Description of the 1st Field Hospital, Bezu le Guery
by Floyd Gibbons, Correspondant for The Chicago Tribune,
gravely wounded at Belleau Wood
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Floyd Gibbons was an intrepid young newspaperman who, in the days of the Mexican Revolution, in the face of Pancho Villa's decree that any gringos found in Mexico would be killed on sight, not only rode straight into Mexico alone, but accompanied Villa through three major battles and became the first correspondant to bring authoritative news of the revolution out of Mexico. It was this same intrepidity which, in February 1917, helped Gibbons to survive the sinking of the Laconia by German torpedoes two hundred miles off the Irish coast and which, on the 6th of June in the following year, caused him to be present in the first-wave assault on Belleau Wood, immediately at the side of Major John Berry who was leading the attack. Both Berry and Gibbons were hit, but whereas Berry was able to regain his feet and continue into the wood, Gibbons was more severely hurt. The first two bullets tore into his shoulder and arm, but it was the third which nearly finished him. He was on the ground when it hit, and it glanced off a rock, penetrated his left eye from below, and ripped back out through his forehead.
Astonishingly, Gibbons never lost consciousness and was later able to record his experience in detail, as well as to relate the little he was able to see and hear of the battle around him. For three hours he lay in the wheatfield in front of Belleau Wood, pinned down by intense machine gun fire until, under cover of darkness, and assisted by fellow correspondant Lt. Oscar Hartzell, he first crawled for some twenty minutes into a small wood, and then walked and stumbled for about a mile to a small relief dugout where he received his first medical attention. Unfortunately, due to a total absence of water, the corpsman was unable to clean Gibbons' wounds, and he had no choice but to continue on, still helped by Hartzell, for another half mile or so until they came to the edge of another wooded area where they found a number of wounded men lying about with a few corpsmen working among them. There were shells flying overhead, some exploding nearby, but the work continued as though it were quiet. Gibbons lay out flat on the ground and rested until a corpsman came by to look him over. He lifted the dressing from Gibbons' eye and simply put it back again, then cleaned and dressed his other two wounds.
There was a severe scarcity of ambulances, so rather than simply to lie untreated on the ground, Gibbons decided it would be better to keep walking. Lt. Hartzell walked slightly in front of him and to the side, providing a kind of platform for Gibbons' wounded arm with his shoulder. In this manner they continued on, with German shells still occasionally dropping around them, until a small American ambulance, brimming with wounded and steaming and sputtering from its radiator cap, came up slowly behind them, picking its way over the rough and pitch-black road. When apprised of Gibbons' condition, in spite of being already badly overloaded, they managed to squeeze him into the front seat. Ten miles later, after an interminable, jolting, and excruciating ride, the destination was reached: the little church in Bezu le Guery which served as a clearing station. It is at this point in the story that we take up the narrative in Gibbons' own words:
"...The clearing station was located in an old church on the outskirts of a little village. Four times during this war the flow and ebb of battle had passed about this old edifice. Hartzell half carried me off the ambulance seat and into the church. As I felt my feet scrape on the flag-stoned flooring underneath the Gothic entrance arch, I opened my right eye for a painful survey of the interior.
The walls, grey with age, appeared yellow in the light of the candles and lanterns that were used for illumination. Blankets, and bits of canvas and carpet had been tacked over the apertures where once stained glass windows and huge oaken doors had been. These precautions were necessary to prevent the lights from shining outside the building and betraying our location to the hospital-loving eyes of German bombing ‘planes whose motors we could hear even at that minute, humming in the black sky above us.
Our American wounded were lying on stretchers all over the floor. Near the door, where I entered, a number of pews had been pushed to one side and on these our walking wounded were seated. They were smoking cigarettes and talking and passing observations on every fresh case that came through the door. They all seemed to be looking at me.
My appearance must have been sufficient to have shocked them. I was hatless and my hair was matted with blood. The red-stained bandage around my forehead and extending down over my left cheek did not hide the rest of my face, which was unwashed, and consequently red with fresh blood.
On my left side I was completely bare from the shoulder to the waist with the exception of the strips of white-cloth about my arm and shoulder. My chest was splashed with red from the two body wounds. Such was my entrance. I must have looked somewhat grewsome because I happened to catch an involuntary shudder as it passed over the face of one of my observers among the walking wounded and I heard him remark to the man next to him:
‘My God, look what they're bringing in.'
Hartzell placed me on a stretcher on the floor and went for water, which I sorely needed. I heard some one stop beside my stretcher and bend over me, while a kindly voice said:
‘Would you like a cigarette, old man?'
‘Yes,' I replied. He lighted one in his own lips and placed it in my mouth. I wanted to know my benefactor. I asked him for his name and organisation.
‘I am not a soldier,' he said; ‘I am a non-combatant, the same as you. My name is Slater and I'm from the Y.M.C.A..'
That cigarette tasted mighty good. If you who read this are one of those whose contributions to the Y.M.C.A. made that distribution possible, I wish to herewith express to you my gratefulness and the gratefulness of the other men who enjoyed your generosity that night.
In front of what had been the altar in the church, there had been erected a rudely constructed operation table. The table was surrounded with tall candelabrum of brass and gilded wood. These ornate accessories had been removed from the altar for the purpose of providing better light for the surgeons who busied themselves about the table in their long gowns of white ~ stained with red.
I was placed on that table for an examination and I heard a peculiar conversation going on about me. One doctor said, ‘We haven't any more of it.' Then another doctor said, ‘But I thought we had plenty.' The first voice replied, ‘Yes, but we didn't expect so many wounded. We have used up all we had.' Then the second voice said, ‘Well, we certainly need it now. I don't know what we're going to do without it.'
From their further conversation I learned that the subject under discussion was anti-tetanus serum ~ the all-important inoculation that prevents lockjaw and is also an antidote for the germs of gas gangrene. You may be sure I became more than mildly interested in the absence of this valuable boon, but there was nothing I could say that would help the case, so I remained quiet. In several minutes my composure was rewarded. I heard hurried footsteps across the flagstoned flooring and a minute later felt a steel needle penetrating my abdomen. The a cheery voice said:
‘It's all right, now, we've got plenty of it. We've got just piles of it. The Red Cross just shot it out from Paris in limousines.'
After the injection Hartzell informed me that the doctors could do nothing for me at that place and that I was to be moved further to the rear. He said ambulances were scarce but he had found a place for me in a returning ammunition truck. I was carried out of the church and somewhere in the outer darkness was lifted up into the body of the truck and laid down on some straw in the bottom. There were some fifteen or twenty other men lying there beside me...."
A long and severely jolting ride through the night was to be Gibbons' lot until, shortly after dawn, he would arrive at the U.S. Military Base Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris where the surgeon's knife and anathesiologist's mask were awaiting him.
The Gibbons portrait and quotation extracted from "And They Thought We Wouldn't Fight", by Floyd Gibbons, George H. Doran Company, New York, 1918.
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