In French Hospitals

BORDEAUX, June 16, 1915.
THE FUND ¹ has sent out to me Mr. A., and he brings a powerful Panhard, a sort of two-seated car with big rumble accommodation — a hunting car, in fact. He brings with him a friend, Mr. N., who, if he thinks it advisable, will also join us with his car. Mr. A. is a land-owner and local magnate from near Oxford, and, not content with caring for twenty-five Belgian refugees, has offered to help us. He is not strong or would be at the front.
We are now getting some fifty-seven hospital bales through the customs, and will deliver to the places I have visited and then go on to others up and down the coast, in the Charentes and possibly Vendée. I visit hospitals, of which I have a big list: the poorer smaller military hospitals which are established and supported mostly by local ‘little’ people, and where, after all these months of war and strain, a friendly lift in the line of clothing or dressings or instruments will cheer the heart of many a weary nurse, surgeon, or blessé; and some big ones too, where they learn that I have permission to go into the wards, and confide to me that such and such things are a serious lack, and that, though the government is willing to give, it has not enough material to give everywhere, and waits are long.
Some of the hospitals are clean, others less so; but through it all the health of the men is wonderful. The surgeon says that his records show seven deaths in 700 cases in his care, and that he has never lost an amputation. At the Croix Rouge in C. they have had eleven deaths in over 1500 cases.
At S. in a big hospital, 300 beds, there was a very able surgeon, but his amputation saw was old and worn and they needed shirts. We have sent the saw and the shirts and some other garments. At another place in the same town, 270 beds, the chief surgeon told me that he could send out twenty men, but could not secure crutches. They are made locally at Bergerac in the Dordogne; the government has placed an order for 30,000, which for lack of workmen could not be delivered; so my surgeon friend said that his hands were tied. He had some made in the town, but the wood was not suitable, and, being green, was dangerous for the men, and he did not like to let them take them away.
I wonder where all the artificial arms and legs and glass eyes are coming from! One officer after another in the government offices here has lost a leg. One sees strings and strings of men in the streets pour prendre l’air, and it is heartrending to see them. And all as cheerful as can be imagined. At C. in the Red Cross hospital a big burly man on a lounge in the open arcade (an exschoolhouse) bragged of having all his toes amputated (gangrène gazeuse, the result of frost-bite) that same morning, and said, ‘At all events they have left me my feet. Vive la France!’ He talked and talked to us and said he wondered whether, toeless, they would let him go back. They treat frozen feet now with hot air from an electrical machine.

