might first seem to be.

"That was our principle and we stuck by it," continued Burlingame. "And any one who deviated from it got b.u.mped, and b.u.mped hard."

You could trust the young military surgeon for that, just as his own superior officers could trust him to produce results, time and time again. For instance there was that week in July when the news came to him--through an entirely unofficial but highly authentic channel--that the First and Second Divisions of the United States Army were going to be used somewhere near Chateau-Thierry as shock troops against the continued German drive. For weeks past he had been carefully watching the big war map of France that hung upon the wall of his office, indicating upon it with tiny pin flags the steady oncoming of the enemy.

And in all those weeks he had been making pretty steady and definite plans against the hour when he would be called upon to act, and to act quickly.

Already he had formed that habit of quick action. Once, it was the seventeenth of June, I think, he had had good opportunity to use it. The First and Second were already in action along the Marne, brigaded with the French, and Burlingame was driving along the rear of their positions. But he supposed that the Divisions were in reserve; he did not realize that it was in actual fighting, not at least until he espied a dust-covered and wounded American quartermaster sergeant staggering down the road. The Red Cross man stopped his car and put the wounded man into it.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"I got hit--with a machine gun," stated the sergeant. "That is, I was with the machine gun. I'd never seen one of the d----d things before, but we were fighting. I got a squad around me and we tackled it. We were making the old bus hum when--well, they tickled me with a lot of shrapnel."

Burlingame waited for no further explanations. He headed his car around and at top speed raced back to Paris. As he rode he studied a pocket map that he always had with him. Montmirial! That was the place he had set out in his mental plans for this sort of emergency; in _just_ this sort of an emergency.

The stop at Paris was short; just long enough to load some fifteen tons of hospital supplies in the swiftest trucks Major Osborne's Transportation Department could supply, to pick up the highly capable Miss Julia Stimson--then chief nurse of the American Red Cross--then off to the front once again. Beyond the fact that the emergency hospital would be somewhere in the neighborhood of Montmirial, the destination of the swift-moving caravan was quite uncertain. Burlingame and Miss Stimson were both route makers and pace makers. They led the way right up behind the front-line positions, to the chief surgeon of that portion of the French Army with which the First Division was then brigaded. An American colonel was talking to a Frenchman at the moment.

"We're here," reported Burlingame.

"Who's we?" asked the Yankee officer.

"The emergency hospital of the American Red Cross," was the instant reply.

The French staff located the outfit immediately, in an ancient chateau at Jouy-sur-Morin near by, which immediately became A. R. C. Military Hospital Number 107--and in a single memorable day evacuated some 1,400 American wounded.

It took real work and lots of it to set up such a hospital as this; also an appreciable amount of actual equipment. First there came the tents and the cots--the most important parts of a mobile evacuation hospital--afterward, in orderly but quick sequence, the portable operating room, with four tables designed for the simultaneous work of four operating teams; each consisting of a chief surgeon, an a.s.sistant, two orderlies, and two women nurses. The tables were, of course, but the beginning of the operating-room equipment alone. There had to be huge quant.i.ties of instruments, anaesthetizing tools; and the like.

"Not merely half a dozen forceps," says Burlingame, "but dozens upon dozens of them."