"I went straight to one of the chief surgeons of their army. I put the matter to him as plainly as I could. 'You are the best ever,' I said to him, 'but--don't you see?--you are tired out. We want to help you. Can't we? Won't you let us loan you nurses and other American personnel as you need them?'
"Would they? Say, the French fell for that suggestion like ducks, and we sent them thirty or forty girls, just as a beginning. Can you think of what it would mean for one of our Yankee boys wounded in a French hospital and perhaps ready to go on an operating table to lose an arm or a leg and then finding no one who could speak his kind of language? And what it would mean if a nice girl should come along--his own sort of a nice girl--ready to let him spill his own troubles out to her--in his own sort of jargon?"
I felt, myself, what it would mean. I had heard before of what the Red Cross Bureau of Hospital Administration was accomplishing under the technical designation of the Service of Professional Aid to the _Service de Santé_--this last the medical division of the French Army establishments. The first opportunity for this service came when General Pershing told Marshal Foch that the American Army was there to be used as the French high commander in chief saw fit to use it. Whereupon Foch moved quickly and brigaded our men with his between Montdidier and Soissons, which meant, of course, the evacuating of the casualties through the French hospitals. The helpless condition of our American boys who did not speak French--and very few of them did--can therefore easily be imagined. They could not tell their wishes nor be advised as to what was going to be done with them. It was then that Burlingame sensed the situation in its fullness; that, with much diplomacy, he first approached Dr. Vernet Kléber, the commander of the French-American section of the French _Service de Santé_, saying that he realized that its service had been taxed to the uttermost and proffering the use of American Red Cross personnel. And Dr. Kléber accepted.
The thirty or forty nurses did not come at one time. But within twenty-four hours, four of them--two nurses and two nurses' aids, and all of them speaking French--were dispatched to the French hospital at Soissons where the first American patients were being received. The movement of the First and Second Divisions in the Beauvais and Montdidier sectors right after increased very greatly this flow of Yankee doughboys into French hospitals--and the American nurses were thrown into them in far greater numbers. Soon a still more definite plan was adopted, which resulted in American nurses, speaking French, being installed in each and every French military hospital which received American wounded. Under this arrangement our nurses were given French military papers for free travel--at the very outset, one of the many time-saving arrangements in a situation which all too frequently was a race between time and death. Another time-saving scheme provided for the reassignment of nurses used by the French _Service de Santé_ without the necessity of approval in advance by Paris headquarters. This very flexible and sensible plan relieved the situation of much red tape and made for immediate results. And not the least of its advantages was the fact that it actually did much to enhance the _entente cordiale_ of the fighting forces of the two allied nations.