turned his face toward her a brief instant and then, turning it back,
continued without a halt: “----but me, and I went down. And when the
lieutenant helped me to my feet he said that nobody but a damn fool or
a Marine could sit under a little short tree like that writing letters
while a whole wagonload of grenades exploded, and get away with it. And
he showed me the tree top blowed clear down the valley and sitting up
there like an open umbrella.”
A medical officer came hurrying over to the nurse.
“The orderly said you wanted me. What is it?”
“It’s that chest case. He can’t go. He’s on the list, but there must be
some mistake. Oh, I think it’s terrible to send a man on the road like
that!”
They passed into the deeper gloom of the tent. I followed. Near the
door on a cot sat a doughboy, a shoulder case, garbed as per army
regulation as far as his waist, and from thence upward his fine torso
naked save for strappings and splints which held his arm in an immobile
apparatus.
With his free hand he was pawing wildly among the effects of his kit,
while he exclaimed in loud excited tones, “I can’t find it! I never
got it. If I had it I’d remember it, wouldn’t I? Say, wouldn’t a guy
remember a thing like that? I guess yes! You never gave it to me--see?”
The orderly--later killed when the hospital was bombed by boche
planes--was down on his haunches lacing up the patient’s boots. He
looked up with a grin.
“What’s biting you, buddy? The last thing I gave you was slum, and I
notice you wolfed that down like one o’clock.”
“It’s my shrapnel. The piece the doctor took outa me. He promised
before he put me to sleep on the operating table to pin it onto my
shirt. Say, look in my pocket, will you?”
The orderly obliged. But the shrapnel was not there. Just then the
doctor passed. “Say, captain, did you operate on this guy? He says you
promised to save his shrapnel.”
The doctor squinted uncertainly through the gloom.
“Yes, sir, you did!” affirmed the private with confidence. “And you
promised, sir, to pin the shrapnel onto my shirt.”
“That’s right. I remember now, old man.” A look passed between the
young surgeon and the orderly. Was it a wink that caused the orderly’s
left eyelid to droop so flat upon his cheek?
“Sir, shall I go get his shrapnel? I think I know where it’s at.”
“Good!” said the surgeon, laughter in his voice. “You’ll find it
wrapped in a piece of gauze.”
“Yes, sir.”
The orderly departed. But just outside the tent he paused, dived down
into his pocket, brought up several objects, examined them attentively,
and then hurried back to the rear entrance, where by the light of an
electric torch the nurse was making up her list.
“S-s-t! Gimme a gauze compress, sister!” said a husky voice in her
ear. Absently she pointed to a parcel on the table. The orderly helped
himself. The next moment he was back in the front tent.
“Here you are, buddy! That’ll hold you for a while!” And he deposited
an object twisted up in a bit of gauze in the soldier’s eager palm. It
was a copper bullet the size of a marble.
“Oh, boy!” ejaculated the private in deep ecstatic joy. “She’s a whale!
A regular Big Bertha! No wonder she stopped me. Say, captain,” he
hailed the surgeon who was passing, “can’t I go back to my outfit? I
don’t want to lose that gang. And I feel fine.”
The orderly chuckled as he warped his man’s free arm into the flannel
shirt. “Feel so darned nifty you’d like to go out and chop down a
couple or three trees just for sport--hey?”
Outside, upon the road, the ambulances were loading rapidly and
rumbling off into the gloom. The sergeant, the man of the hour, oversaw
all.
“Gently there!” This to the brancardiers as they lifted a litter with
a recumbent figure swathed in blankets and shot it into the ambulance.
“You have three in there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, beat it! Now how many more are there left?”
From the steps of the château Major M----, in white cap and operating
apron, surveyed the scene. The procession passed briskly.
Ambulances rolled up, loaded and disappeared. Not a light showed.
The men were mere dusky patches of gloom moving through denser gloom.
Overhead the sky was equally dark, fitting the earth close, like the
stopper of a bottle.
“I wonder how it feels,” I said, “to be lying in the little black
interior of those ambulances and rumbling off to God knows where.”
“Sometimes very dramatic things happen in those same little black
interiors,” observed the major grimly.
An orderly approached, saluted the major.
“Sir, there’s a light shining out of one of the upper windows. It makes
quite a projection. One of the drivers marked it far down the road.”
“Go up and tell the nurse to close the shutter,” commanded the major
tersely. “Tell her to go all over the house. We don’t want a bomb
dropped in the midst of this party.”
