AMERICA'S BEST MEDICOS
AT WORK FOR THE A. E. F.
——
Incomes of Specialists in the Overseas Command
Would Total Enough to Pay off the
National Debt.
——

If the incomes of all the well-known American specialists who have come to France to look after the health of the A.E.F. troops were lumped together they would be enough to pay off the national debt of the country and then leave sufficient to satisfy a camp store-keeper.

This is no pipe dream or a simple newspaper yarn, but the plain truth. Some of the medicos from the United States have given up earnings of such big figures they should only be mentioned kneeling. Where they gathered in half a million at home yearly, they are accepting a major's three thousand and service allowance, in order to see that Bill Jones from Kankakee or Sam Smith from Pleasantville has the proper treatment for warts in his stomach or barnacles on his thinking apparatus.

Ward in an A.E.F. Hospital, Showing Some of the First to Pay a Visit to "Blighty."
Ward in an A.E.F. Hospital, Showing Some of the First to Pay a Visit to "Blighty."

In addition to separating themselves from large wads of coin and all the comforts of home, they have brought over the staffs of their various hospitals, who know all their funny ways of operating, from how best to cut a man loose from his appendix to painless extraction of the bankroll. They have also brought along all their collections of patent knives and scissors, the only thing they left behind being the doctors' bills that would take a year's service as a doughboy to meet the first instalment.

A Fear to Forget.

Nearly everyone has an ingrowing objection to going to a hospital, or acknowledging he must take the count for an illness, because of fear as to what treatment he may draw.

Forget it!

The Amexforce hospitals are not built along those lines, nor are the nurses sweet young things of fifty odd summers who hand out tracts with the morning's milk or make kittenish love to a lad who may be tied down to a bed or too weak to run away. And the doctors are not owlish-looking creatures with whiskers that would make a goat die of envy and sick-room manners that would scare a Mental Scientist into catalepsy. They are real human beings who understand the troubles of mankind from nostalgia (professional name for homesickness) down to enlargement of the coco (unprofessional name for the swelled head) and are doing everything in their power to make a little easier the big game we are playing to a showdown with the Kaiser.

It's human nature to hate to go to the doctor. But if the boys would only realize that if they would take their smaller troubles to the "docs" they could easily prevent them from becoming more serious ones, it would save a lot of useless suffering. Of course, that doesn't apply to treatment for the wounded, but the Army Chief Surgeon is trying his darndest to make that as perfect as possible.

A Hospital of 20,000 Beds.

In the first place, adequate hospital facilities have been arranged for. One hospital alone has a capacity for 20,000 beds. At an emergency call, the hospitals can handle twenty per cent. of the whole Amexforce. To begin with the trenches, the Medical Department has introduced a sort of folding litter that can go around corners without having to make a man who's hit get out and walk around the bends. When he gets to the dressing station or collecting hospital, motor ambulances are ready to take him back to the evacuating hospital, where the women nurses take their chances with the men, eight to ten miles behind the line.

Once his case is looked into there, he continues under the charge of that hospital chief until he gets well or is sent home. If he's moved to another hospital his record and register go with him, so that the new hospital knows immediately he was invalided for a piece of shell in his leg, and no flurried or overworked surgeon tries to operate on him for inflammation of the intestines.

From beginning to end, the best specialists in the whole of the Union are at the disposal of any one who's unfortunate enough to get hurt. If it's eyes, ears, throat, abdomen, shell shock, mental derangement, or no matter what, one of the biggest men from home is on the job. They are not correspondence school surgeons, either.

Some of the Experts.

Maybe one of these is from your own home town and you know him by name or reputation: George E. Brewer, New York; George W. Crile, Cleveland; Henry Cushing, Boston, the brain specialist, who knows every cell in the think tank and just how it works and operates; F. A. Washburn, Boston; Samuel Lloyd, New York; C. L. Gibson, New York; R. H. Harte, Philadelphia; F. A. Besley, Chicago; Angus McLean, Detroit; Charles H. Peck, New York; John M. T. Finney, of Johns Hopkins, Baltimore; F. T. Murphy, St. Louis; M. Clinton, Buffalo; R. T. Miller, Pittsburgh; C. R. Clark, Youngstown, O.; E. D. Clark, Indianapolis; B. R. Shurley, Detroit; Joseph E. Flynn, Yale Medical.

