The A. E. F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

CHAPTER XIII
HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS

SOME of the compliments the mannerly French poured out upon the army left the Americans feeling that they didn't quite deserve them. Others they could take standing. Well to the front of the second lot were all the good words for the medical corps. A leading writer for a big Parisian afternoon paper took the first three columns of his first page to say with undisguised emotion that the French government not merely could, with profit, but should and must pattern after the American Army Medical Service.

One good army hospital in France is like another and so let it be the New York Post Graduate unit which was picked at random for the purpose of a visit. We straggled off the train with two old peasant women whose absorbed faces under their peaked white caps did not encourage us to ask our way of them, and one poilu, bent under the astonishing miscellany of the home-going French soldier. He lost his chance to escape us by eyeing us with frank if friendly curiosity. Could he direct us to the American Army Hospital, we asked, and he wrinkled his weather worn nose. No, he hadn't been home since the Americans had come to war, but, of course, there was only one building in town big enough and new enough to be used by the Americans. If we should turn to the left and then to the right and then to the left again we would come to the school and there he thought we would find the Americans. We did. To the far end of the little town we trudged till we came to a low stone building, gray and white, of good stout masonry. We knew it was the American hospital because over the arched entrance there hung a "bannière etoilée."

We neared the entrance to the tune of some trumpet blasts, not very well played, and we peered from arch to inner court yard just in time to see a swarm of khaki-half-clad soldiers running out from barracks. By the time they reached the mess door they were khaki-clad. The officer who came to take us about explained that on Sunday mornings everybody slept late and dressed on the way to breakfast and that discipline was better on week days. Then he told us that of all the privates in that unit not one had ever been a soldier before. They had been picked for medical service first and military service at such time as the officers had learned enough to teach it to them. I remember later that one of the soldiers objected privately to being drilled by a dentist.

Nine-tenths of the men were fresh out of college, the officer told us, and half the other tenth were freshmen or sophomores. Many of the enlisted men, we were told, had left incomes in the tens of thousands and a few in the hundreds of thousands. The enlisted personnel included one matinee idol, one young New York dramatic critic, two middling well known young authors, a composer of good but saleable music, and a golfer who gets two in the national rating.

The wards were not very different from those of a New York hospital back home, except that they housed a strange mixture of patients. About half were American soldiers and the rest were civilians from the country round about. The French civilians were convinced that though the American doctors might cure them with their marvelous medicines and speckless cleanliness they would surely kill them with air. This particular base hospital was fulfilling two functions for the civilian population. It was seeking to take out adenoids and let in air. A great New York specialist was attending to the adenoids and making progress. It was not always possible to convince the patient that it would do him any good to have his adenoids removed, but if the operation gave the kind American doctor any pleasure he was willing to let him go ahead. The air campaign was making slower progress. Dislike of air is centuries old in France and it has become an instinct with the race. I rode in a railroad car with a French aviator on a balmy day of early autumn and his first act upon entering the compartment was to close both windows. Everybody in this part of France has his bed placed inside a closet and at night he closes the doors.

Worst of all were the extra precautions against air which the French peasants took in case of illness. The young French doctors were at the front and the old men who remained always began the treatment of a case by advising the patient's relatives to close all the windows and start a fire.

At the call of sick babies and old folk of the countryside came aristocrats of the New York medical profession whose fees at home would have bought the house in which the patient lived. Later, of course, the doctors of the hospital will be more rushed by the necessities of the soldiers.

"This is hardly more than a germ of what we plan," a doctor explained to us. "Do you see those tents?" He pointed across a small field. "Those are American engineers and they're going to do nothing for the next few months but build additions to this hospital. Every time I go 'way for a day I come back to find that they've added a thousand beds to the capacity we're planning for. We will extend all the way across the fields over to that road before they're done with us." He spoke in a joyful voice as if nothing in the world was quite so inspiring as a huge hospital filled with patients. That was the professional touch. I remember the story one of the doctors told us about a young surgeon who was sent up to the French front to help handle the cases after a big drive. One of his first patients was a German prisoner who had been shot just above the elbow and bayoneted in the stomach. The doctor had no great trouble with the elbow and he did what he could for the abdominal wound.

"I could save that man all right if it wasn't for that bayonet wound," he said to another American doctor close at hand, and then he added in a reproachful voice as he pointed to the gash: "That's an awful dangerous place to stab a man."