“Have you ever had any disagreeable experiences with wounded German
prisoners?” I inquired.
“We’ve not had many of their wounded, but one night we got in a
Prussian lieutenant. I put him in a tent with a bunch of Germans,
all in pretty bad shape. He shouted and swore like a trooper for
being subjected to the hideous ignominy of having to breathe the same
polluted air as his men. ’Twas an American atrocity! He said he was
a Prussian officer, and he haughtily demanded to be changed to an
officers’ ward.”
“And what did you do? Assign him to a private room with a special nurse
and send up iced champagne?”
“Something like that! I ordered his cot changed, and I placed him
between two poor German devils who were dying of gas gangrene. They
smelled to heaven! I thought if our own nurses could tend to those
fellows it might do his lord-highmightiness good to lie between ’em for
a while! In contrast to his conduct I had a young American lieutenant
out in one of the tents, Ward B, and it was not until he was evacuated
that I learned he was an officer.
“‘Why, lieutenant,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me? I’d have placed
you in the officers’ ward.’
“‘Oh, that’s all right, sir,’ he laughed. ‘What’s good enough for my
men is good enough for me.’ And that is the difference in a nutshell
between autocracy and democracy.”
One of the medical staff approached hurriedly. “Sir, I’d like to keep
some few of these cases. They’re in bad shape. I hate to start them on
the road. It--it’s against my conscience.”
“All right. Use your own discretion. You heard the orders, though--to
make a clean sweep. It may seem hard, but the men will receive better
attention than we’ll be able to give them once the rush begins. But
keep them if you feel you should.”
With a breath of relief the officer turned away to countermand his
order.
“Sergeant!” called the major.
“Here, sir!” came a steady reliable voice from the dark.
“Put all the wounded that are left into one tent--Ward A. How many have
you?”
“About twenty-five, sir.”
“Good. Tell your men to clean up all the rest of the wards and get them
into condition. And, sergeant----”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are those tent bags--the ones in which we pack the tents?”
“Upstairs in the storeroom, sir.”
“Get them down. Place one outside each tent and instruct your men in
their use. Maybe you’d better assign a patrol on this road to-night.”
“Yes, sir. The officer of the day has already spoken to me about it,
sir.”
“All right, sergeant. Then I guess we’re about ready for whatever may
turn up. You’d better try to snatch some sleep.”
“I think I’d rather stay up, sir, if you don’t mind.”
The sergeant saluted. We went inside. Already the surgeons and the
nurses had sought their respective quarters to summon what sleep they
might before the storm broke. I said good night also, and was conveyed
to my billet in the village, the major promising to have me roused if
anything occurred. By now the sky was clear, a deep soft firmament of
gleaming stars which blinked friendly reassurance to the troubled
earth atom below.
“It’s all right!” they seemed mutely to say. “See, we’re still here!
It’s all right!”
The wind was toward the Germans. Therefore, though already the big
guns had waked to their nightly orchestra, and vivid lightninglike
flashes from their flaming throats played constantly across the low
horizon, yet not a single sound could be heard. All through the night,
when at intervals I rose to watch, that leaping devil’s dance played
noiselessly across the rosy sky. It was uncanny--lightning without
thunder. Where was the sound? In the upper air reaches?
The next morning I woke to discover I had not been called. The drive,
then, had not materialized. At the hospital I found that such was
even the case. There was a smile in the air, and a whisper that the
Americans, the previous night, had dumped twelve thousand gas shells
down upon the Hun just as he was clambering over the top. The push for
the moment was averted. Nevertheless a few wounded were trickling in,
and upstairs in the officers’ ward I found two bedfast lieutenants.
One, by his soft velvety drawl, was a Southerner. Later I learned
his exact habitat was Memphis, Tennessee. The other young officer
apparently had been recounting some knavery of the boche, for with my
hand on the open door I heard the Tennesseean respond fervidly: “Yes,
suh. They’re dirty snakes. You can’t have no commerce with them. Yuh
just got to kill their souls!”
I drew back and listened, for the Tennesseean was beginning a tale.
“Yes, suh,” his cool, placid voice flowed on, “they was murderin’ us in
that woods. They’d got us in a pocket and from nests of machine guns
they was shellin’ us three ways. We’d had no meat for over two days.
It was tough, I’m tellin’ yuh, suh. So that night I took my sergeant
and went foraging in the village. It was deserted and the shells was
falling right lively. Presently I shoved open the door of a barn, and
there was a fine fat hawg rooting away inside.
