"Mon corps à la terre,
Mon âme à Dieu,
Mon coeur à la France."
THE trenches in this part of the Vosges are cut along the brows of
heights which directly overlook the Rhine Valley. From these summits
can be seen, beyond the smoke which deepens the mist above the famous
cities of Mulhouse and Colmar, the shadowy boundary of the Black Forest
and the snow-topped mountains of Switzerland. A few yards behind the
mouths of the communication trenches are the first dressing-stations,
everywhere and always one of war's most ghastly spots. Paths make their
way from these dressing-stations down the mountain-sides until they
become roads, and, once they have become roads, our work begins.
Nowhere else are foreign soldiers upon German soil. Nowhere else, from
Ypres to Belfort, do the lines face each other in a mountain range of
commanding summits and ever-visible village-dotted valleys. Nowhere
else can one study in history's most famous borderland both war and one
of those problems in nationality which bring about wars. And surely
nowhere else are Detroit-manufactured automobiles competing with
Missouri-raised mules in the business of carrying wounded men over
dizzy roads.
Until our light, cheap cars were risked on these roads a wounded man
faced a ten-mile journey with his stretcher strapped to the back of a
mule or put on the floor of a hard, springless wagon. Now he is carried
by hand or in wheelbarrows from one half to two miles. Then in one of
our cars there is a long climb followed by a long descent. And over
such roads! Roads blocked by artillery convoys and swarming with mules,
staggering likely as not beneath a load of high-explosive shells! Roads
so narrow that two vehicles cannot pass each other when both are in
motion! Roads with a steep bank on the one side and a sheer drop on the
other! Roads where lights would draw German shells! Roads even where
horns must not be blown!
[Illustration: THE COL DE BUSSANG--THE GATE TO ALSACE RECONQUISE]
Indeed, these roads seem to stand for our whole work. But they do not
by any means represent our whole work, and it is necessary, if one
wants to convey a comprehensive idea of our life, to begin at our base.
This is a village twenty-five miles to the rear, but strategically
located in relation to the various dressing-stations, sorting-points,
base hospitals, and rail-heads which we serve, and, in this war of
shipping-clerks and petrol, one of those villages which is as much a
part of the front as even the trenches themselves. It is a "little,
one-eyed, blinking sort of place." It is not as near to the fighting
as some of us, particularly adventurous humanitarians fresh from
New York and Paris, desire. But, picturesquely placed on the banks
of the Moselle and smiling up at the patches of hollow-streaked
snow that, even in late July and August, stand out on the tops of
the Ballon d'Alsace and the Ballon de Servance, it is a lovely,
long-to-be-remembered spot and every one in the Section quite naturally
speaks of it as "home."
We are billeted in some twenty-five households as if we were officers,
although our rations are the rations of a common soldier and our
Section rules are unfailingly to salute officers and even to make
ourselves scarce in hotels and cafés frequented only by officers. Our
lodgings range from hay-lofts to electrically lighted rooms; but the
character of our welcome is always the same--pleasant, cordial, to be
counted upon--"You are doing something for France and I will do what I
can for you."
One of the fellows, for instance, is quartered over a café. It is
a little place, dirty and unattractive. Before the war an American
tourist dropping into this café would probably have been sold a bad
grade of _vin ordinaire_ and been charged too much for it. But the
other day the chap who is billeted there was a little under the weather
and I took his breakfast to him in his room. I found the café full of
customers who had not been served. The woman of the house was upstairs
giving her _ambulancier américain_ a cup of that great Vosges remedy,
linden tea. I inquired about lunch. But it was no use, there was
nothing for me to do. She was going to fix him some lunch if he felt
like eating it, and his dinner, too. Was not her husband away fighting
and had not her eldest son been marked down as missing ever since his
company took a German trench last June?
