Our Army at the Front Part 11

Just behind the docks is a plexus of railway-lines which, what with incoming and outgoing tracks and switches and side-lines, contains 200 miles of trackage in the terminal alone.

It is for the present no German's business how many hundred miles of double and triple track lead back to the fighting-line, and it is the censor's rule that one must tell nothing a German shouldn't know. But there is plenty of track, figures or no figures.

Equal preparation has been made for such supplies as must remain temporarily at the docks.

There are 150 warehouses, most of them completed, each 400 by 50 feet, and each with steel walls and top and concrete floors. When the warehouses are finished they will be able to hold supplies for an army of a million men for thirty days. They are supplemented by a giant refrigerating-plant, with an enormous capacity, which is served by an ice-making factory with an output of 500 tons daily, the whole ice department being operated by a special "ice unit" of the army, officially called Ice Plant Company 301. The ice department also has its own refrigerator-cars for delivering its wares frozen to any part of France.

To provide for gun appet.i.tes as abundantly as for human, an a.r.s.enal was begun at the same point, which, when completed, will have cost a hundred million dollars. This a.r.s.enal and ordnance-depot is being built by an American firm, at the request of the French Mission in America, who vetoed the American project to give the work to French contractors, because of the man-shortage in France.

It has been built under the direct supervision of the War Department, and was specifically planned so that it might in time, or case of need, become one of the main munition-distribution centres for all the Allies.

Small arms and ammunition are stored and dispensed there, while big guns go direct from French factories.

Regiments of mechanical and technical experts were constantly being recruited in America for this work, and they were sent by the thousands every month of the first year. Maintenance of the ordnance-base alone requires 450 officers and 16,000 men.

Included in the a.r.s.enal and ordnance-depot are a gun-repair shop, equipped to reline more than 800 guns a month, a carriage-repair plant of large capacity, a motor-vehicle repair-shop, able to overhaul more than 1,200 cars a month, a small-arms repair-shop, ready to deal with 58,000 small arms and machine-guns a month, a shop for the repair of horse and infantry equipment, and a reloading-plant, capable of reloading 100,000 artillery-cartridges each day.

The a.s.sembling-shops in connection with the railroad were built on a commensurate scale. Even in an incomplete state one shop was able to turn out twenty-odd freight-cars a day, of three different designs, and at a neighboring point a plant for a.s.sembling the all-steel cars was making one full train a day. The locomotives were a.s.sembled in still a third place. This will have turned out 1,100 locomotives, built and shipped flat from America, at the end of its present contract. Already a third of this work has been done.

And there were, of course, the necessary number of roundhouses, and the like, to complete the organization of the self-sufficient railroad.

Not far away was a tremendous a.s.sembling and repair plant for airplanes, the operators of which had all been trained in the French factories, so that they knew the planes to the last inner bolthead.

The last a.s.sembly-plant was far from least in picturesqueness. It was for the construction, from numbered pieces shipped from Switzerland, of 3,500 wooden barracks, each about 100 feet long by 20 wide, and of double thickness for protection against French weather.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright by the Committee on Public Information._

U. S. locomotive-a.s.sembling yards in France.]

The most amusing of the incidental depots was called the Reclamation Depot, at which the numerous articles collected on the battle-field by special salvage units were overhauled and refurbished, or altered to other uses. Nothing was too trifling to be accepted. The "old-clo' man"

of No Man's Land was responsible for an amazing amount of good material, made at the Reclamation Depot from old belts, coat sleeves, and the like. Many a good German helmet went back to the "square-heads" as American bullets.

In the same American district there was a great artillery camp, with remount stables, containing thousands of horses and mules. Under French tutelage, the American veterinarians had learned to extract the bray from the army mule, reducing his far-carrying silvery cry to a mere wheeze, with which he could do no indiscreet informing of his presence near the battle-lines. So the mule-hospital was one of the busiest spots in the port.

