Early in the conflict, after the Germans had been pushed back from their rush on Paris, the French were in a bad way for many of the necessities of a country at war. Among the necessities that France lacked was sufficient hospital accommodation for the sick and wounded of her armies, and for the first year of the war this shortage was partially supplied by voluntary ambulances—the word ambulance in French being employed for a field hospital. Many rich Americans gave valuable service at this time to their sister republic, the American ambulances at Neuilly and Juilly being among the most noted of the war hospitals.

It was not at all difficult to get staffs for these hospitals, for thousands of young Americans with red blood in their veins and the love of romance in their hearts were only awaiting the opportunity to do something useful anywhere between Paris and the firing line. Between the people of the United States and the French there has always been a deep sympathy, possibly engendered up to half a century ago by their common antipathy to England, a sentiment forever removed by mutual sufferings and common interests and ideals in this war. A witty writer one time said that "good Americans, when they die, go to —— Paris"; jokingly showing the love which the people of the southern half of this continent have for the French. But, no matter what the reasons, the greatest republic in the world was early in responding to the call, and so placed her sister republic, France, under deep obligations for assistance of surgeons, nurses, and hospitals long before Mr. Wilson led the United States to join with the other civilized peoples in their fight against barbarism.

The British were very early up and doing in the same manner, and not many months after Kitchener\'s Contemptibles—a name now revered in Britain—had made their heroic retreat from Mons, many well-equipped hospitals manned by Britons were doing excellent work behind the French lines.

It was my good fortune to serve at the beginning of 1915 in one of these, the Chateau de Rimberlieu, just three miles from the point at which the German lines came nearest to Paris, and seven miles north of Compiègne where a little over one hundred years ago Napoleon for the first time met Marie Louise of Austria when she came to replace the unhappy Josephine.

I obtained the position after much searching for an opportunity to be of service. Going across from New York to London I had been refused a position by the British unless I could enlist, which personal reasons prevented at the time. Then, after two days interviewing, taxicabbing, viséing, pleading, and explaining, I obtained a permit to go to France. At Boulogne the authorities of the British Red Cross and St. Johns Ambulance Association told me they were oversupplied with surgeons and I decided to go to Amiens, where I had a surgical friend.

I could not get away till the following morning, so I spent the afternoon wandering about. The streets were filled with a cosmopolitan throng of soldiers of all shades of color—white, black, and brown—and of various nationalities, British and Canadian Tommies in their khaki, French poilus in their blue-gray uniforms, Ghurkas from India in their picturesque dress, and French Soudanese with strange accouterments. The better hotels were all occupied by the military authorities as headquarters, and the harbor was filled with hospital ships and transports. Walking about the streets one had to look sharp to avoid being run down by hurrying Red Cross ambulances or lumbering motor lorries.

I strolled to the beach, where on the sands Tommies were lounging, gazing longingly across at the shores of England, dimly visible in the distance. One of the soldiers turned to me with a smile and said:

"I was just taking a last look at the old \'ome, sir. Of course, I \'opes to see it again sometime if I don\'t \'appen to stop somethink." And it was all said most cheerfully. I added my wishes for his luck to his own.

On the slow train from Boulogne to Amiens we passed many military camps with their white tents in orderly rows. Here and there oxen were being used by old men and women on their farms, and in one little brook some boys were fishing. I could hardly believe that forty miles or less away two armies of millions of men were contending for the mastery, with civilization depending on the outcome. When, later, I was much nearer to the front I was struck again and again by the matter-of-fact manner in which the French peasant accepts his or her military surroundings. He works coolly in fields into which at times enemy shells are dropping, or over which long range guns are firing into some semi-ruined town of Northern France. Something which is always a cause of wonder and admiration to the observer is that, despite the fact that all the young and able Frenchmen are in the trenches, the women, old men and children who remain succeed in cultivating the farmlands of France right up to the lines.

At Amiens my surgeon friend, who had over twelve hundred war operations to his credit in the past six months, much regretted that I could not be used at the moment,—much regretted; but still regretted. I began to feel that the gods of ill luck were camping on my trail. I went on to Paris. Here my letters of introduction were looked at with anxiety and I with suspicion, for in the early months of the war some foreign surgeons were found to be giving information to the enemy. At any rate, though courtesies and promises were showered upon me, I remained a useless guest at my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli until I reached an almost desperate stage, realizing that, though surgeons were urgently needed, I could not be of service.

Sickly visions of returning home after a futile attempt to be of use came to me, when suddenly luck changed. The director of the Ambulance Anglo-Fran?aise in the Chateau de Rimberlieu came to Paris in search of assistance. Being an Englishman, he looked in at the British Red Cross in the Avenue d\'Ièna where they told him of this forlorn Canadian who had been haunting their offices, but of whom they had lost track. By a bit of luck their commanding officer met me that afternoon on the Place de l\'Opéra, and gave me the director\'s address at the Hotel de Crillon. I hurried at once to call upon him, and offered to take any position from chauffeur to surgeon. There is a biblical quotation that the meek are blessed, for they shall inherit the earth. I inherited the surgeoncy—not a lucrative inheritance, it must be admitted, for it carried no salary, no railway fares, no uniform, all of which must be supplied by the inheritor.