Perhaps it is not surprising that we should be so received in a town
where we have been living now for six months, where we are the best
patrons of the biggest hotel, the most valued customers of half the
shops. But this hospitable reception is by no means confined to our
base. Everywhere we meet with a courtesy and with a gratitude which
bring with them a very satisfactory sense of doing something worth
while and having it appreciated.
Imagine, for instance, a small town surrounded by mountains that,
sloping gently up from its main street and railway station, are
checkered for some distance with houses, green fields, and straggly
stone walls, while hidden in their tree-covered summits are trenches
and batteries of 75's, and here and there hotels where before the war
tourists stopped and to which now the wounded are carried. But on this
day a thick gray mist hangs over the town like a half-lowered curtain.
The guns rest because the gunners cannot see. The mist hides entirely
the tops of the mountains, gives the generally visible houses and
stone walls a dim, unshaped appearance, and makes hardly noticeable a
procession of gray motor ambulances coming out from the tree-line and
making their way down into the town.
[Illustration: SUPPLIES FOR THE SOLDIERS BEING CARRIED ON MULES OVER
THE VOSGES MTS.]
[Illustration: AT A VALLEY "POSTE" (MITTLACH)]
Around the railway station is a group of temporary tents, where the
wounded are given by the ladies of the _Croix Rouge_ a cup of coffee
or a glass of citron and water before being packed into the _train
sanitaire_ to begin their long journey to the centre or south of
France. The ambulances evacuating the hospitals draw up among these
tents under the orders of the sergeant in charge. Four or five French
ambulances arrive and are unloaded. Then a smaller car takes its place
in the line. It has a long, low, gray body with two big red crosses
painted on either side. Beneath the red crosses are the words "American
Ambulance," and a name-plate nailed to the front seat bears the words
"Wellesley College."
The driver, after clearly doing his best to make a smooth stop, gets
down and helps in lifting out the stretchers. One of the wounded, as
his stretcher is slid along the floor of the car and lowered to the
ground, groans pitifully. He had groaned this way and sometimes even
screamed at the rough places on the road. So the driver's conscience
hurt him as he pulled some tacks out of his tires and waited for
the sergeant's signal to start. It was his first day's work as an
_ambulancier_. He could still see every rock and every rut in the last
mile of the road he had just driven over and he wondered if he really
had been as careful as possible.
But he was saved from reproaching himself very long. An _infirmier_
tapped him on the shoulder and, telling him that a _blessé_ wished to
speak to him, led him to one of the tents. It was the man about whom
he had been unhappy, now more comfortable, although evidently still
suffering.
"You are very kind, sir," he said in English that might have been in
other circumstances quite good, and disclosing a lieutenant's _galons_
as he gave his right hand to the driver. "You drive carefully. I
know, for I have a car. I don't like to cry--but I have two broken
legs--anything hurts me--but it is really decent of you fellows to come
way over here--it really is _trop gentil_...." And the driver went
back to his car marvelling for the first of many times at the sense of
sympathy which had made that pain-stricken officer think of him at all.
One wet night not long ago, the writer was stopped _en route_ by a
single middle-aged soldier trudging his way along a steep road running
from a cantonment behind the lines to the trenches. Embarrassed a
little at first and pulling at his cap, this man said that he had heard
in the trenches of the American Ambulance; that a friend had written
back that he had been carried in one of them; that this was the first
time that he had had an opportunity of shaking hands with one of the
_volontaires américains_. Then, as I leaned over to say good-bye, he
shook both my hands, offered me a cigarette, shook both my hands again,
saying, "_une jolie voiture_," and, pointing towards where in the black
distance came the rumble of guns, "Perhaps you will bring _me_ back
to-morrow."
If that man, by the way, had asked me for a lift, as is usually the
case when you are stopped like that on the road, my orders would have
been to have refused him, to have said, "_C'est défendu_" and to
have driven on. The Hague Conventions forbid carrying any soldiers
in ambulances except those who are wounded and those in the _service
sanitaire_. It is, putting it mildly, unpleasant to have to refuse a
man a ride when he is wearily facing a long walk and you are spinning
by in an empty ambulance. It is doubly unpleasant when you feel that
this man would do anything for you from pushing your car out of a
ditch to sharing a canteen. And yet, whenever we have to perform this
disagreeable duty, the conversation usually ends with a "_Merci quand
même_."
