11. Soissons

As soon as I reached the hospital at Soissons, I was taken to the admitting office. I sat in this office for two hours, waiting for my turn to be examined. I surely was thankful there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with me. I think a person could go on and die while waiting to see the doctor in one of these offices. When I finally got inside for my interview with the admitting officer, I discovered that he was a captain whose duty it was to question all the patients as to the nature of their illness and then to send them to the proper department. He acted like a sorting clerk in a post office. I had to tell him my whole story before he could make up his mind where I ought to be sent. After half an hour of my talking and his grunting encouragement he finally decided that I should go to the department that handled the g.i. (gastrointestinal) cases. Thereupon he made out three reams of orders, recommendations, specifications, directions, and so on—all of which boiled down to this: “You take him, Joe. I don’t know what else to do with him.”

When I reported to the next officer, I saw that he was a major. That made me feel pretty good. At least they thought I was sick enough to require someone with a little higher rank. Well, I had to tell this joker my story all over again . . . starting from my early childhood and continuing down to that very moment. He nodded and grunted and clicked his tongue and doodled on a scratch pad while I talked. It was very annoying. I couldn’t tell if my story was amusing and interesting him or if he was bored and was making all those approving sounds from force of habit. But when I finished the long tale, he rushed out of his office, telling me to stay right there until he got back. In about twenty minutes he came back with a lieutenant colonel. Now, that scared me. It was fun being sick enough to interest a captain, and there was something comforting in the thought that you were sick enough to warrant the services of a major. But when they came around with a lieutenant colonel, that made me fear that I really was sick. If they had come in with a full colonel, I know I would have passed out completely; they might as well have sent the undertaker instead.

The major sat in with us and told the lieutenant colonel all I had told him about my symptoms and the nature of my illness. I felt rather proud of the major because he had remembered so much of what I had told him. When the major got through, the lieutenant colonel turned to me and said that he wanted me to tell him all I could remember about my case. Yes, he wanted me to start at the very beginning. Now, that was a pretty hard assignment. I had to tell the same story that I had told four times previously, but this time I had to tell it in the presence of some one who had heard it before. I knew that if I made a mistake, added something new, or left out something that I had told before, they would probably think I was making up the whole tale and would put me down as a psycho case. Now, if you think it isn’t hard to tell the same story exactly the same way over and over, just try it sometime. I must have gotten through this performance O.K. At any rate, they didn’t send for the boys with the strait jacket.

The major and the lieutenant colonel went into a huddle and decided that I must be incarcerated. Of course, they used a different word, but it meant the same thing. I was to be committed as a patient in an Army general hospital, and that was just as final and irrevocable as being ‘sentenced to the guardhouse. I was shown to my room (which was shared with seven other officers) and given orders to put on the hospital uniform. My regular uniform was taken away and locked up to make sure I didn’t try to break out. Those hospital uniforms were something that should have been out of this world but weren’t. Fortunately, for the civilian population, the only place they allow things like that is in an Army hospital. They were called pajamas, but that was an insult. Invariably the coat was made of different material from the pants. It was always big enough for several people. I understand that in emergencies they were often waterproofed and used for truck covers. If anybody ever got a pair of pants to fit him, I never heard of it. Fat men always drew small pants, and small men always drew large pants, and never the twain did meet. When I tied the tie cord around my waist, I always had several yards of pants left over. Once I walked clear around the room and never moved a stitch of thread in my pajamas—they were lying on the bed.

It was decided that I should go on the regular diet given to patients with gastric ulcers. The doctors didn’t know what I had, but until they found out they felt that I should take all precautions. So I went on the ulcer diet. And if I had stayed on it long, I would have been off all diets for eternity. This little culinary concoction began with dehydrated eggs and dehydrated milk for breakfast. For lunch I had dehydrated eggs and some kind of cereal they wrestled up in a peasant’s pantry. For supper I had dehydrated eggs and dehydrated potatoes. For three weeks it was the same, day in and day out. By the way, a dehydrated egg looks, tastes, and smells just as you would expect it to if the old hen had laid it just before she ran up the ramp to Noah’s private zoo. It may have been nourishing, but it surely wasn’t any fun to eat such a dish.