After obtaining a sauf conduit from the military authorities to take me as far as Creille, I left on the train that afternoon for Compiègne, sixty miles to the north, accompanied by an affable young Red Cross orderly, of English parents and Paris birth, who in civil life was a drygoods salesman. At Creille, which was the beginning of the war zone, our troubles began. I was in civilian dress, my uniform not yet being completed. The French military officers here were almost adamant. My passport, director\'s letter, Red Cross authority, all proved of no avail to get me further. Rather strangely, the letter which obtained the desired permission to proceed was an ordinary letter of introduction from a prominent French Canadian parliamentarian which I had in my pocket.

Presto! The officer knew his name, and by I went.

We arrived at Compiègne about midnight, and for the first time we heard the sound of the guns ten miles away. As we were now only seven miles from the Chateau, we thought our troubles were over. But we had reckoned without the sous-prefet de police, who said in the morning when we called that we could go no further without a special permit.

"That chap\'s a bit of an awss," remarked my young friend, expressing my sentiments to a nicety.

However, about 10 a.m. the director whirled into town in his 60-horsepower Rolls-Royce, and learning of our troubles, he smilingly said that he thought he could get around that difficulty. He pulled from beneath the rear seat a military overcoat and cap which I put on; and out of the town we whirled, past sentries at crossroads and railway crossings, to whom the director yelled the password—it was "Clairemont" that day. The password changes daily at a certain hour, and anyone without the new word when required is hailed before the authorities. The director ran some slight risk in thus smuggling me through the lines, but nothing ever came of it; and I gave a sigh of relief when we at last swung into the spacious grounds of the chateau.

The house was a large stone building, used in peace times as the summer home for the family of the Count de Bethune, one of the oldest titled families in France. His two daughters, the Countess de Ponge and the Marquise de Chabannes, lived in a small corner of the building, and gave their time to help us in our nursing work. They did everything in their power, and it was much, to make life pleasant for the patients and for the staff.

The building was ideal for a hospital with room for a couple of hundred patients. The reception hall was used as a general reception room for patients, as well as a lounging room for us in our spare time. Its immense, exquisitely carved mahogany mantel was one of the artistic ornaments that had not been removed to avoid injury. The drawing and reception rooms and the dining hall had been transformed into wards, called the Joffre, French, and Castelnau wards, as were also the larger of the bedrooms on the next floor. The surgeons, nurses, and staff occupied the servants\' quarters on the top floor. The oak-paneled library and smoking room had become the operating theater and the X-ray studio. Our dining-room was the original servants\' dining-room in the basement. The French officers and men who were cared for here received, as they deserved to receive, the best we had to give, the staff gladly taking second place in all things. And at that our life was so much easier than that of the boys in the trenches that we often felt a bit ashamed of the difference.

The chateau was surrounded by some two or three hundred acres of well-laid-out gardens, artificial lakes, fountains, and woods. These grounds had been cut up to a certain extent by trenches, wire entanglements, dugouts, funk-holes, and gun emplacements, all in order and ready for use if the enemy should drive the French back in this direction. The fighting trenches were only three or four miles to the north of us, this chateau being said to be the nearest hospital to the lines in the whole theater of war. We worked, slept, ate, and killed time to the sound of the guns and shells, the latter often bursting well within a mile of us.

The really interesting part of the hospital was the personnel of the staff. There were four surgeons, a French military medical officer, Villechaise; Allwood, a Jamaican, an old college friend of mine whom I had neither seen nor heard of for twelve years until the day I arrived at the chateau, when he came forward to give an anesthetic for me to a case which General Berthier had ordered me to operate upon; King, a Scotsman; and myself. And we four were practically the only members of the staff who were not paying for the privilege of being allowed to serve. The rest of the staff were well-to-do society people who not only financed the institution but also did the nursing and orderly work, gave their automobiles as ambulances, and their personal servants and chauffeurs to act as servants in the hospital.

Besides the Comtesse and the Marquise, we had as nurses a niece of an ex-president of France; a grand-niece of Lord Beaconsfield; and another was a sister-in-law to Lord Something-or-other in Scotland. The latter nurse had as a pal Miss C——, who had stumped her father\'s constituency for him during the last general elections in England. She was a clever girl of twenty-three, an exceptionally good nurse, but oh, what a Tory. She had all the assurance of her age, and Mrs. Pankhurst in her palmiest moments could not put Lloyd George "where he belonged" as could this charming girl of twenty-three. The son of a prominent Paris lawyer, a young, black-eyed chap of seventeen who was doing his bit there till he became old enough to join the army, was one of her great admirers; and when he was not scrubbing floors or performing some other necessary work, he sometimes wrote poetry to her. The last four lines of one of his rhymes I remember:

May your years of joy be many,
Your hours of sorrow few;
Here\'s success in all ambitions
To the man who marries you.


A Mr.............