Our Part in the Great War

I

THE TWO AMERICAS

There are two Americas to-day: the historic America, which still lives in many thousands of persons, and the new various America, which has not completely found itself: a people of mixed blood, divergent ideals, intent on the work at hand, furious in its pleasures, with the vitality of a new race in it, sprinting at top speed in a direction it does not yet know, to a goal it cannot see. It is in the sweep of an immense experiment, accepting all races, centering on no single strain.

This new joy-riding generation has struck out a fresh philosophy of life, which holds that many of the old responsibilities can be passed by, that the great divide has been crossed, on the hither side of which lay poverty, war, sin, pain, fear: the ancient enemies of the race. On the further side, which it is believed has at last been reached, lie, warm in the sun, prosperity and peace, a righteousness of well-being. It is a philosophy that fits snugly into a new country of tonic climate and economic opportunity, distant by three thousand miles from historic quarrels and the pressure of crowded neighborhood. We believe that, by coming on the scene with a lot of vitality and good cheer, we can clean up the old bothersome problems and make a fresh start in the sunshine. Christian Science in a mild genial form is the national religion of America. We believe that maladies and failures can be willed out of existence. As for "the fatalities of history," "an endless war between two mutually exclusive ideals," we classify that way of thinking with the surplus luggage of autocracies.

Now, there is a wide area in life where this breezy burst of power and good-will operates effectively. It is salutary for stale vendettas, racial prejudices, diseases of the nerves, egoistic melancholias. But there are certain structural disturbances at which it takes a look and crosses to the other side, preferring to maintain its tip-top spirits and its complacency. It does not cure a broken arm, and it leaves Belgium to be hacked through. The New America trusts its melting-pot automatically to remake mixed breeds over night into citizens of the Republic. It believes that Ellis Island and the naturalization offices somehow do something with a laying on of hands which results in a nation. Meantime, we go on blindly and busily with our markets and base-ball and million-dollar films.

Troubling this enormous optimism of ours came suddenly the greatest war of the ages. We were puzzled by it for a little, and then took up again our work and pleasures, deciding that with the causes and objects of this war we were not concerned. That was the clear decision of the new America of many races, many minds. The gifted, graceful voice of our President spoke for us what already we had determined in the silence.

But there are those of us that were not satisfied with the answer we made. The fluent now-famous phrases did not content us. It is for this remnant in our population that this book is written. From this remnant, many, numbering thousands, put by their work and pleasures, and came across the sea, some to nurse, and some to carry swift relief over dangerous roads; still others to fight behind trenches and over the earth, no few of them to die. Nearly forty thousand men have enlisted. Many hundred young college boys are driving Red Cross cars at the front. There is an American Flying Squadron. Many hundreds of American men and women are serving in hospitals. Many thousands of hard-working, simple Americans at home are devoting their spare time and their spare money to relief.

I give a few illustrations of the American effort. I have not tried to show the extent of it. I trust some day the work will be catalogued and the full account published, as belonging to history. For we have not wholly failed the Allies. I have merely sought in this book to cheer myself, and, I trust, some friends of "the good old cause, the great idea, the progress and freedom of the race." I believe that the historic America has spoken and has acted in this war. In a time when our country, perplexed by its own problems of mixed blood and warring ideas, bewildered by its great possessions, busy with its own vast work of shaking down a continent, has made a great refusal, it is good to have the spectacle of some thousands of young Americans, embracing poverty, taking dangers and even death gladly. There is something of the ancient crusade still stirring in these bones. The race of Wendell Phillips and Whittier has representatives above ground. There was an America once that would not have stood by when its old-time companion in freedom was tasting the bayonet and the flame. Some of that America has come down to Chapman and Neville Hall, to Seeger, Chapin, Prince, Bonnell.

Nothing said here is meant to imply that the sum of all American efforts is comparable to the gift which the men of France and Belgium and England have made us. I am only saying that a minority in our population has seen that the Allies are fighting to preserve spiritual values which made our own past great, and which alone can make our future worthy.

