Part 14

We sped past the Big Canal and the Little Canal, tranquil stretches of twilight water, colored like gorgeous rose windows by a liberated gleam of the westering sun; reminiscent of Venice, with their overhanging houses, now glooming ruins whose window holes stared like sightless sockets of men blinded in battle; past the business and the residence sections of the city, dead and desolate as the tombs of the Pharaohs; and finally wound up to the summit of a hill whence, the colonel explained, we could obtain a comprehensive view of the havoc the Huns had wrought. And when we had gazed our fill on that tragic exhibition of arrogance and hate, the colonel, like the fine artist he was, led us into a lovely quiet garden close whose darkening air was sweet with the scent of hyacinths, violets, crocuses and spring roses. And kneeling down on the damp turf and getting out his clasp-knife he proceeded to gather us each a nosegay in honor of the event.

“For,” he observed sagely, “flowers are better souvenirs than bits of iron shells.”

When we wondered how he came to be possessed of a garden on this deserted hill-top among the crumbling ruins he explained it was his favorite point of observation. Knowing his love for the spot his men had secretly made this garden for him and tended it carefully and kept it in fresh bloom.

Returning to the citadel we dined once more in the famous mess room, this time with the colonel and all his officers. It was nine o’clock when we finally took leave of him, standing bareheaded in the rain to assure us of the warm pleasure we had given him! It had been an amazing day, crowded with images, emotions, events; and not least amazing was this French colonel, commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun, bubbling over with gayety and humor, filled with profound tenderness and knowledge of life, a savant, learned in history and languages, a distinguished warrior who had been tried in the fiery furnace of battle, and yet simple-hearted as a child or one of his beloved poilus.

It was long after midnight when we arrived in Nancy. Those two tiny fowls de luxe which cost eight dollars we had fallen on and devoured in the night. The following day, on our return to Paris, we learned that the battle to the north was still raging. But the Germans had been checked. Our troops, the ones we had seen moving north, were in the great struggle too. They were being heavily gassed and shelled.

“Worse than Verdun!” said my informant, an American who had just returned from the British Front. “I saw several hundred of our fellows who had been mustard-gassed, lying in a field hospital. They lay on cots, their smarting eyes bandaged with soothing lotions, and they talked to each other in low broken whispers. It gave one a choke in the throat to see all those stalwarts lying flat, eyes bandaged, whispering to the comrades they could not see. I tell you, it made me feel mighty ugly toward the Hun! I wished some of our peace propagandists at home might see that sight, hear those low, choking whispers!”

“What were they talking about? Home? Mother? Where is my wandering boy to-night?”

The officer gave a grim laugh. “Not by a jolly jugful! They were trying to fix the exact hour of the gas attack in order to reckon how soon they’d be back in the trenches to tackle the Hun!”

This, then, was the spirit of the Americans who had entered the great fight. It was the spirit of the poilus before Verdun. It was the spirit of that indomitable colonel who had replied that one hundred and ten thousand brave lives were not too many to give for such a cause. Verdun of to-day was the heritage of these men in khaki who lay with bandaged eyes and spoke in choked whispers. And the Verduns of to-morrow would be theirs by the same sign: The conquering force of spirit controlling the conquering force of arms.

BEHIND CHÂTEAU-THIERRY

This is a story of causes. And those causes produced certain effects. I hope you will be patient with the causes--which, like all causes, are more or less dull--and read on until you come to the effects. There I can promise you some excitement.

When, in the midst of the March offensive, so disastrous in its initial phase, General Foch took command of the various Allied armies in France with the intention of merging those several distinct and often conflicting units into a single compact whole, one and indivisable, which should be at least as supple and cohesive as that of the foe, nobody on the outside even dimly realized how fundamental, how far-reaching would be the changes involved. For after three years and a half of fighting as separate entities each nation had rutted deeply into its own peculiar manner of waging war. England held one sector; Belgium another; France another; and when American overseas soldiers landed in France they were assigned another portion of the line in Lorraine.

And of his own particular sector each nation was supreme lord, of both the front and the back areas, the advanced and the rear war zones. That was his terrain, his stronghold. Therein he could do as he pleased, make war as seemed to him best, without let or hindrance. Thus England built up one policy of war strategy, of transportation and hospitalization; France another; America a third. There were three autonomies, three great war chiefs, three grand headquarters. Each autonomy fought in a water-tight compartment, so to speak--water-tight so far as concerned the others; but unfortunately not water-tight to the boche.

