Part 11 (2/2)
”I come to you first because it has become natural for us to go to the Americans first when we are in need.”
And from a refugee station near Peronne, a Red Cross worker reported:
”They are all looking to me, as a representative of the American Red Cross, to act as a proper G.o.dfather.”
As the days pa.s.sed, the work in this vital area was greatly expanded and increased. The refugees gradually were evacuated through to Paris and beyond, while the service in the valleys of the Somme and the Oise became more strictly military in character. It became better organized, too. But I feel that this last is not the point. We Americans are rather apt to place too great a stress upon organization. And the fact remains that the Red Cross in its first military emergency, with very little organization, indeed, attained a proficiency in service far greater than even its most optimistic adherents had ever dreamed it might attain.
I have turned the course of my book for a time away from the direct service of our Red Cross to our own army because I wanted you to see how and where that direct-service field was founded. From that beginning, at the start of the German drive, it grew rapidly and steadily and, as I have just said, with certain very definite benefits of organization. The drive halted, became a thing of memory, was supplanted by another drive--of a different sort and in the opposite direction--a drive that did not cease and hardly halted until the eleventh day of November, 1918. That was the drive so brilliantly marked with those epoch-making tablets of the superb romance of our American adventure overseas--Chateau-Thierry, Veaux, Saint Mihiel, the Argonne--many other conflicts, too.
In all of these the American Red Cross played its part, and seeks no greater testimony than that so generously volunteered by the very men who received its benefits--the doughboys at the front. They know, and have not been hesitant to tell. My own sources of information are for the most part a bit official--the records made by the Red Cross workers in the field. These tell more eloquently than I can of the work that was done there and so I shall quote quite freely from them.
”My billet has stout cement walls, a mighty husky ceiling and a dirt floor,” writes Lieutenant J. H. Gibson of Caldwell, Idaho, who was attached to the Thirty-third Division. ”The furniture consists of my cot and sundry goods boxes, camouflaged with blankets to make seats, and I have frequent callers. Generally they are casuals--men who have lost their organizations and don't know where to go or what to do. I had three of them the first day, footsore, weary, and homesick. I rustled them a place to get mess, loaded them into my car, and drove them to the nearest railroad railhead, where I found a truck belonging to their Division, stopped it, and got them aboard.”
Under date of October 13, 1918, Lieutenant Gibson further wrote:
”This has been another of those days spent most in quarters, busy with paper work. I find a thundering lot of letter writing necessary in connection with my Red Cross duties. I am the Home Communication and Home Service Representative for the Division in addition to being division 'scrounger.' When any of the folks back home want information about their soldier boys I am supposed to furnish it and, _vice versa_, when any of the soldier boys have home problems I am expected to help them. While I am resting I act as Division shopper, for fighting men need things just the same as ordinary mortals, and I take their orders, have the goods bought through the Red Cross in Paris, and distribute them, collecting the money. When the Division is in action I administer comfort to the wounded in addition to gathering data as to the deaths.
Between times I scout roads, carry dispatches, and help the sanitary train generally. If the devil has work only for idle hands he can pa.s.s me by.
”At dressing stations we endeavor to do two things; to re-dress the wounds and to administer some nourishment. The men wounded have received first aid treatment on the field or at the battalion-aid post and they walk or are carried on litters to the dressing station. There we put them into ambulances or trucks and they go out to the evacuation hospitals. My part of the job was the nourishment end, and so I got a detail of men, improvised a fire, stole a water bucket from another Division which had more than it needed, opened up some rations, and soon was serving hot coffee, bread, and jam to the wounded, endeavoring the while to kid a grin into the face of each. The last was the easiest job for our fellows were sure gritty. I think I batted a thousand per cent on the smile end of the game.”
Under date of October 24, 1918:
”Back from Paris. I rolled out fairly early and got my boxes opened. The boys certainly appreciate the Red Cross shopping service and fairly swarmed in after the articles we had procured for them. There was everything imaginable in the lot--watches, boots, cigars, cigarettes, and candy being the prime favorites. One buddy had a mandolin and another some French grammars. I was overwhelmed and had to get an a.s.sistant detailed, for in addition to making deliveries I had to take orders. Every one wanted to order something. About sixty-five additional orders were placed to-day and I didn't even have time to open my mail.”
