medical personnel of enlisted men to digging latrines for the British
officers' quarters.

Many a man discharged from the British 53rd Stationary Hospital as fit
for duty, was examined by American medical officers and put either into
our own Red Cross Hospital or into the American Convalescent Hospital
for proper treatment and nourishment back to fighting condition. It was
openly charged by the Americans that several Americans in the British
hospital were neglected till they were bedsore and their lives
endangered. Sick and wounded men were required to do orderly work. When
a sturdy American corporal refused to do work or to supervise work of
that nature in the hospital, he was court-martialed by order of the
American colonel commanding the American forces in North Russia. Of
course it must needs be said that there were many fine men among the
British medical officers and enlisted personnel. But what they did to
serve the American doughboys was overborne by the mistreatment of the
others.

Finally no more wounded Americans were sent to the British hospital and
no sick except those sick under G. O. 45. These latter found themselves
cooped up in an old Russian prison, partially cleaned up for a hospital
ward. This was a real chamber of horrors to many an unfortunate soldier
who was buffetted from hospital to Major Young's summary court to
hospital or back to the guardhouse, all the while worrying about the
ineffectiveness of his treatment.

So the American soldiers at last got their own receiving hospital and
their own convalescent hospital. Of course at the fighting fronts they
were nearly always in the hands of their own American medical officers
and enlisted men. The bright story of the Convalescent Hospital appears
in another place. This receiving hospital was a fine old building which
one time had been a meteorological institute, a Russian imperial
educational institution. Its great stone exterior had gathered a
venerable look in its two hundred years. The Americans were to give its
interior a sanitary improvement by way of a set of modern plumbing. But
the thing that pleased the wounded doughboy most was to find himself,
when in dreadful need of the probe or knife, under the familiar and
understanding and sympathetic eyes of Majors Henry or Longley or some
other American officer, to find his wants answered by an enlisted man
who knew the slang of Broadway and Hamtramck and the small town slang of
"back home in Mi