With The Doughboy In France Part 1

With the Doughboy in France.

by Edward Hungerford.

PREFACE

Six months ago I finished writing the chapters of this book. At that time the American Red Cross still had a considerable force in Paris--throughout France for that matter. It was still functioning and, after its fas.h.i.+on, functioning extremely well. In the language of the French it "marched." To-day its marching days in the land of the lilies are nearly over. The personnel have nearly all returned home; the few that remain are clearing and packing the records. In a short time the _Croix Rouge Americaine_ which for months was so evident in the streets of the French capital will be but a memory along the Boulevards. But a memory of accomplishment not soon to be forgotten. If there is one undying virtue of the Frenchman it is that of memory. Seemingly he cannot forget. And for years the remembrance of our Red Cross in his land is going to be a pleasant thought indeed. Of that I am more than sure.

To attempt to write a history, that should be at all adequate as complete history, of a great effort which was still in progress, as the writing went forward, would have been a lamentable task indeed. So this book makes no pose as history; it simply aims to be a picture, or a series of pictures of America in a big job, the pictures made from the standpoint of a witnesser of her largest humanitarian effort--the work of the American Red Cross.

I should feel embarra.s.sed, moreover, at signing my name to this book were any reader of it to believe that it was in any large sense whatsoever a "one man" production. The size of the field to be covered, the brief s.p.a.ce of time allotted in which to make some sort of a comprehensive picture of a really huge endeavor, made it necessary for the author to call for help in all directions. The answers to that call were immediate and generous. It hardly would be possible within a single chapter of this volume to make a complete list of the men and women who helped in its preparation. But the author does desire to state his profound sense of indebtedness to Mrs. Caroline Singer Mondell, Mrs.

Kathleen Hills, Miss E. Buckner Kirk, Major Daniel T. Pierce, Captain George Buchanan Fife and Lieutenant William D. Hines. These have borne with him patiently and have been of much real a.s.sistance. His appreciation is great.

This picture of an American effort tells its own story. I have no intention at this time or place to attempt to elaborate it; but merely wish in pa.s.sing to record my personal and sincere opinion that, in the workings of our Red Cross overseas, there seemed to me to be such an outpouring of affection, of patriotism, of a sincere desire to serve as I have never before seen. It was indeed a triumph for our teachings and our ideals.

E. H.

New York--January, 1920.

CHAPTER I

AMERICA AWAKENS

In that supreme hour when the United States consecrated herself to a world ideal and girded herself for the struggle, to the death, if necessary, in defense of that ideal, the American Red Cross was ready.

Long before that historic evening of the sixth of April, 1917, when Congress made its grim determination to enter the cause "for the democracy of the world," the Red Cross in the United States had felt the prescience of oncoming war. For nearly three years it had heard of, nay even seen, the unspeakable horrors of the war into which it was so soon to be thrust. It had witnessed the cruelties of the most modern and scientific of conflicts; a war in which science seemingly had but multiplied the horrors of all the wars that had gone before. Science and _kultur_ between them had done this very thing. In the weary months of the conflict that began with August, 1914, the American Red Cross had taken far more than a merely pa.s.sive interest in the Great War overseas.

It had watched its sister organizations from the allied countries, already involved in the conflict, struggle in Belgium and France and Russia against terrific odds; it had bade each of these "G.o.dspeed," and uttered many silent prayers for their success. The spirit of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton still lived--and still enthused.

It would have been odd--almost inconceivable, in fact--if anything else had been true. It would have been unpardonable if the American Red Cross had not, long before our entrance into the conflict, scented that forthcoming step, and, having thus antic.i.p.ated history, had failed to make the most of the situation. We Americans pride ourselves as a nation upon our foresightedness, and an inst.i.tution so distinctly American as the American Red Cross could hardly fail to have such a virtue imbedded in the backbone of its character.