There were no wounded at the hospital at the time of our visit, but some of the soldiers in the medical ward were very sick. There was one boy there, who has since mended and gone away, whose recovery seemed hopeless. The doctor in charge saw that something was troubling the young soldier and so he came to him and told him that he was aggravating his illness by this worry or desire.

"Whatever this thing is, you must tell me," said the doctor.

"Do you think I'm going to die?" the boy asked anxiously.

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," the doctor answered a little evasively.

"I knew I was pretty sick," said the boy, catching the evasiveness of the doctor's tone, "and if you think I'm going to die and won't ever get back home again, there's just one thing I want to ask you to do for me."

"What's that?" said the doctor.

"Couldn't you fix it up for me just once to have ham and eggs and apple pie for breakfast?"

The most important thing in the case of all the sick men was to keep them from brooding about home. The doctors made a point of getting around and talking to the patients to cheer them up. One of them complained of homesickness.

"Yes," said the doctor, "I suppose we all have people back there that we miss."

"You can just bet I do," said the sick soldier, "I've got the finest wife in the world in Des Moines and two children and a Ford."

The health of the staff was excellent, but sometimes they felt homesick, too. The enlisted men gave a show the night I was at the hospital and during the course of the performance everybody wept or at least got moist eyed because the play was about New York. It was laid in a year as nameless as the place where the hospital is located. All the program said was: "The bachelor apartments of Schuyler Van Allen on a fine June night a few weeks after the end of the war." Schuyler had just come back from Europe and he found his apartment with everything just as it was on the night he had sailed for France. There was the daily paper he had left behind with the date May 8, 1917, and he looked at the old sheet and mused as he read some of the headlines:

"Kaiser Calls on Troops to Stand Firm," read Schuyler. "The Kaiser," he said to himself, and then he added: "I wonder whatever became of him."

The audience laughed at that, but in a moment the doctors and the nurses and the patients who weren't sick enough to stay in bed wept. It was all because Schuyler looked out of the window and said to his friend: "Oh, it's great to be on Fifth Avenue again. I want to see it in every light and at every hour of the day. It was fairly blazing tonight with the same old hurrying crowd jamming the traffic at Forty-second Street and the same old mob pushing and shoving its way into the Grand Central subway station." The mention of the subway was too much for the audience. By this time the nurse who sat in front of me was dabbing violently at her eyes with her pocket handkerchief. She was breaking my heart and I leaned forward and asked: "What part of New York do you come from?"

"I wasn't ever in New York," she said. "I come from Lima, Ohio."

Like the medical corps, the engineers were peculiarly American and peculiarly efficient as well. We first came upon them when we saw a tall, stringy man looking out of the window of a little locomotive which pulled a train up to a point at the French front. We thought he was an American because his jaws were moving back and forth slowly and meditatively. Inquiry brought confirmation.

"Sure, I'm an American," said the man in the blue jumpers. "I guess I've kicked a hobo off the train for every telegraph pole back on the old Rock Island, but this is the toughest railroading job I've struck yet."

The man in the locomotive was a member of an American regiment of railroad engineers which had taken over an important military road. They had the honor to be the first American troops at the French front who came under fire. The engineers were willing to admit that while washouts and spreading rails were old stories to them, they did get a bit of a thrill the first time they found their tracks torn up by shellfire. But the aeroplanes were worse.

"One night," said our friend the engineer, "there was one of those flying machines just followed along with us and every time we fired the engine and the sparks flew up she'd drop a bomb on us or shoot at us with her machine gun. We tried to hit it up a bit, but she kept right up with us. They didn't hit us, but once they got so rough we just slowed down and laid under the engine for a spell until they decided to quit picking on us."

This regiment of railroad engineers was the huskiest outfit I saw in France. It was carefully selected from the railroads running into Chicago. Of the men originally selected only about one-seventh were taken because the railroads found so many men who were eager to go. One company boasted one hundred and twenty-five six-footers and all were two-fisted fighters. The discipline of the regiment, of course, was not that of an infantry unit. I watched an animated discussion between a captain and his men as to where some material should be placed when the regiment first moved into a new camp.

"You've got the wrong dope about that, Bill," said a private to his captain very earnestly. The officer looked at him severely.

"I've told you before about this discipline business, Harry," he said. "Any time you want to kick about my orders you call me mister." It is hard for a railroad man to realize that a couple of silver bars have changed a yardmaster into a captain.

