On duty and off; letters of Elizabeth Cabot Putnam

Front matter

V / ' J

Class BooL

JUiii.

Contents

I. An American Hospital for French Soldiers i

II. An Amemcan Hospital for French Soldiers

(continued) 47

Chapter I An American Hospital For French Soldiers

On board S.S. Chicago

When I left Father on the dock I thought I should certainly burst ; I never felt so awfully in my life. I looked everywhere for him on the wharf until the boat sailed, but it is just as well I did n't see him, for I should probably have gone on shore again for good if I had. I went in to look for steamer letters and could find only one, which was rather a staggerer, — but about fifteen turned up later, as well as two books and a great basket of fruit from Uncle Frank. This boat is the most minute thing imaginable and is filled twice as full as it ought to be because the boat of the week before was taken off. In consequence there is (for over three hundred passengers) a salon holding about twenty, and a tiny bar-smoking-room ; not enough steamer chairs to go round, two '* services" of the* meals; four people in rooms that are barely equipped for two. In our stateroom there are two washstands, two tiny drawers, four double hooks, and that is all. Absolutely nothing in the way of a cupboard or closet. My room-mates are three young Frenchwomen. Two are actresses (one of them married and returning to a small boy) coming back after an eight months* tour in Canada. The other has been over (leaving three young children) to spend several months with her husband who is buying horses in the United States for the French Government and has been for two years. She is much higher class than the others but not a particle more amiable. They are all very good-natured, though not exactly considerate — leaving the electric light burning all night, for example, and conversing at length when they are called for their bath at six a.m. However, I am delighted to be with them, for I learn how to apply white-washes, lip and cheek rouge, eyebrow pencils, curling irons and fake curls — as well as some French. They go to bed at eleven, read till Heaven knows when, have baths at six, go to sleep again, have breakfast in bed, and spend the whole rest of the morning dressing. If any of us were sick it would be awful, but we're not. For my part, I never felt better. The first two days were absolutely perfect, and so warm that you sat round without a coat. To-day was much colder, overcast, and fairly rough — most marvellous electric green half hidden inside the waves — spray way over the lifeboats on the upper deck.

I am sitting (evening) in a perfect hullabaloo — the dining-room full of men (except for one unbelievable siren) smoking, singing to the ukulele, and shouting generally. The siren has, I believe, been acting as a model for some advertising concern in St. Louis, where she was considered so bad that they are shipping her home. I am not sure whether or not she is French. She is absurdly rouged and belladonna-ed, has champagne hair done very high over cushions, and wears enormous ear-rings, white silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, and a very slight costume. Mr. Sedgwick assures me she consumes large quantities of champagne whenever it goes, and it goes very often, as you get here for two dollars what you pay eight dollars for in New York.

The last two evenings I have sat out on the deck near enough to a group of excellent singers to be able to sing with them unperceived. One evening a man came along and sat with me, in the pitch dark (no lights allowed, all windows covered), and we had a long and pleasant talk (he was a travelling man from Oklahoma), but I have no idea what he looks like and he probably does n't realize that and thinks I cut him dead next day. You see he saw me when he opened the door to let me in, but I did n't like to turn round and stare at him.

A brilliant pink sunset to-night promises fair weather for to-morrow. We don't want it too fair, as submarines can't work well in rough seas. We have had one "drill" which consisted in putting on a lifepreserver and standing at a given place on the deck.

May 26

I don't learn as much French as you 'd hope from

my room-mates, as we arrange (or rather I arrange,

for I must say the two ladies of the stage do just as

they please) never to be there together except in the middle of the night. The superiority of the wife of the horse-buyer becomes every day more apparent.

The last two evenings I have Hstened to a steady rush of talk from a most ingenuous and incongruous lad. He has told me all his affairs without a question from me, and from the amount he knows about other * people on the boat I do not flatter myself that it is my wonderfully sympathetic nature that has drawn him out. He comes from a weirdly named town in Illinois, where his father is a foreman in a machine-shop. He is a mechanic himself and apparently earns upward of two hundred dollars a month, though he is only twenty-one. He finds he can get no further without a college degree, so when he has saved enough he plans to go to Tech. He lies there in his chair thinking of wonderful ways to make money, and he is going to make all he can in his off- time abroad — writing for newspapers, etc. He talks a great deal about money, but I gather that he wants it in order to see more and learn more. He has told me all about his "gurrlfriend" whose graduation from high school, for which he had waited four years, took place the night after he left. He keeps enunciating high moral truths in the most genuine and extraordinary way ; and he is much puzzled about some of the Bible — for instance, he has heard several versions of Daniel in the lions' den and doesn't see how they can all be literally true! He wears light gloves and minds tobacco smoke; and he has shovelled forty tons of coal a day into a furnace, when twenty is what the average stoker can do.

