SECTION IV

THE PEASANTS

I. THE LOST VILLAGES 211

II. THE HOMELESS 221

III. "MON GAMIN" 226

IV. THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 228

V. THE LITTLE CORPORAL 240

VI. THE GOOD CURÉ 244

VII. THE THREE-YEAR-OLD WITNESS 257

VIII. MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" 261

IX. AN APPEAL TO THE SMALLER AMERICAN COMMUNITIES 274

X. THE EVIDENCE 289

XI. SISTER JULIE 294

XII. SISTER JULIE--Continued 312

ADDENDUM 321

APPENDIX

I. TO THE READER 329

II. TO NEUTRAL CRITICS 333

SECTION I

AMERICANS WHO HELPED

I

THE TWO AMERICAS

There are two Americas to-day: the historic America, which still lives

in many thousands of persons, and the new various America, which has

not completely found itself: a people of mixed blood, divergent ideals,

intent on the work at hand, furious in its pleasures, with the vitality

of a new race in it, sprinting at top speed in a direction it does not

yet know, to a goal it cannot see. It is in the sweep of an immense

experiment, accepting all races, centering on no single strain.

This new joy-riding generation has struck out a fresh philosophy of

life, which holds that many of the old responsibilities can be passed

by, that the great divide has been crossed, on the hither side of

which lay poverty, war, sin, pain, fear: the ancient enemies of the

race. On the further side, which it is believed has at last been

reached, lie, warm in the sun, prosperity and peace, a righteousness of

well-being. It is a philosophy that fits snugly into a new country of

tonic climate and economic opportunity, distant by three thousand miles

from historic quarrels and the pressure of crowded neighborhood. We

believe that, by coming on the scene with a lot of vitality and good

cheer, we can clean up the old bothersome problems and make a fresh

start in the sunshine. Christian Science in a mild genial form is the

national religion of America. We believe that maladies and failures can

be willed out of existence. As for "the fatalities of history," "an

endless war between two mutually exclusive ideals," we classify that

way of thinking with the surplus luggage of autocracies.

Now, there is a wide area in life where this breezy burst of power and

good-will operates effectively. It is salutary for stale vendettas,

racial prejudices, diseases of the nerves, egoistic melancholias. But

there are certain structural disturbances at which it takes a look and

crosses to the other side, preferring to maintain its tip-top spirits

and its complacency. It does not cure a broken arm, and it leaves

Belgium to be hacked through. The New America trusts its melting-pot

automatically to remake mixed breeds over night into citizens of the

Republic. It believes that Ellis Island and the naturalization offices

somehow do something with a laying on of hands which results in a

nation. Meantime, we go on blindly and busily with our markets and

base-ball and million-dollar films.

Troubling this enormous optimism of ours came suddenly the greatest

war of the ages. We were puzzled by it for a little, and then took up

again our work and pleasures, deciding that with the causes and objects

of this war we were not concerned. That was the clear decision of the

new America of many races, many minds. The gifted, graceful voice

of our President spoke for us what already we had determined in the

silence.

But there are those of us that were not satisfied with the answer we

made. The fluent now-famous phrases did not content us. It is for this

remnant in our population that this book is written. From this remnant,

many, numbering thousands, put by their work and pleasures, and came

across the sea, some to nurse, and some to carry swift relief over

dangerous roads; still others to fight behind trenches and over the

earth, no few of them to die. Nearly forty thousand men have enlisted.

Many hundred young college boys are driving Red Cross cars at the

front. There is an American Flying Squadron. Many hundreds of American

men and women are serving in hospitals. Many thousands of hard-working,

simple Americans at home are devoting their spare time and their spare

money to relief.

I give a few illustrations of the American effort. I have not tried to

show the extent of it. I trust some day the work will be catalogued

and the full account published, as belonging to history. For we have

not wholly failed the Allies. I have merely sought in this book to

cheer myself, and, I trust, some friends of "the good old cause, the

great idea, the progress and freedom of the race." I believe that the

historic America has spoken and has acted in this war. In a time when

our country, perplexed by its own problems of mixed blood and warring

ideas, bewildered by its great possessions, busy with its own vast

work of shaking down a continent, has made a great refusal, it is good

to have the spectacle of some thousands of young Americans, embracing

poverty, taking dangers and even death gladly. There is something of

the ancient crusade still stirring in these bones. The race of Wendell

Phillips and Whittier has representatives above ground. There was an

America once that would not have stood by when its old-time companion

in freedom was tasting the bayonet and the flame. Some of that America

has come down to Chapman and Neville Hall, to Seeger, Chapin, Prince,

Bonnell.

Nothing said here is meant to imply that the sum of all American

efforts is comparable to the gift which the men of France and Belgium

and England have made us. I am only saying that a minority in our

population has seen that the Allies are fighting to preserve spiritual

values which made our own past great, and which alone can make our

future worthy.

That minority, inheriting the traditions of our race, bearing old names

that have fought for liberty in other days, has clearly recognized that

no such torture has come in recent centuries as German hands dealt out

in obedience to German orders. In the section on French peasants, I

have told of that suffering.

In another section, I am speaking to the Americans who remain

indifferent to the acts of Germany. They are not convinced by the

records of eye-witnesses. The wreck of Belgium is not sufficient. Will

they, I wonder, be moved, if one rises from the dead. We shall see, for

in this book I give the words of those who have, as it were, risen from

the dead to speak to them. I give the penciled records of dead Germans,

who left little black books to tell these things they did in Flanders

and the pleasant land of France.

There are many persons who are more sincerely worried lest an

injustice of overstatement should be done to Germany than they are

that Germany has committed injustice on Belgium and Northern France.

The burned houses and murdered peasants do not touch them, but any

tinge of resentment, any sign of anger, in criticizing those acts,

moves them to protest. Frankly, we of the historic tradition are

disturbed when we see a wave of excitement pass over the country at

the arrival of a German submarine--dinners of honor, interviews

with the "Viking"-Captain--and, in the same month, a perfect calm of

indifference greeting the report of the French girls of Lille sent away

and of families broken up and scattered. We that are shocked by the

cold system of the German conquerors, and publish the facts of their

methodical cruelty, are rebuked by American editors and social workers

as exercising our heart emotionally at the expense of our head. But

that hysteria which greets a German officer, indirectly helping in the

job of perpetuating the official German system of murder and arson,

is accepted as American vivacity, a sort of base-ball enthusiasm, and

pleasant revelation of sporting spirit.

We believe we are not un-American, in being Pro-Ally. We believe we

are holding true to the ideas which created our country--ideas brought

across from the best of England, and freshened from the soul of France.

We believe that Benjamin Franklin was an American and a statesman when

he wrote:--

"What would you think of a proposition, if I should make it, of a

family compact between England, France and America? America would be

as happy as the Sabine girls if she could be the means of uniting in

perpetual peace her father and her husband."

Cheer the _Deutschland_ in, and U-53,[1] but permit us to go aside

a little way and mourn the dead of the _Lusitania_. All we ask, we

that are held by some of the old loyalties, is that we be not counted

un-American. We ask you to throw our beliefs, too, into the vast new

seething mass. Let us contribute to the great experiment a little of

the old collective experience. Because the marching feet of France

strike a great music in our heart, do not hold us alien. We are only

remembering what Washington knew. He was glad of the feet of those

young men as they came tramping south to Yorktown.

In the immense labors of the naturalization factory, do not pause to

excommunicate us, who find an ancient, unfaded freedom in England.

We are moved as Lincoln was moved when he wrote to the operatives of

Lancashire--Englishmen starving because of our blockade, starving but

not protesting. Lincoln wrote:--

To the Workingmen of Manchester: I have the honor to acknowledge the

receipt of the address and resolutions which you sent me on the eve

of the new year. When I came, on the fourth of March, 1861, through

a free and constitutional election to preside in the Government of

the United States, the country was found at the verge of civil war.

Whatever might have been the cause, or whosesoever the fault, one

duty, paramount to all others, was before me, namely, to maintain and

preserve at once the Constitution and the integrity of the Federal

Republic. A conscientious purpose to perform this duty is the key to

all the measures of administration which have been and to all which

will hereafter be pursued. Under our frame of government and my

official oath, I could not depart from this purpose if I would. It

is not always in the power of governments to enlarge or restrict the

scope of moral results which follow the policies that they may deem it

necessary for the public safety from time to time to adopt.

I have understood well that the duty of self-preservation rests solely

with the American people; but I have at the same time been aware that

favor or disfavor of foreign nations might have a material influence

in enlarging or prolonging the struggle with disloyal men in which

the country is engaged. A fair examination of history has served

to authorize a belief that the past actions and influences of the

United States were generally regarded as having been beneficial toward

mankind. I have, therefore, reckoned upon the forbearance of nations.

Circumstances to some of which you kindly allude induce me expecially

to expect that if justice and good faith should be practiced by the

United States, they would encounter no hostile influence on the

part of Great Britain. It is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge the

demonstration you have given of your desire that a spirit of amity and

peace toward this country may prevail in the councils of your Queen,

who is respected and esteemed in your own country only more than

she is by the kindred nation which has its home on this side of the

Atlantic.

I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men at

Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis.

It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to

overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundations

of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest

exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the

favor of Europe. Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the

working-men of Europe have been subjected to severe trials, for

the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the

circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the

question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not

been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic

and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth, and of the

ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I

do not doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained

by your great nation; and, on the other hand, I have no hesitation in

assuring you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most

reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people. I hail

this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that whatever

else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my

own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations

will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.

We believe that Lincoln would have wished his people to show a like

partizanship to-day in the cause of right. Before we all steer quite

out of the tested channel, let us at least remind you that those

captains knew the course. It is idle to talk of a return to the past.

The statesmanship of Franklin is not the statesmanship of to-day. What

Lincoln felt is out of tune with the new America. We must go on with

the vast new turmoils, the strange unguessed tendencies. We must find a

fresh hope in the altered world. Meanwhile, be neutral, but do not bid

us be neutral. You cannot silence us. We mean that our ideas shall live

and fight and finally prevail.

In one section of this book I deal with what the war is teaching us.

The peoples of Europe are reasserting the rights of nationality. We

must understand this. We need a wholesome sense of our own national

being in the America of to-day. Nationality is the one great idea in

the modern world, the one allegiance left us. It has absorbed the

loyalties and fervor that used to be poured out upon art and religion.

Groups of persons find emotional release in the Woman's Movement, in

Trades Unions, in Socialism. But the one universal expression for the

entire community is in nationalism, the assertion of selfhood as a

people. Religious revivals no longer draw the mind of the mass people.