So rigorously was this sense of independence held by each country, so distinctly did each nation cover its zone and its zone alone, that the fresh divisions held in reserve in back areas in case of a possible grand attack could not be stationed save in their own respective territories. French reserves could not be stationed in the British zone; British reserves could not be stationed in the French zone. Even if every sign pointed to a powerful massed action in one particular sector, all the neighboring sector could do was to hold mobile troops, together with trains and camions, in its own area ready to move. Naturally this caused great delay; precious time was lost in conveying troops.

For example, on March twenty-first, when the Fifth British Army fell back, fighting valiantly, before the furious onslaught of a Hun host of quadruple strength, and a temporary breach was made in the line which opened the road to Paris, the French generals, Pelle and Humbert, rushed up their reserves from Picardy and Champagne. These two generals had received special instructions from the French High Command to study the different hypotheses of attack on the British Front and to hold themselves responsible for all consequences. An agreement had been entered into by the British and the French commanders, fixing the sixth day of battle as the one when the French should intervene if necessary and come to the assistance of their British allies. But so fast and furious waxed the offensive, so urgent appeared the crisis to the onlooking French generals, that it was not six days but scarcely more than that number of hours when the blue casques of the French began to appear in the frightful mêlée and the German flood in full drive began to be stemmed.

But it was a narrow squeak. And a good part of its narrowness consisted in the fact that fresh troops could not be held in readiness behind the danger zone, but had to be transported by camion, without their organizations behind them, often without sufficient guns or ammunition, from a long distance, and then hurled without a minute’s rest into the very heart of the maelstrom. Had the French reserves been massed near at hand in the British back areas so that they could have gone immediately into action, there is no doubt that thousands of British soldiers, now German prisoners, hundreds of wounded in hospitals, not to speak of the loss of guns, supplies and evacuation hospitals along the entire front line of that sector, would have been saved to the Allied arms. It was a bitter, grim lesson, and its price was high. But not too high to pay for a unified command.

Now in the present engagements the Germans are meeting French, British, Americans and Italians, all within a few miles upon the same sector. They are intermingled and interwoven, as the need arises, regiment by regiment, company by company, and even man by man. The old partitions have been completely torn down.

One of the most distinctive features of the old régime was the hospitalization system. Here as elsewhere each nation carried on in its own fashion. The British evolved one type of organization; the French another; the Americans a third; so that there existed side by side three separate networks of systems, each elaborate, ramified, complete, which never touched each other. In the British sector, for example, the seriously wounded are evacuated as rapidly as possible back to England, where are located most of their big base hospitals. In the French system the evacuation hospitals are dotted all along the sector a few miles behind the firing line, with their large base and convalescent hospitals scattered throughout the interior, in the Midi or down on the Riviera, far from the rude northern winds. And when the Americans were assigned their sector in Lorraine they organized their system along similar lines.

First come the evacuation hospitals, as close up behind the Front as possible, in order to catch the wounded man within two, three or four hours of the time he falls on the field. Here he is operated on without delay, rendered fit for transportation, and then shipped to some big base farther back in the rear. As the hospital formation recedes from the advance zone of the army, and therefore from acute danger and unstable tenure arising from likelihood of capture, shelling and bombing raids, the bases grow in size and elaboration, until at some points they are vast beehives, community centers with a capacity of ten to twenty thousand beds. Between the two extremes of the formation, the evacuation hospitals just behind that invisible and most uncertain quantity called the front line and the big solid base situated some hundreds of kilometers away--between these two types there exists the greatest difference.

The base, as its name implies, is solid, immobile, permanent, steady as the Rock of Gibraltar or the skyscrapers of New York. The evacuation hospital, on the contrary, creeping up as close as possible behind the fighting forces is light, mobile, supple, easy to move, consisting largely of tents, stuff that can be loaded swiftly on trucks and motor lorries and carried away. If during a big push the line begins to sway perilously, to strain, to crack, with breaches showing here and there, and the order comes to retire, the evacuation hospital can fold up its tents like the Arab and silently steal away, not on camels but their modern substitutes, camions, with the orderlies on the rear truck, thumb to nose, wagging derisive fingers at the oncoming boche, who if he does break through will find--just nothing at all.

That is one difference between evacuation and base hospitals. And there are others. The bases do good straight honest and honorable surgical and medical work of the type that is known in America. They have a fine régime, and this régime is rarely overturned. They are, therefore, prosaic. But an evacuation hospital is dramatic, picturesque, full of potentialities and surprises, with tragedy, comedy and broad farce competing for first place every hour in the day.

