Stretchers

This memoir, published in 1929, provides a first-hand account of the work of an American evacuation hospital on the Western Front in 1918. Whereas the account is centred on the author’s recollections, it also draws on the diaries and correspondence of several of his colleagues. There are also some detailed descriptions of the surgery and antiseptic treatment of wounds.

The author, Frederick A. Pottle (born 3 August 1897), graduated from Colby College in 1917 and joined Evacuation Hospital No. 8 later that year. After the war he studied for a doctorate at Yale University and remained there to pursue a lengthy academic career, serving as Sterling Professor of English from 1944 to 1966. He became the foremost expert on the literary career of James Boswell.

The account starts in Fort Slocum on an island off New York. There Pottle’s unit was assembled. It was a miserable situation:
“As we draw away from that terrible isalnd, each of us knows in his heart that, though the months ahead may hold many bitter and painful experiences, they will contain nothing to match the accumulated and unalleviated horror of Fort Slocum.”
From there the unit transferred to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia where conditions were not much better; two of the company's men dying there in January 1918. Eventually the unit sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey on 10 May on a small Italian liner described as “dirty and insanitary”. The company arrived in Brittany on 24 May and by 6 June were stationed in the Collège de Juilly about 30 km northeast of Paris. There they receive wounded American soldiers from the battle at Belleau Woods:
“Some of them are babbling in delirium, some shouting and cursing as they fight their way out of the ether dream in which they are re-enacting the horror of the trenches, some in their right minds, gaily talking and joking, but the most lie in a half-waking stupor, the inevitable reaction to days of hunger, fatigue, the nervous strain of incessant deadly peril and, finally, the shock of severe wounds, ether and surgical operations.”

After the Armistice, the unit is sent to serve in occupied Germany and the men are billeted in homes in the town of Mayen near Koblenz. This brings conflicting sentiments to mind:
“Shocking! Less than 50 days before the American Army had been engaged in a most earnest and uncompromising effort to kill all the Germans it could; now we sat in their kitchens breaking bread with them, every shade of bitterness past, watching together for the dawn of a New Year. It was inevitable. If you want to make people hate properly, you must keep them out of sight of each other.”