But the idea of nationality sweeps them. It gives them the sense of

kinship, it answers the desire for something to which to tie. It is

easily possible that this idea will fade as the God of the Churches and

the creative love of beauty faded. The Mazzini and Lincoln type of man

may pass as the poet and the saint, Knights and Samurai, passed. But

not in our time, not in a few hundred years to come. Nationalism may be

only one more of the necessary "useful lies," one more illusion of the

human race. But it will serve out our days. The mistake is in thinking

that the heart of the common people will ever be satisfied with a bare

mechanic civilization. Men are unwilling to live unless they have

something to die for. We have filled the foreground in recent years

with new automatic machines, new subdivisions of repetitive process. We

tried to empty the huge modern world of its old values. Then the people

came and smashed the structure, and found a vast emotional release in

the war. The hope of a sane future is not in suppressing that dynamic

of nationality. We must direct it.

II

THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL

The recital of the young college boy crowding his ambulance between

singing shells and bringing in his wounded down death's alley is

familiar and stirring. And this, for most of us, has been the entire

story. But that is only the first chapter. It is of no value to bring

in a wounded man, unless there is a field hospital to give him swift

and wise treatment, unless there is a well-equipped hospital-train to

run him gently down to Paris, unless there are efficient stretcher

bearers at the railroad station to unload him, and ambulances to

transport him to new quarters. And finally, most important of all,

the base hospital that at last receives him must be furnished with

skilled doctors, surgeons, nurses and orderlies, or all the haste of

transportation has gone for nothing. For it is in the base hospital

that the final and greatest work with the wounded man is wrought out,

which will let him go forth a whole man, with limbs his own and a

face unmarred, or will discharge him a wrecked creature, crippled,

monstrous, because of bungled treatment. It is a chain with no weak

link that must be forged from the hour of the wounding at Verdun to

the day of hospital discharge at Neuilly. And that final success of

the restored soldier is built upon the loyalty of hundreds of obscure

helpers, far back of the lines of glory. That which is fine about it

is the very absence of the large scale romantic. It is humble service

humbly given, with no war-medals in sight, no mention in official

dispatches--only a steady fatiguing drive against bugs and dirt and

germs and red tape.

So I begin my story with the work of the Scotch-American at the

entrance of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine. He is

the man that gives every entering wounded soldier a bath, and he does

it thoroughly in four and a half minutes. He can bathe twelve inside

the hour. He has perfected devices, so that a fractured leg won't be

hurt while the man is being scrubbed. He has worked out foot-rests,

and body-rests and neck-rests in the tub. This man has taken his lowly

job and made it into one of the important departments of the hospital.

And with him begins, too, the long tale of inventive appliances which

are lessening suffering. The hospital is full of them in each branch

of the service. Everywhere you go in relief work of this war, you see

devices--little things that relieve pain, and save time and speed up

recovery. That is one of the things differentiating this war from the

old-time slaughters, where most of the seriously wounded died: the

omnipresence of mechanical, electrical, devices. Inventive skill has

wreaked itself on the sudden awful human need. The hideously clever

bombs, and big guns, all the ingenious instruments of torture, will

shoot themselves away and pass. But the innumerable appliances of

restoration, the machinery of welfare, suddenly called into being out

of the mechanic brain of our time, under pressure of the agonizing

need, will go on with their ministry when Lorraine is again green.

The Ambulance is the cheeriest, the cleanest, the most efficient

place which I have visited since the beginning of the war. There is

no hospital odor anywhere. Fresh air and sunshine are in the wards.

A vagrant from Mars or the moon, who wanted an answer to some of his

questions about the lay-out of things, would find his quest shortened

by spending an afternoon at the American Ambulance.

What does America mean? What is it trying to do? How does it differ

from other sections of the map?

The swift emergency handling of each situation has been American in

its executive efficiency. Things have been done in a hurry, and done

well. In eighteen days this building was taken over from a partially

completed school, with the refuse of construction work heaped high,

and made into an actively-running hospital ready for 175 patients.

That, too, in those early days of war, when workmen had been called to

the colors, when money was unobtainable, transportation tied up, and

Germany pounding down on Paris.

The skillful surgical work, some of it pioneering in fields untouched

by former experience, has been a demonstration of the best American

practice.

The extraordinarily varied types of persons at work under one roof in

a democracy of service presents just the aspect of our community which

is most representative. Millionaires and an impersonator, Harvard,

Dartmouth, Tech, Columbia, Fordham, Michigan, Princeton, Cornell and

Yale men, ranchers, lawyers, and newspaper men--all are hard at work

on terms of exact equality. A colored man came in one day. He said he

wanted to help with the wounded. He was tried out, and proved himself

one of the best helpers in the organization. He received the same

treatment as all other helpers, eating with them, liked by them. Some

weeks later, one of our wealthy "high-life" young Americans volunteered

his services. After the first meal he came wrathfully to the surgeon.

"I've had to eat at the same table with a negro. That must be changed.

What will you do about it?"

"Do about it," answered the surgeon. "You will do one of two things--go

and apologize to a better man than you are, or walk out of this

hospital."

Recently this black helper came to the director in distress of mind.

"Have to leave you," he said. He held out a letter from the motor car

firm, near Paris, where he he had worked before the war. It was a

request for him to return at once. If he did not obey now in this time

of need, it meant there would never be any position for him after the

war as long as he lived.

A day or two later he came again.

"My old woman and I have been talking it over," he said, "and I just

can't leave this work for the wounded. We'll get along some way."

A little more time passed, and then, one day, he stepped up to the

director and said:

"I want you to meet my boss."

The superintendent of the motor car factory had come. He said to the

director:

"I have received the most touching letter from this darkey, saying he

couldn't come back to us because he must help here. Now I want to tell

you that his position is open to him any time that he wants it, during

the war, or after it."

Visitors, after walking through the wards, smelling no odors, hearing

no groans, seeing the faces of the men smiling back at them, are

constantly saying to the director:

"Ah, I see you have no really serious cases here."

It is the only kind of case sent to Neuilly--the gravely wounded man,

the "_grands blessés_," requiring infinite skill to save the limb and

life. So sweet and hopeful is the "feel" of the place that not even

575 beds of men in extremity can poison that atmosphere of successful

practice. Alice's Queen had a certain casual promptness in saying, "Off

with his head," whenever she sighted a subject. And there was some of

the same spirit in the old-time war-surgeon when he was confronted

with a case of multiple fracture. "Amputate. Off with his leg. Off

with his arm." And that, in the majority of cases, was the same as

guillotining the patient, for the man later died from infection. There

was a surgical ward in one of the 1870 Paris hospitals with an unbroken

record of death for every major operation. At the American Ambulance,

out of the first 3,100 operations, there were 81 amputations. The death

rate for the first year was 4.46 per cent.

These gunshot injuries, involving compound and multiple fractures,

are treated by incision, and drainage of the infected wounds and the

removal of foreign bodies. A large element in the success has been

the ingenuity of the staff in creating appliances that give efficient

drainage to the wound and comfort to the patient. The same inventive

skill is at work in the wards that we saw on entering the hospital in

the bathroom of the Scotch-American. These devices, swinging from a

height over the bed, are slats of wood to which are jointed the splints

for holding the leg or arm in a position where the wound will drain

without causing pain to the recumbent man. The appearance of a ward

full of these swinging appliances is a little like that of a gymnasium.

Half the wounded men riding into Paris ask to be taken to the American

Hospital. They know the high chance of recovery they will have there

and the personal consideration they will receive. The Major-General

enjoys the best which the Hospital can offer. So does the sailor boy

from the Fusiliers Marins.

We had spent about an hour in the wards. We had seen the flying man

who had been shot to pieces in the air, but had sailed back to his

own lines, made his report and collapsed. We had talked with the man

whose face had been obliterated, and who was now as he had once been,

except for a little ridge of flesh on his lower left cheek. I had

seen a hundred men brighten as the surgeon "jollied" them. The cases

were beginning to merge for me into one general picture of a patient,

contented peasant in a clean bed with a friend chatting with him, and

the gift of fruit or a bottle of champagne on the little table by his

head. I was beginning to lose the sense of the personal in the immense,

well-conducted institution, with its routine and system. After all,

these men represented the necessary wastage of war, and here was a

business organization to deal with these by-products. I was forgetting

that it was somebody's husband in front of me, and only thinking that

he was a lucky fellow to be in such a well-ordered place.

Then the whole sharp individualizing work of the war came back in a

stab, for we had reached the bed of the American boy who had fought

with the Foreign Legion since September, 1914.

"Your name is Bonnell?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Do you spell it B-o-n-n-e double l?"

"Yes."

"By any chance, do you know a friend of mine, Charles Bonnell?"

"He's my uncle."

And right there in the presence of the boy in blue-striped pajamas, my

mind went back over the years. Twenty-seven years ago, I had come to

New York, and grown to know the tall, quiet man, six feet two he was,

and kind to small boys. He was head of a book-store then and now. For

these twenty-seven years I have known him, one of my best friends, and

here was his nephew.

"Do you think I'm taller than my uncle?" the boy asked, standing up.

He stood erect: you would never have known there was any trouble down

below. But as my eye went up and down the fine slim figure, I saw that

his right leg was off at the knee.

"I can't play base-ball any more," he said.

"No, but you can go to the games," said the director; "that's all the

most of us do.

"I wish I had come here sooner," he went on as he sat back on the bed:

standing was a strain. He meant he might have saved his leg.

We came away.

"Now he wants to go into the flying corps," said the surgeon.

He still had his two arms, and the loss of a leg didn't so much matter

when you fly instead of march.

"Flying is the only old-fashioned thing left," remarked the boy, in

a later talk. "You might as well work in a factory as fight in a

trench--only there's no whistle for time off."

I have almost omitted the nurses from this chapter, because we have

grown so used to loyalty and devotion in women that these qualities

in them do not constitute news. The trained nurses of the Ambulance

Hospital, with half a dozen exceptions, are Americans, with a long

hospital experience at home. During the early months they served with

no remuneration. An allowance of 100 francs a month has now been

established. They reluctantly accepted this, as each was anxious to

continue on the purely voluntary basis. There are also volunteer

auxiliary nurses, who serve as assistants to the trained women. The

entire nursing staff has been efficient and self-sacrificing.

We entered the department where some of the most brilliant surgical

work of the war has been done. It is devoted to those cases where the

face has been damaged. The cabinet is filled with photographs, the wall

is lined with masks, revealing the injury when the wounded man entered,

and then the steps in the restoration of the face to its original

structure and look. There in front of me were the reproductions of

the injury: the chin shot away, the cheeks in shreds, the mouth a

yawning aperture, holes where once was a nose--all the ghastly pranks

of shell-fire tearing away the structure, wiping out the human look.

Masks were there on the wall of man after man who would have gone back

into life a monster, a thing for children to run from, but brought back

inside the human race, restored to the semblance of peasant father,

the face again the recorder of kindly expression. The surgeon and

the dental expert work together on these cases. The success belongs

equally to each of the two men. Between them they make a restoration of

function and of appearance.