Here during a big offensive, when Allied and enemy wounded are pouring in in a continuous stream, surgeons, nurses and personnel work like fiends under a tremendous pressure, twelve, twenty-four, even forty-eight hours at a stretch. Here are to be witnessed in the operating room running fights with death as tense and thrilling as anything upon the battlefield. Sometimes the wounded man is exactly upon the great divide, hovering between life and death, an extra hair’s weight capable of sending him to either side; shrapnel in his chest, his lungs full of blood, breathing like a trumpeter, suffering from shock, exhaustion, lack of food--and still able to smile up into the surgeon’s eyes and say faintly: “I’m all right, sir. Take that other poor guy. He’s worse off than me.”

In cases like these, three minutes more or less in the length of the operation spells all the difference between time and eternity. The surgical team works with the perfect union of a football eleven. In their white aprons, caps and masks they look like priests performing a rite. The sweat stands out on their foreheads. Their expert fingers move like lightning, yet precise, unhurried, sure.

In an operation of this kind, with life and death in the saddle and both riding hard, I have seen the assistant hold a watch on the operating team, as if it were a horse race, and call aloud the minutes, thus: “Three! Five! Seven! Ten!” Two minutes too long, and the patient may expire on the table, or die of pneumonia from the added strain of ether on the lungs. Here margins are short and time more precious than the weight of iron in rubies.

Here also is to be seen what is known as the new war surgery. The wounded men are X-rayed before entering the operating room, and the exact position of the foreign body indicated by an indelible cross on the patient’s skin. Consequently the surgeons need not go delving and exploring and guessing all over the landscape, but make a clean straight dive for the intruder. As the greatest danger in all these wounds is that of infection from the gas-gangrene germ, which infests the soil of France and therefore every particle of the soldier’s clothes, and as in addition the wounded are often forced to lie twelve, twenty-four or even thirty-six hours on the field on account of a violent enemy barrage, these wounds are often badly infected by this germ before ever they reach the evacuation hospital, near as that may be. In order, then, to prevent the further spread of the poison throughout the body the wound is laid wide open, the crushed and torn tissues shorn clean away, and a big clean wound created. This is thoroughly cleansed, packed with gauze soaked in Carrel solution, after which the entire area is wrapped in compresses, solidly bandaged, strapped or splinted--and the patient is ready to be shipped a hundred miles.

From this it will be seen that it is at the outset of the game, after the man is first wounded, that the time element is most precious. Upon the speed with which an ambulance can deliver a soldier to the nearest evacuation hospital, divest him of his dirty, infected clothes and lay him on the life-saving operating table depends largely the speed of his recovery and return to the lines. Delays there are bound to be--violent shelling of trenches, back areas or crossroads, which may block every form of transportation for hours. And it is to counteract these unavoidable delays that evacuation hospitals are creeping closer and closer up to the Front, risking bombardment and air raids in order to save a greater percentage of life and limb.

Behind these hospitals, then, stand the big solid bases, imposing, safe and sane. In front of them is still another formation. Briefly, it is something like this: A soldier is wounded on the field, in the trenches, in a wood. If alone, he applies his own first aid. If he has given it away to a comrade, he uses his belt for a tourniquet, his bootlaces--anything. If he cannot get at his wound or if he is knocked unconscious, he lies until he is picked up by friend or foe. If he is not picked up he “goes West,” joining the great host of immortal comrades, and all is well. That is the first step, where each individual attends to himself, is attended to by others or is lost.

The second step consists of getting him to a dressing station, usually in some _abri_, where he is bandaged, given a hot drink, an injection of anti-tetanus serum, and an iodine cross is marked on his forehead to indicate that he has received the same. If he is suffering acutely he is in addition given a morphia tablet. After this he is transported by ambulance to the divisional field hospital, where if he is in good condition he is not even unloaded but sent straight on to the evacuation hospital a few miles farther back. Thus he receives personal, regimental and divisional first aid before ever he strikes the evacuation hospital.

All of which, if he is lucky, he may get inside of two or three hours, and be safely tucked away in his cot coming out from under ether, raving not of home and mother but of going over the top, shouting in stentorian accents: “Shoot ’em to hell, boys! The dirty skunks! Shoot ’em to hell!” to the infinite delight of his comrades in the tent ward, who cheer him on: “That’s the stuff, buddy! Attaboy! Eat ’em alive!”

Finally, after much batting of wobbly eyelids, he opens his eyes feebly upon the white-capped nurse at the foot of the bed and murmurs in weak flat tones of pleasure: “Well, hello, chicken! How’d you ever git here? Gosh! That’s a foul taste in my mouth. Say, can a guy spit in this place?” And if he has come through thus far alive the chances are he will stick. He is the stuff that survives.

