With The Doughboy In France Part 19

Early in the progress of the conflict our Red Cross foresaw the great necessity that would be coming for its acting as a medium of communication between the doughboy and his folks--three thousand miles or more away. The United States Army had made little or no provision to meet this need; it had far larger and far more immediate problems ahead of it. And so about the best that it could be expected to do would be to notify the folks at home that their boy had made sacrifice--supreme or very great--for his country; at the best, a sort of emotionless proceeding upon its part. In the meantime there was hardly a waking hour that those selfsame folks were not thinking of the boy in khaki. While if anything happened to him--serious even, but not quite serious enough to justify the setting of the somewhat c.u.mbersome machinery of the army's elaborate system of notification into motion--both he and the folks were helpless. France is indeed a long, long distance away from the United States. Three thousand miles is a gap not easily spanned.

But it was the job of the American Red Cross to span that gap; not only to bring news of the boy to the home folks, but, in many, many instances, to bring news of them to him. The one thing was nearly as valuable as the other. And while in the elaborate organization of the American Red Cross they were operated as separate functions and bureaus, their work in reality was so interwoven that in the pages of this book we shall consider them virtually as one, and shall begin a serious consideration of this important phase of Red Cross work by calling attention to a very few of the ramifications of a hospital searcher's job. First and foremost her task was to tell those same home folks all that she could pen, or typewrite, about their own particular soldier--exactly where he was at that time and just how he progressed.

The ordinary method of handling the vast volume of these messages was in the form of short, concise, personal reports which pa.s.sed through the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and were forwarded by it to the National Headquarters at Was.h.i.+ngton, where they were made up into letters and forwarded to the families. There were, of course, many variations in this method; for instance, when it was advisable for Paris to write direct to the boy's parents, and in those other cases, which you have already seen, where the letter to America went direct from the Red Cross worker's room at the hospital. The choice between these methods was left quite largely to the individual worker who, in turn, weighed each situation and its necessities, individually and separately.

It was only in these last instances that the lie was sanctioned and even permitted, and even then only upon the absolute demand of the wounded man, himself. He had all the rights in such a situation, and the Red Cross bowed to and respected those rights--in every case.

The Red Cross reports through headquarters were accurate--invariably, and, at first sight, generally unemotional. Here is one of them that is quite typical:

"Private Edward Jones--20th Regiment, Company H--has been wounded in both legs. Wounds painful, but amputation not necessary. In excellent spirits--sends love to family."

Short, to be sure. But to a newsless family three thousand--perhaps six thousand--miles away, with its necessary detail, tremendously satisfying.

Return with me if you will for a final visit to Vichy. No group of Red Cross workers anywhere held a more sacred responsibility than the women who were stationed there. Day in and day out they pa.s.sed through the white lanes of wards in the military hospitals and each day looked--and looked deeply--into the hearts of the American boys that lined them.

Heart and soul these women of the steel-gray uniforms were at the service of our wounded soldier men--at their very beck and call, if you please. And when of a morning a bed here or a bed there was empty, the searchers understood, and prepared to write a letter--a scant matter of sympathetic record at the best--that somewhere back in America would at least relieve the tension of waiting.

Some of the messages that these searchers sent were--as you already know--full of gladness; thank G.o.d for them! Others warned gently--the boy was coming home with his face forever scarred or his limbs or his eyes gone. Still others told--and told again and again--of the brave and the battling soul that finally had slipped away into the eternal mystery of the Valley. Each of these last held between its tiny pages a single flower--plucked at the last moment from the funeral wreath.

Let me quote from one of these letters of a Red Cross searcher.

"I am constantly on duty here," she says, "and visit your brother Harry almost daily. He has been unfortunate enough to have been wounded in the right leg, which the doctors found necessary to amputate just below the knee. I know this will be a great shock to you, but let me hasten to add that Harry is in the best of condition otherwise. The wound is healing marvelously clean and quickly. He is in the healthiest and happiest frame of mind and exceptionally cheerful. Harry wants me to tell you that the last dressing of the wound was yesterday. He expects to be up and trying his crutches within ten days. He received your September money order of ten dollars for which he thanks you very much. I have just cashed it for him.... I am sorry to be the bearer of this sad news, but am happy that I can a.s.sure you of his early recovery and his splendid courage."