In peace days, a city hospital would have only three or four fractures

of the jaw in a year, and they were single fractures. There are

no accidents in ordinary life to produce the hideous results of

shell-fire. So there was no experience to go on. There were no

reference books recording the treatment of wounds to the face caused

by the projectiles of modern warfare. Hideous and unprecedented were

the cases dumped by the hundreds into the American Ambulance. Because

of the pioneer success of this hospital, the number of these cases

has steadily increased. They are classified as "gunshot wounds of the

face, involving the maxillæ, and requiring the intervention of dental

surgery." These are compound fractures of the jaw, nearly always

accompanied by loss of the soft parts of the mouth and chin, sometimes

by the almost complete loss of the face.

I have seen this war at its worst. I have seen the largest hospital

in France filled with the grievously-wounded. I have seen the wounded

out in the fields of Ypres, waiting to be carried in. I have seen the

Maison Blanche thronged with the Army of the Mutilated. I have carried

out the dead from hospital and ambulance, and I have watched them

lie in strange ways where the great shell had struck. But death is a

pleasant gift, and the loss of a limb is light. For death leaves a rich

memory. And a crippled soldier is dearer than he ever was to the little

group that knows him. But to be made into that which is terrifying to

the children that were once glad of him, to bring shrinking to the

woman that loved him--that is the foulest thing done by war to the

soldier. So it was the most gallant of all relief work that I have

seen--this restoration of disfigured soldiers to their own proper

appearance.

And the work of these hundreds of Americans at Neuilly was summed

for me in the person of one dental surgeon, who sat a few feet from

those forty masks and those six hundred photographs, working at a

plaster-cast of a shattered jaw. He was very much American--rangy and

loose-jointed, with a twang and a drawl, wondering why the blazes a

writing person was bothering a man at work. It was his time off, after

six days of patient fitting of part to part, and that for a year. So he

was taking his day off to transform one more soldier from a raw pulp to

a human being. There were no motor car dashes, and no military medals,

for him. Only hard work on suffering men. There he sat at his pioneer

work in a realm unplumbed by the mind of man. It called on deeper

centers of adventure than any jungle-exploration or battle-exploit. It

was science at its proper business of salvation. Those Krupp howitzers

were not to have their own way, after all. Here he was, wiping out

all the foul indignities which German scientists had schemed in their

laboratories.

Two days later, I saw the boys of the American Ambulance unload the

wounded of Verdun from the famous American train. The announcement of

the train's approach was simple enough--these words scribbled in pencil

by the French authorities:

"_12 Musulman_

"_241 Blessés_

"_8 Officiers_

"_1 Malade_

"_Train Américain de Revigny._"

Those twelve "Musulman" are worth pausing with for a moment. They are

Mohammedans of the French colonies, who must be specially fed because

their religion does not permit them to eat of the unholy food of

unbelievers. So a hospital provides a proper menu for them.

Add the figures, and you have 262 soldiers on stretchers to be handled

by the squad of 38 men from the American Ambulance. They marched up

the platform in excellent military formation. The train rolled in,

and they jumped aboard, four to each of the eight large cars, holding

36 men each. In twenty-seven minutes they had cleared the train, and

deposited the stretchers on the platforms. There the wounded pass into

the hands of French orderlies, who carry them to the French doctors

in waiting in the station. As quickly the doctor passed the wounded,

the boys took hold again and loaded the ambulances en route to Paris

hospitals. It was all breathless, perspiring work, but without a slip.

There is never a slip, and that is why they are doing this work. The

American Ambulance has the job of unloading three-fourths of all the

wounded that come into Paris. The boys are strong and sure-handed, and

the War Ministry rests easy in letting them deal with this delicate,

important work. They feel pride in a prompt clean-cut job. But, more

than that, they have a deep inarticulate desire to make things easier

for a man in pain. I saw the boys pick up stretcher after stretcher as

it lay on the platform and hurry it to the doctor. That wasn't their

job at all. Their job was only to unload the train, but they could not

let a wounded man lie waiting for red tape. I watched one long-legged

chap who ran from the job he had just completed to each new place of

need, doing three times as much work as even his strenuous duty called

for.

"Look here," I said to Budd, the young Texan, who is Lieutenant of the

Station squad. I pointed to a man on a stretcher. My eye had only shown

me that the sight was strange and pathetic. But his quicker eye caught

that the man needed help. He ran over to him and struck a match as he

went. The soldier had his face swathed in bandages. Arms and hands

were thick with bandages, so that every gesture he made was bungling.

He had a cigarette in his mouth, just clear of the white linen. But he

couldn't bring a match and the box together in his muffled hands so as

to get a light. He was making queer, unavailing motions, like a baby's.

In another second he was contentedly smoking and telling his story.

A hand grenade which he was throwing had exploded prematurely in his

hands and face.

Work at the front is pretty good fun. There is a lot of camaraderie

with the fighting men: the exchange of a smoke and a talk, and the

sense of being at the center of things. The war zone, whatever its

faults, is the focal point of interest for all the world. It is

something to be in the storm center of history. But this gruelling

unromantic work back in Paris is lacking in all those elements. No one

claps you on the back, and says:

"Big work, old top. We've been reading about you. Glad you got your

medal. It must be hell under fire. But we always knew you had it in

you. Come around to the Alumni Association banquet and give us a talk.

Prexy will be there, and we'll put you down for the other speech of the

evening."

What the people say is this:

"Ah, back in Paris, were you? Not much to do there, I guess. Must have

been slow. Couldn't work it to get the front? Well, we can't all be

heroes. Have you met Dick? He was at Verdun, you know. Big time. Had a

splinter go through his hood. Better come round to our annual feed, and

hear him tell about it. So long. See you again."

But the boys themselves know, and the hurt soldiers know, and the War

Minister of France knows. These very much unadvertised young Americans,

your sons and brothers, reader, often sit up all night waiting for a

delayed train.

These boys of ours, shifting stretchers, wheeling legless men to a

place in the sun, driving ambulances, are the most fortunate youth

in fifty years. They are being infected by a finer air than any that

has blown through our consciousness since John Brown's time. And the

older Americans over here have that Civil War tradition in their blood.

They are gray-haired and some of them white-haired. For, all over our

country, individual Americans are breaking from the tame herd and

taking the old trail, again, the trail of hardships and sacrifice. They

have found something wrong with America, and want to make it right. I

saw it in the man from Philadelphia, a well-to-do lawyer who crossed in

the boat with me. He was gray-haired, the father of three children,

one a boy of twenty-one. He was taking his first real vacation after a

lifetime of concentrated successful work. I saw him lifting stretchers

out of the Verdun train.

Boys and old men with an equal faith. The generation that isn't much

represented over here is that of the in-betweeners, men between

thirty-five and fifty years of age. They grew up in a time when

our national patriotism was sagging, when security and fat profits

looked more inviting than sacrifice for the common good. Our country

will not soon be so low again as in the period that bred these total

abstainers from the public welfare. The men and boys who have worked

here are going to return to our community--several hundred have already

returned--with a profound dissatisfaction with our national life as it

has been conducted in recent years.

I have left the American train standing at the platform all this

time, but it rests there till the afternoon, for it takes three hours

to clean it for its trip back to the front. Only three hours--one

more swift job by our contingent. It is the best ambulance train in

France. The huge luggage vans of the trans-continental expresses were

requisitioned. Two American surgeons and one French Medecin Chef travel

with the wounded men. It carries 240 stretchers and 24 sitting cases

in its eight cars for "_Les blessés_." The five other cars are devoted

to an operating room, a kitchen for bouillon, a dining car, a sleeping

car for the surgeons, and the other details of administration. Safety,

speed and comfort are its slogan. The stretchers rest on firm wooden

supports riding on an iron spring. The entire train is clean, sweet

smelling, and travels easily. J. E. Rochfort, who has charge of it,

went around to the men on stretchers as they lay on the platform.

"You rode easily?" he asked.

"_Très bien: très confortable._"

If an emergency case develops during the long ride, the train stops

while the operation is performed. It is also held up at times by the

necessities of war. For the wounded must be side-tracked for more

important items of military demand--shells, food, fresh troops.

Village and town along its route turn out and throng the station

to see the "_Train Americain_." The exterior of the cars carries a

French flag at one end, and, at the other, the American flag. I like

to think of our flag, painted on the brown panel of every car of the

great train, and brightly scoured each day, riding through France from

Verdun to Paris, from Biarritz to Revigny, and the thousands of simple

people watching its progress, knowing its precious freight of wounded,

saying, "_Le train Americain_," as they sight the painted emblem. It is

where it belongs--side by side with the Tricolor. There isn't a great

question loose on the planet to-day, where the best of us isn't in

accord with the best of France.

That is the biggest thing we are doing over there, carrying a message

of good-will from the Yser to Belfort, up and down and clear across

France, and "every town and every hamlet has heard" not our "trumpet

blast," but the whirr of our rescue motors and the sweetly running

wheels of our express. It is one with the work of the Ambulance

Hospital, where, after the bitter weeks of healing, the young soldier

of France receives his discharge from hospital. Looking on the

photograph and plaster cast of what shell-fire had made of him, and

seeing himself restored to the old manner of man, he has a feeling of

friendliness for the Americans who saved him from the horror that might

have been. The man whose bed lay next walks out on his own two legs

instead of hobbling crippled for the rest of his life, and he remembers

those curious devices of swinging splints, which eased the pain and

saved the leg. He, too, holds a kindly feeling for the nation that has

made him not only a well man, but a whole man. And America has two more

friends in France, in some little village of the province.

This work of the hospital, the train, the motor ambulance, is doing

away with the shock and hurt of our aloofness. These young Americans,

stretcher-bearers and orderlies, surgeons and nurses, drivers and

doctors, are unconscious statesmen. They are building for us a better

foreign policy. It is a long distance for friendly voices of America to

carry across the Atlantic. But these helpers are on the spot, moving

among the common people and creating an international relationship

which not even the severe strain of a dreary aloofness can undo. Our

true foreign policy is being worked out at Neuilly and through the

war-cursed villages. This is our answer to indifference: the gliding

of the immense train through France, carrying men in agony to a sure

relief; the swift, tender handling of those wounded in their progress

from the trench to the ward; the making over of these shattered

soldiers into efficient citizens.

The quarrel none of ours?

The suffering is very much ours.

Too proud to fight?

Not too proud to carry bed-pans and wash mud-caked, blood-marked men.

Not too proud to be shot at in going where they lie.

Neutrality of word and thought?

We are the friends of these champions of all the values we hold dear.

War profits out of their blood?

Many hundreds have given up their life-work, their career, their homes,

to work in lowly ways, with no penny of profit, no hope of glory, "just

because she's France."

