IN June, 1915, it was the pride of the Section in Flanders, Section
1, to feel that it had come closer to war than any other division of
the American Ambulance. In June, 1916, the point of pride is to know
that those first intense experiences have long since been duplicated
and eclipsed. The competitive principle does not enter, naturally; the
significance is that in this twelvemonth the service of the Americans
has been steadily extended and vitalized. And in attempting to express
here something of the whole through one of its parts, I need only
suggest that the initial adventure in the North, comprehending in a
few crowded weeks a fairly full range of experience behind the lines,
perhaps still stands as typical and illustrative of all the rest.
[Illustration: DUNKIRK, MAY, 1915]
In Dunkirk we witnessed, and within our powers tried to cope with,
what yet remains, I believe, the most sensational artillery exploit in
history. It is remembered that the little cars of the Americans often
ran those empty streets, and pursued those deafening detonations,
alone. Here, at our base, we shared the life of a town under sporadic,
but devastating, bombardment; forward, in Elverdinghe, we shared the
life of a town under perpetual, and also devastating, bombardment;
still further forward, in Ypres, we beheld a town bombarded from
the face of the earth in a single night. We shared no life here, nor
yet in Nieuport, for there was none to share. In the salient around
Ypres, we played for many days our small part in that vast and various
activity forever going on at the back of the front. Here we saw and
learned things not easily to be forgotten: the diverse noises of shells
going and coming, of _arrivées_ and _départs_; the stupendous uproar
of the "duel" before the charge, which makes the deepening quiet of a
run-back come like a balm and a blessing; the strange informality of
roadside batteries, booming away in the sight of peasant families and
every passer; the silence and the stillness, and the tenseness and the
busyness, of night along the lines; the extreme difficulty of hiding
from shrapnel successfully without a dug-out; the equal difficulty of
driving successfully down a shell-bitten road in darkness like ink;
the glow against the sky of a burning town, and the bright steady
dots of starlights around half the horizon; the constant straggle of
the evicted by the field-ambulance's front-door, and the fast-growing
cemetery at the back-door; the whine and patter of bullets by the
_postes de secours_ and the business-like ripple of the machine-guns;
the whir of Taubes, the practical impossibility of hitting them from
the ground, and the funny little bombs sometimes dropped by the same;
the noises made by men gone mad with pain; the glorious quiet of men
under the acetylene lamps of the operating-table; "crowd psychology,"
and why a regiment becomes a "fighting machine," and how tender hearts
are indurated with a toughening of the skin; the high prevalence of
courage among the sons of men; drawbacks of sleeping on a stretcher in
an ambulance; the unkemptness of Boche prisoners; life, death, and war,
and the values and meanings thereof.
Such things, as I know, passed into the experience of Section 1, in
Flanders. And these things, and more, have similarly passed into the
experience of scores of young Americans since, in their life and
service behind the lines of France.
It is the composite experience which the following pages narrate; it is
the composite service which the mind holds to with most satisfaction.
We were the _Service Sanitaire Américaine_: a proud title, and we
wished, naturally, to invest it with the realest meaning. That in this
year 1915-16, the American service has been rendered efficiently and
even valuably, this volume as a whole attests, I think. That it has
been rendered with the requisite indifference to personal risk is also,
I hope, supported by the record. A transient in the service, who by no
means bore the burden and heat of the day, may be permitted, I trust,
to say these necessary, or at least these interesting and pertinent,
things with complete detachment.
I remember the hour of Section 1's "baptism of fire." We stood in the
lee (or what we hoped was the lee) of the Petit Château at Elverdinghe,
while German shells whistled over our heads and burst with a wicked
crash about the little church, the typical target, a couple of hundred
yards away. (What interest we felt when a fragment of shell, smoking
hot, fell almost at our feet, and what envy of the man who gathered in
this first memorable "souvenir"!) We were just down from Dunkirk; we
were greener than the grass that blew; and that the novel proceedings
were acutely interesting to us will never be denied. Perhaps each of us
secretly wondered to himself if he was going to be afraid; certainly
all of us must have wished, with some anxiousness, that those strange
whistles and roars would turn themselves another way. And still, when
the young Englishman who ran the ambulance service there appeared at
that moment and asked for two cars to go down the road to Brielen
(which was to go straight toward the trouble), it is pleasant to
remember that there was no lack of volunteers, and two of my companions
were cranking up at once. There was never any time later, I am sure,
when the sense of personal danger was so vivid in the minds of so many
of us together.