The queer thing about the passengers is that they are almost all between twenty and thirty. There may be some few boys younger, and ten or so older, up to forty, perhaps.

It is raining to-day. We have had no sun since Monday. We are due Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. No one seems to worry about submarines — the French least of all.

May 27 This is the most perfect day imaginable — just the weather for the Kayoshk and a little too favorable for submarines. If the sleeping accommodations were decent, and the weather stayed like this, I should wish the voyage three weeks longer.

Last night most of us slept in our clothes and felt it a great waste when we woke up safe and sound this morning. I am never parted from Arthur's waistcoat and Aunt Amy's whistle. I even slept in the waistcoat. To-night we are to make no noise on deck and not have even the glow of a cigarette. The injunction against noise is most necessary, and thanks to it I hope to get more sleep to-night. . . . The boats are all swung out, ready to be lowered. We expect to get in to-morrow night, and when we do I am going to telegraph to the H6tel des Etats Unis for a room and also to Bob on the chance that he can meet me.

It makes you feel awfully queer to be so near possible submarines. I am sure, though, that if we are hit we shall get off in the boats all right.

lo p.m.

After half an hour*s hard work I am ready for bed and feel that I must tell you about my preparations. I have to look decently, in case we are coules during the night, and yet be as comfortable as possible for the uneventful night we shall probably have. I have on about all my regular clothes, including two heavy underpockets with passport, etc., my huge whistle round my neck, and the Neversink Waistcoat on. In the pocket of the latter is a pair of spectacles. Rolled up at the head of my bunk is my long coat, and in its pockets three cakes of Dot, a piece of string, and a case holding hairpins and clean handkerchiefs. I sit here roaring with laughter to myself, and yet the purser has just been to Mr. Sedgwick to say he understood he had undressed last night and he ought not to to-night. You know, really the time you most mind the thought of submarines is when you are in your bath. I spend about five minutes arranging my clothes on pegs so that I can get into them in an instant's time, but even then it is nervous work.

Well, I will turn in; but imagine whether I shall be warm, waistcoat and all ! Not a porthole on the ship open!

May 29 They say we get well into the river at ten or eleven to-night and land early to-morrow morning. This is our last day and I can't believe it. This curious adventure called "going to France" is about to begin. I feel rather swamped.

Neuilly-sur- Seine f June$ Well, I am actually here. It all seems so natural that I can't believe I am not still at home, in a way. I suppose you would like to know all kinds of silly little things about how I arrived and what I did next and so forth. It takes so long to write, even on the typewriter, and I ought to be studying my French lesson and my anatomy. Everything takes so much time! It takes half an hour to get in to Paris.

Well, to go back to the boat. The last afternoon I was down in my stateroom, in more or less undress, packing, when the steward came rushing down and shouted to the boys in the room opposite: '*A torpedo!" The boys tore off at once and I thought our last hour had come, and started, just as I was, for the deck. Luckily, before I got very far I realized that every one was taking it very calmly; and it turned out to be a boat that had been sent by the French Government to convoy us. That evening, about half past ten, the canvas sides to the deck were taken down and all lights lighted, and we were safe. It really was very exciting. We were then in the mouth of the river and anchored there for the night on account of the tide. In the morning I made a slight error in time (having long since broken my watch) and arrived on deck at six-thirty instead of eight-thirty. We were in a most lovely river, with the greenest shores you ever saw and little white castles or lighthouses or something, and a large fleet of square-rigged vessels — which have been pulled out of their hiding-places in order to free the modern boats.

All morning was spent in the most hectic endeavor to get our luggage vis6ed by the douane and checked for the right place ; anything worse managed I have never seen. But after lunch, with free minds we sat down to enjoy the countryside. I won't try to describe it, because there is n't time in this letter, but it was almost jungle-like in its richness, and there were terraced vineyards and castles and everything one could ask. We got on shore by four and dumped our things at the hotel. I decided to forego my military pass and pay my own fare, as I should have had to sit up all night in a third-class compartment with two other women and five men. By spending the night at Bordeaux we had time to visit a most unusually beautiful cathedral and three old churches — one dating from the eleventh century, where Henry Plantagenet married Eleanor of something or other. I had to do all the talking in French !