“‘Sergeant,’ I says, ‘that hawg in there tried to bite me.’
“‘Well, suh,’ says the sergeant, ‘there ain’t no French hawg born that
can bite my lieutenant and get away with it. We-all ain’t going to
stand that from no hawg. No, suh!’ And so that night we had a fine mess
of po’k chops. Yes, suh, those po’k chops certainly tasted grand.”
I slipped inside to have a look at the _raconteur_. He was a tall,
lean, lank, freckled, solemn-looking young gentleman, with a broken
ankle and a quizzical brown eye. Somehow he reminded me of Lincoln.
“Yes, suh,” he was remarking, “this sure is one damn funny man’s wah.”
After I had established myself I demanded what led him to such a
cynical conclusion. But he refused to be drawn, and asked instead the
condition of a patient in the adjoining shock ward. I told him the man
was dead.
“I’m sure sorry to heah that,” he said simply. “That man was in my
outfit and a bettah boy never spit. He got his after I came in. I left
a squad of five in a dugout on the side of a knoll and I told them not
to stir until the shelling let up. Well, this boy says it got pretty
hot and crowded inside and he stepped out a minute to breathe. And
that very minute a shell dropped. He might have saved his life if he’d
bandaged his leg right off; but no, suh, he told me he couldn’t think
of nothing but hauling those poor fellows from that caved-in wreck--and
him with one leg blowed off. That boy deserves a Croix de Guerre. I’m
goin’ to write to his mothah.”
I was called away for a few minutes, and when I returned the lieutenant
was embarked upon another tale:
“Yes, suh, I just couldn’t bear to see that boy’s body lyin’ out in the
blisterin’ sun. By the clothes he was a Marine, and I expect he’d been
hangin’ up against that bob-wire some time. I didn’t care if it was No
Man’s Land. It wasn’t no fit land for an American’s body to be lyin’
out in the sun, and so I started out to fetch it in.
“‘Lemme go, lieutenant!’ one of my outfit says. I’ve got the finest
outfit of boys, miss, you ever laid eyes on.”
“Maybe that’s because they’ve got such a fine lieutenant!” I said slyly.
“No, suh, that isn’t it at all!” he retorted earnestly. “Well, I says
to him: ‘Man, I can’t ask for volunteers for this. It’s too danged
dangerous.’ And that boy, he says to me: ‘Shucks, lieutenant! I’ll die
for yuh any day with pleasure. But for God’s sake, don’t leave me lie
out there like a dawg.’ So I promised, and he went out and fetched the
Marine in. Two hours later that boy was shot straight between the eyes
by a sniper’s bullet. I remembered what he’d said: ‘For God’s sake,
lieutenant, don’t leave my body lie out like that’--and it kind of hurt
my soul. So I sent him back to the rear. And we buried that boy with
honahs. Yes, suh, this sure is one damn funny man’s wah!”
Downstairs the hospital seemed drowned in a drowsy Sabbath calm. Not a
breath stirred. Roses drooped in the hot stillness. High overhead in a
light azure sky Allied planes swam like gnats across a sun-lit stretch
of water. To complete the note of peace two stray hounds dreamed on
the steps or snapped languidly at blue-bottle flies. Who said there
was a world war on hand? And yet, late the night before, still another
warning had come over the wires, and the remaining twenty-five patients
had been hurriedly transported to safer climes.
Down the road thousands of camions were passing, a steady sluggish
stream. The level, poplar-bordered highway was alive with them as
far as the eye could see. Camions filled with French troops; camions
filled with artillery, guns, guns, guns; camions filled with horses,
two to a vehicle. And after that stream of blue casques had flowed by,
with scarcely a minute’s interval, came another stream--United States
khaki, going up on the line. The heavy American lorries thundered by
in a cloud of dust, their wheels tearing the gravel out of the roads.
The men were covered with a coating of dust, thick as if they had come
through a desert sandstorm. Their eye-lashes were powdered gray; their
eyebrows were bleached white; their fresh skins were burned brick red;
and their eyes, unprotected by that abominable visorless overseas cap,
were inflamed with dust and fatigue and lack of sleep. And yet how they
hurrahed, leaning far out to yell as they flashed by! They were going
into hell, and they knew it.
They had no illusions about war. But the sight of those dirty, sweaty,
confident men thrilled us.