If that isn't enough, associated with each of these men are other doctors whose ability is pretty well known all over the States. For instance, Dr. Lloyd, of New York, has with him Dr. McKernon, also of the big town, one of the best ear specialists in the country. If a shell goes off too near you and the eardrum suffers, Dr. McKernon will be on the job to find out if he can't make a new one.

A man who has just come over from Baltimore said the Army had practically cleaned out Johns Hopkins University there, which produces more good doctors to the square inch than France does fleas. So when it comes to sorting out the cases, the men with the bad listeners won't be sent to the throat specialist, nor the chap with a wounded eye made a candidate for the brainstorm man.

The Army's Big Eye Man.

Cases of eye wounds or troubles are handled by a doctor who probably knows more about the eye than any one man in America, Dr. George de Schweinitz, of Philadelphia, who has transplanted his whole sanitarium to France in order that no man of the Amexforce may be deprived of his sight where there is one chance in a million of saving it. With that in view, the chances of coming out of this mess with both eyes are exceptionally good. Statistics from both French and British armies show that of all the wounded they have had, only one man in 1,200 is blinded. If they had had the organization of the American medical force, the chance would probably have been reduced to one man in 2,500.

No one pretends to say that our hospitals make sickness or wounds a pleasure, but be assured of one thing. If anything happens to you, you'll be well looked after in them by the world's leading medical and surgical authorities.

——
A PLEA TO THE CENSOR.
——

"Say," said a short, bow-legged corporal the other day, "I wanta send three pictures home to the folks, but I dunnoo how I can get it across. These censorship rules say all you can send is pictures of yourself without background that might indicate the whereabouts of the studio or other strategic information. These ain't pictures of myself, nothing like it. Wait till I tell you.

"I'm going to entitle this series 'Rapid Transit in France.' I took 'em with a little pocket camera. There's one I took up at the port where we landed—first picture I took in France, it was. It shows one of these two-wheeled carts, with three animals hitched to it. One is a horse, one is a dog, and in the middle there's a great big old cow, and an old French feller in a blue nightshirt sittin' in the road milkin' the cow.

"Then there's another I took over at —— (the town where general headquarters are situated) of the 'bus that goes down to the station to meet trains. You won't believe this unless you've seen it, but that 'bus is hitched up to a horse an' a camel, a regular camel like you see in a circus—come from Morocco, they tell me, and looks as if he had gone as long as it is camels can go without a drink, or chow, either.

"The last one's a prize. I took it in one of those villages up the line. It's a young kid in a soldier's coat down to his knees walking down the main street with a stick in his hand driving a sled, and what do you guess is hitched to the sled? By gosh, a big fat goose, and nothing else. The kid's steerin' the goose with the stick, and the goose's lookin' around with that fool goose look, just like the picture you see of that Crown Prince.

"Say, what do you think those folks with their automobiles and subways and everything would make of that? It sure would open their eyes. Travel's a great thing for a man," said the corporal.

HOW THEY LOOK IN THE TRENCHES.

This New Official Photograph Shows Some of Our Over-seas Troops in their Ringside Costume.
This New Official Photograph Shows Some of Our Over-seas Troops in their Ringside Costume.

——
WHAT SAILOR INGRAM DID.
——

Neither Casablanca nor Horatius at the bridge surpassed in heroism young Osmond Kelly Ingram, who threw overboard the explosives on the American destroyer Cassin in order that the German submarine's torpedo should not detonate them and destroy his ship—and gave his life for his comrades and his country in doing so. Ingram sought danger instead of fleeing it. He might have saved his life without discredit. But he did not think of his life—or if he thought of it, he knew that he was deliberately sacrificing it. And he acted with instant resolution.

To his courage and his quickness is due the fact that Ingram's was the only life lost in the German attack on the Cassin. That result he foresaw and welcomed. He knew how to take death as his portion without an instant's hesitation. He was of the breed of heroes, and his name will be borne forever on the nation's roll of honor.—Boston Transcript.

——
THE ROAD WAS OPEN.
——

France's wonderful highways which saved her in this war are as crooked as a jig saw puzzle, but there are excellent maps which show every road in the country. Up near the fighting front, however, the new military roads are as broad and as good as some of the old highways which have survived since the days of the Romans and more than a map is needed if you want to remain in France.

