Pleasure and Pain of 1918

It is Quantico in early January, 1918. The other units of the Marine Brigade have already sailed for France to form a part of the 2d Division. The headquarters company and the second battalion of the 6th Regiment remain. Colonel Harry Lee commands. We shiver as we follow him on fatiguing marches over the level roads of Virginia. The exhausting job of battalion surgeon is my lot. Sore feet, frostbites, real pains incident to arduous past training, and fake pains to avoid prospective marches make sick call a veritable battalion muster.

January 15, word is passed to stand-by for entrainment. Sick call as usual—not a patient. Three days we stand by. From that unit of more than 1,200 men, there is one patient. He is brought in on a stretcher. Though dangerously sick with pneumonia, he does not wish to go to the hospital. If you wonder at the war record of the marines, that spirit gives the answer.

It was an ideal brigade that went to France. A third were old soldiers, with many of whom I had chased the Cacos about the hills of St. Susan in the campaign of Northern Haiti in 1915. The rest were men of culture and education who had enlisted before being threatened with the draft. All honestly wanted to have their part in the war. Their hopes were realized.

At Philadelphia we board the U.S.S. Henderson. Fifteen days drag by; watches, drills, false alarms, and these eternal life pereservers hanging around our necks. A case of cerebrospinal fever furnishes one outstanding medical experience. Try a spinal puncture with the ship rolling 20 degrees and you will know what I mean. One morning I fail to find the spinal canal. Dr. Locy, my assistant, takes the needle. He succeeds. His face turns a greenish hue. “That’s the first time I've done a spinal puncture when I was seasick,” he remarks and proceeds to prove his statement. The case is well on the way to recovery when we arrive at Saint-Nazaire.

There we arc initiated to the famous society, “eight horses or forty men.” But we officers are not in box cars. We are six in a third-class compartment. During the three-day trip across France, Chaplain Borsch tries to teach us his Canadian French, and we learn the art of bathing and shaving with a single canteen of water each. At long intervals we stop to partake of coffee and sandwiches served by the French Red Cross. French soldiers have gneole added to their coffee. For a time we arc spared such immorality. Afterwards, unofficial diplomacy makes mistakes the rule. Gneole is argot for rum—bad rum; pinard the poilu word for red wine. They used to say, “No gneole, no pinard, then no war.”

We find the marine brigade in the training area at the southern end of the department of Haute-Marne. I am transferred to the 3d Battalion. That unit, with a company of the machine gun battalion, is already quite at home in their billets at Chaumont-la-Ville. The marines live most amicably with the civil population. The only complaint is curious.

Our battalion medical department consists of two doctors and sixteen hospital corpsmen. We are naval personnel attached to a marine unit, serving with the Army, and usually under French command. Our status is a bit complicated. I was retained as a possible spy once because an intelligence officer did not know that the combination existed.

A small barrack building serves as sick bay. I distribute two hospital corpsmen to each of the four companies, retaining the others for the routine ward work. The medical authorities attempt to have eight marines detailed for each company to be stretcher bearers. We are told we are unreasonable. Four men are designated to carry stretchers after the fighting. When we actually get into fighting, 16 men per company of 250 are not sufficient.

The month and a half spent at Chaumont-la-Ville is more strenuous than any similar period in France—strenuous and unstimulating. Long marches in the mud, hundreds of sore feet, chilblains, and colds. Far in the distance a faint rumble, and at night the dim glow of great shells bursting remind us that there is a war going on and we are not doing our part.

No comforts, I was about to say, but there is an important one—my luxurious feather bed. My billet is the best room in the house of a sabotier (maker of wooden shoes). My host’s claim to fame is that he once made a pair for Napoleon III. I come for the first night. His wife tells me that my bed is ready and my fiancée in it. My French is sketchy. I am not sure I have understood, but I ask no questions. The good woman accompanies me, pulls back the covers, points to a well-wrapped brick, and says, Voila voire fiancée, cite va vous garder bien chaud. (There is your fiancée, she will keep you nice and warm.)

