{"id":16254,"date":"2019-04-25T11:00:42","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T15:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/?p=16254"},"modified":"2022-12-07T11:16:49","modified_gmt":"2022-12-07T16:16:49","slug":"a-great-war-postscript-spring-1919","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/2019\/04\/25\/a-great-war-postscript-spring-1919\/","title":{"rendered":"A Great War Postscript: Spring 1919"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Susan L. Speaker ~<\/em><\/p>\n

Everything goes along quietly and monotonously in this area. We crave excitement, and have to do routine inspections in the rain. It\u2019s a humdrum, artificial, unnatural life, particularly this living by force among a crowd of natives that you don\u2019t like.<\/p>\n

\u2014Letter from Stanhope Bayne-Jones to his uncle George Denegre, March 17, 1919. National Library of Medicine, Stanhope Bayne-Jones Papers<\/a>, MSC 155, Box 7, folder 22
\n<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Stanhope<\/a>
Stanhope Bayne-Jones, ca. 1918
National Library of Medicine MS C 155<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Major Stanhope Bayne-Jones<\/a> of the U.S. Army Medical Corps was ready to go home. He had spent more time on duty at the Western Front than most of his fellow Americans; he had arrived with the very first of the American Expeditionary Force<\/a>, Base Hospital #4, in May 1917, and served as a medical officer first with Britain\u2019s Sherwood Foresters regiment, and later with the American forces. He was still on duty the morning of the cease-fire, near St. Mihiel, and was nearly killed just a few minutes before it took effect<\/a>. In the first weeks after the Armistice, he had hoped to be among the first Americans to demobilize. But packing up troops and equipment and shipping them home after a major war can take many months. And the armistice agreement of November 1918 provided for Allied occupation of territory all along the Rhine River, to dispose of leftover military mat\u00e9riel, guard against future attacks from the defeated Germans, and to ensure that reparations payments were made. Thus, about 250,000 American troops (the Third Army) traveled to the U.S. occupation zone, which included the cities of Mainz and Koblenz (then Coblenz). The Chief Surgeon of the Third Army assigned Bayne-Jones and Major Alan Mason Chesney to head the Sanitation Division as Army Sanitary Inspector and Army Epidemiologist, respectively.<\/p>\n

Army sanitary inspectors carried out the important (if unglamorous) preventive health maintenance work of the military. Together with Army engineers and local experts, they checked water supplies for contamination and saw that disinfection measures were followed. They ensured that barracks, billets, and hospitals had sufficient space, heat, and ventilation, that waste disposal was done properly, that food storage and preparation was hygienic. They also kept track of epidemic disease levels among the troops. Many years later, Bayne-Jones summarized these duties in his survey of preventive medicine in the U.S. Army:<\/p>\n

The important sanitary matters that required some degree of centralized operation by the Army [during the occupation] were attempts to reduce venereal diseases by control of houses of prostitution, the supply and control of drinking water, and the enforcement of safeguards against the consumption of vegetables contaminated by the German practice of fertilizing fields with emulsions of human feces sprayed from “honey carts” that had been filled from cesspools.<\/p>\n

The office of the sanitary inspector and epidemiologist maintained from inspections and reports a ledger of cases of communicable diseases and a huge spot-map of the Army area affixed to the walls of a room in the spacious German building in which the Chief Surgeon’s office was located. Here data on the incidence of diseases were compiled and analyzed and a Weekly Health Bulletin was composed for issuance by the Office of the Chief Surgeon. There were brief outbreaks of influenza and typhoid fever among the troops in 1919, and some diphtheria. However, communicable diseases were not excessive in the Army of Occupation.<\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/em>Stanhope Bayne-Jones, Evolution of Preventive Medicine in the United States Army, 1607\u20131939, Washington, DC: USGPO, 1968, pp. 166-167<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bayne-Jones\u2019 letters to his family during the winter and spring of 1919 reveal his increasing homesickness, and his boredom and impatience with his duties. Writing to his sister Marian in January, he tried to make the best of his situation:<\/p>\n

My job here as a sanitary inspector of the army is fairly interesting and entertaining. I have to get out over the whole army area, so I meet all sorts of people and am seeing the country too. I have a Dodge car and have had some beautiful rides up the valley of the Moselle, and down the Rhine, and across the hills between: wonderful scenery.<\/p>\n