A short distance from the port, the engineers built a 20,000-bed hospital, the largest in existence, comprising hundreds of little one-story structures, set in squares over huge grounds, so that every room faced the out-of-doors.

Between the port and the hospital, and beyond the port along the coast, were the rest-camps, the receiving-camps, and a huge separate camp for the negro stevedores. Near enough to be convenient, but not for sociability, were the camps for the German prisoners, who put in plenty of hard licks in the great port-building.

Midway between all this activity at the coast and the training and fighting activity at the fighting-line there was what figured on the army charts as "Intermediate Section," whose commanders were responsible for the daily averaging of supply and demand.

In the intermediate section, linked by rail, were the supplementary training-camps, schools, base hospitals, rest-areas, engineering and repair shops, tank-a.s.sembling plants, ordnance-dumps and repair-shops, the chief storage for "spare parts," all machinery used in the army, cold-storage plants, oil and petrol depots, the army bakeries, the camouflage centre, and the forestry departments, busy with fuel for the army and timber for the engineers.

The achievement of the first year was literally worthy of the unstinted praise it received. And perhaps its finest attribute was that most of it was permanent, and will remain, while France remains, as America's supreme gift toward her post-war recovery.

CHAPTER XIV

FRANCE AND THE MEDICOES

The history of the A. E. F. will be in most respects the history of resources cunningly turned to new ends, of force redirected, with some of its erstwhile uses retained, and of a colossal adventure in making things do. Where the artillery was weak, the A. E. F. eked out with the coast-artillery. Where the engineer corps was insufficient, the railroads were called on for special units, frankly unmilitary. A whole citizenry was abruptly turned to infantry. But one branch of the service, though scarcely worthy of much responsibility when the war began, was, nevertheless, the one most thoroughly prepared. The prize service was the Medical Corps, and it was in this state of astonishing preparedness because immediately before it became the Medical Corps, it had been the Red Cross, and the Red Cross knows no peace-times.

The question of what is Medical Corps and what is Red Cross has always been a facer for the superficial historian.

Broadly speaking, the base hospitals of the army are organizations recruited and equipped in America by the Red Cross, and transported to France, where they become units of the army, under army discipline and direction, and supplied by the Medical Corps stores except in cases where these are inadvertently lacking, or unprovided for by the strictness of military supervision. In any case, where sufficient supplies are not forthcoming from the Medical Corps, they are given by the Red Cross.

This is the Red Cross on its military side. In its civilian work, which is extensive, and in its recreational work it carries on under its own name and by its own authority. Where it divides territory with the Y. M.

C. A., the division is that the Y. M. C. A. takes the well soldier and the Red Cross the sick one, whenever either has time on his hands.

But the Medical Corps plus the Red Cross created between them a branch of the American Army in France which, from the moment of landing, was the boast of the nation.

For a year before America entered the war Colonel Jefferson Kean, director-general of the military department of the American Red Cross, had been organizing against the coming of American partic.i.p.ation. Within thirty days after America's war declaration Colonel Kean announced that he had six base hospitals in readiness to go to the front, and within another thirty days these six units were on their way, equipped and ready to step into the French hospitals, schools, and what-not, waiting to receive them, and to do business as usual the following morning.

The six were organized at leading hospitals and medical schools: the Presbyterian Hospital of New York, with Doctor George E. Brewer in command; the Lakeside Hospital, Cleveland, with Doctor George W. Crile; the Medical School of Harvard University, with Doctor Harvey Cushing; the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, with Doctor Richard Harte; the Medical School of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, with Doctor Frederick Besley, and Washington University Hospital, Saint Louis, with Doctor Frederick T. Murphy.

A little while later the Postgraduate unit went from New York, the Roosevelt Hospital unit from there, and the Johns Hopkins unit from Baltimore. Many others followed in due time.

These hospital units, recruited and organized under the Red Cross, took their full complement of surgeons, physicians, and nurses. All these became members of the army as soon as they landed in France, and they were supplemented, either there or before they crossed, with members of Medical Corps, enlisted just after America entered the war.