Men who were able to write for themselves were supplied with paper and encouraged to do so. Others who were far too ill or confined p.r.o.ne in surgical apparatus--their very hands caught and held taut in a cruel network of pulleys and weights and drain tubes--dictated their letters home--and invariably lied as to their condition. All was "going well."

The patient sufferer had but one report to pa.s.s his lips. "Tell them that I'm feeling fine," was the message that he ordered home.

Sometimes by piecing together information culled from a variety of sources, the searcher was enabled to reconstruct the picture of the last hour of some soldier's life. Comrades would recount the story of his death at the front or describe the moment of his capture by the enemy.

In fact persistent questioning revealed such facts as finally cleared up the doubt as to the fate of a certain Yankee corporal. It happened that the boy had disappeared in April, 1918. It was a number of months afterward that a patient was discovered at a port of embarkation who said:

"Yes, he was killed when the Germans were attacking and a heavy barrage was coming over. They came around back of us and threw hand grenades from the rear. Corporal ---- pulled his pistol and yelled: 'Here they come, boys! Give it to them!' He was awfully generous. He used to get a lot of sc.r.a.pbooks and pa.s.s them around to the boys. When he got a box from home he shared it. He was a mighty generous fellow about lending money, too."

The women who made those sc.r.a.pbooks and packed those boxes of "goodies"

can have no memento from his grave over there, but here was the sweet memory of his courage and his generosity. Think of the comfort that her woman's soul must have found in that frank, outspoken boyish tribute and the relief at finally having had at least the definite information of the truth! So it was that our Red Cross searchers gave constant and almost invaluable aid in revising and verifying the casualty lists of the army; and many who were accounted missing--that dread term that means nothing and yet can mean so much--could, because of their work, be accurately enrolled as dead or as prisoners.

As far back as the summer of 1917 five women had been definitely a.s.signed to this activity--not at Vichy then, but at the American army hospitals which already were beginning to multiply in France. By December of the following year this staff numbered nearly two hundred women, who worked either in the hospitals or in the American Red Cross headquarters in Paris. And while these worked in the hospitals, the Red Cross officers in the field--men serving as searchers, chaplains, or Home Communication representatives--were working in close cooperation with the statistical officers of the army. These were stationed in training camps and concentration camps and with various combat divisions. Ten men were a.s.signed direct by the Red Cross to the Central Records Office of the Adjutant General's Department of the A. E. F.

Understand very clearly, if you will, please, once again, that while in very rare cases our Red Cross did announce casualties, that, after all, was not its real province. To engage in that would have been a mere duplication of the army's own work. Mortality letters were not sent direct to the nearest of kin; they were forwarded to the A. E. F.

Central Records Office in France for final disposition, so that their release through the mails would not antic.i.p.ate the official announcement from the War Department; while the other information, in most instances, was reported to the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and was later disseminated here in the United States from the American Red Cross headquarters in Was.h.i.+ngton.

The lists of the missing soldiers were furnished by the army. Duplicates of these were then immediately distributed to the Red Cross searchers and representatives, who at once sought clues to the individual stories to be builded about the name of each man. Sometimes through arrangements with the army authorities the _boche_ prisoners were interviewed, and these occasionally furnished facts with reference to American prisoners in Germany and gave definite information about aviators who had apparently disappeared within the enemy lines.

Incorporated in these lists of the missing were also the names of all soldiers and sailors concerning whom inquiries had been made of our Red Cross either here in America or over there in France. In the one case these inquiries and in the other through the Paris headquarters in the Hotel Regina. In one month 1,955 cables were sent across the Atlantic from the United States requiring immediate information regarding wounded or missing men. In December, just following the armistice, the Paris office received more than a thousand individual requests for news of the doughboys. Almost literally these came in floodtides; but none was ignored or forgotten. It made little difference, either, as to whether any of them was addressed. The Red Cross cleared its mail with a good deal of efficiency and promptness. Its huge central post-office in Paris was a marvel of precision--and it had at all times a difficult job. Yet it so happened that it was in charge of a man without any previous experience in such a task--Senator Henry Brevoort Kane, of Rhode Island.

It chanced that Senator Kane displayed an immediate adaptability for the job--and with this, combined with great patience and persistence, he made a real success of it.

Perhaps the most satisfactory part of the searcher's job was in many ways the search for missing men--by interviewing the boys in the hospitals about their friends and intimates, getting tremendously tiny details about these in camp or in battle, or even in the hospitals themselves, and from these details evolving the web of evidence--Conan Doyle or E. Phillips Oppenheim could hardly have had a more fascinating time of it than did some of our Red Cross women in unraveling the tangle of confusion which they found wound about this boy or that, or the other fellow. Many an agonizing situation, indeed, was cleared up through the efforts of these women. And such times were almost the sole relief from a task that frequently was dreary and almost always distressing.