At five, in front of the château, the chaplain read the burial
service over the hero who had given his life to save his comrades in
the dugout. Over the pine box lay the folds of the flag, a mantle
of glory. Upon the rude casket some friend had placed a cross of
crimson ramblers, the rich splendor of their hue and their fragrance
symbolizing mutely the beauty of soul of him who lay underneath. Red
roses for those who die in youth for their country! They seemed to
burn in the quiet air. Their fragrance mounted like rare incense. The
chaplain read the immortal words of hope: “I am the resurrection and
the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he
live....” High overhead the faint reassuring drone of Allied planes
mingled with the murmur of the detachment of soldiers, who with bared
heads repeated softly “Our Father who art in Heaven ...” while off
on the side lines stood a group of French children, awed, curious,
respectful, with bunches of field daisies clutched tightly in their
hands, with which, after the _Americains_ had departed, they proposed
to decorate the strange soldier’s grave.
Later, in search of consolation, I wandered back to the Tennesseean’s
ward. I was not disappointed. That liquid drawl flowed on, soft as the
Mississippi at twilight.
“Yes, suh, we called that outfit the Midnight Regiment. I reckon
yuh-all heard of them; they was stationed a while at B----. They was
officered with white folks, and a friend of mine was major. Well, suh,
they put that regiment alongside some French niggers from Upper Africa.
Yuh’d think those two sets would amalgamate, coming from the same
family tree. But no, suh! There was just one perpetual uproar. They was
a-hackin’ and a-choppin’ each up with knives from mawning until night!
Yuh nevah heard such takin’s-on. And the officers couldn’t find what
was the row nohow. So one night the major, he says to his sergeant, a
big negro:
“‘Sergeant,’ says he, ‘I want yuh to go out and make a private
investigation of just what’s the trouble between yuh Americans and
those French niggers, and hand in a confidential report.’
“‘I don’t need to go out and make no ’vestigation, major,’ says that
sergeant. ‘I can report to yuh whut-all’s the trouble right now. Yes,
suh!’
“‘All right, sergeant. What is it?’
“‘Well, suh, it’s like this: Evah since this heah Midnight Regiment
come over to France and been a-takin’ part in this man’s wah, us-all’s
been hearin’ the white folks talkin’ French. All the white folks
gettin’ to talkin’ French. Yes, suh. And now we come up alongside
these strange nigger folks and find them gabblin’ French too! And when
niggers goes to gittin’ stuck up like that and puttin’ on proud white
folks’ airs they’s jest naturally boun’ to be trouble! Yes, suh, that’s
whut it is!’”
The afternoon shaded gently into night; the night’s dark hours slipped
by, silent as bats’ wings; morning came again, calm, sunshiny--and
still no threat of attack. It was ominous, menacing. The hospital staff
rested with taut nerves, like a football team ready at a given signal
to spring into intense action. But the signal was withheld.
Then suddenly one July morning about two o’clock the storm burst. The
atmosphere trembled and shook to the clamor of mighty guns. Even in
Paris, fifty-one miles away, their deep-throated orchestra could be
heard. Pluff! Pluff! Pluff-pluff! Distant, yet clear, unmistakable,
sounded those soft and sinister volleys through the night. Not since
the Battle of the Marne in 1914 had Parisians heard such a violent
bombardment. Some flew to the telephone. Was it a Gotha raid? Was
that the outer antiaircraft barrage? No. It was the long-delayed July
offensive.
THE SPITE ATTACK
The third phase of the great German offensive of 1918 began with the
first light of dawn on July the fifteenth. In Paris, fifty-one miles
behind Château-Thierry, that distant bombardment, violent beyond all
precedent, could be distinctly heard. It could be heard, but the
explosions were not like real explosions. They were like tiny, far-away
echoes, ghosts of explosions--as if baseballs were being hurled with
extreme force against a wall heavily padded with cotton wool. Pluff!
Pluff-pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Distinct, yet muted, they
came, those distant thuds; denatured, so to speak, with all the sound
violence extracted.
Parisians rose from their beds, stepped to the windows and leaned from
their casements to listen. But immediately the nearer night noises
of the city eclipsed those distant ghost roars of battle. The whir
of a belated taxi through the deserted streets, the hollow ring of
footsteps on the pavement, even the blinking of an eyelid--and those
soft sinister booms were completely blotted out. But back in bed once
more, with the windows shutting out the city sounds, the dull pounding
commenced again, steady, persistent as the beat of the blood in the
arteries: Pluff! Pluff-pluff! Pluff!