Every ambulance-driver must have his bad quarters of an hour, no
doubt--and some of the worst of them may concern, not himself at
all, but his car or his wounded. And if it is said that these young
Americans, amateurs and volunteers, have acquitted themselves well in
sometimes trying circumstances, there is no intention to over-emphasize
this aspect of their service. A volume might be written on the
developmental reactions--all but mathematical in their working--of
war-time. Nor does it seem necessary to add that the risk of the
_ambulanciers_, at the worst, is small in comparison with that of those
whom they serve, and from whom in turn they get their inspiration--the
intrepid youths in the trenches.
We came to know these youths very well--the gallant and charming
_poilus_ who have so long carried the western front upon their
shoulders. We sincerely admired them; and on them largely we formed our
opinions of France, and of the war generally, and of war.
[Illustration: AN AMERICAN AMBULANCE IN FLANDERS]
From the standpoint of observation, indeed,--and doubtless it is
observation one should try to record here,--I believe we all felt the
peculiar advantage of our position to have been this, that we mingled
with the soldiers on something like equal terms. We were not officers;
we were not distinguished visitors dashing up in a staff-car for an
hour of sight-seeing. We were rankers (so far as we were anything), and
we were permanent; and in the necessities of our work, we touched the
life of the common fighting man at every hour of the day and night, and
under almost every conceivable circumstance. We were with the _poilus_
in the hour of rout and disaster; we were with them in the flush of
a victorious charge brilliantly executed. We crawled along roads
blocked for miles with them, moving forward; we wormed into railroad
stations swamped with the tide of their wounded. Now we heard their
boyish fun, and shared their jokes in the fine free days off duty; and
now we heard, from the unseen well of the jolting car, their faint
entreaty, _Doucement, doucement!_ We saw them distressed by the loss of
their precious _sacs_, or elated by the gift of a button or a cheese;
we saw them again, in silence and the darkness beside the Yser, very
quiet and busy, with the ping and whine of many rifles; and again we
found them lying on straw in dim-lit stables, bloody and silent, but
not defeated. Now they gave us tobacco and souvenirs, and told us of
their _gosses_, and helped us tinker with our cars, about which some of
them, mechanicians in happier days, knew so much more than we did; and
now they died in our ambulances, and sometimes went mad. We saw them
gay, and we saw them gassed; we found them idling or writing letters
on the running-boards of our cars, and we found the dark stains of
their fading lives upon our stretchers; we passed them stealing up like
stalwart ghosts to action, and we left them lying in long brown rows
beside the old roads of Flanders.
And to me at least it seemed that the dominant note and characteristic
quality of the _poilu_, and all his intense activity, was just a
disciplined matter-of-factness, a calm, fine, business-like efficiency,
an utter absence of all heroics. Of his heroism, it is superfluous
to speak now. My observation convinced me, indeed, that fortitude is
everywhere more common and evident, not less, than even rhapsodical
writers have represented. There seems literally no limit to the powers
of endurance of the human animal, once he is put to it. Many writers
have written of the awful groanings of the wounded. I must say that,
though I have seen thousands of wounded, the groans I have heard
could almost be counted upon the fingers of my hand. Only once in my
experience do I remember seeing any signs of excitement or disorder.
That was in the roads around Poperinghe, in the first threatening hours
of the second battle of Ypres. Once only did I get any impression of
human terror. And that was only a reminiscence, left behind by women
and children in the tumbled empty houses of Ypres. But in all the
heroism, unlimited and omnipresent, there is observed, as I say, little
or no heroics. That entire absence of drum and fife, which strikes and
arrests all beholders at the front, is significant and symbolic. These
men muster and move forward to the risk of death almost as other men
take the subway and go downtown to business. There are no fanfares at
all, no grand gestures, no flourishes about the soul and "la gloire."