III

THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS

This is the story of the American Ambulance Field Service in the words

of the boys themselves who drove the cars. Fresh to their experience,

they jotted down the things that happened to them in this strange new

life of war. These notes, sometimes in pencil, sometimes written with

the pocket fountain pen, they sent to their chief, Piatt Andrew, and

he has placed these unpublished day-by-day records of two hundred men

at my disposal. Anybody would be stupid who tried to rewrite their

reports. I am simply passing along what they say.

One section of the Field Service with twenty cars was thrown out into

Alsace for the campaign on the crest of Hartmannsweilerkopf. Here is

some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Hartmannsweilerkopf is the

last mountain before the Plain of the Rhine, and commands that valley.

The hill crest was taken and retaken. Here, too, is the one sector

of the Western Front where the French are fighting in the enemy's

country. Alsace has been German territory for forty-three years.

The district known as Haute Alsace is a range of mountains, running

roughly north and south; to the east lies German Alsace, to the west

the level country of French Alsace. On the crest of the mountains the

armies of France and Germany have faced each other. The business of the

ambulances has been to bring wounded from those heights to the railway

stations in the plain.

John Melcher, Jr., says of this work:

"The mountain service consists in climbing to the top of a mountain,

some 4,000 feet high, where the wounded are brought to us. Two cars are

always kept in a little village down the mountain on the other side.

This little village is a few kilometers behind the trenches, and is

sometimes bombarded by the Germans. The roads up the mountain are very

steep, particularly on the Alsatian side. They are rough and so narrow

that in places vehicles cannot pass. These roads are full of ruts, and

at some points are corduroy, the wood practically forming steps. On one

side there is always a sheer precipice."

"If you go off the road," writes one of our young drivers, "it is

probably to stay, and all the while a grade that in some parts has to

be rushed in low speed to be surmounted. Add to this the fact that

in the rainy (or usual) weather of the Vosges, the upper half is

in the clouds, and seeing becomes nearly impossible, especially at

night. Before our advent the wounded were transported in wagons or on

mule-backs, two stretchers, one on each side of the mule. Two of us

tried this method of travel and were nearly sick in a few minutes.

Imagine the wounded--five hours for the trip! That so many survived

speaks well for the hardihood of the "Blue Devils." Now with our cars

the trip takes 1-1/2 or 2 hours. We get as close to the trenches as any

cars go. Our wounded are brought to us on trucks like wheelbarrows, or,

at night, on mules, about one-half hour after the wound is received.

This is hard service for both cars and drivers, and it is done in turn

for five days at a time; then we return to St. Maurice to care for the

cars and rest; the ordinary valley service is regarded by us as rest

after the spell on the hills.

"Car 170 (the E. J. de Coppet Car) has been doing well on this

strenuous work. The two back fenders have been removed, one by a rock

in passing an ammunition wagon, and the other by one of the famous

"75's" going down the hill.

"The men appreciate it. Often, back in France, we are trailed as the

'voitures' they have seen at Mittlach, or as the car which brought a

comrade back. They express curiosity as to our exact military status.

The usual thing when we explain that we are volunteers is for them

to say "chic." When they learn that the cars are given by men in the

United States whose sympathy is with them, they nod approval."

Another man writes of the condition of the service:

"At Cheniménil, the headquarters of the automobile service for this

section, we reported to Captain Arboux, and were informed by him of

the terms on which he had decided to accept our services. We were to

draw our food, wine, tobacco, automobile supplies, such as tires, oil,

gasoline, from the Seventh Army, as well as our lodging, and one sou

a day as pay. In short, we were to be treated exactly as the French

Ambulance sections, and to be subject to the same discipline."

Rations consist of a portion of meat, hard bread--baked some weeks

previously--rice, beans, macaroni or potatoes, a lump of grease for

cooking, coffee, sugar and a little wine. For soldiers on duty there

are field kitchens, fire and boilers running on wheels. But billeted

men have their food cooked by some village woman, or a group build wood

fires against a wall. Our men made arrangements to mess at a restaurant.

The work was so continuous that some of the men drove for as long

as fifty hours without sleep, and no one had time for more than an

occasional nap of an hour and a half.

After the battle of Hartmannsweilerkopf the section was decorated as

a whole, and twelve men individually were decorated. Lovering Hill

of Harvard has been in charge of this section. He has received two

citations, two Croix de Guerre, which he doesn't wear, because he knows

that the Western Front is full of good men who have not been decorated.

The boys formed "The Harvard Club of Alsace Reconquise," and had

Harvard Alumni Dinners when the fighting eased up.

"I think that we have saved the wounded many hours of suffering,"

writes Henry M. Suckley of Harvard, 1910. In that quiet statement lies

the spirit of the work done by the American Field Service.

From the head of the Valley of the Fecht, over 10 miles of mountain, 5

up and 5 down, to Krut on the other side--that has been the run.

W. K. H. Emerson, Jr., says:

"Once I went over a bank in an attempt to pass a convoy wagon at

night without a headlight, such light being forbidden over part of

the Mitlach road. I was lucky enough to lean up against a tree before

slipping very far over the bank, and within ten minutes ten soldiers

had lifted the machine, and put it back on the road, ready to start.

Nothing was wrong but the loss of one sidelight, and the car went

better than before. There was great merriment among the men who helped

to put it on the road."

After four months the section had its barracks, at the 4,000-foot

level, blown down by a gale. So they used a new road. Suckley writes of

finding two huge trees across the path.

"I had three wounded men in the car, whom I was hurrying to the

hospital. I walked down two miles to get some men at a camp of

engineers, the road being too narrow to permit turning. There is a new

service to the famous Hartmannsweilerkopf, or, rather, within half a

mile of this most southerly mount contested by the Germans. For three

miles it is cut out of the solid rock, just wide enough for one of our

cars to pass. You can imagine the joys of this drive on a dark night

when you have to extinguish all lights, and when the speed of the car

cannot be reduced for fear of not making the grades. The first aid

post, called Silberloch, is but 200 or 300 yards from the famous crest

which has been the scene of many fierce combats. The bursting of shells

has taken every bit of foliage from the wooded crest, carried pines

to the ground, so that only a few splintered stumps stick up here and

there. At the post no one dares show himself in the open. All life is

subterranean in bomb-proofs covered by five feet of timber. The road is

concealed everywhere by screens, and the sound of a motor may bring a

hail of shells down on your head. The stretcher bearers are so used to

meeting death in its worst forms--by burning oil, by shell fragments,

by suffocating shells--that they have grown to look at it smilingly."

It is a St. Paul's School car that operates there.

"Another time the run was up to an artillery post in the mountains.

The road was extremely steep near the top, and covered with gravel.

It was only by hard effort that a dozen men could push the car up. We

ran to the communicating trench, where they had the man waiting. He

was wounded in the abdomen, and in great pain. We started down over

the terrible road; at every pebble he would groan. When we reached

the worst place of all, where the road had recently been mended with

unbroken stones, his groans began to grow fainter. They ceased, and,

stopping, we found that he was dead. But there had been a chance of

saving his life. A larger car could not have gone up. A wagon or a mule

would have caused his death almost immediately.

"On one of our hills in winter a team of six Red Cross men was kept

on duty waiting for our ambulance to come along. The cars would

go as far as possible up the incline, and before they lost speed

would be practically carried to the crest on the shoulders of the

pushers--mules, with their drivers hanging on the beasts' tails to

make the ascent easier. Strapped on these animals are barbed wire and

hand-grenades, red wine and sections of the army portable houses."

Such is winter in Alsace.

"Luke Doyle had driven his car to the entrance of the Hartmanns

trenches and our last post, when a heavy bombardment forced every one

to make for the bomb-proof. Several men were wounded and he came out to

crank his car and carry them off when he was ordered back to safety. A

few moments later a shell landed close to the 'abri.' It struck a man

and killed him. A flying piece reached Doyle and entered his elbow.

Another of our section, Douglas, arrived, and was knocked flat by a

bursting shell. He rose, put Doyle in his car and drove him up the road

to safety."

Another time, Jack Clark writes:

"Car 161 still lives up to her reputation. Yesterday, in a blizzard,

she was blown off the road between two trees, over three piles of rock,

through a fence and into a ditch. Three men and a horse removed her

from the pasture, and she went on as ever."

Car 163 had 13 cases of tire trouble in two weeks. The whole success

of the adventure depends on the condition of the cars. So through all

the narrative of shell-fire and suffering men recurs the theme of

roads and tires, axle-trouble and hill-grades. The adventure of the car

itself is as real as that of the man. The car becomes a personality to

the man at the wheel, just as the locomotive is to the engineer. It

isn't any old car. It is the little Ford, Number 121, given by Mrs.

Richard Trowbridge of Roxbury, Mass. In that particular car you have

carried 500 wounded men, you have gone into the ditch, stuck in the

mud, and scurried under shell-fire, shrapnel has torn the cover, and

there is the mark of a rifle-bullet on the wheel-spoke. You have slept

at the wheel and in the chassis, after hours of work. You have eaten

luncheons for two months on the front seat. The reader must not get

very far away from the ambulance-car in making his mental picture of

the experience of the boys in North France, and he must not object if

all through this chapter he gets the smell of grease and petrol, and if

the explosions are tires as often as shells. Because that is the way it

is at the front. These boys never take their eyes from the road and the

car. So why should we who read of them?

There is a certain Detroit manufacturer who has a large and legitimate

advertisement coming to him. If he will collect the hundred fervid and

humorous comments written into the records of the field service he will

have a publicity pamphlet which will outlive "A Message to Garcia." For

this job of the jitneys is more than carrying orders; it is bringing

wounded men over impossible routes, where four wheels and a motor were

never supposed to go. Mr. Ford with his ship accomplished nothing, but

Mr. Ford with his cars has done much in getting the boys out of the

trenches. They would have lain there wounded for an hour, two hours, in

the Alsace district for twelve hours longer, if his nimble jitneys had

not chugged up to the boyau and dressing station.

"We expected to be kept rolling all night." To "keep rolling" is their

phrase for driving the car.

"The next sixty hours were not divided into days for us. We ran

steadily, not stopping for meals or sleep except during the brief

pauses in the stream of wounded. Except for one memorable and enormous

breakfast at the end of the first 24 hours, I ate while driving,

steering with one hand, holding bread and cheese in the other. The

first lull I slept an hour and a half, the second night there was no

lull and I drove until I went to sleep several times at the wheel. Then

I took three hours' rest and went on. Gasoline, oil and carbide ran

low; we used all our spare tires. One of our men ran into a ditch with

three seriously wounded soldiers, and upset. Another man broke his rear

axle. During the two and one-half days of the attack, over 250 wounded

were moved by our 15 cars a distance of 40 kilometers."