COGNAC, July 3, 1915.
Off in the far countryside I went in the gate of a small country schoolhouse. An elderly woman and her husband — nice true people, ex-schoolteachers — and their daughter met me and showed me their twenty-bed hospital, in the two classrooms. They were lucky above others, for they told me they had their pensions to spend on the hospital, 1 fr. 25 a day for each man from the state, and what the villagers and peasants bring in kind, and a roast once a day from the butcher, or a ragoût. The mother cooked and served the meals and, you may be sure, did a good deal of mothering besides; the father did the hard cleaning, and a village woman cleaned the floors; the daughter got up early and did the dressings, and taught school a few hours in the little room in the village where it had moved, and then came back to the men and made dressings and clothes when she was not caring for them! I left them a bale of clothing, and I never felt more touched than when the old lady tried to kiss my hand. And it was all neat and clean.
Again, another place, dusty and dreary beyond description, down on the coast beyond R. A peasant, who was M. le maire, showed me his mairie, fitted out with beds and a few chairs, all loaned and of a nondescript type impossible to describe. ‘ N’est-ce pas c’est bien, madame ?’ Impossible not to agree; but you should have seen the attic cobwebs, for I climbed a rickety stair and saw the last salle under the rafters, and a weird little room where a contagieux could be lodged awaiting removal to a separate hospital. The woman in charge of the linen was the schoolmistress, a rheumatic heavy person of the village, teaching in her class, whence I routed her and explained my errand. I left her a bale of clothing, some 200 items,—shirts, pants, vests, socks, towels, handkerchiefs and so forth,— and she burst into tears as she thanked me. The next one, a bit inland, I found to be a tidy little place, — fifty beds in another girls’ school. The Protestant, pasteur, in uniform under his infirmier’s blouse, directs the place; his wife runs the house and the housekeeping; and there is an infirmier (with a diploma) and a staff of helpers. They receive only the two francs from the government for each man, and what they can get in kind from the place. Every week, on certain market-days, the peasants say what they will give, and the place goes on.
Contrasting with these, I can tell of a château where, in a long barrel-roofed gallery decorated with allegories by Nicholas Poussin, M. le Comte d’A. has fifty beds, and the soldiers fish for carp in the moats and go boating among the lily-pads and swans. The countess looks after the men, mostly convalescents, and the place is entirely maintained by them.
Again, in far M. there are forty or fifty beds in a small cinematograph theatre, rather musty, the beds single file even in the small gallery. I know two or three cinematograph hospitals besides.
As for the big hospitals, run by men only, with only a few women in the linen rooms, they are bare and woeful. . . . There is one where I go in and out a good deal — 300 beds in the big lycée. The classrooms have big windows and glass partitions dividing them from the halls, and, against all my expectations, there are always windows open and plenty of fresh air and sun. I distributed pencils and cards and soap there yesterday, and one would think I had given them a gold mine. They are so nice and friendly and grateful, and always have good manners. Everything is open; the postman comes in at ten and walks through the wards, — like as not bends over a dressing; so does the orderly; feels it, if he likes to — you cannot picture it all. The wounded belong to the people and they will see them, and when the head is a man like Dr. P. at R., they sit by their men at all sorts of hours.

COGNAC, July 13, 1915.
Do not let it appear that we in any way criticize France for not being able in a few weeks to house all the wounded in up-to-date hospitals. Before the war there were some 1200 military hospitals; now over 4000 are scattered over the country, and, besides, many more where convalescents are put up, which do not appear on the official lists.
At L. the other day I went into one of the big wards of one of the largest of its many hospitals with Madame L., the wife of the préfet. The men who were up stood at attention at the foot of their beds, and one man attempted to salute us with bandaged stumps. He had lost his right hand and all but the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand, and cheerfully remarked, ‘J’ai de la chance, madame, mes pieds et deux doigts.’ He laughed over his attempts at helping himself, and said he was in a great hurry to find out how much he will be able to do with what he has left. Later, when at the other end of the ward, I saw him pick up a newspaper with his elbow and take it to a man in bed and start reading to him. The surgeon hopes to save the two fingers, which are gangrenous at the tips. He has been an expert cabinet-maker.
The flotsam and jetsam of the war are so many and various! The American consul here asked me to go and see an American man in one of the hospitals. He had come over on a cattleship from Hoboken with horses for the French army; had caught pernicious bronchitis on the way, and now for several months had been in hospital with tuberculosis. I went with Madame L., who will look after him a bit and see that he gets clothes. I took him a lot of papers. It was pathetic: a great hulking horseman, of a very low type, far, far gone, but thinking that, as he could stand, he might get home. He stood up and tried to pull his forelock when we spoke to him; but his language was primitive and crude, and he could only say that he needed nothing except some clean and new clothes to land in, and that seemed all we could do. He has learned a few words of French, and the sister in charge told me ‘ qu’il était un bon enfant, facile à nourir et toujours reconnaissant. ’ They say they will discharge him next week, when a big steamer starts; but —!
It is strange to find one’s self doing such things. The no-handed man; then this poor exile; then a Maroccan in fez and khaki insisting on shaking hands with us, and showing his fingers that he could move now after a shattered shoulder; another great splendid Tunisian, who has been tamed by delicate little Madame L. till he stands up and looks a man in his hospital garb — with a bullet somewhere unfound. Six months he has been there, and for weeks was in such a wild rage of lust of German blood that no one could dress his wounds. For Madame la préfète and for no one else would he eat: ‘Moi bon petit pour madame, bon français moi, tuer Boche là-bas tantôt.’ But no ‘tantôt’ in the trenches for him yet awhile; more likely Tunis and his little girl of six that he told us about in his picturesque mongrel French. Then the long rows of broken wrecks of men lying on their pillows (for this hospital boasts of white pillows), one or two of them visibly fading and others still able to smile at my little companion and the surgeon who is with us. And then here and there a face that we pass quickly by, for instinct tells that the very last battle is being fought. One wonders sometimes if they mind strangers looking at and speaking to them, and I was quite shy of it at first; but now I can talk to any and all if I get a chance, even if sometimes it is only a bonjour as I come and a bonne chance as I go.