The efficiency of medical officers and commanding officers is to an extent graded by the brevity of their sick lists. Hence the creation of an official excused list. In our difficult conditions this unofficial list becomes enormous. The whole brigade has sore feet. One battalion commander complains and gives orders to his medical officer that his men are to be fit for all duty or on the sick list. The next morning the names of 215 of his men appear on the official sick list.

In war-time France we are often called on to do general practice. On one of these occasions I fill out a report for a poilu who cannot return to the front at the completion of his leave. He is enjoying the measles. My work done, a harmless looking, water-like drink is offered me. I attempt the “down the hatch” method. It sets me afire: my first experience with the powerful prunelle, the brandy of eastern France.

Our battalion commander, Major Sibley, develops herpes zoster of the side of the forehead and one eye. I consult Lloyd Whitham of the Hopkins Unit at Bazeilles. Lloyd and I agree that the major should go to a hospital.

“Michael,” he pleads, and I hear tears in the old soldier’s voice, if he docs succeed in keeping them from his eyes, “I have been with this battalion since it was formed. Can’t you patch me up so I can take it to the front?”

“Possibly, Major,” I concede, “but yon may lose the sight of that eye.”

“Damn the eye.”

Orders come to leave for the front. Manning, my assistant, and I find them a bit inopportune. Our budding romances with the school teacher and her pretty sister are brutally nipped. Chaumont-la-Ville turns out to the last inhabitant to bid and kiss us good-bye. We, idiots, are all joy, they all tears. My old hostess is saddest of all. "You Americans are laughing as if you are going to a fête," she whimpers. She holds up her hand, the five fingers spread out. "Ah, I know what happens to you at the front. You go like this." Then she folds in three fingers and kinks the fourth, "and you come back like this."

But the first month does not yet bear out her prediction. We are comparatively comfortable in the quiet sector called the Tranche de Cologne, in the valley of the, Longeau, about ten kilometers south of Verdun. The trenches are well made, there is an excellent organization of dugouts, and soon our hearts are warmed by the first suspicions of spring.

I envy a French second lieutenant who shares my dugout. His orderly arrives noiselessly in the early morning, lays out his clothing, shines his leather, warms his camp bath, and prepares- his breakfast.

At the psychological moment he announces, "Le bain de Monsieur le Leuknant est pret." But I eat the regular "chow" and am fortunate to have a hospital corpsman knock the mud off my boots.

My battalion aid station is a comfortable dugout with a small dressing-room and bunks for several patients. The companies are distributed along a front of more than two kilometers. The hospital corpsmen attached to each company are now of real value. They bring in only the cases needing my attention or hospitalization.

If a man can march and fight, he fights, if not he goes to the rear. Malingering the battalion is almost unknown. One marine who had been out from Chau-Mont-la-Ville with the diagnosis of flat feet rejoins us. When the hospital refused to discharge him, he ran away and covered seine hundred kilometers principally on his flat feet.

The routine bombardment is negligible. The Germans sow only a hundred or so shells daily over our area. The French battery near my dugout makes a sort of game at shooting a 75 mm. at a bicyclist at a certain hour. Sometimes I go over to the artillery observation post to see the fun. All parties in the game seem to enjoy it.

Major Sibley and I make an almost daily inspection of the front during which I keep an eye on sanitary conditions. On the only company front where conditions are frankly disgusting there is a medical officer on duty. The reason becomes evident when I attempt to have this doctor inspect with me. He is very uncomfortable outside his dugout and far more interested in cracking shells than sanitation.

