Part 15 (1/2)
”How could you get them all together?” I asked him.
”It was easy. We figured it all out--when we still had less than fifty thousand American soldiers in France. So that when we had a call for an operating-room outfit we did not have to stop and wonder what we should send out for a well-equipped one. All that was done well in advance, with the result that in the high-pressure months of May and June, 1918, we began to reap the benefits of all the dirty work and the drudgery of the fall of 1917.”
I interrupted myself--purposely. I was talking of that first week in July when the word came that the First and Second Divisions--no longer brigaded with the French, but standing by themselves as integral factors of the United States Army--were going into action at Chateau-Thierry.
The results of that action need no recounting here. They have pa.s.sed into the pages of American history along with Saratoga and Yorktown and Gettysburg and Appomattox. They are not germane here and now to the telling of this story of our Red Cross in action. It is germane, however, to know that within fifteen minutes of the receipt of the news of the beginning of the Chateau-Thierry fight, Burlingame of the American Red Cross was in his swift automobile and on his way there.
Information already had reached him that our troops were to be pushed northward from Chateau-Thierry and the sectors about Rheims and southeastward from Montdidier. Acting upon this somewhat meager information he headed his machine straight toward Soissons. A wild ride it was, every mile of it; for Burlingame well knew that every moment counted in the crucial battle against the Germans.
From time to time he would meet motor cars or camions or little groups of soldiers who, in response to his signalings, would stop and frankly tell him what they knew about the position or the movement of our army.
But all this information was also meager, and much of it was contradictory. Finally, however, at an obscure crossroads he stumbled upon a group of more than ordinary intelligent Yanks who gave him news which seemed so accurate and so vital that he halted his car and pulled out his road maps. He located himself quickly. And it was not a long guess that decided him then and there to establish a hospital.
Remember, if you will, that this man Burlingame is exceedingly long on common sense, quick thinking, and quick acting; short, if you please, on that abominable thing known as red tape. Sensing the situation with a keenness that, in the light of after events, was uncanny, he decided that, when the clash came, it would come midway between Soissons and Chateau-Thierry, a little to the east of the point where he had halted his car. And there it came. ”It was bound to be a hard b.u.mp,” said he, and so it was.
He at once got in touch with the American Red Cross warehouses at Beauvais and at Paris and ordered medical and surgical and hospital supplies in abundance forwarded to Chantilly--the point where he had so quickly decided he would locate the emergency evacuation hospital. He ordered eight surgeons, sixteen nurses, and twelve enlisted men, who were on duty at A. R. C. Hospital Number 104, at Beauvais, to proceed at once to Chantilly, where they were met by additional Red Cross personnel sent on direct from Paris. He made arrangements with the Ambulance St.
Paul, which was then located at Chantilly, to establish the material and men and women being rushed from Paris and from Beauvais as an annex to its formation. Thus, in a mere twelve hours, was established an American hospital along the French lines of communication.
And none too quickly. On the following morning the big fighting set in to the north of Chateau-Thierry. And within a few hours the American wounded began pouring into the old French chateau town of Chantilly. In three weeks just 1,364 of our boys had been accommodated in our emergency Red Cross hospital there; after which there was a s.h.i.+fting of positions and of armies with a removal of the victorious Americans to other sectors, and only French were left in the neighborhood. Which, in turn, rendered it quite easy for our Red Cross to turn over the entire equipment to our French allies, who stood in great need of it.
Chateau-Thierry was in fact the first really great test of the American Red Cross. It was its first opportunity to perform its chief and most vital service--the succoring of the wounded men of the United States Army. It met that test. As a single example of the many ways in which it met the test consider the request for three thousand blankets, in addition to several thousand pillows, pajamas, dressings, surgical instruments, and medicines that poured in upon the Bureau of Hospital Administration at Paris at four o'clock on the afternoon of the eighteenth of July. Osborne's department was a little short of motor cars at that particular moment; the continued emergency at Chateau-Thierry, with the multifold demands that it brought upon every function of the Red Cross, had fairly exhausted his garages. There might be cars in, in a few hours, said the transportation dispatchers. But Burlingame's men took no such chances. They poured down from out of the Regina headquarters and, taking their places in the middle of the Rue de Rivoli, halted and commandeered taxicabs as they hove in sight.
With a half dozen of the Parisian ”one lungers” screeching their very souls out in the second speeds, they visited four of the Paris warehouses in quick succession. A truck was brought up out of the offing. By eight o'clock it was loaded, and by midnight it was at the firing line and being unloaded of its precious supplies.
