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CHAPTER 1
The Harjes Formation
In March of 1910, a group of Americans living in Paris opened a small, semiphilanthropic hospital just off the Boulevard Victor Hugo in the suburb of Neuilly. When the war broke out in August of 1914, the American Hospital became a natural focal point for the concerned American colony. They donated money, equipment, and automobiles, and even offered their personal services, to help the war effort. Learning that the American Hospital intended to treat wounded soldiers by setting up tents in the hospitals gardens if necessary, French officials were directed by a Dr. Févier, surgeon general of the French Army, to offer the Americans the unfinished Lycée Pasteur to use as its "ambulance/' or military hospital. (Ambulance can be a misleading term. The Americans, like the English, use the word to denote a motorized vehicle designed to carry patients to hospitals. For the French, ambulance designates a military hospital. In this text, ambulance in lowercase refers to vehicles, and Military Hospital replaces Ambulance, though I am aware there are those who prefer American Ambulance of Paris to American Military Hospital because the latter suggests that the American military was involved, and this was most emphatically not the case.) The Lycée Pasteur, which had been requisitioned by the French government, was an elaborate arrangement of redbrick school buildings just beyond the Maillot gate in Neuilly, six blocks from the American Hospital. After the war, the Lycée Pasteur reclaimed its buildings on the Boulevard d'Inkerman, and the Americans were reimbursed for some of their construction expenses. The ante-bellum American Hospital, which got a new building in 1926, still carries on its work today at its old location, just off the Boulevard Victor Hugo.
The French offer of Lycée Pasteur carried with it two conditions. First, the American Hospital Board had to agree to underwrite the completion of the buildings and grounds, at a cost of $400,000. Second, the Board had only twenty-four hours to accept. Neither of these stipulations daunted the Hospital Board's two principal powers: former Ambassador Robert Bacon, its president, and Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, the second wife of William K. Vanderbilt. Once introduced, the deal was done. On August 14, 1914, the day after accepting the offer, Bacon appointed a Board of Governors for the American Ambulance of Paris. The roster of the Ambulance Board alone is sufficient to demonstrate that this board had the wherewithal, clout, and connections to get things done: Mrs. Henry P. Davison (her husband later directed the American Red Cross), Mrs. E. H. Harriman, Mrs. Myron T. Herrick (wife of the popular ambassador to France), Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Mrs. Montgomery Sears, Mrs. Bayard Van Rensselaer, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, among other names of equal luster.
To help recruit the medical staff and oversee the completion of the lycée buildings (which needed mostly interior work: lighting, heating, and cabinetry), the Ambulance Board named an administrative Ambulance Committee. Working together, these two groups soon had the American Military Hospital up and running — in the nick of time. According to a report later filed with the American Hospital Board, the first four wounded soldiers were received on September 6. As the French and British continued to drive the Germans back from the Marne in mid-September, the number of blessa) rose steadily. Ninety-one were admitted to the Military Hospital on the 15th of September; 146 on the 16th; 209 the following day; and during the second half of September and the first half of October, the average number of patients per day reached 238.
Yet all this medical service would not have been helpful without a means of getting the bUddéd to the hospital. Mrs. Vanderbilt and Harold White, manager of the Ford Motor Company's French assembly plant, had already addressed the matter of transporting the wounded. With financial assistance from Mrs. Vanderbilt, White donated ten Ford chassis, which were outfitted as ambulances by a local carriage builder. A crude plank floor was extended from the gas tank out over the rear axle, an overarching canopy of canvas covered the rear compartment, and a single board was strapped across the top of the gas tank for the driver to sit on. That was all — no side doors, no roof over the cab, no windshield.
The first drivers signed on in no less improvised a manner. J. Paulding Brown, whose pleasure tour of Europe had been interrupted by the outbreak of the war, showed up at the Military Hospital one day in early September of 1914, and "15 minutes later was an ambulance driver." Brown's "first of a series of interesting trips into the environs of Paris" was made on September 7, and thereafter "for several weeks we were busy along the Marne gathering in wounded and bringing them back to Paris."