A few days ago two American newspaper correspondents were travelling from one French city to another, the shortest course, according to the same excellent maps, taking them close back of the French lines. All day there had been a blinding snow, it was deep and loose on the ground, and the car was going as fast as possible for safety.

Temporary wooden signs at cross roads showed the direction of different camps. The road plunged through a forest, occasionally they passed a soldier plodding through the snow, then emerged along the base of a ridge honeycombed with dug-outs and bombproofs on its sheltered side. It was plain that they were close to the front. Soldiers peered from doorways at the car skidding through the swirling snow; then the huts ceased. For a mile the correspondents ran behind a flapping wall of canvas camouflage, with barbwire entanglements on the other side of the road. The map indicated they were on the right road.

Then they came to a barbwire affair like a turnstile lying on its side in the middle of the road, and stopped. They could not see a hundred feet through the fog and snow, but could hear the muffled boom of nearby cannon. The map showed only three kilometers ahead the main highway to the city they were headed for. They did not know that the German trenches were only two kilometers ahead and that the snow was the only reason the Boche had not seen them and favored them with a shot. Two French officers came along and in his best French one of the correspondents asked if they could get through on that road.

"Yes, if you speak German," was the answer with a laugh and in excellent English.

——
THERE'S A REASON.
——

"For Pete's sake, Ed, quit tryin' to pick your teeth with your fork! Mind your manners, man!"

"Aw, go easy, Mike; how'n'ell am I goin' to buy a toothpick, with wood so expensive in France?"

——
SEA SLANG PUZZLES POILU.
——
Trips on an Idiom and His Pride
Takes a Fall.
——

Among the idiomatic terms adopted by United States Marines everywhere, the expression "shove off" is used more frequently than any other. In the sea-soldier lingo, if a Marine goes home on furlough, leaves his camp or garrison or goes anywhere, he "shoves off."

A story comes from France of a Marine who had been acting as orderly for a lieutenant. The officer sent him on an errand, and when he returned the lieutenant was nowhere about. A poilu, who happened to be loitering in the vicinity, was questioned by the Marine:

"Have you seen the lieutenant?"

"Oui, monsieur, oui," replied the poilu, proud of his newly acquired Marine Corps English, "he have—what you call—pushed over."

——
HOW ABOUT THEM?
——

Things that make all the difference in the world:—

A letter from —— (fill in name to suit yourself.)

A real soap-and-hot-water bath.

A real shave.

Dry feet.

American tobacco.

"Good work!" from the skipper.

A home-town paper less than a month old.

"Seconds" on coffee—when it's made right.

Pay-day.

YANKEE AVIATORS
PLAY IN LUCK
——
Dead Engine Sneezes and
Picks Up after a 2,000
Meter Drop.
——
SKY FULL OF CREAM PUFFS.
——
Observer Who Fails to Surround
Something Hot Faints
From the Cold.
——

Those were American boys who dodged Boche air patrols, laughed at anti-aircraft guns and spattered bombs upon Rombach and Ludwigshafen far behind the Boche lines.

One of them used to be a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Joseph Wilson, of Wheeling, W. Va., another is Bud Lehr, of Albion, Neb., who played center on a basketball team that won the State championship. The others are Charles Kinsolving and Charles Kerwood, of Philadelphia, and George Kyle, of Portland, Ore. They are corporals in a French flying squadron situated within an hour's flight of an American infantry training camp.

Seated around the rough mess table in their popotte—a tiny building stuck away on a ledge of rock under a cliff—they told all about the bombing of the railroad stations and ammunition factories at Rombach and Ludwigshafen.

"The old Boche almost got me that time," said Lehr, lifting the oil cloth table cover to knock wood. "The engine of my boat died on me just over Rombach. I pulled everything in sight and kicked every lever I couldn't see. Nothing doing; anti-aircraft shells bursting right on a level with me. We began to drop. I turned around to the observer and pulled a sea-sick grin.

A Sneeze Spelled Joy.

"'It's all off, kid,' he said. 'Looks like we're through.'

"We dropped from 5,000 meters to 3,000. Then the engine sneezed, coughed and took up again. My heart and the boat came up 2,000 meters in one jump. The rest of the formation had gone on, dropped their bombs on Rombach and were beating it for Ludwigshafen. By the time I got back to my right altitude I could see the effects of their bombs. The railroad station was burning like a haystack and smoke was coming from the munitions plant. I circled the town and the observer released the bombs.