LA ROCHELLE, July 17, 1915.
Here there are many big, rather dreary hospitals that are well managed, though often lacking what we would think absolute necessities; and one sees such sights and hears such tales that I wonder sometimes if it really is life we are living, or just an ancient tale of ruthless and useless barbaric slaughter for the greedy conquest of a neighboring race.
And the long rows of men in all stages of illness! — those who are brighteyed and eager for cigarettes and a talk, and those who look straight ahead and scarcely see me, and those poor bits of mangled humanity that one passes by silently because they are at the brink. And still they come; a row of beds are empty one day, the next they are filled. At E. the other day a nice peasant, Monsieur le maire, was so overjoyed at the bale of clothing that, as he told Madame L. the next day, he thought it too good to be true — as a gift — but had he done well to accept the things — from a lady whom he did not know? For if they had sent in a bill, never could the village have paid for such beautiful things. He was sent home happy that he had done right.

COGNAC, July 24, 1915.
I have done all sorts of things since I wrote you on the 17th — among others visited a big hospital for blacks (Algerian troops) at R. and distributed personally cigarettes to every soldier. Most of them were bedridden, and I had a few words with each through two interpreters and the Guadeloupe French negro doctor in charge, who with the Mohammedan doctor runs the place. Poor things, they seemed very exotic and out of place, but I am getting used to seeing them about, though exactly here they are not very numerous. Many were badly done up, one or two done for; and one splendid Arab, stone blind, sitting up in bed, all alone in a little ward, trying awkward fingers on a strange mandolin. But he was cheerfully pleased and thanked me courteously, salaaming and kissing his hand Bedouin style in honor of ‘Englis Madame’s ’ visit. I shook hands with him, and he said something about the feel of my glove that I did not quite catch the gist of, as the interpreter did not know the word in French for the thing that it recalled to his mind. He was dying of tuberculosis, but assuring me that he will soon be well and — ‘ Moi bon français, tuer Boches beaucoup,' a refrain that comes readily to their lips. They are primitive soldiers and killing is as the breath of life to them — and from all accounts what the Boches hate the most is a hand-tohand encounter with them. I was very much interested in seeing how eager they were when Dr. D. said I was an English lady; they seemed to have a great respect and liking for the breed.
It was ‘decoration day5 in the little square; one man received the médaille militaire and citation à l’ordre du jour de l’armée; seven others, including a young priest, received the médaille de guerre and citation à l’ordre du jour du régiment. I heard the ruffle of the drums when I was posting my letters, and went out into the crowd to see the simple ceremony and the march past of the remnants that are here of the two Arras regiments. The flag is at the front and there is no band, and as the drafts go forward what is left grows less and less. It breaks me up more than anything yet, when they go by.