The regiment set great store by the number thirteen. It was put into service on a Friday the thirteenth and it left its American base in two sections of thirteen cars each. The locomotives' headlight numbers each totaled thirteen and the thirteenth of a month found the regiment arriving at its European port of entry. The thirteenth of the next month found the regiment starting for its French base and when the camp was reached a group of interpreters was waiting.

"How many are you?" asked the colonel.

"Myself and twelve companions," replied one of the Frenchmen.

The regiment will never forget the first night at its French base. It arrived at midnight but crowds thronged the darkened streets and gave the big Americans an enthusiastic greeting, although it was forbidden to talk above undertones. Since they could not hurrah for the soldiers, the villagers hugged them, and from black windows roses were pelted on shadowy figures who tramped up the street to the low rumble of a muffled band.

"Great people, these French, so demonstrative," said a captain, who was once a trainmaster in a Texas town.

"I was in the theater the other night," he said, "and a couple of performers on the stage started to sing 'Madelon.' Well, I'd heard it before and I knew the chorus, so when they got that far along I joined in. Well, there was a young girl sitting next me and when she saw that I knew the song she just threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

"And now," said the captain, "everybody in the regiment's after me to teach 'em that song."

CHAPTER XIV
WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY

"The Germans haven't thrown a single shell into Rheims today," said our conducting officer apologetically. "Yesterday," he continued more cheerfully, "they sent more than five hundred big ones and they wounded two of my officers."

We left the little inn at the fringe of the town and rode into the square in front of the cathedral. At the door the officer turned us over to the curator. The old man led us up the aisle to a point not far from the altar. Here he stopped, and pointing to a great shell hole in the floor said: "On this spot in the year 496 Clovis, the King of the Franks, was baptized by the blessed St. Remi with oil which was brought from heaven in a holy flask by a dove."

Something flew over the cathedral just then, but we knew it was not a dove. It whistled like a strong wind, and presently the shop of a confectioner some ten blocks away folded up with a ripping, smashing sound. Clovis, with his fourteen centuries wrapped about him, was safe enough. He had quit the spot in time. But a younger man ducked. The old guide did not even look up.

"The first stone of the present cathedral was laid in May, 1212, by the Archbishop Alberic de Humbert," he said.

Another big shell tore the sky, and this time the smash was nearer. It seemed certainly no more than nine blocks away. The young man began to calculate. He figured that he was seven centuries down, while the Germans had nine blocks to go. That was something, but the guide failed to keep up his pace through the centuries. There were no more happy hiatuses.

"Scholars dispute," he continued, "as to who was the architect of the cathedral. Some say it was designed by Robert de Coucy; others name Bernard de Soissons, but certain authorities hold to Gauthier de Reims and Jean d'Orbais." Two more shells crossed the cathedral. The controversy seemed regrettable and the young man shifted constantly from foot to foot. He appeared to feel that there was less chance of being hit if he were on the wing, so to speak.

"One or two have named Jean Loups," said the guide, but he shook his head even as he mentioned him. It was evident that he had no patience with Loups or his backers. Indeed, the heresy threw him off his stride, and the next smash which came during the lull was more significant than any of the others. The crash was the peculiarly disagreeable one which occurs when a large shell strikes a small hardware store. Even the guide noticed this shell. It reminded him of the war.

"Since April," he said, "the Germans have been bombarding Rheims with naval guns. All the shells which they fire now are .320 or larger. They fire about 150 shells a day at the city, mostly in the afternoon, and they usually aim at the cathedral or some place near by."

The young man noted by his watch that it was just half-past one.

"A week ago the Germans fired a .320 shell through the roof, but it did not explode. I will show it to you, but first I must ask you to touch nothing, not even a piece of glass, for we want to put everything back again that we can after the war."

On the floor there was evidence that some patient hand had made a beginning of seeking to fit together in proper sequence all the available tiny glass fragments from the shattered rose windows. It was a pitiful jigsaw puzzle, which would not work. The curator stepped briskly up the nave, and at the end of a hundred paces he stopped.

"This is the most dangerous portion of the cathedral," he explained. "Most of the big shells have come in here." And he pointed to three great holes in the ceiling. Then he showed us the monstrous shell which had not exploded and the fragments of others which had. Down toward the west end of town fresh fragments were being made. Each hole in the cathedral roof sounded a different note as the shells raced overhead. But the old curator was musing again. He had forgotten the war, even though the smashed and twisted bits of iron and stone from yesterday's clean hit lay at his feet.

