With The Doughboy In France Part 10

Triacourt fell in six hours.

Count that, if you will, for an American fighting Division.

The headquarters of the Second were at Mananville to the south of the fighting lines. And halfway between Limey of the trenches (they ran right through the streets of the little town) and Mananville was Noviant where, as you already know, the _triage_ was established beside the walls of the church and the Red Cross functioned at the front.

Remember that the _triage_ was nothing more nor less than a sorting station, where wounded men, being sent back in a steady stream from the front--three to six miles distant--were divided between four field hospitals of the Regular Army service; one handling ga.s.sed cases, another badly wounded, and the other two the strictly surgical cases.

Each of these divisions consisted roughly of from ten to fifteen doctors and about one hundred enlisted men--no women workers were ever permitted so near the front--and was equipped with from five to eight army trucks of the largest size.

There has been sometimes an erroneous impression that the Red Cross was prepared to a.s.sume the entire hospital functions of the United States Army; I have even heard it stated by apparently well-informed persons that such a thing was fact. It is fact, however, that if the enormous task had been thrust upon the shoulders of our Red Cross it would have accepted it. It has never yet refused a work from the government--no matter how onerous or how disagreeable. As a matter of fact, the army, for many very good and very sufficient reasons of its own, preferred to retain direct charge of its own hospitals, both in the field and back of the lines, and even took over the hospitals which the Red Cross first established in France before the final policy of the Surgeon General's office was definitely settled, which hardly meant a lifting of responsibility from the shoulders of the American Red Cross. Its task, as we shall see in the chapters which immediately follow this, was almost a superhuman one. It needed all its energies and its great resources to follow the direct line of its traditional activity--the furnis.h.i.+ng of comfort to the sick, the wounded, and the oppressed.

A wise man, one with canny understanding, if you will, who found himself at the Saint Mihiel sector would have understood that a battle was brewing. There was a terrific traffic on each of the roads leading up toward the trenches from the railhead and supply depot at the rear--big camions and little camionettes, two-man whippet tanks, French seventy-fives (as what is apparently the best field cannon yet devised will be known for a long time into the future), motor cars with important-looking officers, ambulances, more big camions, more little camionettes--all a seemingly unending procession. Fifth Avenue, New York, or Michigan Avenue, Chicago, on a busy Sat.u.r.day afternoon could not have been more crowded, or the traffic handled in a more orderly fas.h.i.+on.

The barrage which immediately preceded the actual battle began at one o'clock on the morning of the twelfth. It lasted for nearly four hours and not only was noisily incessant but so terrific and so brilliant that one could actually have read a newspaper from its continuous flashes if that had been an hour for newspaper reading.

"It was like boiling water," says Kimball, "with each bubble a death-dealing explosion."

At five o'clock in the morning the men went over the top, and our Red Cross man shook himself out of a short, hard sleep of three hours in a damp shed near the _triage_ beside the church at Noviant, for it had been raining steadily throughout the entire night, and went across to that roughly improvised dressing station. His big day's work was beginning. By six it was already in full swing. The first wounded men were coming back from the fighting lines up at Limey and were being sorted into the ambulances before they were started for the three big evacuation hospitals in the rear--each of them containing from three hundred to five hundred beds. The Boston man saw each wounded soldier as he was placed in the ambulance. Into the hands of those men who asked for them or who were able to smoke he gave cigarettes. And to those who were far too weak for the exercise or strain that smoking brought, gave a word of encouragement or perhaps a shake of the hand. And all in the name of the Red Cross.

He could have put in a busy day doing nothing else whatsoever; but felt that there were other sections of the battle front that needed the immediate presence of the American Red Cross. So at about half after seven he climbed in beside the driver of a khaki-colored army camionette and headed straight for Limey, and the heart of the trouble. There was another old and badly battered church in the town square there, and there a new _triage_ already was being established; for the Yanks were driving forward--with fearful impetus and at a terrific rate. So the hospital went on, the sorting stages, with their indescribable scenes of human suffering--more stretchers and still more in the hands of _boche_ prisoners coming in with their ghastly freight. Captain Kimball again pa.s.sed out his cigarettes and started forward. Now he was on the scene of actual warfare. Dawn had broken. It had ceased to rain and the sky was bright and blue with white, fluffy, sun-touched clouds drifting lazily across it--just as the Boston boy had seen them drift across the sky in peaceful days on Cape Cod when he had had nothing to do but lie on his back and gaze serenely up at them.