Thus at Paris, the heart of the world. But up at Château-Thierry,
the seat of alarms, it was a vastly different affair. There was
nothing dim, distant, dissolved, denatured or cotton-woolly about the
cannonading in that sector. It was the storm center of the tornado.
The air was thick with clamor. The heavy guns bellowed incessantly. In
order to hear each other men had to lean close and shout, and then it
was only by the lip movement that they could be understood. It was like
trying to speak during the rushing thunder of an express train. The
Prussian storm troops were attacking formidably, with all their immense
prestige, and the Americans were responding coolly, methodically as the
Concord minutemen, with machine gun and rifle.
It cannot be said that the Prussians were cowards. They had been
ordered to hold their position at any cost; and they fought
ferociously, until they were dropped by the bayonet. In their
machine-gun pits twenty and thirty Hun gunners were found, piled in
heaps, slain by the bayonet, showing they had resisted desperately to
the end; and the path to those same pits could be traced by American
dead. Neither side asked or gave any quarter, and in those first fierce
days of the offensive few prisoners were taken.
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1918, by the Curtis Publishing Company._
_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information. Photo,
by courtesy of the American Red Cross. Reproduced from The Saturday
Evening Post of Philadelphia._
TENT-WARD SHOWING DAMAGE CAUSED BY GERMAN BOMBS. THIS RED
CROSS MILITARY HOSPITAL WAS BOMBED BY GERMAN PLANES DURING THE JULY
OFFENSIVE WHILE THE AMERICANS WERE WINNING AT CHÂTEAU-THIERRY]
Despite the redoubtable blows of the famous iron-disciplined Prussian
Guards and the Bavarian Reserves, shock troops alleged to be
irresistible, despite also the hail of bullets and gas shells and high
explosives right in their faces, the Americans started a counter-drive.
The Germans had initiated this game called “drive,” and now the
Americans, under Foch and Pershing, were ramming that same game down
their throats. And slowly the German line began to recoil. Slowly those
Prussians and Bavarians, fighting like tigers, began to retire. For
the first time since America’s entry into the war she began to land
substantial body blows upon the enemy; for the first time that enemy
began to stagger under the terrible punishing force of those blows,
delivered with the whole weight of a powerful angry nation behind them.
The Germans had started out to stampede the Americans; the Americans
retorted by stampeding the Germans--a little.
And now began two tides: one tide strong, and hourly growing stronger,
sweeping the Hun back, pressing into tighter corners and hotter hells,
victorious; the other tide composed of those who fell--a quiet,
stricken, bloody tide, ebbing slowly toward the rear.
The hospital was waiting to receive them, surgeons and nurses in aprons
and caps. In the kitchen a soldier, told off as cook, stoked the
big kitchen range until it glowed incandescent on top, and the huge
marmites of coffee and cocoa disseminated a fragrant aroma through the
house. Ambulances, a steady stream, began to climb the dark, wooded
hill road. Two lanterns, like bright, glowing eyes, fastened on either
side of the entrance gate, guided them into the grounds. In the rear
of the château, in front of the admission tent, they halted; deposited
their burdens--silent, immobile, blanket-swathed figures, whose white
bandages showed deep crimson stains--retrieved blankets and stretchers;
snatched a hasty gulp of strong black coffee, and rumbled off for
another load. More drew up, unloaded, departed. And still more and more
and more. What a traffic in the dead of night! The traffic sergeant
gave low, terse orders. A hooded lantern gleamed here and there. Over
all was the infernal voice of the cannon, and those swift, stabbing,
crimson flames across the sky.
Inside the admission tent, despite the rush and the constant influx of
fresh stretchers, a clean-cut order prevailed. Men, sorely wounded,
rested on their litters without change for a few minutes, while their
infected clothes were removed and a brief history taken, after which
they were borne off by brancardiers directly to the X-ray and operating
rooms. Thus with all haste and yet with all order a constant sorting
went on, the serious operative cases going forward, the lighter
cases remaining behind. These latter were helped into clean pyjamas,
given hot soup or cocoa--some of them during the fury of the attack
had not tasted food for more than twenty-four hours--their wounds
re-bandaged, and put to bed to await their turn in the long procession
that led to the operating table. And some of these latter, shelled
incessantly, under constant shock and stress, not having closed an eye
for seventy-two hours, took the high dive into deep oblivion with the
coffee cup still in their hands, and slept solidly for a night and a
day on end.