LA ROCHELLE, July 29, 1915.
At Cognac, at 11 o’clock, just as I was writing you, came a telegram from here that thirty-one bales were at L., and after lunch we were off; visited two hospitals at S. for the second time, and came on; got hold of the ship-broker before six and will land the bales early in the morning, run down to C. with four or five for the two hospitals there, back to lunch, pick up our dressing cases, ship two or three bales to hospitals here, get another load of six on the car, run down to R. for dinner with Dr. K., deliver a bale to the big hospital there, then to St. G. with four bales, and back to Cognac, when the remainder will have turned up by grande vitesse. These last will take a couple of days to deliver; then we will come back here and continue our deliveries from here. Do you think I am to be busy?
I was up at a quarter before seven this morning, ready at eight-fifteen for the head doctor of the hospital of ‘ evacuated’ Arras regiments quartered at C., who was to take me over it. I am much impressed with what two or three clever men have accomplished with a deserted convent building and much begging. There is not a bed that matches another, and but few blankets and coverlets, and chairs and tables are conspicuous by their absence, and pillows are so rare as to stand as a luxury, and there is not a woman nurse in the place — only a few devoted women who mend and fix up the clothes. Would you believe it, the dressings and bandages that they have are those that come in on the men from the trenches, washed and mended and sterilized, and those that are discarded by the Croix Rouge over the way. I gathered that the two hundred bandages and the cotton and dressings in the four bales of clothes I left with them were about the first new ones they had had. I do not wonder that there has been much sickness — forty men crowded in a small house with little rooms; but there is no money; neither men nor officers (those that are left!) have any, and of course there is no one at home to send them anything — and it is pathetic! ... I feel as if I had written you this before, for every time I see or hear of the Arras regiments it pulls at my heartstrings.
I am sure I do not know if I am doing the work rightly or not, but am doing it as I see it and am trying to do odds and ends, outside of the regular hospital work, that interest me.
I have made a bowing acquaintance with a group of sentinels on a bluff above the hillside overlooking Angoulême. We pass and repass there often, and I got to throwing my papers out of the car for them, and now I see that they brighten up when they see the red cross and its inscription. I have a parcel of illustrated papers and cards and cigarettes ready for my next trip. They sleep in a shed and have a few thatched shelters, and the sad-looking mattresses are often out in the sun. Of course I have never stopped and spoken with them, but they do look so dreary, — at their very important watch-work, — and cela ne doit pas être gai!

COGNAC, August 15, 1915.
The American dressings are being very much liked now — at first they were strange and the nurses did not know how to use them. Now I give away mounds of them. Bandages are wanted 4 or 5 inches wide and 6 or 7 yards long. Many hospitals after months of wear and washing have only worn-out and worn-thin ones left.
At V. the other day I had a long chat with three youths, grands blessés, who had been returned from Germany in the last batch of disabled prisoners. All three taken the same day, at the end of last September — and all three with open wounds. One, a lad of twentythree, had had a piece of obus taken out of his shoulder (think of it all these months), and was amusing himself embroidering on a frame with his left hand. The other one had a huge hole in his left side and might be paralyzed for some time to come, and a third had a fractured leg that would not heal. They all talked together in chorus and were as merry as grigs. Nothing mattered so long as they were in France again. They had not been too badly off, they said (except for lack of any sort of good medical care); but the descriptions of the treatment of English and Russians were not pretty. They said the English were so débrouillards that they got along somehow and always managed to keep clean and indifferent; but the Russians are looked upon as a little below the beasts and treated accordingly.
You all seem so far away and it seems an evil dream — a continuous performance of sorrow. You have no idea how strange the country seems; never an able-bodied man in the fields or a young one. The villages are nearly deserted except by the aged and the children. Sometimes the men and women returning from distant fields as the evening falls seem so old, so old, and wearing a far-off vague look in their eyes — it almost appears as if they had returned from another world to put their hands to the plough again for La Patrie.