"I plunged forward over the broken field," he told me, "and there I came across my artillery captain. I called an aid and we took him back--he of the bright new boots that had so recently been polished.... I got back into the game. All the time our boys shot ahead and the racket was incessant. Once, when I b.u.mped my way across the German trenches, I paused long enough to stick my nose down into one of their dugouts. It was easy to see that the enemy had not antic.i.p.ated the attack. For in that dugout--it was wonderfully neat and nice, with its concrete walls and floors and ceiling and its electric lights--was the breakfast still upon the table; the bread, the sausages, and the beer. I could have stayed there an hour and enjoyed it pretty well myself. But there were other things to be done. I got out into the sh.e.l.l-plowed fields once again. Across that rough sea of mud an engineer regiment was already building a road, which meant that we could get a Red Cross ambulance right to the very front. I walked back to Limey--or rather I stumbled over the rough fields--and there found one which had come through from Toul that morning, loaded to its very roof with bandages and chocolates and cigarettes. And I found that Triacourt had fallen. It still lacked some minutes of noon. The job for which our Division had been given two days had been accomplished in six hours--but such hours.

"We drove without delay into Triacourt--a fearfully slow business every foot of it, with every inch of the hastily constructed road crowded with traffic. But we got through and in the early afternoon were in the main street of the little town which the French had watched hungrily for four years and seemingly had been unable to capture. The women and children of the place came out into the sun-lighted street and rubbed their eyes.

Was it all a dream; these men in tin helmets and uniforms of khaki and of olive drab? No, it could not be a dream. These were real men, fighting men. These were the Americans, the Americans of whom rumors had even run back of the enemy lines. They found their voices, these women, for the Germans had taken the men of Triacourt as prisoners.

"'_Bons Americains!_' they shrieked, almost in a single cry. And we saluted gravely."

Over the heads of the two Red Cross men--the captain and the driver of the little camionette--an aftermath of the battle in the form of an air fight between _boche_ planes and American was in progress; young Dave Putnam, one of the most brilliant of our aces, was making the supreme sacrifice for his country. To the north the Germans were dragging up a battery and preparing to sh.e.l.l the little town that they had just lost; but not for long. Batteries of American .155's were appearing from the other direction and were working effectively. And at dusk a report came into Division Headquarters that a company of one of the old Regular Army regiments had captured an entire German hospital--patients, nurses, doctors, and even two German Red Cross ambulances; while the tingling radio and the omnipresent telephone began to bring into Division Headquarters the story of one of the most remarkable American victories of the entire war. And our Red Cross began the first of a four days'

stay in a damp dugout in the lee of a badly smashed barn.

Kimball's story is quite typical of many others. But before I begin upon them--what the motion-picture director would call the "close-ups" of what is perhaps the most picturesque form of all the many, many picturesque features of our Red Cross in action, consider for a moment how it first got into action upon the field of battle. I have referred several times already to the excessive strain which the great German offensives which began in March, 1918, placed upon its facilities, while they still were in a stage of development. When we read of the work of the Transportation Department and of the Bureau of Supplies, we saw how both of these great functions had suddenly been confronted with a task that demanded the brains and brawn of supermen and how gloriously and brave-heartedly they had arisen to the task. The field service of our Red Cross--its first contact with the men of our army in actual conflict--was second to neither of these.

Remember, if you will, that it was but a mere nine months after the American Red Cross Commission to Europe landed in France that its organization was put to its greatest test. The news of the long-expected and well-advertised German offensive reached Paris on the very evening of the day on which it started, March 21, 1918. Paris caught the news with a choking heart. The _coup_, which even her own military experts had frankly predicted as the turning point of the entire war, actually had come to pa.s.s. No wonder that the once gay capital of the French fairly held its breath in that unforgetable hour--that every other community of France, big or little, did the same--and fairly fought for news of the day's operations. Yet news gave little comfort. It was bad news, all of it; fearfully and unmistakably bad. Each succeeding courier seemed to bring enlarged statements of the enemy's immensity and seemingly irresistible force. It was indeed a real crisis.

In that hour of alarm and even of some real panic, our American Red Cross showed neither. It kept its cool and thinking head. Major James H.

Perkins, then ranking as Red Cross Commissioner to Europe and a man whom you have met in earlier pages of this book, called a conference of his department heads on that very evening of the twenty-first of March. He told them quietly that they were to make known every resource at their command and to have each and every one of their workers--men or women--ready for call to any kind of service, night or day.

"Let every worker feel that on him or her individually may rest the fate of the allied cause," was the keynote of the simple orders that issued from this conference.