The journey next day was well worth waiting for. Such enchanting villages, with the cottages all made of the same kind of stone, with reddish tiled roofs grown over with moss, gardens full of roses, and everywhere the most marvellous green trees of a thousand different sorts. I am longing, on the way home, to stop off at some one of the little villages, for they are really too adorable. Some were built on the side of a steep hill, just as they are in Italy. And everywhere masses and masses of white locust, all in full blossom.

Of course I Ve left out a thousand things — such as the queer costumes in Bordeaux, and the regiments coming and going; we saw two negro or Algerian regiments. In Bordeaux, too, being in a hotel right at the railway station, we saw many sad partings between families and men, and many rapturous meetings.

We reached Paris at half-past eight in the evening and drove straight to the Etats Unis — and there was Bob sitting right there, writing. He looks finely and about ten years younger than when he left. I was rarely gladder to see any one.

The next morning I reported at the Ambulance to the very charming and agreeable Mrs. Munroe, who told me to get my permis de s6jour and come Monday morning to be vaccinated (I should have been before coming) and measured for my uniform and have my work explained. Which I did and it was. Then I went to see J.*s friends and found them more than cordial and so attractive, except in that they could n't take me till the middle of July. Thence to Madame Lauth, whose address Mrs. Parkman gave me, and I am there now, until the middle of July, when she goes out of town and I go to the Henris'. I really am in great luck, for they are a large family of interesting and very musical people. The father is a doctor, a specialist in tuberculosis, and is a perfect darling. He is about sixty-five, I should say, and had given up practice before the war; but now he spends ten to twelve hours a day in the tuberculosis ward of a French military hospital. Even so, he finds energy to give me a French lesson which I enjoy to the utmost — Father would like to hear him mimic my e — he shouts at me when I do wrong and pats my hand or hugs lo ON DUTY AND OFF

me when I do right — and then, later in the evening, plays on the piano or *cello. The son, Henri, of seventeen or eighteen, is almost a genius at music and can play anything, right off the bat, on the violin or piano. There is a daughter of twenty-four and three young French girls, boarders, who are studying one thing or another, and an American woman. They all talk French all the time, naturally, and I can't say I get an awful lot of the general conversation, — because they talk about real things and that is very different from saying that you want a hot bath or a cup of tea. My French is adequate for getting what I need, but not for talking. However, I am sure to learn, and I shall have plenty of time at the Ambulance to talk with the men to my heart's content. The house is a regular city house, but has a large garden behind, with big trees, where we have our supper. Heaven be praised, I think I can hold down the job. In fact it apparently will not take all my time, so, later, when I have mastered French and got the job down to a fine point, I shall ask for more work. My work as historian is about as follows. Each patient (all French, of course) comes in with a certain number of papers scribbled in atrocious handwritings, sometimes in pencil, from a poste de secours or other hospitals, and on entering the Ambulance a card is given him to be filled out by me. From the various papers I find out his name, address, regiment, ward and bed number, where wounded, when, by what, first dressing, how soon, following dressings (oh, no, I forgot, you only get the first six things from the

FRENCH WOUNDED u

papers, and also what the first diagnosis was; the others you get from him); also what operations he has had and what they were. If he has an X-ray you examine it and try to find out for yourself what it shows. You try to gather what the present diagnosis is, and if you can't, you ask the doctor. The doctor is as good-natured as possible, but it is apparently poor form to ask him anything you could possibly guess for yourself. But what you can't guess, and the final note of evacuation, you ask him for. All this information has to be written both in French and in English. I have borrowed an anatomy book from the doctor with whom I live and shall have to learn all the bones, etc., in French.

Curiously enough, you don't seem much nearer the war here than you do at home. Of course, there are all the wounded men, when you have time to take them in, and every other person — more — in the street is in heavy mourning; and the car conductors are women ; and sugar is scarce. But Paris is just the same big, busy city it was when we were here before, as far as I can see. If I were more equal to taking in the talk I suppose I should know more. Of course, so far, I have spent almost all my time getting a permis de s6jour, which I have n't yet achieved. My photographs were too big and we had to traipse all around to find a photographer — the first six we tried being closed "a cause de mobilisation." In that kind of practical way — too little coal to have hot baths or to have the elevators in the big stores run more than half the day — you do feel the difference.

