CHAPTER VI

THE CAMP OF THE PRODIGALS

We are in a natural amphitheater of the forest, near a big base hospital, about seventy miles behind the lines in France.  Always in the stillness of the woods, even at this distance, one can hear the intermittent boom of the big guns at the front, and the air is vibrant on this summer evening.  Beyond the wood lies the old drill ground of Napoleon, which is used today as a field for final training for the reenforcements for the front line.

In this wide open space in the woods at sundown the patients of the hospital in their blue uniforms are gathering for the meeting.  It is a picturesque sight to see about eight hundred of them seated on the grass, while an orchestra composed of their own men is playing before the opening of the meeting.  Who are these men before us?  They are not the wounded who have fallen on the field of honor, but the sick, and, quite frankly, they all have venereal disease.  The war has dragged this moral menace so into the light of day that the times of prudish silence and of fatal ignorance should have passed for all who are truly concerned for the welfare of the soldier and who want to know his actual conditions.  We shall, therefore, in this chapter call a spade a spade.

The eight hundred men gathered here are a small part of some thousands of similar cases in France.  The London Daily Mail of April 25th, 1917, referring to the report of the military authorities to the House of Commons, stated that there had been some two hundred thousand cases of venereal disease in the British Army in France alone.  This does not include England or the men on the other fronts.  The British Army is not worse than others.  Professor Finger, at a meeting of the Medical Society in Vienna early in the war, estimated that over 700,000, or some ten per cent of the Austrian troops, had contracted venereal disease.  More ominous still is the fact that in almost every place yet investigated the majority of the men were confessedly living in immorality amid the temptations of the base camps in France.

As we visit the hospitals in France, we are saddened by the fact that for one of the two venereal diseases no cure has yet been found, that a large proportion of these cases suffer a relapse, and that over seventy per cent will develop complications.  As one Commanding Medical Officer said, “There is enough venereal disease in these military camps now to curse Europe for three generations to come.”

One young major said:  “Every day I am losing my boys.  I’ve lost more men through these forces of immorality than through the enemy’s shot and shell.”  The recent report of the Royal Commission shows the grave menace of the disease to Britain, where twenty per cent of the urban population has been infected.  Flexner’s terrible indictment in his “Prostitution in Europe” proves how particularly dangerous and