It was in the days that immediately followed that the flexibility and the emergency values of the American Red Cross organization--qualities that it had diligently set forth to attain within itself--came to their fullest test. The discipline and willingness of practically every worker was also under test, while for the very first time in all its history overseas it was given large opportunity to carry to the men of the allied lines a great material message.

How well was that material message carried?

Before I answer that point-blank question, let me carry you back a little time before that night of the spring equinox. Let me ask you to remember, if you will, that the super-structure of Red Cross effort in that critical hour had been laid many weeks before; in fact very soon after its original unit of eighteen men under command of Major Murphy had first arrived in France. It had experimented with the French, in definite and successful efforts to relieve the hard-pressed civilian population of that distressed country. It had worked, and worked hard, in the broad valleys of the Somme and the Oise, which had been devastated by the _boche_ when he made his famous "strategic" retreat to the Hindenburg Line in March, 1917--just one year before.

The Germans had left behind them an especial misery in the form of a vast region of burned and blown-up homes, broken vehicles and farm machinery, defiled wells, hacked and broken orchards, and ruined soil. I have stood in both of these valleys myself after German retreats and so can bespeak as personal evidence the desolation which they left behind.

I, myself, have seen whole orchards of young fruit trees wantonly ruined by cutting their trunks a foot or more above the level of the ground.

And this was but a single form of their devilment.

Yet as the Germans retreated "strategically" there in the spring weeks of 1917, there followed on their very heels the heavy-hearted but indomitable refugees who in yesteryear had known these hectares as their very own. Returning, they found but little by which they might recognize their former habitats. Devastation ruled, life was practically extinct.

The farm animals, even the barnyard fowls and the tiny rabbits--the joy of a French peasant's heart--had been killed or carried away. Not even the bobbins of the cast-out sewing machines or the cart wheels were left behind by an enemy who prided himself on his efficiency, but who had few other virtues for any decent pride.

Seemingly stouter-hearted folk than the French might have quailed at such wholesale destruction; but the refugees did not complain. Instead, they set patiently to work--many of them still within the range of the enemy's guns--to rehabilitate themselves. Their burdens and their problems were staggeringly great; their resources pitifully small. Thus our Red Cross found them, and to give them effective aid--not only in the valleys of the Somme and the Oise, but in the other devastated areas of France--formed the Bureau of Reconstruction and Relief under Edward Eyre Hunt. Of Mr. Hunt's work, the record will be made at another time.

In order, however, that you may gain the proper perspective on the beginnings of the field service of our Red Cross with our army in action, permit me to call attention in a few brief sentences to some salient features of the Bureau of Reconstruction and Relief.

It located warehouses at convenient places--Ham, Noyon, Arras, and Soissons--all of them within gunshot of the Hindenburg Line. These were stocked with food, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, building materials, seed, farm implements, even with rabbits, chickens, goats, and other domesticated animals. A personnel of several field workers was sent into the district to supervise the distribution of these commodities, which was done partly through authorized French committees and munic.i.p.al officers in the devastated towns. These cooperated with devoted groups of British, French and American workers, who established themselves in small groups and who worked to inspire the liberated areas with faith and courage and hope. Looming large among all these coordinated agencies were the Smith College Unit--composed of graduates of the Northampton inst.i.tution--and the group of workers from the Society of Friends--both of whom, in the fall of 1917, became integral parts of the Red Cross.

These two coordinated agencies, together with the _Secours d'Urgence_, the _Village Reconst.i.tue_, the Civil Section of the American Fund for the French Wounded, the Philadelphia Unit, and the _Comite Americaine pour les Regiones Devastees_, had their various operations well under way by the early summer of 1917. When it entered the field, our American Red Cross offered a.s.sistance in every way to these organizations, thereby giving a new impetus to their work. Agricultural societies were organized for the common rehabilitation of the areas, American tractors and plows were furnished by the French Government, while the Red Cross workers helped with and encouraged the planting, furnis.h.i.+ng large quant.i.ties of seeds as they did so, while small herds of live stock, also given by the Red Cross, appeared here and there upon the French landscape.

The workers did even more. They turned to and helped patch up buildings that, with a minimum amount of labor, could again be made habitable, erected small barracks in some places, and a.s.sisted generally in renewing life and the first bare evidences of civilization in the towns of the desolated sections.