"The first stone of the present cathedral was laid in May, 1212, by the Archbishop Alberic de Humbert," he said. "Alberic gave all the money he could gather and the chapter presented its treasury, and all about the clergy appealed for funds in the name of God. Kings of France and mighty lords made contributions, and each year there was a great pilgrimage, headed by the image of the Blessed Virgin, through all the villages. And the building grew and sculptors from all parts of France came and embellished it and in 1430 it was finished. You see, gentlemen," he said, "it took more than two hundred years to build our cathedral."

We left the cathedral then and paused for a minute in the square before the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, who brought her king to Rheims and had him crowned. In some parts of France devout persons speak of the Jeanne statue in Rheims as a miracle because, although the cathedral has been scarred and shattered and every building round the square badly damaged, the statue of Jeanne is untouched. I looked closely and found the miracle was not perfect. A tiny bit of the scabbard of Jeanne had been snipped off by a flying shrapnel fragment, but the sword of Jeanne, which is raised high above her head, has not a nick in it.

Crossing the square we went into the office of L'Eclaireur de l'Est. This daily newspaper has no humorous column, no editorials, no sporting page and no dramatic reviews, and yet is probably the most difficult journal in the world to edit. The chief reportorial task of the staff of L'Eclaireur is to count the number of shells which fall into the city each day. That doesn't sound hard. The reporter can hear them all from his desk and many he can see, for the cathedral just across the street is still the favorite target of the Germans. Sometimes the reporter does not have to look so far. The office of L'Eclaireur has been hit eleven times during the bombardment and three members of the staff have been killed. One big shell fell in the composing room and so now the paper is set by hand. It is a single sheet and the circulation is limited to the three or four thousand civilians, who have stuck to Rheims throughout the bombardment. One of the few who remain is a man who keeps a picture postcard shop in a building next door to the newspaper office. His roof has been knocked down about his head and his business is hardly thriving. I asked him why he remained.

"I started to go away several months ago after one day when they put some gas shells into the town," he said. "The very next morning I put all my things into a cart and started up that street there. I had gone just about to the third street when a shell hit the house behind me. It killed my horse and wrecked the wagon and so I picked up my things and came back. It seemed to me I wasn't meant to go away from Rheims."

The shelling increased in violence before we left the office of L'Eclaireur. One shell was certainly not more than a hundred and fifty yards away, but the work went on without interruption. The printers who were setting ads never looked up. Mostly these advertisements were of houses in Rheims which were renting lower than ever before. If there was anyone in the visiting party who felt uncomfortable he was unwilling to show it, for just outside the door of the newspaper office there sat an old lady with a lapful of fancy work. A shell came from over the hills and, in the seconds while it whistled and then smashed, the old lady threaded her needle.

A day later, when some of us were willing to confess that of all miserable sounds the whistling of a shell was the meanest, we found a curious kink in the brain of everyone. It was the universal experience that the slightest bit of cover, however inadequate, gave a sense of safety out of all proportion to its utility. Thus we all felt much more uncomfortable in the square than when we stood in the composing room of the newspaper which was shielded by the remains of a glass skylight. The same curious psychological twist can be found among soldiers at the front. Again and again men will be found taking apparent comfort in the fact that half an inch of tin roof protects them from the shells of the Germans.

One is always taken from the cathedral of Rheims to the wine cellars. The children of darkness are invariably wiser than the children of light and the champagne merchants have not suffered as the churchmen have. Their business places have been knocked about their heads, but their treasures are underground deep enough to defy the biggest shells. In the cellar of a single company which we visited there were 12,000,000 quarts of wine. Even the German invasion at the beginning of the war failed to deplete this stock. Hundreds of people live in these cellars, which are laid out in avenues and streets. We came first to New York, a street with tier upon tier of wine bottles; then to Boston, then to Buenos Ayres, then to Montreal. One of the visitors explained that the street named New York contained the wine destined to be shipped to that city, while Buenos Ayres contained the consignment for the Argentine capital, and so on. We nodded acceptance of the theory, but the next wine-laden street was called Carnot and the next was Jeanne d'Arc.

From the cellars we made a journey to a battery of French .75's. It was a peaceful military station, for so well were the guns concealed that they seemed exempt from German fire, in spite of the fact that they had been in place for half a year. The men sat about underground playing cards and reading newspapers, but the commander of the battery was unwilling that we should go with such a peaceful impression of his guns. He brought his men to action with a word or two and sent six shells sailing at the German first line trenches for our benefit. We left, half deafened, but delighted.