One sultry morning, the Germans treat us to several thousand gas shells, concentrating them in the low parts of our area. A company of another battalion camping in a valley behind the front receives the majority. Gas defense instruction has insisted disproportionately on the immediate effects and too little on the late effects of gas. The company takes to high levels and remains there during the attack. Afterwards they foolishly return to the valley, where the gas still lingers, to cook and cat their dinner. Symptoms begin to appear in a few hours. Practically the whole company has to be sent to the hospital. About thirty die. I have no doubt some of that company are still breathing with difficulty on account of that blunder—or perhaps they are not breathing.

Attempting surgery that day almost costs me my job. French artillery ride through our sector and one man has his thigh broken by a shell fragment, which is lying visible in the wound. I give him a whiff of ether and take it out. This is called major surgery under a general anaesthetic and I am severely criticized.

We arrive at midnight in a support position when a shell drops on a mule team. Three mules are killed and two marines are slightly wounded. Their wounds are dressed. It is midnight, the wounds are trivial, and no liaison has been established. The men are kept until morning and sent out without having received antitetanus serum. What a mass of correspondence about that antitetanus!

Another piece of red tape is cut in an amusing way. The chief of the G.U. division proclaims that anti-syphilitic treatment should be continued in the front line. His representative arrives to see that his ideas are carried out. The “Boche” come to our aid with a few well-placed shells and the specialist is scared out of his impractical ideas.

From the quiet sector we move to Vivery la Grande and Vivery la Petite. One company is billeted in the latter village and in that company influenza appears. The men who voyaged in a certain box car are the first affected. It spreads through that company and, when we move, it goes through the rest of the battalion. The weather is ideal, which may account for the mildness of the cases and the absence of pulmonary symptoms. Half the personnel have the disease, including both of us medical officers.

But usually these periods in the rest areas are delightful. To delouse, bathe, and shave after a long stay in the front line is an intense pleasure. We don our best uniforms and chat with the villagers as we sip the vin du pays on the terraces or in the restaurants. Rest-au-rant, rest to the weary, how true to its etymological meaning has it remained in the villages of France. And at night there is the rapture of stretching out between clean linen sheets in a comfortable bed.

One fine day our holiday ends brusquely. We are among the many units thrown together and rushed to stop the “hernia” pushed through the allied lines when the fifth British Army gave way at Chemin-des-Dames. We are ignorant of the details but when we see road stones marked Meaux 5K. Paris 60K., and hear firing not far ahead, we know that something is radically wrong.

As we bump along in our camions we meet all France, it seems, in hopeless flight. Families perched high on great lumbering carts that carry the household wealth, women wheeling heavily loaded wheelbarrows with complaining wheels, feeble men staggering beneath holies, and children whose streaming tears are marked out by dust, all hurry by, their faces portraying utter discouragement.

We push northeast of Meaux. The enemy are soon made out ahead and we know we are at the front. We take up positions under cover of woods. The Germans neglect the open country. There are only a few shallow trenches. Bombardment becomes appalling. My medical unit is in a little woods upon which a battery concentrates its full attention. Four or five shells fall in a row at one end, then another row crashes down, and another, until the whole patch is covered.

Our artillery has not yet arrived to defend us, so the game goes on ad nauseam- We can tell to a second when the shells are to burst in our part of the woods. Rapidly our trenches become deeper.

A marine sees his “buddy” blown to nothing as the two walk single file. The boy is shaking like an aspen. He is my first “shell-shock” case. I march the poor fellow up and down where the shells are falling in considerable number. I have the fool idea that is good treatment. At every detonation he goes into a fit of wild hysteria. I see the case is demoralizing the other men and send him out.

In another sector we enjoy the luxury of a farm for a few days. To drink milk, eat eggs, and use china is a distinct innovation at the front. When the shells fall too fast we take refuge in the wine celler which also serves as aid station. A shell kills a cow. With the inherent ingenuity of hospital corpsmen, it is butchered and hung up.