After I had been in the hospital for several days, the doctors sent me word that I was to go to the X ray room for some pictures. The morning I went for this examination, I didn’t even get the dehydrated eggs, for which I was thankful. I won’t go into all the gory details of that visit, but there is one little gimmick they used on me down there that you ought to know about. The doctor had me strip to the waist and lie on a table as cold as a slab of ice while he squinted at my private insides through the fluoroscope. It was dark in the room and I couldn’t see what he was doing, but soon after he began the examination, he started pressing against my stomach with some kind of instrument. The more he looked, the harder he pressed, until it seemed that he would go right through me. You have seen these metal nutcrackers that fasten onto the side of a table and have a top that you screw down to crack the nuts. Well, that was what he was using on me, I knew. He was screwing this thing down tighter and tighter on my stomach. I knew that when he got through I would have a waist that looked like grandmother’s when she wore those wasp-waist outfits. I was really chagrined when he got through and I saw that the only instrument he had was a small wooden mallet.

After he had finished this examination, the doctor asked me to wait in the outer office for about ten minutes. He wanted to make some more pictures of me. It turned out that I waited four hours. I didn’t get back to my room until three o’clock that afternoon. By that time I was even willing to eat more dehydrated eggs—and that was all I got.

While I was serving my term in the general hospital in Soissons, orders came in for my outfit at Camp Detroit. As you will remember, we had been scheduled to go on to the Pacific. But while I had still been at Camp Detroit, getting ready to sail, news had come in of the first atomic bomb. Soon after this, rumors had begun to fly that Japan would soon surrender and we would not have to go to the Pacific. As events turned out, this was one rumor that proved to be correct. Japan did soon surrender and our orders were changed. The day I left for the hospital, orders came through directing my outfit to return to the States. Ill always regret that I wasn’t in camp the day that news arrived. I’m sure there was some real celebrating going on. But word soon reached me in the hospital at Soissons and I was pretty happy about the whole thing. I just hoped that I wouldn’t be kept in the hospital until after my outfit left. I had horrible visions of being assigned to some other battalion that had to remain in Europe for occupation duty.

A few days later the ward officer came into my room and said that he had news for me. He had in his hand a clump of X ray pictures and he had on his face a very solemn look.

“It doesn’t look so good for you, Chappy,” he said.

Can you imagine how I felt? It has become a national joke how low the Army’s physical standards were. You have heard all the cracks about how the Army took in men as long as they were still warm, and so on. Then, too, you have heard how men were kept on duty when they had to go on crutches, and how two men sometimes had to be assigned to a third soldier to hold him up while he performed his duty. And you probably have heard those rumors about Patton and his attitude toward disabled soldiers. Well, I knew all that, too. And when this medical officer came in with this long, solemn look on his face and said that things didn’t look so good for me, I looked behind him, fully expecting to see the undertaker come in the door any minute. But I had to be brave.

“O.K., Doc,” I said staunchly as I stretched out on the bed and folded my hands on my chest so they were just the way I wanted them to be when they laid me away, “I can take it. Don’t try to spare me. If my time has come, I’m ready. How long have I got?”

“Not very long, I’m afraid,” he answered. “The X rays show that you have an ulcer. As soon as we can arrange for your travel we will have to send you back to the States.”

Back to the States! And I had thought he was about to say that they would have to send me out in a pine box. I sat bolt upright in bed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. It is a great thrill to learn that your death sentence has been commuted and you are going to be sent back to your family. In my happiness over this news I almost forgot why I was being sent home. After all, I thought to myself, an ulcer is not anything to be going around boasting about. They have the reputation of causing a lot of trouble. So I asked the Doc about this: “Is it very serious?”