If you would the better understand the real task that these women faced, permit me to quote from a letter written by one of them:

"The most entertaining part of my work is writing letters home for the wounded boys. In answer to my letters the replies that come back are more than adequate reward. The letters come from farmhouses in Vermont, from factory towns in Connecticut, from busy Ma.s.sachusetts cities, and from lonely Western ranches. They are pathetic, sad, funny; but all of them are overflowing with surprises and grat.i.tude for the person in the mysterious 'over there' who had taken the trouble to visit and write home for her 'particular boy' after he was wounded. These letters for the boys were usually written to a woman--mothers, sisters, or 'girls'

the favorites first, of course, although occasionally 'aunty' or 'teacher' came in for a message of rea.s.surance.

"The first letter I had to write was for a boy who had lost his right eye. He wanted me to write his girl, whose photographs I had seen several times. She had very fluffy hair and usually seemed to stand in an apple orchard. After this he made a rather staggering suggestion: Would I please read all of Alice's letters so that I should know what kind of a girl she was and so answer her letters better! Realizing that a Red Cross worker should flinch at nothing and trying not to think of Alice's feelings in the matter, I took the letters out of a bag at the head of his bed and plunged into the first one.

"To my intense relief they all began 'Dear Bill,' and ended 'Your true friend, Alice.' Her only reference to matters of the heart was the hope that he would not fall in love with any of those pretty Red Cross nurses over there. For the most part Alice seemed to prefer impersonal topics, such as the potato crop, the new cla.s.s, and the party at the grange Sat.u.r.day night. Bill thought she was a mighty fine writer and, I think, was a little worried lest I be unable to compose a letter worthy of her.

He was worried, too, about the best way to tell her that he had lost an eye. 'You know, _I_ don't care. The left one is working better than it ever did and I know it won't make no difference in the way she thinks of me, but she'll feel pretty bad for me, I know that, and I want you to please tell her about it real gentle.' We finally decided to tell her in this letter that he had been seriously injured in his right eye and then, in the next letter, which he would write himself, he would tell her it was gone.

"In due time I received a grateful note from Alice in a very long, elegant, and exceedingly narrow envelope inclosing a correspondence card covered with high-schoolish-girlish writing. 'Thank you so much,' she wrote, 'for your letter giving me news of Bill, who I was getting so anxious about, as I had not heard from him for so long. I am glad he is getting better and that he really is not suffering.'

"Another grateful letter came from the mother of Michael Holihan. Mike had been badly wounded and at first no one thought he could possibly pull through, for he had a piece of shrapnel in the liver. He survived the operation, however, and became very anxious to write his mother.

'Now you just please write her what I tell you,' he said. 'Mother is pretty old now and she is always worrying, but I got it all thought out just what I am going to say to make her stop.' This is what he dictated:

"'_Dear Mother_:

"'I was hurt the other day but not enough to keep me down very long and I am as well as ever now. They certainly do use me fine in this hospital. I am having a great time. Gee, I am a happy boy, and don't you worry none about me, mother.

"'Your son, 'MIKE.'"

"After making this effort he lay back on the pillow and shut his eyes for a moment, tired out, only to open them anxiously to ask: 'That'll fix her, won't it?' Apparently it did not entirely 'fix her,' for her answer came back to me--an anxious scrawl--'I received your letter and, dear Red Cross lady, it was so kind of you to write when you must be so busy and let me know how my son was getting along, as I was waiting day after day for a letter from him and I didn't know what could be the matter as he always writes regularly like the good son he is. I am worrying day and night and even if Mike did say I shouldn't because what do boys know about it if they are sick or well and my Mike would say that he was well if he could only lay flat on his back and look at the ceiling he would. As this is all I have to say, I will bring this letter to a close. Tell Mike, I and all the family have wrote him!'"