Ambulance work depends on the supply of gasoline, oil, carbide and

spare parts, solid rations and sleep. Success rests in patching tires,

scraping carbon and changing springs. Any idea of ambulance work is off

the mark that thinks it a succession of San Juan charges. It is hard,

unpicturesque work, with an occasional fifteen minutes of tension.

"A stretcher makes a serviceable bed, and, warmly wrapped in blankets,

one can sleep very comfortably in an ambulance."

"A climb of 800 meters in less than 10 kilometers involves mechanical

stress."

"The unique spring suspension and light body construction make our cars

the most comfortable for the wounded of all the types in service."

A mechanical detail--but it is in these bits of ingenious mechanical

adaptation to human needs that the American contribution has been

made. It isn't half enough in a machine-made war to be dashing and

picturesque. You must fight destructive machinery with still cleverer

engines of relief. The inventive brain must operate as well as the

kind heart and the spirit of fearlessness. It is in the combination

of courage and mechanical versatility that the best of the American

quality has been revealed.

Flashes of the soldier life are given by the boys. Canned beef is

called by the poilu "singe," or monkey meat.

"All that is impossible is explained by a simple 'c'est la guerre.' Why

else blindly scrape one's way past a creaking truck of shells, testing

20 horses, two abreast, steaming in their own cloud of sweaty vapor?

Why else descend slopes with every brake afire, with three human bodies

as cargo, where a broken drive shaft leaves but one instantaneous twist

of the wheel for salvation, a thrust straight into the bank, smashing

the car but saving its load? 'C'est la guerre.'"

"'Chasseurs Alpines': a short, dark-blue jacket, gray trousers, spiral

puttees, and the jaunty soft hat 'bérets.' These are the famous 'blue

devils.'"

"I, who came for four months and have been working eight, can assure

any one who is considering joining the American Ambulance that he will

go home with a feeling of great satisfaction at having been able to

help out a little a nation that appreciates it, and that is bearing the

brunt of the fighting on the Western Front."

"Among the wounded that our cars carried, was the General of the

Division--General Serret"--brought down from the height he had held to

be amputated and to die.

Another section of twenty-four cars started in at Esternay at the time

of the spring freshets, when life was chilly and wet. Eleven received

individually the Croix de Guerre. This section served two divisions

of the second French Army and had a battle front of from seven to ten

miles--the St. Mihiel sector, a region subject to artillery fire. It

has been commanded by Oliver Hazard Perry, a descendant of Commodore

Perry.

They had 1,800 wounded a week, and a mileage of 5,000 kilometers.

"Sudbury broke his arm cranking, this morning."

The service was brisk. Shroder with two wounded was rounding a corner

when a shell hit so close as to jump his car up. One car came in from

service in July with 23 shrapnel holes. On July 8, within 24 hours, the

boys of this section carried 997 wounded.

"During the bombardment the trenches were so smashed by continuous

fire as to cease to be trenches: the men lay in holes in the ground.

They would come down when relieved, dazed and sometimes weeping, yet

they held their ground." Long waits and frantic activity: dullness and

horror alternating. Nine members of the ambulances were in the house

against which a shell exploded. A soldier was killed and one mortally

wounded. The Americans were thrown in a heap on the floor. "Now, the

section occupies a large house just outside the town. There is a large

hole in the garden where a shell alighted soon after this became our

new quarters; but the good fortune of the Ambulance is with it still."

"To Clos Bois. Sharp shrapnel fire. Small branches and leaves showered

down in the wood. It was necessary for two of our men, whose ambulances

stood in the open to expose themselves in putting stretchers in the

cars. Great courage was displayed by McConnell, who was active in this

work even when not required to be so, and who was hit in the back by a

fragment of shell, sustaining, however, no further injury than a bad

bruise. Mention should be made of Martin, who drove away with his car

full of wounded while the firing was still going on, a bullet mark in

his steering-gear, and a spare tire on the roof punctured."

The order of the day, July 22, cited the American section, "Composed of

volunteers, friends of our country."

Here are a half dozen impressions that come to the men in the course of

their work.

"I counted one evening fifteen balls, within a space of a dozen yards

of the doorway where I was sheltering."

"The dark houses, deserted streets, the dim shape of a sentry, the

night scents of the fields"--these are what the evening run reveals.

"On the one hand are the trenches where men live in conditions which

must resemble those of the cave men: dug into the earth, and with

danger of death as a daily habit; on the other, within half an hour's

walk, most of the comforts of civilization. We come down from the work

of carrying hundreds of mangled men, and in the evening sit eating

strawberries and cake in a pretty drawing-room."

"The wounded had a curiously unconcerned appearance, as though having

been hit already they are immune."

"Our young heroes----" Yes, they are all of that, fearless, and swift

to act. But they are practical heroes--good mechanicians, ready to lend

a hand on any lowly job of washing a stretcher or shifting furniture.

I like the rough-neck way of the American Ambulance. There has been a

snobbish attempt made to describe these young workers as belonging to

our "best families," representing the "elite" of America. That is to

miss the point of the work. It is democratic service. Work hard and you

are a popular member of the community. This Lorraine section went to

Verdun, and Robert Toms of Marion, Iowa, wrote me:

"Everybody has the right spirit, and we are all working together. We

are living the real army life--sleeping out of doors and eating in a

barn."

One of the Verdun sections was sent to Bar-le-Duc recently where a

bombardment by fourteen German aeroplanes was under way. Forty persons

were killed and 160 injured. The boys cruised around the streets

during the overhead shelling of forty-five minutes, picking up the

dead and wounded. Almost all the cars were hit by fragments of shell.

This prompt aid under fire endeared the American Ambulance to the

inhabitants of that town. Next day one of the drivers took his coat to

a tailor for repair. The man refused to accept any pay from one who had

helped his city.

A few of us were sitting around quietly one day when a French

sous-officer entered, in a condition of what seems to our inarticulate

Northern stolidity as excitement, but what in reality is merely clear

expression of warm emotion. He said:

"The people of Bar-le-Duc are grateful for what the Americans have

done. Your work was excellent, wonderful. We will not forget it."

This work of the American Ambulance Field Service is the most

brilliant, the most widely known of any we are doing in France. As we

motored through Lorraine, Major Humbert, brother of the Commanding

General of the Third Division, stopped three of us, Americans, and said

he wished to tell us, as spokesman to our country, that the American

Ambulance Service gave great satisfaction to the French Army. "It is

courageous and useful. We thank you."

A Flanders section was sent out, ten cars at first. They served at the

Second Battle of the Yser, when gas was used for the first time by the

enemy. It is a flat country and they ran close to the battle-front.

They were billeted at Elverdinghe till the village crumbled under shell

fire.

The work was in part "cleaning plugs and cylinders, tightening nuts and

bolts, oiling and greasing, washing our little cars just as though they

were a lot of dirty kiddies." The cars receive pet names of Susan, and

Beatrice, and The Contagious Bus. The Contagious Bus, Car 82, driven by

Hayden, carried 187 contagious cases between March 29 and May 12, and

a total of 980 men, covering 2,084 kilometers. In one day 95 men were

transported to the hospitals in that one car.

"At 2.30 in the afternoon a call came from the 'Trois Chemins' poste,

and in answering it Day and Brown had a close call. While on the road

to the poste, at one place in view of the German trenches, they were

caught in a bombardment, seven shells striking within 100 yards of

the machine. Two or three days later, Latimer halted his machine at

the end of the road, and walked down to the poste with the 'Medecin

Auxiliare.' Shrapnel began to break near them and they were forced to

put in the next few minutes in a ditch. They were forced to lie down

five times that morning in this ditch, half full of mud and water. The

red-headed girls still continue to keep open their little store right

near the church on the main street. Downs spent the night on the road

where he had dropped out with a broken transmission. A fire caused by

the heating apparatus broke out in Ned Townsend's car. It flamed out

suddenly, and it was too late to save even his personal belongings."

There are all kinds of interludes in the work. Here is a Christmas

note, "Dec. 25. The section had its Christmas dinner at 5 o'clock.

Kenyon plays the violin very well, and Day and Downs are at home with

the piano. Toasts were drunk all the way from Theodore Roosevelt to

'The Folks at Home.' After dinner impromptu theatricals, Franklin and

White's dance taking the cake."

"Car wanted for Poste de Secours No. 1, 200 yards from trenches, eight

kilometers from our post. The car rocks from shell holes. Watch for the

round black spots."

General Putz, commanding the Détachement d'Armée de Belgique, states:

"In spite of the bombardment of Elverdinghe, of the roads leading to

this village, and of the Ambulance itself, this evacuation has been

effected night and day without interruption. I cannot too highly praise

the courage and devotion shown by the personnel of the section."

One of the men writes: "From 3 a.m. April 22 until 7.30 p.m. April 26,

five cars on duty. In those four days each man got seven hours' sleep,

sitting at the wheel, or an hour on a hospital bed."

Of one sudden shell-flurry: "We stayed still for fifteen minutes, I

smoking furiously, and the English nurse singing. Little 'Khaki,' the

squad's pet dog, lay shaking."

Five days of continuous heavy work exhausted them, and half of the

corps was sent to Dunkirk "en repos." On the day of their arrival

shells came in from a distance of twenty-one miles, twenty shells at

intervals of half an hour. They took a minute and a half to arrive. The

French outposts at the German lines telephoned that one was on its way,

and the sirens of Dunkirk, twenty-one miles away, blew a warning. This

gave the inhabitants a minute in which to dive into their cellars. The

American Ambulances were the only cars left in the town. On the sound

of the siren the boys headed for the Grand Place, and, as soon as they

saw the cloud of dust, they drove into it.

As one of them describes it:

"We spent the next two hours cruising slowly about the streets, waiting

for the next shells to come, and then going to see if any one had

been hit. I had three dead men and ten terribly wounded--soldiers,

civilians, women. The next day I was glad to be off for the quiet

front where things happen in the open, and women and children are not

murdered."

"Seven shells fell within a radius of 200 yards of the cars, with

pieces of brick and hot splinters."

A French official said of the Dunkirk bombardment:

"I was at most of the scenes, but always found one of your ambulances

before me."

A Moroccan lay grievously wounded in a Dunkirk hospital. One of our

boys sat down beside the cot.

"Touchez le main," said the wounded man, feebly. He was lonely.

The boys stayed with him for a time. The man was too far spent to talk,

but every little while he said:

"Touchez le main."

Through the darkness of his pain, he knew that he had a companion

there. The young foreigner at his side was a friend, and cared that he

suffered. It is difficult to put in public print what one comes to know

about these young men of ours, for they are giving something besides

efficient driving. I have seen men like Bob Toms at work, and I know

that every jolt of the road hurts them because it hurts their wounded

soldier.