On Sunday Mr. Sedgwick and Mr. Davis and I went to the Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame, and then Mr. Sedgwick took me to lunch with a cousin of his who works at the Ambulance. Mr. Sedgwick has certainly been good to me. This afternoon when I am in town — I have had to go in every day since I came — I am going to try to get a ticket for a service next Sunday at Notre Dame in memory of fallen Belgians. I read about it in the paper and I am sure it will be interesting. Sunday afternoon I took a walk in the Bois. Everything is such a distance here ! And it is as hot as July — with cool nights, however.

June 9 I got my first letters from home yesterday and you may believe I was glad to have them.

I wish Father were living here because he would like this family so much. I am really uncommonly glad to be with them, and Madame Lauth said to tell you they were tres contents to have me and felt that I was a real friend. People come to the house more or less, so I have a chance to hear them all talk together — though I may say right here that I am awfully slow at learning, even to understand. Dr. Lauth is a charmer and I love the lessons I have with him. I read long poems of Lamartine and selections from Chateaubriand, and he criticises. My e is like a bleat.

I wish each day were six times as long, so that I could spend a whole day at the Ambulance, another learning French and reading ''War Wounds," and a third in visiting people and places and writing letters. To-morrow is Sunday and I can answer some of my steamer letters, but I have to arrange my wash for three weeks and fix my tabliers d'infirmiere, which are too small in the waist and too long. I leave here at three-thirty to go to Notre Dame, and am counting on doing lots of studying.

Later We have just been having a wonderful evening of music — a Beethoven trio for *cello, violin, and piano, and other trios, and a Bach thing for voice accompanied by the three, and selections from *' Orpheus" for the same. Henri, the lad of seventeen, who finishes his lyc6e in a few weeks, played alternately violin and piano, and his teacher, an orchestra leader, played first violin. Finally Henri played marvellously on the piano ; and afterwards his mother just said, ** Think of all that music going to the war. War is cruel," She has lost her older boy in the war already, though from diphtheria, not from wounds — and Henri starts training, in artillery as an engineer, as soon as he graduates. He is an uncommonly nice boy, with the best manners, fundamental and superficial, I ever saw. Poor Madame Lauth is a person of very strong feelings, very active and keen, as if she would soon burn herself out.

You have to laugh a great deal at the Ambulance because the men laugh all the time. It is so absolutely different from an ordinary hospital. Most of the men are in excellent condition, and when they are not new, or newly operated on, or having their wounds dressed, they are apparently in uproariously good spirits. They believe in taking one day at a time, I guess, and the relief of being out of the trenches must be great. Anyhow, they are always making jokes and poking fun at each other and at the nurses. Most of them try to learn a little English, and I shall get some kind of French- English book for beginners. I think also that I can read aloud to them — Ars6ne Lupin — to our mutual edification. In the morning, with dressings, etc., everything is very busy, but in the afternoon there is a pleasant sense of leisure, and I can foresee much delightful companionship with the men when I am abreast with my job. The doctor is a Pittsburgh man. He is very good-natured and ready to be asked any questions and to show you what is going on in a surgical way. He says I may see some operations later. There is no point in my going into a description of the wounds for I don't know enough; they are terrible and when you see the men laughing and fooling you can't believe theirs are as bad ; but then you see theirs dressed the next morning and they are just as bad. Sometimes the wounds are very evident, for they expose them to the sun, in the window or in the garden. And speaking of gardens, one of the chief rose-growers of France is a worker at the Ambulance and he has given beds of the most beautiful roses I have ever imagined — more beautiful. They are good-sized roses on low bushes and are every shade from pale yellow to deep red — unbelievable shades of orange and buff. The whole hospital is most attractive — at least in this weather — and some one sends in flowers (of which the streets are full) for the wards every week.

There are two enormous dining-rooms full of people, for all the ambulanciers of the Paris Service eat there, too. My work is all on one corridor; seven wards of ten beds each — 63 to 69, tell Jamie, on the ground floor, across the end farthest from the front door. I should imagine this hospital was as well equipped as any at home, though, of course, I don't know. Four of my wards are of oflicers and three of poilus.