No child could be more eager to show a toy than is a French officer to let a visitor see in some small fashion how the war wags. We went from the battery to a first line trench. It was slow work down miles and miles of camouflaged road to the communicating trench, and all along the line we were stopped by kindly Frenchmen, who wanted us to see how their dugouts were decorated or the nature of their dining room or the first aid dressing station or any little detail of the war with which they were directly concerned. Much can be done with a dugout when a few back numbers of La Vie Parisienne are available. Still, this scheme of decoration may be carried too far. I will never forget the face of a Y. M. C. A. man who joined us at a French officers' mess one day. It was a low ceilinged room, with pine walls, but not an inch of wall was visible, for a complete papering of La Vie Parisienne pictures had been provided. Among the ladies thus drafted for decorative purposes there was perhaps chiffon enough to make a single arm brassard.

Trenches, save in the very active sectors, give the visitor a sense of security. Open places are the ones which try the nerves of civilians, and it was pleasant to walk with a wall of earth on either hand, even if some of us did have to stoop a bit. From the point where we entered the communication trench to the front line was probably not more than half a mile as the crow flies – if, indeed, he is foolish enough to travel over trenches – but the sunken pathway turned and twisted to such an extent that it must have been two miles before we struck even the third line. Here we were held while ever so many dugouts and kitchens and gas alarm stations and telephones were exhibited for us. They were all included in the routine of war, but of a sudden romance popped up from underground. The conducting officer paused at the entrance of a passage. "Another dugout" we thought.

"Bring them up!" said the officer to a soldier, and the poilu scrambled down the steps and came up with a bird cage containing two birds.

"These are the last resort," explained the officer. "We send messages from the trenches by telephone, if we can. If the wires are destroyed we use flashes from a light, but if that station is also broken and we must have help the birds are freed."

Neither pigeon seemed in the least puffed up over the responsibility which rested upon him.

The German trenches were just 400 yards away from the first lines of the French. It was possible to see them by peering over the rim of the trench, but we quickly ducked down again. Presently we grew less cautious, and one or two tried to stare the Germans out of countenance. If they could see that strangers were peeping at them they paid no attention.

The French officer in charge seemed embarrassed. He explained that it was an exceptionally quiet day. Only the day before the Germans had been active with trench mortars, and he couldn't understand why they were sulking now. Possibly the bombardment from the French .75's, which had been going on all day, had softened them a bit. He looked about the trench dejectedly. The soldiers of the front line were playing cards, eating soup or modeling little grotesque figures out of the soft rock which lined the walls of the trenches. He called sharply to a soldier, who fetched a box of rifle grenades out of a cubbyhole and sent half a dozen, one after the other, spinning at the German lines. Probably they fell short, or perhaps the Germans were simply sullen. At any rate, they paid no attention. They were not disposed into being prodded to show off for American visitors.

The officer suddenly thought up a method to retrieve the lost reputation of his trench. If we could only stay until dark he would send us all out on a patroling party right up to the wire in front of the German first line. We declined, and made some little haste to leave this ever so obliging officer. In another moment we feared he would organize an exhibition offensive for our benefit and reserve us places in the first wave.

If things were quiet on the ground there was plenty of activity aloft. It was a clear day, and both sides had big sausage balloons up for observation. Once a German plane tried to attack a French sausage, but it was driven off, and all day long the Germans sought without success to wing the balloon with one of their long range guns. In that particular sector on that particular day the French unquestionably had the mastery of the air. We saw four of their 'planes in the air to every one German, and once a fleet of five cruised over the German lines. The Boche opened on them with shrapnel. It was a clear day, without a breath of wind, and the white puffs clung to the sky at the point where they broke. Presently the French planes swooped much lower, and the Germans opened on them with machine guns. Somebody has said that machine gun fire sounds as if a crazy carpenter was shingling a roof, and somebody else has compared the noise to a typewriter being operated in an upper room, but it is still more like a riveting machine. It has a business-like, methodical sound to me. To my ear there is no malice in a machine gun, but then I have never heard it from an aeroplane.

The officer in charge accompanied us to the end of the communicating trench.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

We told him that we were going directly to Paris.

"Have a good time," he said, "but leave one dinner and one drink for me."

"You are going to Paris?" we asked.

He looked over toward the German wire and smiled a little. "I may," he said.