It goes on a high mission. The land over which it flies inherited its spirit of freedom from a race which had practised liberty for a thousand years. And the daughter paid back the debt to the mother. Her successful practice of free institutions caused the civic stature of the citizen in the motherland to grow. It lit the torch of liberty in France. Then, moving abreast, these three lands.of democracy imparted to it impetus so resistless that freedom is sweeping victorious round the globe. Today constitutional government is the rule, not the exception, in the world. Once more these three nations are together leading a great cause and this time as brothers in arms.

Follow the flag!

It goes on a world mission. If the high hope of our President is fulfilled, that flag will have new meaning. Just as the stars and stripes in it symbolized the union of free states in America, so now they may come to symbolize the beginnings of a

union of nations, self-governing, and because they are self-governing, making for good will and for justice.

Follow the flag!

It goes on a stern mission. Follow it, not for revenge, yet in anger-righteous anger against the bloody crew who, with criminal intent, have brought upon the world the greatest sum of human misery it has ever known in all its history. Follow it till that ugly company is put down and the very people themselves whom they so grievously deceived and misled, by coming into liberty, will come to bless that flag and kiss its gleaming folds.

Follow the flag!

Too long it has been absent from that line in France where once again an Attila has been stopped. It has been needed there, God knows! And yet, tho not visible to the eye, it is and has been there from the beginning. It is there in the hearts of those fifty thousand American boys who saw their duty clear and moved up to it. Now at last it may be flung to the breeze in the front line, to be visible by day, and to remain at nightfall, like the blessings of a prayer fulfilled, in the consciousness of men. Follow it and take your stand beside the fifty thousand.

Follow the flag!

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T

HE ship that took them out passed unnoticed. At an Atlantic port, somewhere in America, early in May, 1917, the liner left, utterly without flourish, just one of many slate colored, deep laden, unlabeled merchantmen braving U-boats these days. A long gun jabbed out over her stern.

No American battleflag snapped aloft, to set a thousand harbor tugs whistling in salute as she sailed. Dun, grim, silent and she carried the "first for France."

Aboard was the first unit of the United States Army-uniformed, carrying the American flag, under War Department orders-to go to the front, Base Hospital No. 4, two hundred and fifty-two strong. It was not merely the first of the army's forces off in this

war.

It was the first army unit that ever sailed in the history of the United States for service on the continent of Europe.

If John P. Holland had not carelessly invented the infernal submarine, Base Hospital No. 4 wouldn't have sailed so unostentatiously. There would have been a parade to the pier, godspeed speeches full of "firsts," hullabaloo down the bay, pictures in all the papers, wireless reports all the way over and kudos galore. The submarine has taken the pomp out of war, even in places three thousand miles away from the front.

BY HEBER BLANKENHORN

It was only a regiment of doctors going to a post nowhere near the firing line, with only submarines to face and slight chance of being bombed.

But they were the first to answer the Allies' call for help and some were glad that America's first should be healers, not killers. Others were proud that the first call should find America perfectly prepared.

THE first unit was mobilized and off in seven days. Five more hospital units followed hard at their heels. In all so far Colonel Jefferson R. Kean, Director General of Military Relief, has organized thirty-six base hospitals under the Red Cross to be mobilized with the army under War Department

orders.

Ten thousand surgeons, nurses and attendants, this means, are under way for France. They will not all come back, as any one knows who has studied the casualty lists of the medical arm of the belligerents.

The percentages of casualties, according to the reports from the Allies as cited by Captain A. Lippincott, U. S. Signal Corps, run as follows: medical, infantry, artillery, air. The mortality rate among the doctors in official reports for a long time now has been actually the highest of the war. The normal ratio is 10 doctors to 1000 men. At present there is only one doctor to 1000 men in France.

The British army lost six hundred doctors in the battle of the Somme alone. As long as a year and a half ago the French army service became demoralized, between losses and inefficient organization. In the Russian army, with its peculiar system of "flying columns" of doctors who work right in the trenches, the mortality has been far higher in the medical service than

THE

HE war surgeon's task is not inspiring to the popular mind. No "citations" in it, no headlines. It is gloomy, discouraging, an endless wade in the "backwash of war." Toilers in the hospital get no acclaim in the communiqués, not even a notice unless some attendant is killed, as was H. E. M. Suckley of Rhinebeck, New York, by a German avion dropping bombs eighteen miles back of the trenches.

Without a thrill, without even the intoxicated heat of "going over the top" for a charge, without even a hate, the doctors struggle on at the most disheartening job in the whole business of war.