In March, 1918, these desecrated lands were just springing to life once again. G.o.d's sun was breaking through the clouds of winter and gently coaxing the wheat up out of the rough, brown lands, gardens again dotted the landscape--the Smith College Unit itself had supervised and with its own hands helped in the planting of more than four hundred and fifty of these--the little villages and the bigger towns were showing increasing signs of life and activity; then came the blow. The clouds gathered together once again. And in the misty morning of the twenty-first of March began a week of horror and devastation--a single seven days in which all the patient, loving labor of nearly a twelvemonth past was erased completely. The Germans swept across the plains of Picardy once again--the French and British armies and the terror-stricken civilians along with the American war workers were swept before them as flotsam and jetsam, all in a mad onrush. Yet all was not lost. One field worker, a stout-hearted little woman in uniform, sat in the seat of a swaying motor truck and as the thing rolled and tossed over a road of unspeakable roughness wrote in her red-bound diary, this:

[Ill.u.s.tration: AS SEEN FROM ALOFT

The aeroplane man gets the most definite impression at the A. R. C.

Hospital at Issordun, which was typical at these field inst.i.tutions]

"The best of all remains--the influence of neighborliness, friends.h.i.+p, kindness, and sympathy--these are made of the stuff which no chemistry of war can crush. We face more than half a year's work torn to pieces.

But I do believe that the fact of this sacrifice will deepen its effect."

Such was the spirit of our Red Cross workers overseas.

They now had full need for such spirit. The monotony of working from daylight to dusk in lonely farms and villages, where patience was the virtue uppermost, was now to be replaced by a whirl of events which succeeded one another with kaleidoscopic rapidity, demanding service both night and day of a character as varied as the past had been colorless.

The headquarters of the American Red Cross for the Somme district on the morning of the twenty-first of March, 1918, were at Ham--the little village once made famous by the imprisonment and escape of Louis Philippe. They were in charge of Captain William B. Jackson, who afterwards became major in entire charge of the Army and Navy Field Service. Here at Ham was also the largest Red Cross warehouse in the entire district. Another warehouse stood at Nelse, a few miles distant, to the rear. To the north was Arras, with still another American Red Cross storehouse, while to the south was the Soissons warehouse.

On that same morning--one cannot easily efface it from any picture of any continued activity of the Great War--the Smith College Unit workers had gone from their headquarters at Grecourt, both on foot and in their four Ford cars, to their various tasks in the seventeen small villages in the immediate vicinity. Two or three of these young women journeyed to Pommiers, a little town in the area, whose school had been reopened by them, and which also served the children of several surrounding villages. And because so many of the children had to walk so far to their lessons the Red Cross served them each day with a substantial school lunch--of vermicelli, chocolate, and milk. A few others of the college graduates went a little farther afield--to supervise planting operations in near by towns--yet not one of these girls was one whit above turning to and working on the task with her own hands, while some helped the Red Cross workmen's gangs roofing houses and stables, repairing shops and fitting outbuildings, in some crude form, for human habitation.

Into the very heart of those varied activities that March morning marched the red-faced British Town Major of Ham with the blunt and crisp announcement to the Red Cross man that the town must be evacuated without delay; the retreat already was well under way, the vast hegira fairly begun.... The Red Cross force there at Ham did not hesitate. It first sent word to all the workers in the villages roundabout; then, having quickly mobilized in the town square its entire transportation outfit--three trucks, a camionette, and a small battered touring car--gave quiet, prompt attention to its own immediate problem of evacuation work.

It functioned fast and it functioned extremely well. Back and forth across the River Somme--over the rough bridges hurriedly builded by Americans for the British Army--it transported hundreds and hundreds of children and infirm refugees. All that day, all that night, and well into the next morning it worked, driving again and again into the bombarded towns in the region to bring out the last remaining families.

The Germans were already on the edge of the town when one Red Cross driver made his last trip into Ham--on three flat tires and a broken spring! Yet despite these physical disabilities succeeded in carrying six wounded British soldiers out to safety.

To our Red Cross the Smith College girls reported, with great prompt.i.tude. And throughout the entire succeeding week--a deadly and fearfully depressing seven days of continued retirement before the advancing Germans--showed admirable courage and initiative; the sort of thing that the military expert of to-day cla.s.ses as _morale_ of the highest sort. These women worked night and day setting up, whenever the retreat halted even for a few hours, temporary canteens and dispensaries and evacuating civilians and carrying wounded soldiers through to safe points behind the lines. And because many of these last were American soldiers they formed the first point of field contact between our Red Cross and our army and so are fairly ent.i.tled to a post of high honor in the pages of this book.

"Send me another sixty of those Smith College girls," shouted an American brigadier general from his field headquarters in the fight at Chateau-Thierry. "This forty isn't half enough. I want a hundred."