The military rank of the physicians and surgeons conformed in a general way to the unofficial rank of the same men when they had worked together in the hospitals from which they came. There were, of course, some exceptions to this rule, but not enough to make it no rule at all.

It was true of the medicoes, as it was of the engineers, that they took military discipline none too seriously, because they brought a discipline of their own. Wherever, in civilian pursuits, the lives of others hang on prompt obedience, there is a strictness which no military strictness can outdo. This was true of the personnel of any hospital in America, before there was thought of war. It was equally true, of course, after the units were established behind the fighting-lines. But there was a certain lack of prompt salute and a certain freedom with first names which not the stoutest management from the military arm of the service could obliterate from the base hospitals. The Medical Corps enlisted men were naturally not sinners in this respect. The routine work of the base hospitals all fell to them.

It was usually a sergeant of the army--though he was never a veteran--who attended the reception-rooms, kept account of symptoms, clothes, and first and second names, and did the work of orderly in the hospital. It was the privates who kept the mess and washed the dishes and changed the sheets.

The nurses went under military discipline and into military segregation--sometimes a little nettlesome, when the hospitals were far from companionship of any outside sort.

The sites selected for the hospitals were either French hospitals which were given over, or schools or big public buildings remade into hospitals by the engineers. Each site was arranged so that it could be enlarged at will. And the railways which connected the outlying hospitals with the rest of the American communications were laid so that other hospitals could be easily placed along their line. There was a splendid elasticity in the Medical Corps plan.

One base hospital was much like another, except for size. Those near the line differed somewhat from those farther back, but their scheme was uniform. At any rate, the history of their doings was similar enough to have one history do for them all. Take, for example, one of the New York units which landed in August and was placed nearer the coast than the fighting. It was put in trim by the engineers, then sanitated by the humbler members of the Medical Corps. The great wards were laid out, the kitchens were built, windows were pried open--always the first American job in France, to the great disgust and alarm of the French--and baths were put in.

The chief surgeon had specialized in noses and throats at home. When the hospital was ready, naturally the soldiers were not in need of it--being still in training in the Vosges--so the services of the hospital were opened to the civilian population of France.

By November there was not an adenoid in all those parts. The death-rate almost vanished. Into this rural France, where there had been no hospital and only a nursing home kept by some Sisters of Mercy who saw their first surgical operation within the base hospital, there came this skilful organization, handled by men whose incomes at home had been measured in five figures, and all the healing they had was free.

Multiply this by twenty, and then by thirty, before the pressing need for care for soldiers directed the Medical Corps back to first channels, and there will be some gauge of what this service did for France.

And the grat.i.tude of France was more than commensurate. Praise of the American Medical Service flowed unceasingly from officials and civilians, statesmen and journalists. There were constant demands made upon the French Government that it should pattern its own medical forces exactly upon the American, making it the branch of the medical specialist and not of the politician or the military man.

The individual officers of the Medical Corps had much to learn, however, from the French and the British. Though they knew hygiene, prophylaxis, antisepsis, and surgery as few groups of men have ever known it, they became scholars of the humblest in the surgery of the battle-field.

Every officer of the Medical Corps was kept on a round of visits behind French and British fronts during the fairly peaceful interim between their landing and the American occupation of a front-line sector.

The Red Cross was the great auxiliary of the Medical Corps. It kept up its recruiting in America, both for nurses and physicians, and for supplies.

And in supplies it played its greatest part. The Red Cross maintained enormous warehouses, separate entirely from army control, which contained provisions to meet every possible shortage. It was known by the Red Cross that never in the history of the world had there been a medical corps of any army that had not finally broken down. No matter how painstaking the provision, the need was always tragically greater.

And so surgical dressings, sets of surgical instruments, medicines, antiseptics, and anaesthetics piled up in the great A. R. C.

store-houses.