Blasted men, gangrenous bodies, are about them always. They work in stench and moaning and horrib'e dying. Death is at their elbow day and night. If they succeed they see half their cures return wearily to the trenches, the other half, maimed, go home to drag out a useless existence.

never lets up in the long wards and the nurse is continually at the beck of torture. She has been overtasked as well in many of the hospitals of France. One nurse, one nurse's aid and a three-fingered orderly with an entire hospital of forty beds to care for unassisted, is not an unusual case.

With this before them the American doctors and nurses are going abroad so eagerly that the commander of No. 4 said on arriving in Great Britain that his people were "crazy to go into action."

Their enthusiasm grows out of their

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splendid preparation. Colonel Kean began organizing over a year ago. Base IIospital No. 4 was recruited at Lakeside Hospital Cleveland, Ohio. Its doctors were all officers of the United States Mcdical Reserve Corps, and some had had "war" expericnce with the Guard on the Mexican border, while others had served in relicf emergencies, such as the flood at Dayton and the like. Its dircctor, the noted surgeon, Dr. George W. Crile, had gone to France for a time carly in the war.

This unit accomplished a tour de force in mobilizing in a week. A base hospital is a complicated organization. Its two hundred and fifty members include twenty-five surgcons, sixty-five nurses, one hundred and fifty orderlics, recorders, attendants, cooks, mcchanicians, launderers, electricians, etc., and its equipment for 500 beds when housed under canvas takes twenty-five or thirty tcnts. The first units for France did not need this equipment, as they were ordered to prepared hospitals. Many sorts of experts went-pcdiatrists, dentists, X-ray men, ophthalmologists, bacteriologists.

The Lakeside men did heroic things to tear themselves loose and be first off. Famous surgeons instantly sacrificed practises worth $100,000 a year.

Here is exactly what one young lieutenant did on five successive days: 1, he mobilized; 2, he married; 3, he hurried off to Philadelphia to read a scientific paper, the result of two years' research, before the Society of American Physicians; 4, he rushed back to Ohio to say "good-bye" to home; 5, he started cast again -for the front. Like feats were accomplished by the other units, the Harvard, the Presbyterian-Columbia of New York, the Johns Hopkins, the Chicago,

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the Philadelphia, the St. Louis, all in the first call to the colors.

Their work is cut out for them. After the dressing stations in the trenches have slapped on "first aid" and the field hospitals back of the lines have operated the vital cases, the wounded pass thru the evacuation hospitals to the basc hospitals.

Since hospital ships are being ruthlessly torpedocd these days the base hospitals must be in France and every "drive" from now on will tax them to the uttermost.

No. 4's men intend to do more than the "cut out" work. Major Crile, Major Lower and Major Hoover, the best known among them, would like to see what can be accomplished by quick operative work in the very trenches, dragging their anesthetics and knives into the dark of dugouts and mud of shell holes. Their reasoning is based on the fact that abdominal cases if not operated within four hours after the wound are usually fatal. They want to work out this grim arithmetic-whethcr by following up attacks right with the fighters the percentage of men saved will not be greater than the perccntage of doctors killed. The problem, tho unpleasant, must be scientifically resolved.

They hope to do research work as well, with that $25,000 which Samucl Mather donated at the picr. One of them, who has been working on the origins of jaundice, had in his pockets reports of how France is suffering from a plague of jaundice due to trench rats. Out of war they will try to distill some essence of good for humanity.

No. 4, convoyed at the last by an American destroyer, reached England on May 17. Major Gilchrist, in command, found his force welcomed by a

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ONE OF THE OPERATING TENTS

British general and his staff at a port decorated with American flags in the doctors' honor.

On to London, and humble No. 4 found itself lionized. Buckingham Palace invited its presence for the first reception of the sort that ever took place. Royalty democratically shook the hand of every man and woman and King George addrest them, saying: "We grcet you as the first detachment of the American army to land on our shorcs."

In England No. 4 was face to face with the one thing it fcared. The fear had come upon it an hour before sailing. They know they were trained, they were drilled, they were all preparedbut they had no hand. By the scrcaming cagle, what a fix! They hastily canvassed their administrative pcrsonnel recruited a few days before and discovered that of the one hundred and fifty, scvcnty-six were college boys, enlisted as privates, at fifteen dollars a month, volunteers to do the hardest, mcancst work around a hospital. Some

of them were runaways.

Of the seventy-six, a dozen were found who "could play anything." An officer rushed ashore and purchased half a dozen d: ums and as many fifcs.

On the Voyage over the sharked-up drum corps learned to play "Yankee Doodle" -but not at Buckingham Palace. Even for the frills of war they competent and

were

ready.

In France in the grim business of saving shattered men these 10,000 American doctors and nurses may in the next year work incalculable good for the race and make the name "American" blest among the nations of the earth.

New York City