I was such an observer.

My errand was primarily humane, to visit the hospitals at or near the
front, and to be able to form an opinion of what supplies were needed,
of conditions generally. Rumour in America had it that the medical and
surgical situation was chaotic. Bands of earnest and well-intentioned
people were working quite in the dark as to the conditions they hoped
to relieve. And over the hospital situation, as over the military,
brooded the impenetrable silence that has been decreed by the Allies
since the beginning of the war. I had met everywhere in America tales
from both the German and the Allies' lines that had astounded me. It
seemed incredible that such conditions could exist in an age of
surgical enlightenment; that, even in an unexpected and unprepared-for
war, modern organisation and efficiency should have utterly failed.

On the steamer crossing the Atlantic, with the ship speeding on her
swift and rather precarious journey windows and ports carefully closed
and darkened, one heard the same hideous stories: of tetanus in
uncounted cases, of fearful infections, of no bandages--worst of all,
of no anæsthetics.

I was a member of the American Red Cross Association, but I knew that
the great work of the American Red Cross was in sending supplies. The
comparatively few nurses they had sent to the western field of war
were not at the front or near it. The British, French, Belgian and
Dutch nursing associations were in charge of the field hospitals, so
far as I could discover.

To see these hospitals, to judge and report conditions, then, was a