Early the morning of June 6, our battalion medical department helps in the attack made by the 5th Regiment. Until noon several of us work at first aid in the open field. However, though the first-aid work yields me a decoration, my greatest contribution is more military than medical. Having no designated stretcher bearers, the marines come back in droves carrying their wounded. In one case six bring in a wounded lieutenant. I make them drop the wounded and return to the attack. A combatant should receive a court-martial, not a medal, for carrying out wounded during a fight. Alacrity of movement to the rear is instinct, not valor, and a wounded man on your back actually gives you a feeling of protection.

In the afternoon we go forward with our own battalion which captures most of the Bois de Belleau.¹ Though both units with whom we attack that day lose about half of their men in killed and wounded, no hospital corpsman is wounded. I believe we are spared partly because of our Red Cross brassards. In both attacks the fighting is at close quarters. A few of our wounded are dressed by the Germans and sent back to us.

In the afternoon a dry culvert serves as an unusually safe aid station and facilitates evacuation. The famous Fords stop on the road above. One of these overruns its mark into enemy's country.

The company hospital corpsmen apply first-aid dressings, put on tourniquets if necessary, give a hypodermic of morphine, and have the stretcher bearers carry those who cannot walk to the aid station. Here the dressings are verified, coffee given, and the patient made comfortable with sufficient blankets. By this method the terrible period between first aid and arrival at a hospital becomes, for the wounded, a dream which is not too unpleasant.

Our mission is to move the wounded to the rear and deliver them to the hospitals in as good condition as possible. Not always as quickly as possible, because morphine, rest, and care will save many men who otherwise would die of shock during their trip to the rear.

Not until June 25 do we have complete possession of the Bois de Belleau. During the whole month of June the bombardment is continuous. Rifle and machinegun fire is always banging away in the corner of the woods, and the air has become fetid with the stench of the bodies that have lain unburied in dangerous places since the attack of June 6.

One night as we are leaving the front for a turn in reserve, we witness an extraordinary display. Just far enough to the rear r to relax from that stimulation which makes everyone walk on the heels of the man ahead, we sit down to rest. Shells thud in the direction of Paris and hundreds of searchlights shoot up into the sky. Many colored star shells illuminate the heavens. From time to time a plane is caught in a ray of light and followed, while shrapnel bursts around it. Somehow, at this distance, only the beauty of the thing impresses us and we sit for an hour drinking in its magnificence.

The Yankee or 26th Division relieves our division on the Chateau-Thierry front. We remain in support until about July 14. Our battalion is billeted at Marie, close to the Marne—and baths. General Harbord, the division commander, has a meal at our battalion mess. He is wearing the Marine Corps’ devices on his collar.

At Meaux, a few kilometers in the rear, we are able to obtain some food and drink to break the monotony of “monkey meat’’ (supposedly Argentine beef), which has been our piece de resistance since the latter part of May. The town proves an excellent market, especially so because the merchants there look upon the marines as all that stood between them and capture by the Germans. Among the purchases are a few bottles of Chateau Y’quem.

Major Sibley appreciates wines, so I attempt a trick. The crown-stamped cork of the Chateau Y’quem is drawn and replaced by a simple one, a Haut Grave label is substituted for the original, and the bottle is put on the table. During dinner the Major pours out a glass and raises it to his lips. As he tastes it his face brightens into a beatific smile, “Grave hell,’’ he exclaims, examining the label and then eyeing me suspiciously, “That’s Chateau Y’quem.”

One night the German guns burst forth again on our right. With the equipment we can carry, and only emergency rations, we are bounced for thirty hours across France. Why do we leave nothing between the Germans and Taris but the 26th Division? And why do we go away from the firing? We scratch our heads over a map and guess right. We are to do a surgical operation on the German lines by reducing the hernia between Rheims and Villers-Cotterets, which the “Boche” pushed through in May.

In Villers-Cotterets woods, on the evening of July 17, we drag our stiffened bodies from the camions. Under cover of the vast woods the allies are assembled in all their variety. French cavalry, infantry, artillery, tanks, Moroccans, Algerians, Canadians, English, Anzacs, etc., all mingle in a marvelous disorder. But by a miracle, out of that chaos comes the attack of July 18, the turning point of the war, the Second Battle of the Marne.