\Once the Germans had been pushed above the Aisne in late September, the French holding stations were necessarily beyond the reach of the Military Hospital's Fords, and the usefulness of the ambulances temporarily waned. Sanitary trains now constituted the principal means of transporting the wounded from the front to La Chapelle, the renovated rail station at the northernmost edge of Paris. This former railway depot had been transformed into an official receiving station to which all Paris-bound hospital trains brought their wounded. Once a warehouse-like barn with a huge unloading platform, this cold and stark station was made over into a warm, pleasant, and efficient distribution center. On the platform facing the railroad tracks were four newly constructed barracks, each painted a different color. The wounded were taken from the railroad cars directly into one of these structures, where nurses gave them hot soup and bread, and dressed them in fresh bandages if necessary. Using cards coded according to the color of the barracks, clerks wrote down the names of the wounded, four per card, grouped according to type of injury. Then the cards were distributed to the drivers, whose ambulances were lined up in stalls. After selecting his or her stretcher-bearers from a common pool, the driver sent them to the barracks corresponding to the card's color, where they picked up the four blessés named on the card. Once the blessés were loaded into the ambulance, the driver took off for the appropriate hospital — say, the American Military Hospital if the four blessés required facial surgery — or to the Val du Grâce for special types of amputation. The only hitch was that no station, not even the wondrously efficient La Chapelle, could keep pace with the daily slaughter and the resultant backlog of trains. One night, Harold Howland noted, "There were two trains standing alongside the La Chapelle station and one inside, and eight more waiting in the yards outside the city to come in."
The most expedient means of distributing blessés from La Chapelle to the numerous hospitals was by automobile, but ambulance work was regarded by many as incidental, not integral, to a hospital's true and proper functions. In that trips into the field were no longer practical and, for Americans, were actually prohibited by military policy, the Ambulance Committee of the American Military Hospital hesitated before deciding officially to add a transportation department to its operations. Some on the Committee felt that whatever ambulance service the American Military Hospital required could be handled by other motor corps operating in the city, including units from Spain, Canada (whose drivers were all women), and Scandinavia. In addition, they knew that eventually an ambulance service would probably be co-opted by the military, which would, understandably, take over the control and deployment of the vehicles. The Hospital seemed to have little to gain by setting up its own ambulance service. Most of the medical administrators felt that a hospital's job was to treat the wounded, not to fetch them.
Other factors worked against the inclusion of a transportation department in the American Military Hospital's operations. Given the magnitude of the Hospital's undertaking and its policy of treating the most challenging cases, particularly men in need of facial reconstruction, an ambulance service would be a drain on the Hospital's finances and personnel. The American Military Hospital had become a highly respected and successful institution by concentrating its efforts on the medical aspects of its service. By the end of 1915, it had an impressive number of beds in operation — 575, with another 50 ready for emergencies. Although the hospital staff was serving largely without pay, the Board spared no expense on medical technology, which gave rise to the criticism that the Hospital was extravagant. Still, despite the Hospital's emphasis on treatment rather than transportation, its ambulances had already proved their worth at the holding stations in Meaux, Lizy-sur-Ourcq, and Coulommiers during the Battle of the Marne. The cars were also of considerable use in distributing the wounded who continued to arrive at La Chapelle. So, by late February of 1915, the Military Hospital Board finally consented to form a Transportation Committee, which would oversee the formation and operation of an ambulance service. Not surprisingly, transportation matters were relegated to the bottom of the Hospital's budgetary and organizational priorities. New ambulances were occasionally purchased with money raised in the United States by William Hereford, a New York banker who was the chief fund-raiser for the entire American Hospital organization. Some contributors specified that their donations go toward buying ambulances, giving Hereford no choice but to spend the money on cars. Nevertheless, by December of 1916, when the hospital was spending over $1,000 per day to handle nearly 1,600 wounded, the number of ambulances working directly out of the Neuilly hospital had increased from the original ten to just thirty-five.
The American Military Hospital was not unique in its attitude toward ambulance units. Until the early spring of 1915, few hospitals recognized the importance of independent ambulance services, particularly when it came to trench warfare. When armies marched, the armies' mobile hospitals could follow the troops and pick up the wounded at assembly points. In this war, however, not only was the French Army stationary, but its medical facilities were often based in converted civilian hospitals and other civic buildings, which were invariably a moderate distance from the front, far enough to be out of artillery range. The wounded had to be hauled back to these urban hospitals, but neither trains nor horse-drawn wagons provided an entirely satisfactory means of transporting them. The blasted, seasonally boggy terrain over which the blessés had to be carried would not sustain railroad beds, and the wagons moved so slowly that the wounded were exposed far too long to enemy fire. Cars, in short, were the answer. However, as was the case with the American Military Hospital in Paris, most civilian hospital boards and their administrative surgeons were not accustomed to supporting or managing an extensive ambulance service.
A typical case was Mrs. C. Mitchell Depew, who converted half of her Château d'Annel at Longueil, some nine miles north of Com-piègne, into a splendid forty-bed hospital. The American Mrs. Depew was a long-time resident in France and a close friend of General Joffre, who helped her obtain the necessary medical licenses. Mrs. Depew and her staff opened the hospital on August 27, but when German troops poured across the region three days later, everyone, including members of her own family, had to leave. Returning a month later, they reopened their hospital and, according to Dr. Harvey Cushing, who visited the Château d'Annel the following March, "have been continuously busy [ever since]." Cushing, a Harvard surgeon who was inspecting various regional clinics on behalf of the American Hospital Board, counted "seven nurses for the 40 patients [and] an ambulance corps of four Ford cars."