"Then I turned nose back towards Verdun and crossed the lines. A couple of miles behind the line the engine ran out of gas, so we came down in a field."

They circled several times on the French side of the lines before crossing in order to reach the necessary altitude. Kyle dropped eight bombs, most of them on the munition plant at Ludwigshafen.

"The sky was full of cream puffs," he said, "but it didn't bother us very much because most of the stuff was breaking above or below us. We took our time, aimed for the objective, and dropped the bombs.

Can't See Bomb's Results.

"You can't hear them explode or see the results unless you're flying quite a distance behind the squadron because we go so fast that by the time the fire gets under way we are miles off. Except for Lehr's machine, we maintained our formation and came out flying in the same position. If there were any Boche patrols out in our neighborhood they knew better than to tackle us.

"When we came down I found my observer unconscious. I thought he had been hit, but he had only fainted from the cold.

"You big rummy," turning to the observer and swiping one of his cigarettes from the open box on the table—"You big rummy, I told you you had better surround something hot before starting—a bowl of oatmeal or coffee.

"Gimmie a light now."

All five are awaiting their transfer to the American flying corps.

——
STARS IN A HERO'S ROLE.
——
Movie Actor Plays Sapper in a
Real Rescue.
——

Among the candidates for officers' commissions at the A. E. F.'s training schools is a former movie star who has served his apprenticeship with the British Army. To see him now, few would recognize him as one of the high steppers under the bright night lights of Broadway as he was a year ago. Seized by a sudden impulse, he enlisted in the British army without waiting for America to get into the war and now in return for faithful service, has been given an opportunity by that government to fight under his own flag. Several other Americans who have also worn the British uniform, and who were sent to the school for the same purpose, tell this story of one of the former screen star's experiences:

In the darkness—locomotives, auto lights in the fighting zone—a heavily loaded truck was struck by a train. The truck was overturned down an embankment, imprisoning the two men on it, killing one almost instantly and seriously injuring the other. Spurred by the latter's groans and appeals for help an officer was directing a squad of men with crowbars and sticks in an effort to lift the truck when the former actor came up. The men were making no progress in budging the heavy wreck while there was a possibility, if they did, that it would crash down on the still living man.

"I think I can get the man out, sir if I may try," the New Yorker said saluting the officer.

"Who are you?" the officer asked surprised at the interruption.

"I'm a Yank, sir," he replied, using the popular designation for Americans in the British army.

"What's your rank?" continued the officer, determined that the man be rescued properly if at all.

"Master engineer, sir," the American answered.

Evidently that was sufficient for the officer, for he at once assented with:

"You may try. Lend him a hand men."

The "Yank" took a shovel and started tunnelling under the truck. As he wormed himself into the little hole, the shovel was abandoned for a bayonet and he pushed the dirt back with his hands to others, who threw it aside. After an hour's work, he had the dead man out. Another hour, and he had burrowed molelike, to the side of the other man, who still was conscious.

"Do you want to take a chance? It'll be torture getting out," he said to the truck driver.

"Anything to get from here to die outside," the man gasped.

A rope was shoved in and the American tied it around the man's legs. Slowly, while he guided the battered body of the now unconscious man, comrades pulled them both back through the narrow tunnel.

"I'll see that you're mentioned in regimental orders for your efforts," said the officer to the exhausted "Yank," and he did.

The truck driver had an arm broken, a shoulder crushed and a fractured skull. He was rushed to a hospital on a chance that his life might be saved after so much effort. The work was not in vain, for a few days ago a letter was received from him, well again at his home in England, saying to the former movie star:

"The latch string of this home in Leicester is always hanging out for you."

"WELL, I'LL BE—!"

THEY'RE ALL HERE.

"Fat Casey!"

"Well, I'll be—!"

After seven years Gabby and Fat Casey came face to face on a snow-covered country hillside in France. Gabby played right tackle on the football team out in Chicago in his sophomore year. Casey, a senior, was center and a bother to the trainer because he would surround two bits' worth of chocolate caramels every day, adding to the dimension that won him his nickname.

Somewhere in France Gabby swung his right mitt and clasped Casey's. They hung on in a kind of reminiscent grip, searching one another's face for changes.

