With The Doughboy In France Part 17

Second only to ice in importance as a hospital auxiliary was light. In the early years of the war, the surgeons of the allied nations worked under great difficulties at night and undoubtedly many lives were sacrificed because of the lack of proper lighting facilities. I have heard of the doctors ripping off a wounded man's clothing by the light of one star sh.e.l.l and waiting for the next to give them enough brilliancy to examine his injuries.

For at least ten or a dozen years past our larger American circuses have used portable electric-lighting plants on their various itinerant trips across the land--with a fair degree of success. Those circuses gave our Red Cross in France an inspiration. Lieutenant Harry C. Hand, a director in its Central Department of Requirements, in studying the markets for the proper sort of equipment, used them as models and so evolved, as a plant most practical for Red Cross needs, a three-and-a-half kilowatt outfit consisting of a gasoline engine, an electric generator, and a switchboard. This outfit, mounted upon a stout camion, would light 135 incandescent lamps of twenty-five watts each. On its travels it carried in its lockers the lamps, extension cords, sockets, and the like to make them available for almost instant service. And the Red Cross in the heart of the war emergency had five of these outfits at its service in France.

One other allied factor in this hospital supply service deserves attention before we finally turn away from it. I have referred from time to time to the vast quant.i.ties of drugs which our Red Cross distributed to both its own and other hospital centers. It was obvious that this distribution had to be centralized, and because of the delicate and extremely valuable nature of this particular form of supplies be kept quite separate and distinct from the others. So "The Red Cross Pharmacy," as it was generally called, came into existence, at a former apartment building at No. 10 Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, and quickly came to such importance that it was made the headquarters of the Section of Hospital Supplies, which in turn was a division of the larger Bureau of Hospital Administration.

Throughout all of the hard months of the war this section boasted that each night found the requisitions for that day filled. There were no left-overs; not even when a single day's work meant fifty-six huge orders entirely completed, and little rest for a staff which averaged forty-one men and women.

The pharmacy was well systematized. In its bas.e.m.e.nt were the receiving, the packing, and the s.h.i.+pping departments, while upon its broad main floor the drugs and antiseptics were actually stored, the second floor being given to dental supplies, surgical instruments, rubber goods, sutures, serums, laboratory equipment, and the like. Each of these various departments was in charge of a specialist, a man of many years'

experience in the line which he headed.

By June, 1918, the pharmacy in the Rue de Tilsitt had become of such importance that it was re-created into a Section of Supplies, with Major George L. Burroughs, of the Ma.s.sachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston, as its sectional chief. Within a month he had found the demands upon his department so much increased that he was forced in turn to increase its facilities--by the addition of two warehouses. In another six weeks a new burden was placed upon his shoulders--the distribution of all alcohol, ether, oxygen, and nitrous acid issued by our Red Cross, which meant, of course, more s.p.a.ce needed--so the unused powder magazine at Fort D'Ivry and the riding academy at No. 12 Rue Duphot--both loaned by the French Government authorities--were added to the quarters of the pharmacy.

Some idea of the amount of work undertaken and accomplished by this Red Cross pharmacy may be gained when it is understood that in the six months ending January, 1919, 75,016 pounds of drugs were issued from it.

There were in that time 3,954,178 tablets, 21,566 phials of serum, 271 surgical units, 15,108 pairs of rubber gloves, and 22,059 feet of adhesive plaster, in addition to many hundreds of packets of other drug supplies.

Seemingly we have drifted away from our American boys, sick or wounded and in hospitals. In reality, of course, we have not. Every one of these provisions, large or small, was aimed directly at their comfort, while each deserved to be rated as a necessity rather than comfort--comfort, at least, as the average luxury-loving American knows it. It was comfort rather than luxury that I found our boys enjoying there at Savenay--long, comfortable huts, builded hurriedly but furnished with great care, great taste, and great attractiveness. Savenay, itself, was a good deal of a mud-hole, a fearfully wretched place underfoot. The Red Cross huts shone brilliantly in contrast. Here, as in the canteens all over France, the boys might congregate--practically at all hours--and amuse themselves as their fancies dictated; or, if fancy grew a bit bored, it was part of the job of the directress--one of whose essential qualifications was resourcefulness and another versatility--to find some new form of amus.e.m.e.nt. It was not enough to hand out the cigarettes--one or two packs a week--or the pipes and the playing cards and the tobacco, pretty much as requested--there had to be shows. The American pa.s.sion for play-acting is something to be reckoned with.

Perhaps you do not quickly understand how versatile those very shows might readily become. Let me quote from _Toot Sweet_--the little fortnightly newspaper which our American Red Cross printed for the boys convalescing there at Savenay. That is, the Red Cross furnished the printing press, the type, and the rest of the paraphernalia for the making of the publication; the boys, themselves, supplied the brains that made it so very readable at all times.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 mile]

"'Stunt Night,' advertised in Base 69 Hut for March 13, brought a lot of inquiries," says _Toot 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 s.p.a.ce 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 was the 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 s.p.a.ce?

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, and are 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 gla.s.s of sparkling water), became a city of wounded; all too often a city of death.

The French Army 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 ga.s.sed 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 Elysee Palace--a gaming and amus.e.m.e.nt center of none too savory a reputation; yet with its central location on the main street, its ample lounging s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sed none too 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.u.t.tonholes 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?"

Imagine something 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 quant.i.ties 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 Elysee 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 each _poilu_ carried away a little gift of American cigarettes--to any Frenchman the very greatest of all treasures. Sat.u.r.days were set aside for "compet.i.tive 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 men and women workers--with the result that by Thanksgiving Day, 1918, a very creditable production ent.i.tled "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 Chatel-Guyon.

Some one is going to come along some day and write the a.n.a.lysis 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 a.s.signed 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 sc.r.a.ps of sh.e.l.ls and other metals that came to his hungry fingers, while the Red Cross sent a full complement of musical instruments down from Paris. And so the 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, what _is_ the 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 folk who 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 the _Stars 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 doughboy himself. 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 a.s.sistant 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 the _Etats Unis_, the peasants and the _poilus_, 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" inst.i.tution 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 Pathe 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 Red Cross 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 the _boche_ came 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 limited capacity 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 a.s.sociations. 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.