It is true, no doubt, that the ambulance-driver views the scene from
a somewhat specialized angle. His principal association is with the
sequelæ of war; his view is too much the hospital view. Yet, it must
be insisted, he becomes quickly and strangely callous on these points;
and on the whole would be less likely to overstress the mere horrors
than someone who had not seen so much of them. On the other hand, as I
have suggested, he has extraordinary opportunities for viewing war as a
thing at once of many parts and of a marvellously organized unity.
[Illustration: AN AMERICAN AMBULANCE IN YPRES]
Personally I think that my sharpest impression of war as a whole
came to me, not along the _postes de secours_ or under the guns at
all, but at the station _place_ in the once obscure little town of
Poperinghe, on the 23d of April, 1915.
That, it will be remembered, was a fateful day. At five o'clock on the
afternoon before (everybody was perfectly specific about the hour),
there had begun the great movement now known as the Second Battle of
Ypres (or of the Yser). The assault had begun with the terrifying
surprise of poison-gas; the gas was followed by artillery attacks of a
ferocity hitherto unequalled; Ypres had been wiped out in a few hours;
the Germans had crossed the Yser. Thus the French and English lines,
which were joined, had been abruptly pushed back over a long front.
That these were anxious hours for the Allies, Sir John French's report
of June 15 (1915) indicates very plainly, I think. But they were far
from being idle hours. To-day the whole back country, which for weeks
had swarmed with soldiers, was up. For miles around, Allied reserves
had been called up from camp or billet; and now they were rushing
forward to stiffen the wavering lines and stem the threatening thrust
for the coast.
At three o'clock on this afternoon, I stood in Rue d'Ypres, before the
railway station in Poperinghe, and watched the new army of England go
up. Thousands and thousands, foot and horse, supply and artillery, gun,
caisson, wagon and lorry, the English were going up. All afternoon
long, in an unending stream, they tramped and rolled up the Flemish
highroad, and, wheeling just before me, dipped and disappeared down a
side-street toward "out there." Beautifully equipped and physically
attractive--the useless cavalry especially!--sun-tanned and confident,
all ready, I am sure, to die without a whimper, they were a most likely
and impressive-looking lot. And I suppose that they could have had
little more idea of what they were going into than you and I have of
the geography of the nether regions.
This was on my left--the English going up. And on my right, the two
streams actually touching and mingling, the English were coming back.
They did not come as they went, however. They came on their backs, very
still and remote; and all that you were likely to see of them now was
their muddy boots at the ambulance flap.
Service Sanitaire as we were, I think Section 1 never saw, before
or since, such a conglomeration of wounded as we saw that day at
Poperinghe. Here was the rail-head and the base; here for the moment
were the Red Cross and Royal Army Medical Corps units shelled out of
Ypres; here was the nervous centre of all that swarming and sweating
back-of-the-front. And here, hour after hour, into and through the
night, the slow-moving wagons, English, French, and American, rolling
on one another's heels, brought back the bloody harvest.
[Illustration: SOLDIERS MARCHING BY AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN A FLEMISH
TOWN]
The English, so returning to Poperinghe _gare_, were very well cared
for. By the station wicket a large squad of English stretcher-bearers,
directed, I believe by a colonel of the line, was unceasingly and
expertly busy. Behind the wicket lay the waiting English train,
steam up for Boulogne, enormously long and perfectly sumptuous: a
super-train, a hospital Pullman, all swinging white beds and shining
nickel. The French, alas, were less lucky that day. Doubtless the
unimagined flood of wounded had swamped the generally excellent
service; for the moment, at least, there was not only no super-train
for the French; there was no train. As for the bunks of the station
warehouses, the _hôpital d'évacuation_, they were of course long since
exhausted. Thus it was that wounded _tirailleurs_ and Zouaves and black
men from Africa, set down from ambulances, staggered unattended up
the station platform, sat and lay anyhow about the concrete and the
sand--no flesh-wounded hoppers these, but hard-punished men, not a few
of them struck, it was only too manifest, in the seat of their lives.
This was a bloody disarray which I never saw elsewhere, and hope never
to see again. Here, indeed, there was moaning to be heard, with the
hard gasp and hopeless coughing of the _asphyxiés_. And still, behind
this heavy ambulance, rolled another; and another and another and
another.