This sketches in the large the hospital formation that the American Army built to care for its wounded behind the Lorraine sector under the old régime. All of the units, the string of evacuation hospitals, base hospitals and transportation facilities were designed and constructed on the principle of America’s holding that particular sector.

And then, presto, General Foch took command.

That simple statement merits an entire paragraph all to itself, for it wiped out the old order and engendered a whole new realignment of policies and plans--in hospitalization especially. For manifestly if American troops were to be shifted here and there, up and down the Western Front as the need rose--as they must indeed be shifted if the Allied army was to be as swift and mobile as that of the foe--then a hospital formation away over east in the Lorraine country was not going to be a great advantage to American troops fighting up north round Montdidier and Château-Thierry. Nor could the American Army all at once, by the wave of a magic wand, conjure into being another system. And even if it could there would still remain the question of conflicting French and American traffic over already congested lines.

Yet something had to be done to cover this situation, and done at once, for our troops were already on the move. The French command, in collaboration with the American command, solved it in the only possible fashion. It was decreed that when American troops fought in a French sector the wounded should be evacuated along with the French through the French system; when they fought with the British their wounded should be evacuated with the British to England. And so the affair stood.

Americans went up to the British Front in Flanders. They went to the French Front in Picardy and Champagne. They stayed at home on their own Front in Lorraine. And the wounded began to be evacuated by all three systems. So far, so good. And yet, not altogether good. Good perhaps from a purely military point of view; not so good from a human point of view. For the Americans in the French hospitals were lonesome. There was no use blinking the fact. They did not do well. Hearing never a word of their own language, unable to make their wants known, unable also to comprehend the soft babble of words by which the gentle French sisters tried to express their sympathy, they sickened, not so much from their wounds as from pure nostalgia and longing for the familiar home tongue.

And one man died. But while he was ill in that strange hospital in a foreign land he kept a little journal which he called The Philosophy of Loneliness. From that little book of scribbled notes it appeared that this young soldier grieved and grieved for lack of someone to speak to him in his own tongue. And at last, when his isolation became intolerable, he decided to rise up and go in search of human companionship. But the tall woman in black, with the black veil, like one of the Fates, kept thrusting him back into bed. Her hands were gentle but strong. He told her, quite simply, that he only wanted somebody to talk to. She replied with a torrent of strange unintelligible sounds. And then he shouted aloud, in order to drown her babble and hear some good honest American speech.

It was no use; she could not comprehend; she held him down, gently but firmly, pouring out over his fainting soul the soft strange babble of sounds. He swooned under the torment. The next day he tried again. Again the tall black-veiled figure thrust him down with hands that were gentle but strong. Again the hated sounds. Again he swooned. The third day, very weak but resolute, he recorded in his journal his intention to try once more, and strove to rise. But over him, as ever, was that black unyielding figure, holding him down; and so she held him, gentle, ruthless, unknowing, babbling into his ears those strange sounds until he died.

In comment upon this incident Major Perkins, Chief Commissioner for Europe of the Red Cross, said: “When I read the few pitiful pages of that journal of one of our men who had gone to his end in utter loneliness of soul I decided that something must be done. Either Americans must have their own hospitals or else we must put American nurses into French hospitals.”

Accordingly American women, nurses, visitors and aids, were assigned to fifty-two French hospitals containing American men. One day it chanced in a certain French hospital that one of these aids, a bright, pretty girl, was working in a ward. And as she moved here and there, busy at her tasks, she sang softly under her breath the following cheerful ditty:

“_Where do we go from here, boys? Oh, where do we go from here?_”

“I don’t want you to go anywhere from here!” came an abrupt voice from a bed behind her. Turning she beheld a wounded American, a pale newcomer, regarding her from inflamed, bloodshot eyes.

“Well,” she replied, laughing, “I don’t intend to go anywhere this very minute. What’s the matter with your eyes? Gassed?”

“Nothing,” he replied laconically. “I’ve not slept for seventy-two hours. They shelled us up there for three days. That’s where I got mine. I’ve been lying here watching you for an hour and trying to make up my mind which I wanted to do most--go to sleep or go on looking at you. And I decided I’d rather go on looking at you. I don’t know,” he added wistfully, “whether you consider that much of a compliment or not?”

“I consider it the finest compliment I ever had in my life, bar none--from a man who hasn’t slept for seventy-two hours.”