PARIS, Sept. 9, 1915.
There is a far-off hospital that is short of beds. Do you know of any one who for twenty dollars will set up one, with his name on it, or a memorial bed? Beggar I am, I know, but, my dear, you too would beg hard.
I came up here in the interval of quiet in the Argonne for a rest and change, and have had sleeps from 10.30 to 9.30, and am at present as alert and eager to begin again as one can be. Rest and change, but no respite from the surrounding ever-present shadow. Amputations, amputations, and amputations! Three youngsters in front of the hotel yesterday with an orderly, all on crutches; it must have been their first walk-out, from the way they went. In the Rue de la Paix five in a row, each with the left leg gone, trotting along at a great rate and as gay as crickets, each evidently trying to outwalk the others. Out of the Café de Paris came a splendid six-foot youngster with his mother in deep mourning; he hopped into the front seat of a big limousine, declining help; three more, soldiers they, saluted him as he passed. He wore three medals. On the terrace of the Tuileries rows can be seen all day in the sun; on the Champs Elysées, everywhere, everywhere, till one is nearly suffocated.
I have been seeing something of the dépôt of Les Blessés au Travail, and you have no idea of the jolly things that they turn out. And artists have taken to making toys! I have seen rabbits and chickens in painted wood by Jeanne Poupelet that are dreams; and dolls, modeled Breton dolls in costumes, that look like Holbein drawings. For 100 francs there is a peasant doll that looks as if she had been picked up out of a Millet picture, — but not to the taste of a child. I wanted them all. I have a small wooden kid with his yellow dog in tow, both star-gazing: ‘Chouette, voilà un Zeppelin, mon vieux Schrapnel! ’ That I wish you had — and a bunny! The men in the hospitals have done interesting wood-saw work, painted; also some paper-doll work that is quite jolly.
And all day and all night the great white silvery birds, with the tricolor rosette on their wings, hover over the city. At night they look like falling or sailing stars, and we are rarely without their droning song.

PARIS, Oct. 7, 1915.
When I hear people criticize France for not having all things for her wounded I remember the tales we heard about Montauk in 1898, and wonder what would happen if twenty thousand, to say nothing of forty thousand, wounded men were to be plunged into New York of an August day, and on top of them many thousand refugees.
At the end of last week and after the ‘push’ of September 25, we received thirty-five thousand new wounded, and all the hospitals are full again and room is being made in the smaller places for the more or less convalescent. We will need even more than last winter. Of course the sanitary arrangements are better organized, but the whole problem is terrific. I am already in despair when I see the depleted state of the warehouses. A friend just in from a hospital tells me that men have lain for three days in their blood-stained shirts because there were no clean ones.

PARIS, Oct. 8, 1915.
I have to hunt up gauze for a big hospital in C. They cannot get a bit there.
In the Hôpital R., last week, Dr. B. made three hundred operations in four days and none of the personnel of the hospital slept. The patron was ‘ on the job’ and they all stayed, but the last night, they tell me, was terrific.
There is a man in Paris who has lost both legs, the right arm, and both eyes; his fiancée has declared that it will make no difference and that she will marry him all the same.
An officer who is being trained by a friend of mine, and is quite blind, says his greatest grief is that his mother has lost her reason because his face is nearly shot away. He is learning to make pottery. Another is not happy if he cannot hold a flower in his hand, as it is a point d’appui avec le passé.
I had a long talk with Mr. B., and he told me that no one in America has any idea what is really going on in the evacuated regions. When it comes to reconstructing the country, there will not be anything to begin on. Les Boches have taken away every ploughshare, every bit of metal from every agricultural instrument and off every door, and even nails. There is nothing, nothing, nothing left but primitive conditions — not even these, as all the forests have been shot away and those not on the battle-line have had to be cut to provide wood for the lining of trenches and firing for the field kitchens. Our beautiful Forêt de Crécy has gone this way. So you see that we have to get the men on their feet again, and when that is done there will be the beginning of reconstruction. But the Germans are still in France!