On another night during the same battle, a veteran army surgeon major arrived in Paris at one o'clock in the morning. He found the medical offices of the Red Cross open--there were no hours in those strenuous days when one found them closed--and demanded supplies. The man was faint from lack of sleep. He was put in bed for 120 minutes--not one minute less, not one minute more. When he was awakened, his supplies were at the door. They had been gathered in a motor truck from three warehouses immediately roundabout. Later this army man returned to Paris and reported that the work of our Red Cross that night had made it possible for every man in his Division to have a chance for recovery.
Had it not been for the supplies, he added, sixty per cent of them might have died.
But it was in the quick establishment of hospitals that I think that Burlingame's function of the Red Cross attained its most satisfactory as well as its most dramatic results. Take Number 110 at Coincy, also no great distance from Chateau-Thierry. It, too, sprang up as a direct result of that famous battle. A radical change of location of our troops in that territory and increasing activities in the neighborhood of Fere-en-Tardenois made an American evacuation hospital at or near that point an immediate necessity. Burlingame, in the same trusty motor which carried him so many miles over the battle-scarred and sh.e.l.l-holed and traffic-worn highroads of France, went out with Colonel Stark, of the Regular Army force, to find a site for it. They decided on a little town of Coincy, on the direct main line of evacuation from the American sector.
The only things that stood in favor of Coincy were its location and the fact that it had water. There was little else left there; not a chateau or a ruined church or even a barn in which to locate, temporarily at least, a hospital. Moreover, there was no time for picking or choosing in that country through which the _boche_ in the beginnings of his final retreat had just pa.s.sed. In the center of some partly demolished buildings, Stark and Burlingame found a pump, still in working order.
This, they decided, would make a splendid site for their new hospital.
The road which ran close by the ruins was the main road to the front--not far away, as the constant booming of artillery attested--and the fact that the railroad also was fairly near simplified the problem of evacuations. These two factors, together with that of the water, which was both pure and abundant--the French already had marked the pump, ”_Eau potable_”--decided the question.
So the two men staked a claim to the ruin. Before they returned to the car Burlingame picked up a piece of board. He fished a bit of charred wood out of the debris. It served as chalk. With it he began slowly marking the board: ”A. R. C. Hospital No. ----.” He hesitated for just a moment. What the deuce was the number of that last hospital? Well, no matter. Number 110 would do. And Number 110 it became and so remained even after the hospital was ancient--whole weeks ancient--and finally had been moved to Villers-Daucourt.
”And so with a little burned wood, a piece of busted wall, and a cow yard, the most advanced American hospital in the battle of the Vesle started in,” says Burlingame. ”We took our burned-wood sign, fastened over the pump--and, _voila_, there was Red Cross Hospital Number 110.
And then we hustled to the first military telephone and began phoning Paris and other Red Cross headquarters to hustle the stuff out to it.
'Send it up the road from Fere-en-Tardenois,' I told them, 'until you come to the cow yard with the sign. Only look out you don't miss the sign.'... And all the time it was raining like h.e.l.l.”
One other of these Red Cross hospitals deserves especial mention in the pages of this book--the tented inst.i.tution upon the race course at Auteuil just outside the fortifications of Paris. This inst.i.tution, situated within the confines of the lovely Bois-de-Boulogne, also was established to meet the hospital necessities arising at the crux of the German drive of 1918. It was first planned to take cases far advanced toward recovery and so to relieve the badly overcrowded Red Cross hospitals at Neuilly and other points in the metropolitan district of Paris. And because of this type of cases, and the fact that summer was close at hand, it was felt that tent structures properly builded and floored could be used, and so much time saved.
That at least was the plan in May when the race course was commandeered through the French authorities and work begun. In twenty-one days the hospital was completed with six hundred beds, while draughtsmen were preparing to increase its capacity to twenty-four hundred beds.
But as the _boche_ came closer and closer to Paris, that original plan was quickly swept aside, and even the Red Cross made quick plans to transfer its general headquarters to Tours or some other city well to the south of France. Auteuil became, not a convalescent resort, but a military emergency hospital of the first cla.s.s--American Red Cross Hospital Number Five, if you please. It soon reached great proportions.
In the five months that marked its career--from May 30 until the end of October, 1918--it received 8,315 patients who had a total of 183,733 days of hospital treatment and 2,101 operations. Nearly five per cent of all the surgical cases of our army in France pa.s.sed through its portals.
And when under the sudden and almost unexpected pressure that was placed upon it, it found itself seriously short of personnel--the men and women already working it fatigued almost to the point of exhaustion--nurses and other workers were drawn from the Children's Bureau, the Tuberculosis Bureau, and other functions of the American Red Cross. They were not registered nurses, to be sure, with neat little engraved diplomas in their trunks, but they were both willing and efficient. And that, at that time, was all that was necessary. I think that I have already referred to our Red Cross in France as a mobile inst.i.tution.