Part 9 (1/2)

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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 ”banniere etoilee.”

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 soph.o.m.ores. 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.”