June II I have only just begun to get into my work, though it seems to me as if last Monday, when I began doing more or less, was a hundred years ago ; it is extraordinary to think that it was only a week ago that I was vaccinated and introduced to my predecessor and measured for my — cap and gown, I was going to say, and it is cap and dress. I wear — or shall when the dressmaker sees fit to bring me my dress — a rather bright Copenhagen blue dress with white muslin collars and cuffs, a big white apron covering almost all the skirt and having a square tab in front with shoulder straps, and a little white muslin cap a good deal like what girls wear in a choir.

One gets awfully fond of the men almost at once, they are so very friendly, and so childlike in their capacity for enjoyment. It gives them the most exquisite pleasure to say "Good morrning, Mees Pet* nam/' in English; they only know my name in one ward, where they were trying especially to learn English and where I insisted on their calling me properly. Otherwise they just call all the auxiliaries "Mees." To-day I met one of my blesses on the street, en permission, and he recognized me before I fairly saw him, and you can't imagine what a thrill it gave me — I feel as though I were really part and parcel of it now.

My actual work won't be hard at all when once I have learned the vocabulary. Just at present it is a little puzzling to have to translate the diagnosis of entrance and discharge, and the treatment, into French. The doctor knows almost no French. However, it is a limited vocabulary, and I am learning it — I know all the ordinary bones and organs and a good many operative words. The hardest thing is taking the notes that have been written by hand — and a villainous one — by French doctors in the ambulances the bless6 has been to before reaching Paris, and making sense out of them enough to boil them down, in case there was an operation, or pass them over if there has been none — just getting from them the original diagnosis and the vulnerative agency, which is almost invariably 6clat d'obus. I think I shall learn a good deal, for I have a very nice doctor and can always watch the dressings and ask any questions I want — provided the m^decin chef is not present ; if he is, the strictest silence is preserved, although he is a very pleasant, understanding, rather young man, who certainly does n't look as if he were a stickler for form. I dare say that might be the same in any hospital.

... I have been building blocks this evening with an awfully cunning and fearfully bright little girl of four, daughter of the cook here, who informs you, with questioning, that her father is "a la guerre'* where **il tue les Boches," and that she does n't like **Guillaume" **parcequ'il a fait mal a Papa" — all with the utmost cheerfulness. If anything goes wrong with her she says, "C'est la guerre." Her poor father has n't been heard from since the first month of the war, and no one knows whether he is alive or dead*

June 13 I wish Jamie were here, to see if the Ambulance has advanced a good deal since 191 5. Was Dakin's solution the thing then? It is a disinfectant which hangs in a glass vessel over the bed and is turned on every so often, and — I thought allowed to run for an hour at a time. Thus, when the nurse left the other day and told me to turn on two Dakin things at two o'clock, I almost inundated one man by leaving it running. Fortunately there was very little in the vessel, and the other man was able to make me understand the idea — namely, that you turn it on for two seconds only. But I spent an awful night, that night, because I suddenly remembered that the solution burns the skin and that the skin around the wound is carefully covered by oiled silk for that reason — and I knew the man's back had got wet and had visions of him with no skin left. Next day he was as well as ever. I imagine the extensions are much more elaborate than when Jamie was here. I will write him about some of them, some day at the Ambulance. . . .

June 17 The event of the week has been the arrival of Pershing — whom the French call by every name except his own, including "Pere Ch6ri" — and that was very exciting. Not that anything in particular happened — they had not put his arrival in the papers, and though there was a very enthusiastic crowd it was not a large one — at the Crillon Hotel, that is; I believe it was bigger at the station. I was in the hotel lobby when he came in, so I got a good look at him and thought him a very decent representative of the race. After he went upstairs I went out, thinking all was over, and found that Joffre was just coming. It made you weep to hear the French cheer Joffre ; I never heard anything like it; and they all looked so devoted to him and so full of joy at his return. Of course, Pershing did not get anything like the enthusiasm Joffre did — quite properly — on this first appearance, but then the crowd started crying, ** Au balcon! Au balcon!" with a rhythm like a cheer, and Pershing came out on his balcony and bowed and smiled, and then there was a roar of **Vive I'Amerique," I can assure you. It made me wildly proud and perfectly sick. I am as bad as Aunt B, these days, for crying, and if I am to get on with this letter I must leave this subject and tell you about the service last Sunday at Notre Dame. Except this : I waved my flag up above the crowd when Pershing was in the balcony and felt sure he saw it and smiled at me — but as I heard four other people say the same thing, I suppose it was not so.