Ofttimes, as a boy, have I read of the warriors of long ago, and how, when they prepared for battle, it was their women--their wives and their mothers, if you please,--who girded them for the conflict; who breathed the prayers for their success, and who, whether or not they succeeded in attaining that success, bound up their wounds and gave them comfort upon their return. Such is the spirit of the Red Cross. The American artist who created that most superb of all posters, _The Greatest Mother in the World_, and who placed in the arms of that majestic and calm-faced woman the miniature figure of a soldier resting upon a stretcher, sensed that spirit. The American Red Cross is indeed the greatest mother in the world, and what mother--what American mother in particular--could have failed in the early spring of 1917 to antic.i.p.ate the inevitable?

Certainly none of the mothers of the hundred thousand or more boys who antic.i.p.ated our own formal entrance into the Great War, by offering themselves--bodies and hearts and souls--to the armies of Britain, France, and Canada.

Other pens more skilled than mine have told, and will continue to tell, of the organization of the Red Cross at home to meet the certainties and the necessities of the oncoming war. For if America had not heretofore realized the magnitude of the task that was to confront her and had even permitted herself to become dulled to the horrors of the conflict overseas, the historic evening of the sixth of April, 1917, awakened her. It galvanized her from a pa.s.sive repugnance at the scenes of the tragic drama being enacted upon the great stage of Europe into a bitter determination that, having been forced into the conflict, no matter for what reason, she would see it through to victory; and no matter what the cost. Yet cost in this sense was never to be interpreted into recklessness. Her boys were among her most precious possessions, and, if she were to give them without stint and without reserve--all for the glory of her supreme ideal--she would at least surround them with every possible requisite for their health, their comfort, and their strength.

This was, and is, and will remain, the fundamental American policy.

With such a policy, where should America turn save to her Red Cross? And who more fit to stand as its spiritual and actual head than her President himself? So was it done. And when President Wilson found that the grave responsibilities of his other great war tasks would prevent him from giving the American Red Cross the detailed attention which it needed, he quickly appointed a War Council. This War Council was hard at work in a little over a month after the signing of the declaration of war. It established itself in the headquarters building of the Red Cross in the city of Was.h.i.+ngton and quickly began preparations for the great task just ahead.

For the fiber of this War Council the President scanned closely the professional and business ranks of American men. He reached out here and there and chose--here and there. And, in a similar way, the War Council chose its own immediate staff. A man from a New York city banking house would find his office or his desk--it was not every executive that could have an office to himself in those days--adjoining that of a ranch owner from Montana or Wyoming. The lawyer closed his brief case and the doctor placed his practice in other hands. The manufacturer bade his plant "good-by" and the big mining expert ceased for the moment to think of lodes and strata. A common cause--a common necessity--was binding them together.

War!

War was the cause and war the necessity. A real war it was, too--a real war of infinite possibilities and of very real dangers; war, the thing of alarms and of huge responsibilities, and for that war we must prepare.

It was said that America was unready, and so it was--in a way. It was unprepared in material things--aeroplanes and guns and s.h.i.+ps and well-trained men. But its resources in both money and in men who had potential possibilities of becoming the finest soldiers the world had ever seen, were vast, almost limitless. And it was prepared in idealism, and had a.s.suredly a certain measure of ability. It was prepared too to use such ability as it had in turning its resources--money and untrained men--into a fighting army of material things; material things and idealism. One thing or the other helped win the conflict.

"They said that we could not raise an army; that if we did raise it, we could not transport it overseas; and that if we did transport it overseas, it could not fight--and in one day it wiped out the St. Mihiel salient."

These words tell the entire story--almost. Not that it becomes us Americans to talk too much about our forces having won the war. For one thing, it is not true. The British and the French armies also won the war, and if both had not hung on so tenaciously ours would not even be a fair share of the victory. But for them there would have been no victory, not on our side of the Rhine, at any rate, and men in Berlin, instead of in Paris, would have been dictating peace terms.

It is true, however, that without our army, and certainly without our moral prestige and our resources, the fight for democracy might have been lost at this time, and for many years hereafter. Count that for organization--for real American achievement, if you please. We builded a machine, a huge machine, a machine not without defects and some of them rather glaring defects as you _come_ close to them, but it was a machine that functioned, and, upon the whole, functioned extremely well.