The 5th Regiment attacks first. We remain in support. I spend most of the day at a hunting lodge situated at the convergence of several roads from the advancing front. Naturally it has become the clearing station for wounded. They are evacuated by returning ammunition trucks. Stretched out on the grass several hundred soldiers await their turn. Here is one with a great hole in the place of one eye, another, his thigh shattered, another with a great abdominal wound held together with a dressing.

The first-aid work goes on rapidly in the lodge. Soon I find I have assumed the direction of evacuation. The good humor that prevails is astonishing. Sometimes it is difficult to persuade those with abdominal wounds to take precedence over their comrades. In palatine cockney, in nasal Yankee, in the drawl of our southland, or in the jerky monosyllables of North African French, each proclaims the triviality of his own wounds. The sunshine of the beautiful summer day seems to pervade even the disposition of the wounded. Ca marche is the report of each wounded Frenchman. All is optimism.

The enemy is completely surprised and thrown back a dozen kilometers in a vital part of the front. Soup is found simmering on the stoves; unfinished meals; clothing and weapons in eloquent disorder; airplanes and great cannon abandoned; and on the ground, his body sprawled upon his unfinished game of solitaire, lies a man dead.

It is a different story the next day when our battalion attacks. We attempt to advance beyond Verzy. On our left, French cavalry, carrying lances as in the days of Napoleon, make a charge which is as beautiful as it is suicidal. Our losses, too, arc terrific. We can advance hardly two kilometers. An enormous cave in the town of Verzy becomes the shelter for the wounded from the area. A German dugout serves as my battalion aid station. In the evening I visit the cave because we have trouble having our stretchers and blankets returned.

Never have I imagined such horrors. The air is heavy with the pungent order of blood and sweat, and from time to time the nauseating sweetish smell of mustard gas; the flickering dim glow of candles which light faces greenish and deathlike, the continual groans of hundreds of wounded and dying, the pools of slippery blood, create a hideous inferno which dwarfs the imagination of Dante. Outside a barrage makes the evacuation of the wounded impossible. The streets of the town, below the level of the cave, are flooded with poison gas. In spite of gas and shells, a distinct feeling of relief comes over me as I slip on my mask and hurry through the night back to my little aid station.

In all the hell of those two clays there is one hopeful sign. The spirit of the enemy is broken. The prisoners come in by hundreds. They have lost the cockiness of those we took a month ago at the Bois de Belleau. These know they are losing the war.

After a second gruesome day we are relieved. At midnight the battalion, wearing masks, traverses the village of Verzy. It is still steeped in mustard gas. One man fills his canteen at a street fountain. The wetting of his hand gives us the only gas burn resulting from that march.

A moderate bombardment continues as we camp under the woods for the rest of the night. One large shell crashes in a group causing a dozen causalities. We send the wounded to the field hospital near by. Early in the morning our dentist verifies their evacuation. When he returns and tells me the story of their sad condition he bursts into tears. My reaction is different. Someone has failed in his duty in not sending these men out. Under the diagnosis of "Exhaustion, mental" a medical officer goes to the rear. The next day we entrain for the Saint-Mihiel area. On July 27, I write this letter of doubtful consolation:

We are out of shell fire for the first time in two months. The battalion has had a bath and feels better. We are about half our regular complement, having recently sent the other half to the hospitals or buried them on the field. Replacements are coming and soon we will be in fighting trim.My hospital corpsmen have done well. One was no unusually conspicuous that I recommended him for a medal of honor. It is fine to watch those men work in the hell of shell and machine-gun fire. I have been lucky in only having three of the sixteen wounded, and those not very seriously.

P.S.—I am asking for a job with the Hopkins Unit.