A week later:
”I spent the day at my billet, busy with the correspondence which my position with the Red Cross necessitates and which, by the way, is a little difficult to handle in view of the fact that I am minus every convenience. Letter files, index cards, guides, and cabinets are about as scarce as hen's teeth. It is wonderful, however, just what a man can do without. A small goods box will make a very pa.s.sable letter file, and a cigar box, the kind that fifty come in, can be made into a reasonably useful card-index tray. I was wise enough to bring a small typewriter from the states and it has proven absolutely indispensable.... The men are in rest billets and the delouser and shower baths are busy cleaning them up. The men come in squads to the building which houses the equipment, strip off their clothing which goes to the delouser, where they are dry-baked at a temperature sufficiently high to kill the nits.
While this is being done they are thoroughly scrubbing themselves, and when they are through with the bath, their clothes are finished and ready to be put on. The Red Cross never did a better thing than when it furnished this equipment to my division.”
Permit me to interrupt Lieutenant Gibson's narrative to explain in somewhat greater detail the operation of these Red Cross portable cleansing plants which added so greatly to the comfort of the doughboys, not only in the field, but, in many cases, in rest billets or camps far back from it. It so happened that many times the men in the front lines would go weeks and even a full month without the opportunity of a decent bath. Such is war. It is a known fact that the boys of the Third Division once spent a full five weeks in the trenches without even changing their clothes, after which they were sent behind to a Red Cross cleansing station and bathed and refitted with clean clothing before being sent back again--with what joy and refreshment can easily be imagined.
The type of portable shower used in many cases was generally known as the ”eight-headshower” or field douche. It consisted of a simply designed water tank with fire box, in which might be burned coal or wood, a pipe line with eight sprays, and flooring under the sprays. The thing was easily adjusted. In a building with water supply it was a simple matter indeed to connect the tank with the water supply; while in the open field, where there might be neither water pressure nor water connection, the precious fluid could be poured into the tank with buckets. The apparatus was durable and reasonably ”fool-proof.”
During the Chateau-Thierry drive nine of these portable showers were set up by our Red Cross, and in one week, seven thousand men were brought back from the firing line, bathed, given clean clothes, and sent back refreshed mentally and morally as well as physically. Sixty men an hour could easily be bathed in one of these plants, and two gallons of water were allowed to each man.
The delouser, as the army quickly came to know the sterilizing plant, almost always accompanied the portable shower upon its travels. It, too, was a simple contraption; a great cylinder, into which the dirty clothing was tightly crammed until it could hold not one ounce more, and live steam poured in, under a pressure of from sixty to one hundred and fifteen pounds to the square inch. This was sufficient to kill all the vermin; and, in some cases, the bacteria as well, although this last was not guaranteed. The delouser, with a capacity of fifty suits a day, could almost keep pace with one of the shower baths, and both could be set up or taken down in ten minutes.
A shower bath mounted on a Ford was one of the best friends of the Eighty-first Division as it played its big part in the defeat of the Hun. It made its first appearance in September, when the Division was stationed in the Vosges, with headquarters at St. Die. After a few hard days in the trenches the men would return to their headquarters, well to the rear of the lines, and beg for some sort of bathing facilities--and these, apparently, were not to be found.
Captain Richard A. Bullock was our Red Cross man with the Eighty-first.
It bothered him that the men of his Division could not have so simple a comfort when they asked for it and needed it so much. He determined to try and solve the problem, and so found his way down to the big American Red Cross warehouse and there acquired one of the portable field equipments such as I have just described. It was a comparatively easy trick to mount the device on a Ford, after which Bullock paraded the entire outfit up and down the lines of the Eighty-first and as close to the front-line trenches as fires were ever permitted. In a mighty short time he could get the bath in order and showering merrily, and when all the men who wanted to bathe had been accommodated the contraption would move on.
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