A young millionaire who has been driving up in the Alsace district,

remarked the other day:

"I never used to do anything, but I won't be able to live like that

after the war. The pleasantest thing that is going to happen to me

when this thing is over will be to go to the telephone in New York and

call up François.

"'That you, François? Come and let's have dinner together and talk over

the big fight.'

"François is a Chasseur Alpin. I've been seeing him up on the mountain.

François is the second cook at the Knickerbocker Hotel, and the finest

gentleman I ever knew."

[Illustration: The section that was "shot up" at Verdun--American

Ambulance Field Service, Section Three. Ralph Blumenthal, the Princeton

All-America football centre, standing at the right. Next him, Waldo

Pierce, the artist.]

[Illustration: Philibert, Eighth Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, Fifth

Prince of the name, Forty-fifth Count of the name, stooping at the left

to repair a bad tire. He was chauffeur of the car that carried us to

Verdun.]

IV

THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN

The French have been massed at Verdun in the decisive battle of the

war. So were the Americans. Our little group of ambulance drivers were

called from the other points of the 350-mile line, and five sections

of the American Ambulance Field Service and the Harjes and the Norton

Corps work from ten up to twenty hours of the day bringing in their

comrades, the French wounded. One hundred and twenty of our cars and

120 of our boys in the field service were in the sector, under constant

shell-fire. Several were grievously wounded. Others were touched. A

dozen of the cars were shot up with shrapnel and slivers of explosive

shell.

Will Irwin and I went up with Piatt Andrew, head of the field service,

to see the young Americans at work. We left Paris on July 1 in a motor

car. Our chauffeur was Philibert, Eighth Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre,

Fifth Prince of the name, Tenth Marquess of Cruzy and Vauvillars,

Forty-fifth Count of the name, Sixteenth Viscount of Tallart,

Twenty-first Baron of Clermont en Viennois, Ancien Pair de France,

descendant of the Seigneur of Saint Geoire. For nine centuries his

family has been famous. The Duke is a kindly, middle-aged aristocrat,

who is very helpful to the American Field Service. He takes the

boys on visits to some one of his collection of châteaus. He drives

Piatt Andrew on his tours of inspection. He is a gifted and furious

driver, and on our dash from Paris to Verdun he burned up a couple

of tires. It was a genial thing to see him, caked with dust on face

and clothing, tinkering the wheel. To be served by one of the oldest

families in Europe was a novel experience for Irwin and me, though

actually what the Duke was doing in his democratic way is being done

almost universally by the "high-born" of France. Up through thousands

of transports, thousands of horses and tens of thousands of men, we

steered our course to Lovering Hill's section of the American Field

Service.

There on the hillside, to the west of Verdun, were the boys and their

cars. It was daytime, so they were resting. All work is night work.

They were muddy, unshaved, weary. A couple of base-ball gloves were

lying around. One of the boys was repairing a car that had collided

with a tree. There was mud on all the cars, and blood on the inner

side of one car. For ten nights they have been making one of the

hottest ambulance runs of the war.

It was on that run that William Notley Barber, of Toledo, Ohio, was

shot through the back. The shell fragment tore a long, jagged rent in

his khaki army coat, with a circle of blood around the rip, entered the

back and lay against the lung and stomach. The car was shattered. The

next man found him. The wrecked car still stood on the road with a dead

man in it, the wounded soldier whom he was bringing back. We saw Barber

at the field hospital. He had been operated on for the second time. He

showed us the quarter inch of metal which the surgeon had just taken

out, the second piece to be removed. He has won the Medaille Militaire.

This section needed no initiation. They had long served at

Hartmannsweilerkopf in the Alsace fighting, and of their number

Hall was killed. This experience at Verdun is a continuation of the

dangerous, brilliant work they have carried on for sixteen months.

These men are veterans in service, though youngsters in years. By their

shredded cars and the blood they have spilled they have earned the

right to be ranked next to soldiers of the line.

They gave me the impression of having been through one of the great

experiences of life. There was a tired but victorious sense they

carried, of men that had done honest service.

As we sat on the grass and looked out on a sky full of observation

balloons and aeroplanes, a very good-looking young man walked up. Only

one thing about his make-up was marred, and that was his nose--a streak

of red ran across the bridge.

"Shrapnel," he said, as he saw me looking. "And it seems a pity, too. I

spent $600 on that nose, just before I came over here. They burned it,

cauterized it, wired it, knifed it, and pronounced it a thorough job.

And as soon as it was cleaned up, it came over here into powder and

dust and got messed up by shrapnel. Now the big $600 job will have to

be done over again."

This young man is Waldo Pierce, the artist. It was he who once started

on a trip to Europe with a friend, but didn't like the first meal, so

jumped overboard and swam back. He sailed by the next boat, and arrived

on the other side to find his friend in trouble for his disappearance.

Through the side of Pierce's coat, just at the pocket, and just over

the heart, I saw a bullet hole.

"Pretty stagey, isn't it?" he explained. "If it had been a ragged,

irregular hole, somewhere else, say at the elbow, it would have

been all right. But this neat little hole just at the vital spot is

conventional stuff. It looks like the barn door, and five yards away.

"And this is worse yet," he added, as he took out from the inner

breast pocket a brown leather wallet. Through one flap the same

shrapnel bullet had penetrated. Together, coat and wallet had saved

this young man's life.

"That's the sort of thing that wouldn't go anywhere," Pierce went on.

He is a Maine man, and has a pleasant drawl.

Wheeler's car was shot through, the slatting ripped at the driver's

place, the sides a mess. A man on his right and a man at his left were

killed. The stuff passed over his head as he knelt before a tire. The

boys have been playing in luck. A dozen fatalities were due them in

the June drive at Verdun. This was the fiercest offensive of the four

months, and they stood up to it.

We were looking west, and as we looked an aeroplane burst into flames.

As it fell, it left a trail of black smoke, funnel shaped, and always

at the point of that funnel the bright spark, and at the heart of that

spark a man burning to death. The spark descended rather slowly, with

a spiraling movement, and trailing the heavy smoke. It burned brightly

all the way to the horizon line, where it seemed to continue for a

moment, like a setting sun on the earth's rim. Then it puffed out, and

only the smoke in the sky was left. In another moment the light wind

had shredded the smoke away.

It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and we had been coming from Paris

at full tilt to get to the Etat Major and report ourselves. So, after

watering the car and shaking hands all around, we started off, and

straightway the rear left tire went flat, and its successor went flat,

and for the third time it went flat. So we crawled to a village at

midnight, and laid by for repairs.

At 3 a.m. we rose. There was no dressing to be done, as we had rested

in our clothes. We ran out past the city of Verdun on the road going

east to Fort de Tavannes. Wheat was ripening to the full crop in a

hundred fields about us. All the birds were singing. The pleasant stir

and fullness of summer were coming down the air.

Then on a sudden the famous Tier de Barrage broke out--the deadly

barrier of fire that crumbles a line of trenches as a child pokes in an

ant hill: the fire that covers an advance and withers an enemy attack.

Here was what I had been waiting for through twenty-one months of war.

I had caught snatches of it at a dozen points along the line. I had

eaten luncheon by a battery near Dixmude, but they were lazy, throwing

a shell or two only for each course. But here, just before the sun

came up, 200 feet from us, a battery of twelve 75s fired continuously

for twenty minutes. Just over the hill another battery cleared its

throat and spoke. In the fields beyond us other batteries played

continuously. Some of the men put cotton in their ears.

We ran through a devastated wood. The green forest has been raked

by high explosive into dead stumps, and looks like a New Hampshire

hillside when the match trust has finished with it. The road is a thing

of mounds and pits, blown up and dug out by a four months' rain of

heavy shells. The little American cars are like rabbits. They dip into

an obus hole, bounce up again and spin on. They turn round on their own

tails. They push their pert little noses up a hill, where the road is

lined with famous heavy makes, stalled and wrecked. They refuse to stay

out of service.

We rode back through the partially destroyed city of Verdun, lying

trapped and helpless in its hollow of hills. We drove through its

streets, some of them a pile of stones and plaster, others almost

untouched, with charming bits of water view and green lawns and

immaculate white fronts. The city reminded me of the victim whom a

professional hypnotist displays in a shop window, where he leaves him

lying motionless in the trance for exhibition purposes.

Verdun lay seemingly dead inside the range of German fire. But once the

guns are forced back the city will spring into life.

Then we returned to the ambulance headquarters and in an open tent

shared the excellent rations which the field service provides for its

workers. We were sitting with the French lieutenant and discussing

the values of rhythm in prose when the boys shouted to us from the

next field. An aeroplane was dipping over an anchored sausage-shaped

observation balloon. The aeroplane had marked its victim, which could

not escape, as a bird darts for a worm. The balloon opened up into

flame and fell through thirty seconds, burning with a dull red.

The hours we had just spent of work and excitement seemed to me fairly

crowded, but they were mild in the life of the field service. They

pound away overtime and take ugly hazards and preserve a boy's humor.

More young men of the same stuff are needed at once for this American

Ambulance Field Service. The country is full of newly made college

graduates, wondering what they can make of their lives. Here is the

choicest service in fifty years offered to them.

Even a jitney wears out. Bump it in the carburetor enough times, rake

it with shrapnel, and it begins to lose its first freshness. More

full sections of cars should be given. The work is in charge of Piatt

Andrew, who used to teach political economy in Harvard, was later

Director of the Mint, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and secretary

of Senator Aldrich's Monetary Commission.

[Illustration: A. Piatt Andrew, who, as Director, has raised the

American Ambulance Field Service from a small beginning to a powerful

factor in rescue work.]

As soon as twilight fell we started on the nightly round. Here was

Section 4 of the American Ambulance doing hot service for Hill 304

and Dead Man's Hill. It was on this ride that I saw the real Verdun,

the center of the deadliest action since men learned how to kill. The

real Verdun is the focused strength of all France, flowing up the main

roads, trickling down the side roads and overflowing upon the fields.

The real Verdun is fed and armed by the thousands of motor cars that

bray their way from forty miles distant, by the network of tiny narrow

gauge railways, and by the horses that fill the meadows and forests.

Tiny trucks and trains are stretched through all the sector. They look

like a child's railroad, the locomotive not more than four feet high.

They brush along by the road, and wander through fields and get lost in

woods. The story goes in the field service that one of these wee trains

runs along on a hillside, and just back of it is a battery of 220's

which shoot straight across the tracks at a height of three feet. The

little train comes chugging along full of ammunition. The artillery men

yell "Attention," and begin firing all together. The train waits till

there seems to be a lull, and goes by under the muzzles.

We were still far enough from the front to see this enginery of war

as a spectacle. The flashing cars and bright winged aeroplanes,

the immense concourse of horses, the vast orderly tumult, thousands

of mixed items, separate things and men, all shaped by one will to

a common purpose, all of it clothed in wonder, full of speed and

color--this prodigious spectacle brought to me with irresistible appeal

a memory of childhood.