On my left was the cannon fodder going up; on my right was the cannon
fodder coming back. The whole mechanics of war at a stroke, you might
have said: these two streams being really one, these men the same men,
only at slightly different stages of their experience. But there was
still another detail in the picture we saw that day, more human than
the organized machine, perhaps, and it seemed even more pathetic.
Behind me as I stood and watched the mingling streams of soldiers, the
little square was black with _réfugiés_. Farther back, in the station
yard, a second long train stood steaming beside the hospital train, a
train for the homeless and the waifs of war. And presently the gate
opened, and these crowds, old men and women and children, pushed
through to embark on their unknown voyage.
[Illustration: AMERICANS IN THEIR GAS-MASKS]
These were persons who but yesterday possessed a local habitation and a
name, a background, old ties and associations, community organization,
a life. Abruptly severed from all this, violently hacked off at the
roots, they were to-day floating units in a nameless class, droves
of a ticket and number, _réfugiés_. I walked up the platform beside
their crowded train. A little group still lingered outside: a boy, a
weazened old man, and three or four black-clad women, simple peasants,
with their household goods in a tablecloth--waiting there, it may be,
for the sight of a familiar face, missed since last night. I asked
the women where they came from. They said from Boesinghe, which the
Germans had all but entered the night before. Their homes, then, were
in Boesinghe? Oh, no; their homes, their real homes, were in a little
village some twenty kilometres back. And then they fixed themselves
permanently in my memory by saying, quite simply, that they had been
driven from their homes by the coming of the Germans in October (1914);
and they had then come to settle with relatives in Boesinghe, which
had seemed safe--until last night. Twice expelled and severed at the
roots: where were they going now? I asked the question; and one of the
women made a little gesture with her arms, and answered, stoically: "To
France"--which was, as I consider, the brave way of saying, God knows.
As the case seemed sad to me, I tried to say something to that effect;
and, getting no answer to my commonplaces, I glanced up, and all the
women's eyes had suddenly filled with tears.
And outside the English were still going up with a fine tramp and
rumble, nice young clerks from Manchester and green-grocers' assistants
from Tottenham Court Road.
I have never forgotten that the very last soldier I carried in my
ambulance (on June 23, 1915) was one whose throat had been quietly
cut while he slept by a flying sliver of a shell thrown from a
gun twenty-two miles away. But it will not do, I am aware, to
over-emphasize the purely mechanical side of modern war, the deadly
impersonality which often seems to characterize it, the terrible
meaninglessness of its deaths at times. Ours, as I have said, was
too much the hospital view. That the personal equation survives
everywhere, and the personal dedication, it is quite superfluous to
say. Individual exaltation, fear and the victory over fear, conscious
consecration to an idea and ideal, all the subtle promptings and stark
behavior by which the common man chooses and avows that there are ways
of dying which transcend all life: this, we know, must have been the
experience of hundreds of thousands of the young soldiers of France.
And all this, beyond doubt, will one day be duly recorded, in tales to
stir the blood and set the heart afire.
And the fine flourish is not altogether wanting even now. As some
offset to the impression of pure blood and tears, let me quote a
document showing that the courage of France still sometimes displays
itself with the dash of purple. Before me is a copy of the official
proclamation of the Mayor of Dunkirk, posted through the town after the
stunning surprise of the first bombardments. It runs as follows:--
_DUNKERQUOIS_
_Les Bombardements que nous venons de subir ont fait surtout des
victimes dans les rues._
_Je recommande_ ESSENTIELLEMENT _aux habitants de s'abriter dans
les caves voutées et de ne pas se fier même à des écarts de tir
assez longs pour sortir_.
_Dunkerquois, nous avons à supporter les risques de la guerre,
nous les supportons vaillamment._
_Notre ville peut avoir à payer son tribut au vandalisme de nos
ennemis comme d'autres villes_, NOUS GARDERONS HAUT LES COEURS.
_Les ruines seules seront allemandes, la terre restera française
et après la_ VICTOIRE, _nous nous retrouverons_ PLUS FORTS, PLUS
RESOLUS ET PLUS FIERS QUE JAMAIS.