Trench Knives and Mustard Gas: With the 42nd Rainbow Division in France

Chapter 11 Hospital and Home

H O S P I T A L A N D H O M E 107 CHAP TE R ELEVE N Hospital and Home V ittel, a jewel-like resort of the Vosges, was no longer a playground for the continental rich. Its ornate Central Hotel, Nouvel Hotel, and other famous hostelries were now inhabited by gassed and wounded convalescents of the 42nd Division. A few French and British were mixed in with the Americans. Patients clad in bathrobes basked upon the hotel balconies of grilled iron. Doughboys and artillerymen in shoddy, nondescript getups of brown, gray, and rusty blue hobbled on crutches in the peaceful parks, lolled upon the benches of a casino pavilion, and dotted a fairy-book town square of shops and cafés. A former salon at the sumptuous Hôtel de Lorraine, now lined with hospital cots and frequently visited by nurses and women of the Red Cross, was filled with Rainbow officers evacuated from the Baccarat hospital three weeks before. Barney, suffering tortures from his mutilated leg, which hung in a Balkan frame of ropes, pulleys, and heavy weights, occupied an adjoining alcove.1 Division mates from the Ohio infantry, the Indiana field artillery, the Maryland trench mortars , the engineers, and a balloon corps officer with a broken arm were among those present. Riley, Silva, Varn, and Setliffe, of 168th, also had cots near my own, and like me seemed to be out of the woods. Capt. Atkins, of A company, old and haggard from the overdose of phosgene gas, still shambled about between treatments for his heart and lungs. 108 TRENCH KNIVES AND MUSTARD GAS Turns at Barney’s bedside, rambles through the parks, church on Sunday, visits to nearby Contrexéville with the others, made up my days. Between times we lived and relived the gas attacks, now swallowed up in four weeks of history. The whole thing had been a jumble of vivid scenes and lurid impressions. These had been very real when one was cornered with them, but some of the horror had been washed out by rest and absence from the front. I felt that a few miracles had happened, but was too glad for life to indulge in much deep meditation. We had had little thought of gas as all of the talk of the night previous to the attack in Village Negre had been about an expected Boche raid. The raid had developed in unsuccessful assaults upon GC’s 5 and 6, and more blood-spilling affairs in our old sector in front of Badonviller. Six or seven Americans and numbers of Boches had been killed in the fray. No one had had on masks on the ridge above Village Negre or at Miller’s machine-gun post, when the holocaust had struck. The suffocating L company in the low hollow had been trapped so suddenly that they had no chance to sound the klaxon alarms. Anderson, Brooke, and I had mistaken the gray gas clouds on the moonlit road for the usual residue from bursting shells. The excitement of it all probably deadened our senses of smell, while the gory sight which had confronted me in the candlelit shelter had set my brain in a muddled whirl. It never occurred to me that Hassler’s bloody face was without a mask because of a horrible wound in the jaw. Nevertheless , I was into my own mask in a much shorter time than it had seemed. Hassler had been hit outside and Barney had led a group into the thundering moonlight to rescue him. A shell fragment had taken a cross-section of bone and sinew out of Barney’s thigh and both of the wounded men had been dragged into the shelter by the others. Nothing could be done for poor Hassler, while Barney had nearly bled to death before Maj. Branch of the sanitary detachment, working in a blinding, suffocating mask himself, had applied a crude tourniquet. Nineteen victims of L were headed for Baccarat soon after dawn. The effect of phosgene gas was so treacherous and fre- H O S P I T A L A N D H O M E 109 quently unsuspected that Pierce did not take any chance, but had bundled all who showed any signs of distress into waiting ambulances. Hassler had been silent on the stretcher by my side during the ambulance ride, while...