My feelings were a curious chaos when I left the battalion. Only four of the original officers who marched out of Chau-mont-a-la-Ville still remained. For us, the prophesy of my old hostess had more than come true. Three times I had seen half my unit become casualties. Yet I felt a sympathy toward my battalion which was almost personal. In the front line there was the gratification of feeling that you are doing all you can. I was a little ashamed when I told the French family with whom I was billeted that I was going to a hospital. “Ah,” they said, "You are lucky, your going a l’ambuscade.” Ambuscade is argot, not French, for a place where shells do not fall.

Nevertheless, my real medical experience in France began at Bazeilles. Now I had the chance to treat patients as a member of an excellent medical organization. Bazeilles had grown to a hospital center of seven base hospitals. Under average conditions, all cases which might be ready for duty within a month were retained for treatment. From time to time we would receive orders to send to the rear all patients not immediately fit for duty.

Such orders foretold a drive. When a drive was on, the hospital staff was divided into two equal teams. One team worked from noon until midnight, the other from midnight until noon. During these strenuous periods six tables in the operating room worked continuously. Each hospital had about the same organization. The center could handle 4,000 the first day of a drive and 1,000 a day afterwards. Hospital trains kept up an efficient service.

Our X-ray man, “Pop” Miley, was a wonder at locating shell fragments. Finding and removal of foreign bodies and debridement—a careful cleaning of the wound with the removal of all dead tissue—was the usual operation. Ether was our universal anaesthetic. The wounds were packed open to avoid gas bacillus infection, and Dakin’s solution irrigations begun after bleeding was arrested.

That dreaded infection, the gas bacillus, was at first always treated by amputation. My first case was a youngster, who had found the war too hard. He had shot a bullet through his own hand. Gas bacillus infection followed. We amputated at the shoulder. In later eases debridement plus extensive separation of the muscles with peroxide dressings gave as high a percentage of recoveries. The scrum now recommended had not yet been developed.

When the rush of a drive subsided we had many experiences with secondary closures, skin grafting, and even orthopedic surgery. One orthopedic ease especially impressed me. He was a marine. A 1-pounder had taken off the corner of his shoulder. His left arm was dangling by the brachial plexus and the great blood vessels. A debridement was done and the arm supported until the wound was clean. The denuded corocoid process of the scapula and the broken end of the humerus were now brought together. The arm was immobilized in the correct position. Bony union followed and the result was a very useful arm.

Autumn came to the Vosges. The pegs swept forward on our great war map. I learned of my promotion to the rank of lieutenant commander, the highest rank in the Hopkins Unit and logically in command. A Navy doctor in command of an Army hospital? I would be transferred the same day. I wished to stay. I was having an agreeable opportunity to serve with the younger instructors of my medical school days.

One day we looked at each other with blank expressions and exclaimed, “It’s true, the war is over. What shall we do now?” There was a brief celebration and a frantic rush for the States. I deserted the shrine of Mars for that of Venus.

I reported to the Navy at Hospital No. 1, Brest, in late January. The town was overflowing with troops. The hospital was full of patients who were sure that their conditions made transportation to the States imperative. My attitude was different for I wrote home, “looking back I have begun to realize that, from my own selfish point of view, it has been a very successful war.”

With the boisterous Yankee Division aboard, the U.S.S. Agamemnon sailed from Brest about March 30, 1919. Among the "casuals" were my bride and I. Now when I think of the war, these living pictures stand out in my memory:

The marines joyously entraining at Quantico as if for a picnic; my good old hostess at Chaumont-la-Ville dramatically and prophetically bidding us farewell; the bloody slaughter at the Bois de Belleau; the gorgeous beauty of the aerial raid over Paris; the "damn the eye" of Major Sibley, his beatific smile as he recognized the Chateau Y'quem; the inferno in the cave at Verzy; the exhaustive operating at Bazeilles-sur-Meuse; and, shivering by my side in the icy church of the little village of Rouceux, a cherished flower of France.