It took raw materials--men among them--and fas.h.i.+oned them into fighting materials; fighting materials which flowed in one channel or another toward the fighting front overseas. And with one of these channels--the work of the American Red Cross with the Army of the United States in France--this book has to do.

CHAPTER II

OUR RED CROSS GOES TO WAR

On the day that General John J. Pers.h.i.+ng first came to Paris--it was the thirteenth of June, 1917--the American Red Cross already was there. It greeted the American commanding general on his arrival at the French capital, an occasion long to be remembered even in a city of memorable celebrations. For hours the historic Place de la Concorde was thronged with patient folk. It was known that General Pers.h.i.+ng was to be quartered at the Hotel Crillon--since come to a new fame as the headquarters of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace--and it was in front of the doors of that establishment that the crowd stood thickest. There were many, many thousands of these waiting folk, close-packed upon the pavement, and only giving way to a dusty limousine in which sat the man who was to help bring salvation to France and freedom to the democracy of the world.

After the doors of the hotel had swallowed General Pers.h.i.+ng and his French hosts, the crowd refused to disperse; also, it became less patient. A long swinging chant began--the typical chant of the Paris mob. "_Balcon, balcon, balcon_," it sang in rhythmic monotony, and upon the balcony of the hotel in a few minutes Pers.h.i.+ng appeared, while the crowd below him went wild in its enthusiasm.

But before the American commanding general had made his appearance upon the balcony he had been greeted in the parlors of the Crillon, both formally and informally, by the members of the first American Red Cross Commission to Europe. By coincidence that Commission had arrived in Paris that very morning from America, and were the first Americans to greet their high commanding officer in France. And so also to give him promise that the organization which they represented would be ready for the army as soon as it was ready; for back in the United States widespread plans for the great undertaking so close at hand already were well under way.

This American Commission had sailed from New York on the steams.h.i.+p _Lorraine_, of the French Compagnie Generale Transatlantique, on the second day of June. It consisted of eighteen men, headed by Major Grayson M.-P. Murphy, a West Point man of some years of active army training and also a New York banker of wide experience. The other members of the party were James H. Perkins, afterward Red Cross Commissioner for France; William Endicott, afterward Red Cross Commissioner for Great Britain; Frederick S. Hoppin, Rev. Robert Davis, Rev. E. D. Miel, F. R. King, Philip Goodwin, Ernest McCullough, Ernest T. Bicknell, C. G. Osborne, R. J. Daly, A. W. Copp, John van Schaick, and Thomas H. Kenny. They were men who had been hastily recruited and yet not without some special qualifications for the difficult preliminary work which they were about to undertake. Until the preliminary "get-acquainted" luncheon which Major Murphy gave for the party in New York on the day preceding its sailing, comparatively few of them knew one another. Yet the great task into which they were entering was to make them lifelong friends, and to develop for the Red Cross, both in Europe and in America, many executives whose real abilities had not really been attained at the time of their appointment to Red Cross service.

These men were volunteers. With a few exceptions, such as clerical workers and the like, the early members of the Red Cross served without pay. At first they had no military rank. Apart from Major Murphy, who bore the t.i.tle of Commissioner to Europe--there being at the time no separate Commissioner to France or to Great Britain--there were merely deputy commissioners, inspectors, and secretaries. Major Murphy's t.i.tle had come to him through his army service. It was not until some time later that the War Department issued General Orders No. 82 (July 5, 1917), conferring t.i.tles and fixing the a.s.similated rank of Red Cross personnel. Accordingly commissions and rank were given and the khaki uniform of the United States Army adopted, with distinctive Red Cross markings. Though it is not generally understood, American Red Cross officers have received from the President of the United States, issued through and over the signature of the Secretary of War, commissions which appointed them to their rank and held them to the discipline and the honor of the United States Army.