"What does it remind me of?" I kept saying to myself. Now I had it:

When I was a very little boy I used to get up early on two mornings

of the year: one was the Fourth of July and the other was the day the

circus came to town. The circus came while it was yet dark in the

summer morning, unloaded the animals, unpacked the snakes and freaks,

and built its house from the ground up. Very swiftly the great tents

were slung, and deftly the swinging trapezes were dropped. Ropes

uncoiled into patterns. The three rings came full circle. Seats rose

tier on tier. Then the same invisible will created a mile long parade

down Main Street, gave two performances of two hours each, and packed

up the circus, which disappeared down the road before the Presbyterian

church bell rang midnight.

A man once said to me of a world famous general: "He is a great

executive. He could run a circus on moving day." It was the perfect

tribute. So I can give no clearer picture of what Pétain and his five

fingers--the generals of his staff--are accomplishing than to say they

are running one thousand circuses, and every day is moving day.

Our little car was like a carriage dog in the skill with which it kept

out of the way of traffic while traveling in the center of the road.

Three-ton trucks pounded down upon it and the small cuss breezed round

and came out the other side. The boys told me that one of our jitneys

once pushed a huge camion down over a ravine, and went on innocent and

unconcerned, and never discovered its work as a wrecker till next day.

But soon we passed out of the zone of transports and into the

shell-sprinkled area. We went through a deserted village that is

shelled once or twice a day. There is nothing so dead as a place,

lately inhabited, where killing goes on. There is the smell of tumbled

masonry and moldering flesh, the stillness that waits for fresh horror.

Just as we left the village, the road narrowed down like the neck of

a bottle. It is so narrow that only one stream of traffic can flow

through. By the boys of the field service this peculiarly dangerous

village of Bethlainville is known as "Bethlehem"--Bethlehem, because no

wise men pass that way.

The young man with me had been bending over his steering gear, a few

days before, when a shrapnel ball cut through the seat at just the

level of his head. If he had been sitting upright the bullet would

have killed him. And another bullet went past the face of the boy with

him. The American Field Service has had nothing but luck.

"But don't publish my name," said my friend. "It might worry the folk

at home."

We rode on till we had gone eighteen miles.

"Here is our station."

I didn't know we were there. Our Poste de Secours was simply one more

hole in the ground, an open mouth into an invisible interior--one more

mole hole in honeycombed ground.

We entered the cave, and something hit my face. It was the flap of

sacking which hung there to prevent any light being seen. We walked a

few steps, hand extended, till it felt the second flap. We stepped into

a little round room, like the dome of an astronomical observatory. It

was lit by lantern. Three stretcher bearers were sitting there, and two

chaplains, one Protestant, one Roman Catholic. The Protestant was a

short, energetic man in the early forties, with stubby black beard and

excellent flow of English. The Roman Catholic, Cleret de Langavant, was

white-haired, with a long white beard, a quite splendid old fellow with

his courtesy and native dignity. These two men, the best of friends,

live up there in the shelled district, where they can minister to the

wounded as fast as they come in from the trenches. Of one group of

thirty French stretcher bearers who have been bringing wounded from

Dead Man's Hill to this tunnel, where the Americans pick them up, ten

have been killed.

We went out from the stuffy, overcrowded shelter and stood in the

little communicating trench that led from the Red Cross room to the

road. We were looking out on 500,000 men at war--not a man of them

visible, but their machinery filling the air with color and sound. We

were not allowed to smoke, for a flicker of light could draw fire.

We were standing on the crest of a famous hill. We saw, close by, Hill

340 and Dead Man's Hill, two points of the fiercest of the Verdun

fighting. It was the wounded from Dead Man's Hill for whom we waited.

Night by night the Americans wait there within easy shell range.

Sometimes the place is shelled vigorously. Other nights attention is

switched to other points.

"I shouldn't stand outside," suggested one of the stretcher bearers.

"The other evening one of our men had his arm blown off while he was

sitting at the mouth of the tunnel. He thought it was going to be a

quiet evening."

But the young American doctor liked fresh air.

It was a wonderful night of stars, with a bell-like clarity to the

mild air and little breeze stirring. A perfect night for flying. We

heard the whirr of the passing wings--the scouts of the sky were out.

Searchlights began to play. I counted eight at once, and more than

twenty between the hills. Sometimes they ran up in parallel columns,

banding the western heaven. Sometimes they located the knight errant

and played their streams on him at the one intersecting point. Again

the lights would each of them go off on a separate search, flicking

up and down the dome of the sky and rippling over banks of thin white

cloud.

Star lights rose by rockets and hung suspended, gathering intensity

of light till it seemed as if it hit my face, then slowly fell. The

German starlights were swift and brilliant; the French steady and long

continuing.

"No good, the Boches' lights," said a voice out of the tunnel. A French

stretcher bearer had just joined us.

Other rockets discharged a dozen balls at once, sometimes red,

sometimes green. Then the pattern lights began to play--the lights

which signal directions for artillery fire. They zigzagged like a

snake and again made geometrical figures. Some of the fifty guns,

nested behind us, fired rapidly for five minutes and then knocked

off for a smoke. From the direction of Hill 304 heavy guns, perhaps

220's, thundered briefly. We could hear the drop of large shells in

the distance. The Germans threw a few shells in the direction of the

village through which we had driven, a few toward the battery back

of us. We could hear the whistle of our shells traveling west and of

their shells coming east. To stand midway between fires is to be in a

safe and yet stimulating situation. From the gently sloping, innocent

hillocks all about us tons of metal passed high over our heads into the

lines. If only one shell in every fifty found its man, as the gossip of

the front has it, the slaughter was thorough.

"It is a quiet evening," said my friend.

It was as if we were in the center of a vast cavity; there were no

buildings, no trees, nothing but distance, and the distance filled

with fireworks. I once saw Brooklyn Bridge garlanded with fireworks.

It seemed to me a great affair. We spoke of it for days afterward. But

here in front of us were twenty miles of exploding lights, a continuous

performance for four months. With our heads thrust over the tunnel

edge, we stood there for four hours. The night, the play of lights, the

naked hill top, left us with a sense of something vast and lonely.

The Protestant clergyman came and said: "Let us go across the road to

my abri."

He stumbled down two steps cut in clay and bent over to enter the earth

cave. "I will lead you," he said, taking me by the arm.

"Wait while I close the door," he said; "we must not show any light."

When the cave was securely closed in he flashed a pocket electric. We

were in a room scooped out of the earth. The roof was so low that my

casque struck it. A cot filled a third of the space. The available

standing room was three feet by six feet.

"You will forgive me for asking it," he went on, "but please use your

pocket lamp; mine is getting low and I am far away from supplies. We

can get nothing up here."

My friend handed over his lamp. The clergyman flashed it on a

photograph pinned against a plank of wood.

"My wife," he said; "she is an American girl from Bensonhurst, Long

Island. And that is my child."

He turned the light around the room. There were pages of pictures from

the _London Daily Mail_ and the _New York Tribune_. One was a picture

of German soldiers in a church, drinking by the altar.

"I call this my New York corner," he explained, "and this is my

visiting card." From a pile he lifted a one-page printed notice, which

read:

"Declaration Religeuse.

"I, the undersigned, belong to the Protestant religion. In consequence

and conforming to the law of 1905, this is my formal wish: In case of

sickness or accident, I wish the visit of a Protestant pastor and the

succor of his ministry whether I am undergoing treatment at a hospital

or elsewhere; in case of death I wish to be buried with the assistance

of a Protestant pastor and the rites of that Church."

Space is left for the soldier to sign his name. The little circular is

devised by this chaplain, Pastor----, chaplain of the----Division.

At 2 o'clock in the morning we were ordered to load our car with the

wounded, one "lying case," three "sitting cases." We discharged them at

the hospital, and tumbled into the tent at Ippecourt at 4 o'clock.

V

"FRIENDS OF FRANCE"

American relief work in France has many agencies and activities. I have

given illustrations of it, but these are only admirable bits among

a host of equals. I have told of the American Field Service. Other

sections of young Americans have been at work in the hottest corners of

the battle front. The Harjes Formation and the American Volunteer Motor

Ambulance Corps, known as the Norton Corps, have made a name for daring

and useful work with their one hundred cars on the firing line. What

the Field Service has done, they too have done and suffered. It was

with a glow of pride that I read the name of my Yale classmate, W. P.

Clyde, junior, of the Norton Ambulance, cited in an order of the day,

and made the recipient of the French War Cross. The commanding general

wrote of him:

"Volunteer for a perilous mission, he acquitted himself with a cool

courage under a heavy and continuous fire. He has given, in the course

of the campaign, numerous proofs of his indifference to danger and his

spirit of self-sacrifice."

I have shown the contribution of scientific skill and mechanical

ingenuity which Americans have made in hospital and ambulance work.

There remains a work in which our other American characteristic of

executive ability is shown. Organization is the merit of the American

Relief Clearing House. When the war broke out, American gifts tumbled

into Paris, addressed and unaddressed. There was a tangle and muddle

of generosity. The American Relief Clearing House was formed to meet

this need. It centralizes and controls the receipt of relief from

America intended for France and her Allies. It collects fresh accurate

information on ravaged districts and suffering people. It prevents

waste and overlapping and duplication. It obtains free transportation

across the ocean for all gifts, free entry through the French customs,

and free transportation on all the French railways. It forwards the

gifts to the particular point, when it is specified. It distributes

unmarked supplies to places of need. It receives money and purchases

supplies. It has 114 persons giving all their time to its work. It has

issued 45,000 personally signed letters telling of the work. It employs

ten auto trucks in handling goods. It has concentrated time, effort

and gifts. It has obtained and spread information of the needs of the

Allies. It has been efficient in creating relationship between the

donor in America and the recipient in France, and in increasing good

will between the nations. I do not write of the Clearing House from the

outside, but from a long experience. For many months my wife has given

all her time to making known the work of Miss Fyfe who manages the work

of relief for civilians, their transportation, and conducts a refugee

house, and a Maternity Hospital in the little strip of Belgium which

is still unenslaved. Little local committees, such as Miss Rider's in

Norwalk, in Cedar Rapids, in Montclair, and in Douglaston, L. I., have

been formed, and 36 boxes of material, and over $1,500 in money, have

been given. Those supplies the Clearing House has brought from New York

to La Panne, Belgium, free of charge, promptly, with no damage and no

losses. What the Clearing House has done for this humble effort, it

has done for 60,000 other consignments, and for more than a million

dollars of money. It has distributed supplies to 2,500 hospitals and

200 relief organizations in France. It has sent goods to Belgium,

Salonica, to the sick French prisoners in Switzerland. It dispatched

the ship _Menhir_ for the relief of Serbian refugees. It has installed

a complete hospital, with 200 beds and a radiograph outfit. The cases

which it transports contain gauze, cotton, bandages, hospital clothing,

surgical instruments, garments, underwear, boots, socks. The names of

the men who have administered this excellent organization in Paris are

H. O. Beatty, Charles R. Scott, Randolph Mordecai, James R. Barbour,

and Walter Abbott.