“No. Not too bad. If you will take good care of yourself, watch your diet, cut out that moonshine (and me a chaplain— ha!), and otherwise be careful, you can get over it in due time. But we will have to send you home. We can’t treat you properly over here.”

Well, now, that wasn’t so bad. After all, I thought, if I could cure it in a short time with the proper care, why should I worry about a little ulcer? Besides, wasn’t this thing getting me home? That ulcer was my ticket back to the States and my family. The more I thought about it, the prouder I got of that ulcer. When I was in the company of other officers in the hospital, I felt very sorry for them. Poor fellows, I reflected, what they wouldn’t give to have an ulcer that would send them back home! But, no, they were all well—solid as a rock, sound as a silver dollar, and all that stuff—disgustingly healthy. And as a penalty, they had to stay in Europe, while my little ulcer took me home.

It didn’t take long to get climatized to the idea that I was going home, and right away I started scheming ways and means of hastening my departure. I thought that this new attitude was odd, since I had been so anxious to get overseas in the first place. When the time finally had come for me to go, I had gone with the avowed intention of staying several years. But what had happened? I had been overseas only about six weeks before I had started wishing I was home again. When at last it had been determined that I was to go home, I had been over there just three months. By then I had been ’good and ready to come back. I’d done my share of kicking old Uncle Sam in the shins, but when I’d gotten away from the old boy’s fireplace, I really had begun to miss him and his kind of folks.

It occurred to me that if my battalion was to return to the States in just a few weeks, I might as well return with them. I thought that would get me home pretty quick. One day I sprang this brain child on the ward officer. He laughed at me.

“That wouldn’t work at all,” he assured me. “You are a hospital patient, remember? Wherever you go, whatever you do from now until the day when you are discharged from the hospital—you will do it through hospital channels. You will be sent from here to the Hospital Distribution Center, where it will be determined if you are to return to the States by air or by boat. According to that decision, you will be sent either to a port or to the Air Evacuation Hospital in Paris. From either of these places you will be sent to a hospital near your home—or at least not more than three thousand miles away. Everything is all set up. You can’t get out of channels. Besides, you will get home a lot quicker this way. You’ll be sitting pretty in the good old U.S.A. not more than two weeks from today.”

Well, if that didn’t make me feel like a postage stamp!

You’ll be marked and stamped and sent through channels, he said in effect—and woe betide the individualist who tries to lack over the traces!

There wasn’t much I could do about getting back to the battalion, so I went over one day and told them the sad news. I wasn’t too sad. I had to rub it in a little by assuring them I would be down at the docks to meet them when they came into New York. They could ride over in a smelly old cattle boat, but I was going to fly over in the very best of luxury—with a stewardess, coffee, sandwiches, reclining seats, good company, and all that sort of thing. That made the fellows of the 844th envious of me and they all wanted to know how they could get one—the stewardess, not the ulcer. After I had had my fun, I bade them all a fond farewell and cautioned them against eating sour pickles with their ice cream on the way home—it would give them a lovely shade of green.

I may as well tell you now that all that fun was of short duration. I was the one who got left in Europe. I had all the assurances of the authorities in Soissons that I would certainly be in the States within two weeks. Why, they said, some of their patients were home two days after leaving their hospital. And, foolish boy that I was, I believed these purveyors of optimism. As you will see, I was over a month getting home. My battalion sailed for home before I even left Soissons. Some of the boys were at home or at separation centers before I ever left France. And I was the one who had been bumping my gums about meeting them at the dock!

About ten days after the medics had decided to send me home, and one day before I took on the color and odor of a dehydrated egg from having eaten so many of them, I was informed that I was to leave Soissons that very day. Hastily I packed my toothbrush (which had been given to me by the Red Cross) and made arrangements for some other party to take over my lease on the hospital. That afternoon I left by ambulance for the Hospital Distribution Center. I spent one night there while the authorities decided whether I was to return to the States by air or by sea. They decided I was to go by air. So the next morning I was taken down and placed on a hospital train headed for—you guessed it, Paris.