That minority, inheriting the traditions of our race, bearing old names that have fought for liberty in other days, has clearly recognized that no such torture has come in recent centuries as German hands dealt out in obedience to German orders. In the section on French peasants, I have told of that suffering.

In another section, I am speaking to the Americans who remain indifferent to the acts of Germany. They are not convinced by the records of eye-witnesses. The wreck of Belgium is not sufficient. Will they, I wonder, be moved, if one rises from the dead. We shall see, for in this book I give the words of those who have, as it were, risen from the dead to speak to them. I give the penciled records of dead Germans, who left little black books to tell these things they did in Flanders and the pleasant land of France.

There are many persons who are more sincerely worried lest an injustice of overstatement should be done to Germany than they are that Germany has committed injustice on Belgium and Northern France. The burned houses and murdered peasants do not touch them, but any tinge of resentment, any sign of anger, in criticizing those acts, moves them to protest. Frankly, we of the historic tradition are disturbed when we see a wave of excitement pass over the country at the arrival of a German submarine – dinners of honor, interviews with the "Viking" – Captain – and, in the same month, a perfect calm of indifference greeting the report of the French girls of Lille sent away and of families broken up and scattered. We that are shocked by the cold system of the German conquerors, and publish the facts of their methodical cruelty, are rebuked by American editors and social workers as exercising our heart emotionally at the expense of our head. But that hysteria which greets a German officer, indirectly helping in the job of perpetuating the official German system of murder and arson, is accepted as American vivacity, a sort of base-ball enthusiasm, and pleasant revelation of sporting spirit.

We believe we are not un-American, in being Pro-Ally. We believe we are holding true to the ideas which created our country – ideas brought across from the best of England, and freshened from the soul of France. We believe that Benjamin Franklin was an American and a statesman when he wrote: —

"What would you think of a proposition, if I should make it, of a family compact between England, France and America? America would be as happy as the Sabine girls if she could be the means of uniting in perpetual peace her father and her husband."

Cheer the Deutschland in, and U-53,1 but permit us to go aside a little way and mourn the dead of the Lusitania. All we ask, we that are held by some of the old loyalties, is that we be not counted un-American. We ask you to throw our beliefs, too, into the vast new seething mass. Let us contribute to the great experiment a little of the old collective experience. Because the marching feet of France strike a great music in our heart, do not hold us alien. We are only remembering what Washington knew. He was glad of the feet of those young men as they came tramping south to Yorktown.

In the immense labors of the naturalization factory, do not pause to excommunicate us, who find an ancient, unfaded freedom in England. We are moved as Lincoln was moved when he wrote to the operatives of Lancashire – Englishmen starving because of our blockade, starving but not protesting. Lincoln wrote: —

To the Workingmen of Manchester: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of the address and resolutions which you sent me on the eve of the new year. When I came, on the fourth of March, 1861, through a free and constitutional election to preside in the Government of the United States, the country was found at the verge of civil war. Whatever might have been the cause, or whosesoever the fault, one duty, paramount to all others, was before me, namely, to maintain and preserve at once the Constitution and the integrity of the Federal Republic. A conscientious purpose to perform this duty is the key to all the measures of administration which have been and to all which will hereafter be pursued. Under our frame of government and my official oath, I could not depart from this purpose if I would. It is not always in the power of governments to enlarge or restrict the scope of moral results which follow the policies that they may deem it necessary for the public safety from time to time to adopt.

I have understood well that the duty of self-preservation rests solely with the American people; but I have at the same time been aware that favor or disfavor of foreign nations might have a material influence in enlarging or prolonging the struggle with disloyal men in which the country is engaged. A fair examination of history has served to authorize a belief that the past actions and influences of the United States were generally regarded as having been beneficial toward mankind. I have, therefore, reckoned upon the forbearance of nations. Circumstances to some of which you kindly allude induce me expecially to expect that if justice and good faith should be practiced by the United States, they would encounter no hostile influence on the part of Great Britain. It is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge the demonstration you have given of your desire that a spirit of amity and peace toward this country may prevail in the councils of your Queen, who is respected and esteemed in your own country only more than she is by the kindred nation which has its home on this side of the Atlantic.