After the claims of immediate dramatic suffering, comes the great mute

community of the French people, whose life and work have been blighted.

And for one section of that community the Association of "_Les Amis

des Artistes_" has been formed. "To preserve French art from the

deadly effects of the war, which creates conditions so unfavorable to

the production of masterpieces of painting, sculpture, architecture,

decorative arts, engraving," is the object of this society. The members

see that other forms of activity will swiftly revive after the war.

"The invaded districts will be rebuilt, business will flourish. But

art will have a hard and prolonged struggle." The society purchases

from its funds the works of men of talent whom the war has robbed of

means of support. These paintings, statuary, engravings, so acquired,

are annually divided among the members. The purchase is made by a

committee composed of distinguished artists, critics and connoisseurs,

representing the three great French salons and the various art

tendencies of the modern movement. The Honorary Committee includes

Bakst, Hanotaux, Maeterlinck, Rodin and Raemaekers. Americans who are

aiding are Mrs. Mark Baldwin, Mrs. Paul Gans, Walter Gay, Laurence V.

Benét, and Percy Peixotto.

The new American fund of the "Guthrie Committee" for the relief of the

orphans of war has been recently announced. It is planned to raise many

millions of dollars for this object.

Children, artists, invalid soldiers, refugees--there is a various and

immense suffering in France at this moment, and no American can afford

to be neutral in the presence of that need. The sense of the sharp

individual disturbance and of the mass of misery came to me one day

when I visited the Maison Blanche. We entered the open air corridor,

where a group of thirty men rose to salute our party. My eye picked up

a young man, whose face carried an expression of gentleness.

"Go and bring the War Minister your work," said the Major who was

conducting us.

A little chattering sound came from the lips of the boy. It sounded

like the note of a bird, a faint twittering, making the sound of

"Wheet-Wheet"--twice repeated each half minute. Then began the

strangest walk I have ever seen. His legs thrust out in unexpected

directions, his arms bobbed, his whole body trembled. Sometimes he sank

partly to the ground. His progress was slow, because he was spilling

his vitality in these motions. And all the time, the low chirrup came

from his lips. More laborious and cruel than the price paid by the

victims of vice was this walk of one who had served his country.

And yet nothing in the indignity that had been done to his body could

rob him of that sweetness of expression.

"A shell exploded directly in front of him," explained the doctor, "the

sudden shock broke his nervous system, and gave him what is practically

a case of locomotor ataxia. He trembles continuously in every part.

It forces out the little cry. The effect of that shock is distributed

through his entire body. That is what gives hope for his recovery. If

the thing had centered in any one function, he would be a hopeless

case. But it is all diffused. When the war ends many of these men who

are nerve-shattered, will recover, we believe. As long as the war

lasts, they live it, they carry a sense of responsibility, with the

horror that goes with it. But when they know the shelling is over for

ever they will grow better."

In a few minutes the young soldier returned carrying two baskets.

The one thing that is saving that man from going crazy is his basket

making. Very patiently and skillfully his shaking hands weave

close-knit little baskets. Some of them were open trays for household

knick-knacks. Others were worked out into true art shapes of vase. I

shan't forget him as he stood there trembling, the little reed baskets

rocking in his hands, but those baskets themselves revealing not a

trace of his infirmity. Only his nervous system was broken. But his

will to work, his sweet enduring spirit, were the will and the heart of

France.

The War Minister, in whose hands rests the health of four million

soldiers, is as painstaking, as tender as a nurse. Fifteen minutes he

gave that man--fifteen minutes of encouragement. The rest of France

waited, while this one little twitching representative of his race

received what was due from the head of the nation to the humblest

sufferer. Do I need to say that the soldier was bought out? Professor

Mark Baldwin and Bernard Shoninger held an extempore auction against

each other. But one basket they could not buy and that was the tray the

man had woven for his wife. He was proud to show it, but money could

not get it. And he was a thrifty man at that. For, as soon as he had

received his handful of five-franc notes, he went to his room, where he

sleeps alone so that his twittering will not disturb the other men, and

hid the money in his kit. Something more for his wife to go with the

basket.

Clearing house of the suffering of France, the Maison Blanche is the

place where the mutilated of the Grand Army come. As quickly as they

are discharged from hospital, they are sent to this Maison Blanche,

while completing their convalescence, before they return to their

homes. It is here that arms, legs, stumps, hands and the apparatus

that operates these members, are fitted to them. They try out the new

device. It is to them like a foot asleep to a whole man; a something

numb and strange out beyond the responses of the nervous system.

It behaves queerly. It requires much testing to make it articulate

naturally.

Through the recreation hall, where plays and motion pictures have made

gay evenings in time past before the war, file the slow streams of

the crippled, backwash of the slaughter to the North. To the soldiers

it is a matter of routine, one more item in the long sacrifice.

They fit on the member and test it in a businesslike way, with no

sentimentalizing. Too many are there in the room, and other hundreds

on the pleasant sunny lawns, in like case, for the individual to feel

himself the lonely victim. There are no jests--the war has gone too far

for superficial gayety--and there is no hint of despair, for France is

being saved. The crippled man is sober and long-enduring.

There in that room I saw the war as I have not seen it in five months

of active service at the front. For yonder on the Yser we had the

dramatic reliefs of sudden bombardment, and flashing aeroplanes. But

here were only broken men. There were no whole men at all in the long

Salle. The spirit of the men was all that it ever was. But the body

could no longer respond. They stood in long line, stripped to the waist

or with leg bare waiting their turn with the doctor and the apparatus

expert. There is the look of an automaton to an artificial limb, as

if the men in their troubled motions were marionettes. And then the

imagination, abnormally stimulated by so much suffering, plays other

tricks. And it seemed to me as if one were looking in at the window

of one of those shameful "Halls of Anatomy" in a city slum, where

life-size figures lie exposed with grotesque wounds on the wax flesh.

But here was the crackle of the leather straps, and the snapping of

the spring at the knee and elbow-joint of the mechanism, and the slow

moving up and filing past of the line, as man after man was tested for

flexibility. Here is the army of France--here is the whole vast problem

flowing through one door and gathered in one room.

American money is helping to reëducate these broken men, teaching

them trades. There at the Maison Blanche, our fellow-countrymen have

already trained 563 men, and at the Grand Palais 257. As I write this,

701 maimed men are still in course of being trained, and the number

in the agricultural school has grown to 90. Altogether 2,000 maimed

soldiers have been trained through American help. Most of the money for

this work has been raised by the "American Committee for Training in

Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France," of which Mrs. Edmund

Lincoln Baylies is Chairman. The president of the society in France in

control of this work is B. J. Shoninger, the former president of the

American Chamber of Commerce in Paris.

Like England in the battle line, we are only at the beginning of our

effort. In spots and patches we have responded well. Many are giving

all they can. The thirty-five million dollars in money which we have

collected for all causes is excellent. (Though England has given more

than that to Belgium alone, in addition to financing the war and caring

for her own multitude of sufferers.) America has made gifts in goods to

the amount of sixty million dollars. Of local relief committees working

for France we have over two thousand. There are about forty-five

thousand Americans devoting their full time to the service of France as

soldiers, drivers, fliers, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and executive

officers. There are many thousands in the United States who are using a

portion of their strength and leisure to raise money and supplies. As

Sydney Brooks said to me:

"Those Americans who believe in our cause are more Pro-Ally than the

Allies."

A group of Americans among our millions are aware that Washington wrote:

"All citizens of the United States should be inspired with unchangeable

gratitude to France."

NOTE: For an account of the work of Mrs. Wharton see page 321.

VI

THE SAVING REMNANT

I wish to show in this book three expressions of nationality. I seek

to show the fire and vigor of German nationality, and how that force

has been misdirected by the handful of imperialistic militarists in

control. There has been no instance of a noble force so diverted

since the days of the Inquisition, when the vast instinctive power

of religion was used by a clever organization to torture and kill.

Every instinctive element in our being is at times turned awry.

Nationalism suffers just as sex love suffers from the perversions of

evil institutions. But the abuse of instinct is no argument for cutting

loose from that vital source and seeking to live by intellectual

theories, emptied of warm emotional impulse. The remedy is in applying

the intellect as a guide and corrective, not in treating instinct as an

enemy. The nationalism of the German people will yet vindicate itself

and swing true to freedom and justice.

I try to reveal the nationality of France, in the love of the peasant

for the soil of his Patrie, for the house where he was born, and for

the sunlight and the equality of his beautiful country. I have shown

that there can be no peace as long as other men with other customs

invade that soil, burn those homes, and impose their alien ideas.

I have told of what the American tradition of nationality has driven

our men and women and our boys to do in France. They see the fight of

France as our fight, just as France saw the American Revolution as her

struggle. None of this work was done in vague humanitarianism. These

men and women and boys are giving of their best for a definite aim.

They are giving it to the American cause in France. France is defending

the things that used to be dear to us, and our fellow-countrymen who

are of the historic American tradition are standing at her side.

In recent years, our editors and politicians have been busy in

destroying our historic tradition and creating a new tradition, by

means of which we are to obtain results without paying the price.

Neutrality is the method, and peace and prosperity are the rewards. I

have collected many expressions of this new conception of Americanism.

One will suffice.

Martin H. Glynn, temporary chairman of the National Democratic

Convention, in renominating Woodrow Wilson for president, said:

"Neutrality is America's contribution to the laws of the world.... The

policy of neutrality is as truly American as the American flag.... The

genius of this country is for peace. Compared with the blood-smeared

pages of Europe, our records are almost immaculate. To-day prosperity

shines from blazing furnaces and glowing forges. Never was there as

much money in our vaults as to-day.... When the history of these days

comes to be written, one name will shine in golden splendor upon the

page that is blackened with the tale of Europe's war, one name will

represent the triumph of American principles over the hosts of darkness

and of death. It will be the name of the patriot who has implanted his

country's flag on the highest peak to which humanity has yet aspired:

the name of Woodrow Wilson."

It was in protest against this neutrality, this reveling in fat money

vaults, this assumption that prosperity is greater than sacrifice, that

these young men of whom I have told have gone out to be wounded and to

die. This mockery of the "blackened page" and "blood-smeared pages" of

Europe has stung many thousands of Americans into action. The record of

their service is a protest against such gloating. These fighters and

rescuers and workers would not have served Germany with an equal zest.

Neutrality between France and Germany is impossible to them. Those who

fail to see the difference between France and Germany in this war are

not of our historic American tradition.