Before the _Lorraine_ was well out of the upper harbor of New York on that memorable second day of June, Major Murphy called a meeting of the Commission. He explained to them in a few words that they were, in effect, even then, military officers and would be expected to observe military discipline, and as a beginning would appear at dinner that evening in their uniforms--the army regulations at that time prevented relief workers of any sort appearing in the United States in their overseas uniforms--and thereafter would not appear without their uniforms until their return to America. The grim business of war seemingly was close at hand. It began in actuality when one first donned its accouterments, and was by no means lessened in effect by the stern war-time rules and discipline of a merchant s.h.i.+p which, each time she crossed the Atlantic, did so at grave peril.

Yet peril was not the thing that was uppermost in the minds of this pioneer Red Cross party. It took the many rules of "lights out" and "life preservers to be donned, _s'il vous plait_," boat drill, and all the rest of this particularly grim part of the bigger grim business, good-humoredly and light-heartedly, yet kept its mind on the grimmer business on the other side of the Atlantic. And, so that it might become more efficient in that grimmest business, undertook for itself the study of French--at one and the same time the most lovable and most d.a.m.nable of all languages.

"I shall not consider as efficient any member of the party who does not acquire enough French to be able to navigate in France under his own power in three months."

Major Murphy laughed as he said this, but he meant business. And so did the members of the Commission. As the s.h.i.+p settled down to the routine of her pa.s.sage, the members of the Commission settled down to a life-and-death struggle with French. For two long hours each morning they went at it. At first they gathered in little groups upon the decks, each headed by some one capable of giving more or less instruction; then they found their way to the lounge, where they grouped themselves round about a young woman from Smith College who had taught French in that inst.i.tution for some years. It was this young woman's self-inflicted job to give conversational lessons to the Red Cross party, and this she did with both enthusiasm and ability. She chose to give them conversational French--in the form of certain simple and dramatic little childhood epics.

"This morning we will have the story of Little Red Riding Hood," she would say, "and after I am done telling it to you in French, you gentlemen, one by one, will tell it back to me--in French."

In order that the effect of the lesson should not be too quickly lost Major Murphy ruled that French, and no other language, should be both official and unofficial for luncheon each day. This order quickly converted an ordinarily genial meal into a Quaker meeting. For when one of mademoiselle's more enthusiastic pupils would start an audacious request for "_Encore le pain, s'il vous plait_," he was almost sure to be greeted either with groans or grins from his fellows. Yet the lessons of those short ten days were invaluable. Many of the men of that party who since have attained more than a "navigating" knowledge of French have to thank the lady from Smith College for their opportunity to acquire it. The "bit" that she did for the Red Cross was perhaps small, but it was exceedingly valuable.

Afternoons, sometimes evenings, too, were given to business conferences wherein ways and means for meeting the big problem so close ahead were given attention. It matters not that many of the plans so carefully developed upon the _Lorraine_ were, of necessity, abandoned after the party reached France. The very men who were making these plans realized as they were making them that field service--actual practice, if you please--is far different from theory, and as they planned, felt that the very labor they were undergoing might yet have to be thrown away, although not completely wasted. For the members of that pioneer Red Cross Commission were gaining one thing of which no situation whatsoever might deprive them; they were gaining an experience in teamwork that was to be invaluable in the busy weeks and months that were to follow.

Very early in the morning of the twelfth of June the _Lorraine_ slipped into the mouth of the Gironde river; for the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique, driven from Havre by the submarine menace and the necessity of giving up the Seine embouchure to the great transport necessities of the British, had been forced to concentrate its activities at Bordeaux, the ancient port of the Gascogne country. The s.h.i.+p crossed the bar at the uncomfortable hour of three in the morning, and the Red Cross party first realized the fact that in army life night hours and day hours are all the same, when it was ordered to arise at once and face the customs and the pa.s.sport inspectors. That inspection was slow work, yet not delaying. For the Gironde runs to the sea many miles after it pa.s.ses the curving quay and the two great bridges of Bordeaux. The fact that the _Lorraine_ was able to reach the quay well before noon was due not only to her being a good s.h.i.+p but to the fact that she had both wind and tide in her favor.