Our Red Cross as well as our army officers, themselves, recognized almost from the beginning that an untroubled soldier always is the best soldier. It also appreciated--as this book already should have told you--that its primary object in Europe was to bring the utmost comfort and relief to America's fighting millions. That was why, in the early summer of 1918, it issued a small pamphlet telling the doughboy to "pack up his troubles in his old kit bag" and to hand them to the first Red Cross representative he met. He was a.s.sured that there was no worry of any kind, either on the one side of the ocean or the other, that the Red Cross could not or would not shoulder for him. These pamphlets were printed by the hundreds of thousands and distributed to every American soldier in France. And they were an evidence of the real desire of the great organization of the crimson cross to make itself invaluable, not alone in the comparatively few large ways of succor, but in an almost infinite number of smaller and individual ones. It was in this last sort of help, of course, that the Home Communication Service shone. It was its own particular sort of a job to take from the hara.s.sed minds of individual soldiers their individual problems--as varied and as complicated as the temperaments and the conditions of the doughboys, themselves. Take a single instance:

Here was a man who was owner of a small but growing business in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. When a unit was being recruited near Utica and a call for volunteers was being issued, he responded--with instant promptness. At the time he donned the khaki the two banks in the little town from which he came held notes against his business for a sum of a little more than a thousand dollars. They had been endorsed by his brother, a hard-working farmer of the valley.

Before this boy had been mobilized he arranged to have his young wife conduct the business--with the aid of his long-time a.s.sistant. The banks told him that the notes would, in no event, be called before his return from the service of his country. They were fairly perfervid in their expressions of their desires for patriotic service, and the young man left for France, his mind well at ease.

His first letters from home were full of optimistic comfort. A little later, however, they were not quite so serene. Finally this soldier received a letter from his wife stating quite frankly and without reserve that the two banks had called the loans, forced his brother to sell part of his farm stock, and then had sold out their little business.

The boy in khaki was furious. A week before he had stuffed into his _musette_ the little American Red Cross booklet which told of that organization's sincere desire to help the individual American soldier who found himself in trouble. "I'll take them at their word," thought he and immediately sought out the Red Cross man with his unit, and to him spilled the entire story. The Red Cross man boiled. He was not a young man--being a bit too old for regular army service, he had taken the Red Cross way as being the best for him to serve his country--and he had heard stories of that sort before, and decided to take prompt action on this one.

It so happened that there were some pretty big American bankers on the American Red Cross staff over there in France. When this incident was rushed through to them--with vast promptness--they, too, took action.

They did not even wait for the mails, but cabled the main facts of the story to the secretary of the American Bankers' a.s.sociation, saying that the proofs were coming on by post, but requesting immediate action. A representative of the a.s.sociation took the first train up into central New York and, through a personal investigation of the books of the two banks, quickly verified the incident--in every detail. After that he promptly returned to New York city and, placing the matter before the executive committee of the Bankers' a.s.sociation, asked that justice be quickly done. It was. The two miserly and hypocritical banking inst.i.tutions were forced to return the young soldier's business to his wife and to pay back the brother the money which they had taken from him. After which they were both kicked out of the national a.s.sociation.

Along with the pamphlet advising the doughboy to pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and then carry them to the nearest Red Cross man or woman, there was prepared a poster originated by a man out in the Middle West, who because of his understanding affection for boys was particularly well qualified to prepare it. It was used to placard Brest and some other port towns. As I recall it, it read something like this:

AMERICAN SOLDIER AND SAILOR

Are you worried about anything back home; your wife, children, mother, insurance, allotments, taxes, business affairs, wills, powers of attorney, or any personal or family troubles of a private nature?

THE AMERICAN RED CROSS HOME SERVICE MEN

will help you by cable, telegraph, letter--a.s.sisted by forty million members of the Red Cross at home. Information _Free_.

Troubles? The American doughboy seemed to have all the troubles that the poster catalogued--and then some more. The response to the poster and the pamphlet was immediate. Soldiers sought out the American Red Cross Home Communication people all over France. At Brest the first office was in a tent near Camp Pontanzen. Later two offices were established. One, for the sailors, was located in Brest itself, and fairly accessible to the landing stages. Another was located in a stone barracks that had been builded by the great Napoleon. This office not having an outside door available to pa.s.sers-by, wooden steps were built up the wall to a French window. Another set of steps was affixed to the inner wall and led right down to the desk of the Red Cross representative. Eventually this work at just this one point became so great in volume that four of these offices were pressed into service.

"What does Home Service really do for a man?" asked a magazine woman who was "doing" France for her publication at one of these offices. The answer to her inquiry was definite.

"It does everything," they told her, "from giving a soldier a needle and thread to letting our tears mingle with his between sobs when he tells us of his home troubles."