PARIS, October 19, 1915.
I am going about in the hospitals here, and, hardened visitor as I am, I must say that the results of this last battle are enough to make one quail. The worst things yet are the poor men who have mended jaws. The wounds are fearful, and the operations, skillful as they are, leave the man with a jaw which usually he can use but which is a caricature to look at. The poor men themselves know what they look like and some of them are very hard to manage. In fact, there have been cases where they have run amuck and smashed things — window-panes and anything that was handy. They were a hideous sight. No wound, no matter how bad, has impressed me as much as those poor distorted faces.
It was a dreary place, that hospital, except for the wonderful surgeon and the women, who have devoted all their time and strength to the nursing. They should all receive crowns of glory, these French women. These in particular belong to no society and come from all ranks. One is an American, the Comtesse d’A.; her ward was one of the best cared for in the place. The surgeon is an enthusiast at his job and all the men adore him, and as he has some means he has used all for the hospitals that are under him. His own clinic out at N. is an ideal place. He takes in men who need extra care and who must undergo the most difficult operations. There are only twenty-five beds, and the little wards never hold more than four or five and are all light and exquisitely clean. But the poor men and the terrible things they are coming out of! Never can you imagine the cheerfulness of that place and the effect of the doctor on the men. He told one man his leg was to come off in the morning, and the poor devil went on grinning his pleasure at the doctor’s jokes as if legs were the least important things on earth. Another had lost one leg and the other foot. The doctor wants to save the rest of the leg, but, curiously, the man argues every day with him that it is better to cut it at the same place so that at least he shall be symmetrical! This morning he talked gayly of the artificial legs he would have.
A man who has had a bullet extracted from his heart is now on the way to entire recovery, though still in bed. He was so positive that the bullet would be extracted and that he would have it to show to his friends, that he spent the day before the operation making a small raffia basket, a wee thing, to hold his precious bit of projectile. And, sure enough, he sat up in bed and reached for the little basket and showed it — a heavy lead bullet a fraction less than five eighths of an inch in diameter. I do not know who was prouder, the man with his bullet or the surgeon when he showed the nearly healed wound on the man’s ribs. It is the second heart operation that he has done. The first was on a boy of twenty, and he is about and quite recovered. It was in the nature of an experiment, but now the doctor says it must be considered a feasible and more-than-apt-to-be-successful opération de guerre. One wishes for millions to be able to help such a man. His two aids said to me that their hours are from seven in the morning to twelve at night.

PARIS, Oct. 24, 1915.
Those splendid cases of dressings that have come from Boston! I only wish I knew the women who made them, they are so beautiful and so useful. The same sister I mentioned just now was always jubilant when she saw that I had some Boston tins in the car. The first time I went there the local pharmacist, evidently an authority in the town, was called in to see them and was émerveillé at their beauty and usefulness.

PARIS, November 14, 1915.
Last week I managed to worm my way into one of the very big military hospitals, and a French acquaintance and I asked if we might take that blind boy out for a walk. He, poor chap, is a Breton, thirty years old, with a wife and three kiddies at home; he has lost one eye and the sight of the other is gone. He pined for an outing, but the nurses in a hospital of one thousand beds cannot spare the time. It was a great event and, his tunic being in the locker, his comrades lent him, one a waistcoat, another a jacket, the orderly a cap; we had a new handkerchief and a muffler, and we started. You should have seen us, taking a shabby French soldier, blind in one eye and with the other swathed in bandages, out promener in the Luxembourg! We bought him a cane, taught him how to use it, and walked him and walked him, took him to vespers at St. Etienne, got him some milk and brioches for lunch, and then back to his ward. I have heard since that he has taken the precious cane to bed with him for fear that he might miss it in the morning. He told me that, of his three brothers who answered the mobilization call, one disappeared early on the Belgian front, another was wounded at the same time he was and has since disappeared, and the third is seriously ill in a Normandy hospital. And he is stone blind! He does not yet know it, poor lad.
They are an extraordinary lot, these blind men. I saw another yesterday, a Kabyle, who was being taught by Miss D. to make braided mats. He is a great hulking fellow with a beaming crooked smile and a fetching manner that I cannot describe, and is one of the experiments in feature-making from the American Ambulance. One big brown eye is sightless, and the eye-socket of the other is blown off, as well as all the upper part of the nose. What shows below the bandage — the tip of the nose and all the left side of the mouth — has been reconstructed, and I suppose that they are continuing with what is not visible under the swathings. Then there are others, officers who are making pottery, some of it very good in form. One has a fancy to do it out of his head — and does things that look as if they had come out of prehistoric tombs. One is an architect, and wonderful beyond belief are the models of houses and cottages that he has constructed out of clay — and, besides, he has designed the ground-plan by a method of his own.
One wonders how the women keep it up. They are splendid in every way. In the country hospitals they are the most valiant of their kind. At the beginning of the war the majority had had no training at all, but they have learned and have become expert in many things. It is an honor to help them, and to send them the necessaries that they cannot obtain in their own land for their men.