Frequent entertainments and concerts are given.
Afternoon tea is served every Sat.u.r.day, at which some American lady acts as hostess.
REGISTRATION--The Union keeps an accurate index of all men who register at its Paris headquarters or at its London Branch, 16, Pall Mall East, S.W.1. It is anxious to get in touch with all college and university men in Europe, who are therefore urged to register by MAIL, giving name, college, cla.s.s, European address and name and address of nearest relative at home.
AMERICA"S BEST MEDICOS AT WORK FOR THE A. E. F.
Incomes of Specialists in the Overseas Command Would Total Enough to Pay off the National Debt.
If the incomes of all the well-known American specialists who have come to France to look after the health of the A.E.F. troops were lumped together they would be enough to pay off the national debt of the country and then leave sufficient to satisfy a camp store-keeper.
This is no pipe dream or a simple newspaper yarn, but the plain truth.
Some of the medicos from the United States have given up earnings of such big figures they should only be mentioned kneeling. Where they gathered in half a million at home yearly, they are accepting a major"s three thousand and service allowance, in order to see that Bill Jones from Kankakee or Sam Smith from Pleasantville has the proper treatment for warts in his stomach or barnacles on his thinking apparatus.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Ward in an A.E.F. Hospital, Showing Some of the First to Pay a Visit to "Blighty."]
In addition to separating themselves from large wads of coin and all the comforts of home, they have brought over the staffs of their various hospitals, who know all their funny ways of operating, from how best to cut a man loose from his appendix to painless extraction of the bankroll. They have also brought along all their collections of patent knives and scissors, the only thing they left behind being the doctors"
bills that would take a year"s service as a doughboy to meet the first instalment.
A Fear to Forget.
Nearly everyone has an ingrowing objection to going to a hospital, or acknowledging he must take the count for an illness, because of fear as to what treatment he may draw.
Forget it!
The Amexforce hospitals are not built along those lines, nor are the nurses sweet young things of fifty odd summers who hand out tracts with the morning"s milk or make kittenish love to a lad who may be tied down to a bed or too weak to run away. And the doctors are not owlish-looking creatures with whiskers that would make a goat die of envy and sick-room manners that would scare a Mental Scientist into catalepsy. They are real human beings who understand the troubles of mankind from nostalgia (professional name for homesickness) down to enlargement of the coco (unprofessional name for the swelled head) and are doing everything in their power to make a little easier the big game we are playing to a showdown with the Kaiser.
It"s human nature to hate to go to the doctor. But if the boys would only realize that if they would take their smaller troubles to the "docs" they could easily prevent them from becoming more serious ones, it would save a lot of useless suffering. Of course, that doesn"t apply to treatment for the wounded, but the Army Chief Surgeon is trying his darndest to make that as perfect as possible.
A Hospital of 20,000 Beds.
In the first place, adequate hospital facilities have been arranged for.
One hospital alone has a capacity for 20,000 beds. At an emergency call, the hospitals can handle twenty per cent. of the whole Amexforce. To begin with the trenches, the Medical Department has introduced a sort of folding litter that can go around corners without having to make a man who"s. .h.i.t get out and walk around the bends. When he gets to the dressing station or collecting hospital, motor ambulances are ready to take him back to the evacuating hospital, where the women nurses take their chances with the men, eight to ten miles behind the line.
Once his case is looked into there, he continues under the charge of that hospital chief until he gets well or is sent home. If he"s moved to another hospital his record and register go with him, so that the new hospital knows immediately he was invalided for a piece of sh.e.l.l in his leg, and no flurried or overworked surgeon tries to operate on him for inflammation of the intestines.
From beginning to end, the best specialists in the whole of the Union are at the disposal of any one who"s unfortunate enough to get hurt. If it"s eyes, ears, throat, abdomen, sh.e.l.l shock, mental derangement, or no matter what, one of the biggest men from home is on the job. They are not correspondence school surgeons, either.
Some of the Experts.