I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men at Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundations of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the working-men of Europe have been subjected to severe trials, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth, and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I do not doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained by your great nation; and, on the other hand, I have no hesitation in assuring you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people. I hail this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.

We believe that Lincoln would have wished his people to show a like partizanship to-day in the cause of right. Before we all steer quite out of the tested channel, let us at least remind you that those captains knew the course. It is idle to talk of a return to the past. The statesmanship of Franklin is not the statesmanship of to-day. What Lincoln felt is out of tune with the new America. We must go on with the vast new turmoils, the strange unguessed tendencies. We must find a fresh hope in the altered world. Meanwhile, be neutral, but do not bid us be neutral. You cannot silence us. We mean that our ideas shall live and fight and finally prevail.

In one section of this book I deal with what the war is teaching us. The peoples of Europe are reasserting the rights of nationality. We must understand this. We need a wholesome sense of our own national being in the America of to-day. Nationality is the one great idea in the modern world, the one allegiance left us. It has absorbed the loyalties and fervor that used to be poured out upon art and religion. Groups of persons find emotional release in the Woman's Movement, in Trades Unions, in Socialism. But the one universal expression for the entire community is in nationalism, the assertion of selfhood as a people. Religious revivals no longer draw the mind of the mass people. But the idea of nationality sweeps them. It gives them the sense of kinship, it answers the desire for something to which to tie. It is easily possible that this idea will fade as the God of the Churches and the creative love of beauty faded. The Mazzini and Lincoln type of man may pass as the poet and the saint, Knights and Samurai, passed. But not in our time, not in a few hundred years to come. Nationalism may be only one more of the necessary "useful lies," one more illusion of the human race. But it will serve out our days. The mistake is in thinking that the heart of the common people will ever be satisfied with a bare mechanic civilization. Men are unwilling to live unless they have something to die for. We have filled the foreground in recent years with new automatic machines, new subdivisions of repetitive process. We tried to empty the huge modern world of its old values. Then the people came and smashed the structure, and found a vast emotional release in the war. The hope of a sane future is not in suppressing that dynamic of nationality. We must direct it.

II

THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL

The recital of the young college boy crowding his ambulance between singing shells and bringing in his wounded down death's alley is familiar and stirring. And this, for most of us, has been the entire story. But that is only the first chapter. It is of no value to bring in a wounded man, unless there is a field hospital to give him swift and wise treatment, unless there is a well-equipped hospital-train to run him gently down to Paris, unless there are efficient stretcher bearers at the railroad station to unload him, and ambulances to transport him to new quarters. And finally, most important of all, the base hospital that at last receives him must be furnished with skilled doctors, surgeons, nurses and orderlies, or all the haste of transportation has gone for nothing. For it is in the base hospital that the final and greatest work with the wounded man is wrought out, which will let him go forth a whole man, with limbs his own and a face unmarred, or will discharge him a wrecked creature, crippled, monstrous, because of bungled treatment. It is a chain with no weak link that must be forged from the hour of the wounding at Verdun to the day of hospital discharge at Neuilly. And that final success of the restored soldier is built upon the loyalty of hundreds of obscure helpers, far back of the lines of glory. That which is fine about it is the very absence of the large scale romantic. It is humble service humbly given, with no war-medals in sight, no mention in official dispatches – only a steady fatiguing drive against bugs and dirt and germs and red tape.

