ence we had
come and wondered what the folks back home would say to hear of our
fighting in North Russia.

I

U. S. A. MEDICAL UNITS ON THE ARCTIC OCEAN

Someone Blunders About Medicine Stores--Spanish Influenza At Sea And No
Medicine--Improvised Hospitals At Time Of Landing--Getting Results In
Spite Of Red Tape--Raising Stars And Stripes To Hold The Hospital--Aid
Of American Red Cross--Doughboys Dislike British Hospital--Starting
American Receiving Hospital--Blessings On The Medical Men.

At Stoney Castle camp in England, inquiry by the Americans had elicited
statement from the British authorities that each ship would be well
supplied with medicines and hospital equipment for the long voyage into
the frigid Arctic. But it happened that none were put on the boat and
all that the medical officers had to use were three or four boxes of
medical supplies that they had clung to all the way from Camp Custer.

Before half the perilous and tedious voyage was completed, the dreaded
Spanish influenza broke out on three of the ships. On the "Somali,"
which is typical of the three ships, every available bed was full on the
fifth day out at sea. Congestion was so bad that men with a temperature
of only 101 or 102 degrees were not put into the hospital but lay in
their hammocks or on the decks. To make matters worse, on the eighth day
out all the "flu" medicines were exhausted.

It was a frantic medical detachment that paced the decks of those three
ships for two days and nights after the ships arrived in the harbor of
Archangel while preparations were being made for the improvisation of
hospitals.

On the 6th of September they debarked in the rain at Bakaritza. About
thirty men could be accommodated in the old Russian Red Cross Hospital,
such as it was, dirt and all. The remainder were temporarily put into
old barracks. What "flu"-weakened soldier will ever forget those double
decked pine board beds, sans mattress, sans linen, sans pillows? If
lucky, a man had two blankets. He could not take off his clothes. Death
stalked gauntly through and many a man died with his boots on in bed.
The glory of dying in France to lie under a field of poppies had come to
this drear mystery of dying in Russia under a dread disease in a strange
and unlovely place. Nearly a hundred of them died and the wonder is that
more men did not die. What stamina and courage the American soldier
showed, to recover in those first dreadful weeks!

No