Casey wore a smudge on his upper lip. Gabby's face was still un-hairy, but a little lined by the last few years of bucking the business line for a living. Casey has no cause for wrinkles, having a wealthy Dad. And, anyway, Fat's disposition proofed his map against the corrugations of money problems.

We find them shaking hands again.

Casey is driving a touring car over from Divisional Headquarters to call for the major of the Third Battalion. He stalls on the hill from dirty distributor points and gets out to sand-paper them. That red-headed sentry, gazing skyward through field glasses on "aeroplane watch" against the Boches, can be none other than Gabby, the ex-right tackle.

Gabby is a little puzzled by Fat's moustache, but only for a second.

"Whatever became of Charley Rose," he asks, "and Bill Lyman, and all the rest of them?"

"For the love of Mike—meeting you in this forsaken spot after all this time! Where are you stationed? Can't we stage a reunion? Can't we, Fat?"

Well, Fat is a sergeant-chauffeur, Q.M.C. Gabby is a doughboy in an infantry regiment. They can't get together. They're at the War.

For the next ten minutes a whole battlefield of Boche fliers might have sneaked past the Chicago sentry and bombed the daylights out of Division Headquarters without any hindrance from Gabby.

Charley Rose, says Fat, is an infantry lieutenant. Maury Dunne's in the heavy artillery. Dan McCarthy, the hopeless but untiring "sub" of the 1911 squad, is in France in the Q.M.C.

"Well, doggone!" says Fat, in wonderment at the littleness of the world. "Well, gee whiz!" says Gabby, thinking the same thing.

You'll meet 'em all over here—your old rivals, your staunchest pals. You may find yourself top sergeant over the very kids you stole apples or milk bottles with back in the "good old days." Perhaps you'll be saluting the fellow who cut you out of your girl back in high school when an exchange of class pins with pretty Frances Black meant that you were engaged to her for that semester.

Somewhere in France, they're all here.

---

SO THIS IS FRANCE?

The first shift is coming out from the tables. White-haired plump Madame scurries over to her place at the door to collect the dinner toll. Silver clinks into her country cash register, a cigar box with the lid knocked off.

The second shift edges toward the dining room where Suzanne and Angel and Joan are rushing about, clearing away the traces of the first service.

"How's the chewin'?" asks the Albany rifleman.

"Pretty good, pretty good," says the engineer boy from Los Angeles. "Good place to fill up on tan bread for a change."

Close your eyes and shut out the khaki. The buzzing voices, the scraping hob nails take you back to the Democratic convention of Pottewantamis County last Spring when the delegates came in through a sleet storm and dried their socks around the stove in the Chamber of Commerce. Or you're back in the locker room hearing the coach's final instructions for the county championship tussle with Lincoln High.

The second service is finishing. Four soldiers are rolling the old tin-throated piano into the middle of the floor. One of them used to be a rag-time "song-booster." Oh, baby, how he can torment those keys!

There they go, in a chorus of fifty roof-raising voices:

"Twice as nice as Paradise,
And they called it Dixie Land!"

---

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

The American war zone recently was honored by a visit from several "lady journalists" who came out from Paris to see how "our boys" were faring.

One of these young women had been reared in luxurious surroundings in New York. Since coming to Paris she seldom went about wearing anything but slippers. These were all right because she always rode in a taxi.

A certain American captain, who thinks nothing of using a nice ten-foot snow bank for bathing purposes, was delegated to conduct the young women through the American war zone.

From the start, the horror of the New York society writer knew no bounds.

"What," she exclaimed, "no pillows for our men! And you say, Captain, they have no bathtubs, but have to bathe in the rivers and creeks? And I see, there are no table cloths or napkins? Captain, leave it to me! I'm going to tell the people of America all about the terrible living conditions of our soldiers over here. Something must be done, and something will be done by an aroused public opinion back home!"

The captain indulged an inward chuckle that racked his soul. Then his face became solemn.

"Please don't stir up any scandal in America over this," he entreated the young woman writer. "I'll tell you confidentially that feather beds are on the way from America for every soldier and there are whole boatloads of bathtubs coming, too. But what's sweetest of all in this—promise you'll keep it a secret until it happens?—our government is going to present every soldier in France with a beautiful manicure set!"

"That's more like it," said the lady, much mollified.