So I begin my story with the work of the Scotch-American at the entrance of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine. He is the man that gives every entering wounded soldier a bath, and he does it thoroughly in four and a half minutes. He can bathe twelve inside the hour. He has perfected devices, so that a fractured leg won't be hurt while the man is being scrubbed. He has worked out foot-rests, and body-rests and neck-rests in the tub. This man has taken his lowly job and made it into one of the important departments of the hospital. And with him begins, too, the long tale of inventive appliances which are lessening suffering. The hospital is full of them in each branch of the service. Everywhere you go in relief work of this war, you see devices – little things that relieve pain, and save time and speed up recovery. That is one of the things differentiating this war from the old-time slaughters, where most of the seriously wounded died: the omnipresence of mechanical, electrical, devices. Inventive skill has wreaked itself on the sudden awful human need. The hideously clever bombs, and big guns, all the ingenious instruments of torture, will shoot themselves away and pass. But the innumerable appliances of restoration, the machinery of welfare, suddenly called into being out of the mechanic brain of our time, under pressure of the agonizing need, will go on with their ministry when Lorraine is again green.

The Ambulance is the cheeriest, the cleanest, the most efficient place which I have visited since the beginning of the war. There is no hospital odor anywhere. Fresh air and sunshine are in the wards. A vagrant from Mars or the moon, who wanted an answer to some of his questions about the lay-out of things, would find his quest shortened by spending an afternoon at the American Ambulance.

What does America mean? What is it trying to do? How does it differ from other sections of the map?

The swift emergency handling of each situation has been American in its executive efficiency. Things have been done in a hurry, and done well. In eighteen days this building was taken over from a partially completed school, with the refuse of construction work heaped high, and made into an actively-running hospital ready for 175 patients. That, too, in those early days of war, when workmen had been called to the colors, when money was unobtainable, transportation tied up, and Germany pounding down on Paris.

The skillful surgical work, some of it pioneering in fields untouched by former experience, has been a demonstration of the best American practice.

The extraordinarily varied types of persons at work under one roof in a democracy of service presents just the aspect of our community which is most representative. Millionaires and an impersonator, Harvard, Dartmouth, Tech, Columbia, Fordham, Michigan, Princeton, Cornell and Yale men, ranchers, lawyers, and newspaper men – all are hard at work on terms of exact equality. A colored man came in one day. He said he wanted to help with the wounded. He was tried out, and proved himself one of the best helpers in the organization. He received the same treatment as all other helpers, eating with them, liked by them. Some weeks later, one of our wealthy "high-life" young Americans volunteered his services. After the first meal he came wrathfully to the surgeon.

"I've had to eat at the same table with a negro. That must be changed. What will you do about it?"

"Do about it," answered the surgeon. "You will do one of two things – go and apologize to a better man than you are, or walk out of this hospital."

Recently this black helper came to the director in distress of mind.

"Have to leave you," he said. He held out a letter from the motor car firm, near Paris, where he he had worked before the war. It was a request for him to return at once. If he did not obey now in this time of need, it meant there would never be any position for him after the war as long as he lived.

A day or two later he came again.

"My old woman and I have been talking it over," he said, "and I just can't leave this work for the wounded. We'll get along some way."

A little more time passed, and then, one day, he stepped up to the director and said:

"I want you to meet my boss."

The superintendent of the motor car factory had come. He said to the director:

"I have received the most touching letter from this darkey, saying he couldn't come back to us because he must help here. Now I want to tell you that his position is open to him any time that he wants it, during the war, or after it."

Visitors, after walking through the wards, smelling no odors, hearing no groans, seeing the faces of the men smiling back at them, are constantly saying to the director:

"Ah, I see you have no really serious cases here."

It is the only kind of case sent to Neuilly – the gravely wounded man, the "grands blessés," requiring infinite skill to save the limb and life. So sweet and hopeful is the "feel" of the place that not even 575 beds of men in extremity can poison that atmosphere of successful practice. Alice's Queen had a certain casual promptness in saying, "Off with his head," whenever she sighted a subject. And there was some of the same spirit in the old-time war-surgeon when he was confronted with a case of multiple fracture. "Amputate. Off with his leg. Off with his arm." And that, in the majority of cases, was the same as guillotining the patient, for the man later died from infection. There was a surgical ward in one of the 1870 Paris hospitals with an unbroken record of death for every major operation. At the American Ambulance, out of the first 3,100 operations, there were 81 amputations. The death rate for the first year was 4.46 per cent.