But Dr. Cushing was wrong in one matter. Mrs. Depew's hospital may have been in full operation when he visited it in March of 1915, but between the preceding September and the end of January it had been virtually without patients. Earlier, in November of 1914, two French generals (Berthier and Dziewonski) directed the médecin en chef at Montdidier to deliver his overflow of wounded to her hospital. However, because the Montdidier doctor had no ambulances to spare and because Mrs. Depew had not obtained the requisite laissez-passers (permits) or sufficient gasoline to run her own ambulance service, Mrs. Depew's hospital was without the means of bringing in any patients, Montdidier's overflow included. Not until the end of January, by which time Mrs. Depew had obtained three ambulances, the appropriate passes, and a ration of gasoline, did the Longueil hospital have a legitimate ambulance service. Accordingly, when Cushing arrived in March, the hospital had ambulances (Cushing counted an additional one, making four in all) and a full component of forty blessés.
Largely owing to the French ban on foreign nationals in the field, the American volunteer ambulance services were slow to be accepted by French officials, but once the usefulness of the American cars and drivers was recognized, the demand grew instantly. The experience of Edward Dale Toland captures the pace and nature of the change in attitude toward American ambulance drivers. Toland, a 28-year-old Philadelphia gentleman, boarded the S.S. Laconia out of New York in late August of 1914, intending "simply to see the excitement and the French people in wartime." Having spent the previous six years in the engineering and banking businesses, the Princeton alum (1908) was intrigued by "the prospect of an indeterminate holiday." Instead, the unassuming and modest Toland got caught up in the rush of events and before he knew it was helping to form the very first American volunteer ambulance unit.
Having been in Paris the previous year, Toland was stunned by what he saw upon arrival on September 14. The entire length of Avenue de l'Opéra revealed "not a soul on the sidewalks,' and that evening the usually hectic Place de la Concorde was "as dark and still as a country churchyard," Toland wrote in his diary. In early September, United Press reporter William Shepherd had stood on Avenue de l'Opéra and looked in its shops and down its side streets. "No human being is in sight," Shepherd observed in Confessions of a War Correspondent. "The prairies of Texas were never more silent." In contrast, Will Irwin's first chapter in The Latin at War depicts Paris as unfazed during this period, with its populace as contented and outgoing as ever. Irwin admitted that his sample was skewed, however: "Naturally, I know the American colony in Paris better than the French ..., [and] they are for the most part wealthy or well-to-do, and before the war they were an idle set." The city was still reeling from the terrors of the first weeks of the war. During August, three million German troops had raced across the western front, carried by 550 trains a day rolling through Belgium, to bear down upon the French capital. The German advance was finally halted and turned back a few miles outside Paris in early September, just before Toland's arrival. By late September, the German western flank had been driven north of the Aisne, where both sides eventually dug in. Nevertheless, many Parisians remained convinced that the German threat was not over, and that made them wary and sometimes capable of ugly conduct that winter.
Toland spent his first day at the Cooper-Hewitt Hospital, a small operation near the Bois de Boulogne. Although splendidly equipped, the fifty-bed Cooper-Hewitt was completely empty — not a single patient, despite the savage fighting that had taken place recently along the Marne, literally within earshot of Paris. "The French officials in Paris do not seem to want wounded men brought in here," Toland was told by a Mrs. F, who managed the hospital (Toland does not give her full name). Throughout the city, she said, "There are some six hundred beds now prepared with first-class equipment and staff all ready and waiting for them." The officials, she figured, "are afraid the possibility of a siege is not over, or else they are afraid that the moral effect on the French public will be bad."
Mrs. F told Toland that the only way to get patients into these small private hospitals was to ignore the officials and operate one's own ambulance service, as she had done for her other hospital, the converted Majestic Hotel. The night before Toland's arrival, Mrs. F and her aides had driven a huge omnibus out to the army's holding station at Montereau, some sixty miles outside Paris, and brought back twelve blessés, who had been virtually abandoned there. What she had seen at the Montereau station was almost more than she could bear: hundreds of wounded men piled on filthy straw, all wounds septic "beyond description," no bandages or gauze or anesthetics, no surgeons, and maybe one nurse for every fifty men. Sadly, her "horrible old rattle-trap of an omnibus" had room for only a small fraction of the men requiring emergency attention. Mrs. F's passionate account of this experience so impressed Toland that the former banker instantly blurted out an offer to help the Majestic's operations in any way he could. So much for the indeterminate holiday he had envisioned.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Gentlemen Volunteers"
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Copyright © 2011 The Estate of Arlen J. Hansen.
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