Chapter M: I 8 is the Cable and Telegraph Section of Military Intelligence. A (4)

I am perfectly aware that the medical officers who do me the honor to read this chapter will criticise me for the omissions I have made. And such criticism is justified. I have dismissed such important phases of the work of the Medical Corps as the Division of Surgery with a few paragraphs; to the Dental Corps and the Nurse Corps I have been able to devote but a few lines; the Sanitary Corps, the Ambulance Service, and a score of other branches I have merely mentioned. Of the marvellous work performed by our medical officers in plastic surgery, in bone grafting, in the disinfection of wounds, in orthopedics, in the treatment of the blind, the shell-shocked, and the insane, I have written nothing—the subject is too great, the space at my disposal too limited to even attempt it. The most that I can hope to do in the limits of a single chapter is to give my readers the same fleeting, cursory view of the achievements of the Medical Department that one obtains of a countryside from an airplane.

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If America’s losses in the greatest of wars were relatively slight—and they _were_ slight when compared with the appalling casualties suffered by most of the other warring nations—the reason is not to be found in the superiority of American strategy, in the ability of American commanders, or in the excellence of American weapons, but in the efficiency, self-sacrifice, and devotion of the officers, nurses, and men who wore the caduceus of the Army Medical Department. And I know whereof I speak, for I have not only visited French, British, Belgian, Italian, even German, hospitals all the way from La Panne to Montfalcone, thus affording me standards of comparison, but I spent nearly three months in an American hospital on the Marne, I came home on an American hospital-ship, and for nearly three months more I was under the care of army medical officers in the United States. In dressing-stations, field, camp, base, debarkation, and general hospitals I have watched the Medical Department at its work, and the first-hand knowledge thus gained gives me the right to assert that it was the most efficient service of its kind possessed by any army. To its officers and men, and to the devoted women of the Army Nurse Corps, I lift my hat in gratitude and admiration. The American Army and the American people owe them a debt which they can never fully pay.