Maybe one of these is from your own home town and you know him by name or reputation: George E. Brewer, New York; George W. Crile, Cleveland; Henry Cushing, Boston, the brain specialist, who knows every cell in the think tank and just how it works and operates; F. A. Washburn, Boston; Samuel Lloyd, New York; C. L. Gibson, New York; R. H. Harte, Philadelphia; F. A. Besley, Chicago; Angus McLean, Detroit; Charles H.
Peck, New York; John M. T. Finney, of Johns Hopkins, Baltimore; F. T.
Murphy, St. Louis; M. Clinton, Buffalo; R. T. Miller, Pittsburgh; C. R.
Clark, Youngstown, O.; E. D. Clark, Indianapolis; B. R. Shurley, Detroit; Joseph E. Flynn, Yale Medical.
If that isn"t enough, a.s.sociated with each of these men are other doctors whose ability is pretty well known all over the States. For instance, Dr. Lloyd, of New York, has with him Dr. McKernon, also of the big town, one of the best ear specialists in the country. If a sh.e.l.l goes off too near you and the eardrum suffers, Dr. McKernon will be on the job to find out if he can"t make a new one.
A man who has just come over from Baltimore said the Army had practically cleaned out Johns Hopkins University there, which produces more good doctors to the square inch than France does fleas. So when it comes to sorting out the cases, the men with the bad listeners won"t be sent to the throat specialist, nor the chap with a wounded eye made a candidate for the brainstorm man.
The Army"s Big Eye Man.
Cases of eye wounds or troubles are handled by a doctor who probably knows more about the eye than any one man in America, Dr. George de Schweinitz, of Philadelphia, who has transplanted his whole sanitarium to France in order that no man of the Amexforce may be deprived of his sight where there is one chance in a million of saving it. With that in view, the chances of coming out of this mess with both eyes are exceptionally good. Statistics from both French and British armies show that of all the wounded they have had, only one man in 1,200 is blinded.
If they had had the organization of the American medical force, the chance would probably have been reduced to one man in 2,500.
No one pretends to say that our hospitals make sickness or wounds a pleasure, but be a.s.sured of one thing. If anything happens to you, you"ll be well looked after in them by the world"s leading medical and surgical authorities.
A PLEA TO THE CENSOR.
"Say," said a short, bow-legged corporal the other day, "I wanta send three pictures home to the folks, but I dunnoo how I can get it across.
These censorship rules say all you can send is pictures of yourself without background that might indicate the whereabouts of the studio or other strategic information. These ain"t pictures of myself, nothing like it. Wait till I tell you.
"I"m going to ent.i.tle this series "Rapid Transit in France." I took "em with a little pocket camera. There"s one I took up at the port where we landed--first picture I took in France, it was. It shows one of these two-wheeled carts, with three animals. .h.i.tched to it. One is a horse, one is a dog, and in the middle there"s a great big old cow, and an old French feller in a blue nightshirt sittin" in the road milkin" the cow.
"Then there"s another I took over at (the town where general headquarters are situated) of the "bus that goes down to the station to meet trains. You won"t believe this unless you"ve seen it, but that "bus is. .h.i.tched up to a horse an" a camel, a regular camel like you see in a circus--come from Morocco, they tell me, and looks as if he had gone as long as it is camels can go without a drink, or chow, either.
"The last one"s a prize. I took it in one of those villages up the line.
It"s a young kid in a soldier"s coat down to his knees walking down the main street with a stick in his hand driving a sled, and what do you guess is. .h.i.tched to the sled? By gosh, a big fat goose, and nothing else. The kid"s steerin" the goose with the stick, and the goose"s lookin" around with that fool goose look, just like the picture you see of that Crown Prince.
"Say, what do you think those folks with their automobiles and subways and everything would make of that? It sure would open their eyes.
Travel"s a great thing for a man," said the corporal.
[Ill.u.s.tration: HOW THEY LOOK IN THE TRENCHES.
This New Official Photograph Shows Some of Our Over-seas Troops in their Ringside Costume.]
WHAT SAILOR INGRAM DID.