Indeed, discipline in a French soldier seems to be able to maintain
itself remarkably from within. Officers and men mingle probably more
unrestrainedly than in any army in the world. A soldier when talking to
an officer does not stand at attention after the first salute. Privates
and officers are frequently seen in the same room of a hotel or café,
and sometimes even have their meals in messes that are scarcely
separated at all. But these encroachments upon military formalism
seem to go no deeper than the frills of efficiency. Orders are obeyed
without "reasoning why," and, as in all conscript armies, the machinery
of punishment is evolved to uphold authority at all cost. Officers have
wide and immediate powers of punishment, and the decisions of courts
martial judging the graver offences are swift, severe, and highly
dreaded.
But, returning for the moment to Saint-Maurice, we park our cars
in the public square, on a hillside, along the fence of the curé's
yard and against the walls of an old church, where their bright red
crosses flame out against the gray flaking stone, and, on a cold
morning, it is always possible to save a lot of cranking by pushing
them down the hill. About half the Section on any given day are to be
found at the base and "in bounds," which means the square, the hotel
where we have our mess, or the room where one is billeted. These men
compose the reserve list, and are liable to be called at any minute
when they must "roll," as we say, instantly. The rest of the Section
are on duty in detachments of from one to eight cars and for periods
of from twenty-four hours to a week at various dressing-stations,
sorting-points, field hospitals, and so forth. The men on reserve are
used to reinforce these places, to fill up quickly _trains sanitaires_,
to rush to any one of a half-dozen villages which are sometimes shelled.
[Illustration: AMERICAN DRIVERS IN ALSACE]
Often, when the fighting is heavy, not a man or a car of Section 3 is
to be found at Saint-Maurice. The repair car even will be driven to
some crossroads or sorting-point where our ambulances bring the wounded
from several dressing-stations. And Mr. Hill will be away in the staff
car dropping in upon the widely separated places where his men are
working to see that all is going well or to know the reason why.
Mr. Lovering Hill, at the outbreak of the war, was practising law in
New York City. He had been educated at Harvard and in Switzerland,
and, speaking French as well as English, and thoroughly understanding
the French temperament and people, he immediately enlisted with the
American Ambulance of Neuilly as a driver. In six months he was
promoted to the rank of squad leader, and, since last July, ranking as
a first lieutenant in the French army, he has been in charge of the
work of Section Sanitaire N{o} 3, succeeding Mr. Richard Lawrence, of
Boston, who had been compelled to return to the United States. Mr. Hill
believes in never letting the reins of discipline drag, and yet he gets
along famously with all except those who have a habit of recalling in
some way that they are volunteers.
A French lieutenant and an official interpreter are also attached to
the Section. We are partly under the control of the Sanitary Service
and partly of the Automobile Service. The French _personnel_ are a
link between the Automobile Service and our unit, and they are busy
from morning until night keeping abreast of the required reports, for
five-day reports must be made on the consumption of gasoline, the
number of miles run, the number of wounded carried, the oil, carbide,
and spare parts needed, the rations drawn, and, in great detail, any
change in _personnel_.
There are no orderlies or mechanics attached to our Section and each
driver is responsible for the upkeep and repair of his own car. We do
as much of this work as possible in the square where we park our cars.
So we patch tires, scrape carbon, and change springs while the church
bell rings persistently and mournfully for masses and funerals and
while the people who sit and watch us from their shop windows laugh at
our language as much as if they understood it.
In general charge of this work and of a blacksmith shop that we have
turned into a workroom is a so-called Mechanical Department composed
of the two drivers who know the most about automobiles. And so
successfully has the system worked out that, laymen though most of
us be, none of our "Chinese Rolls Royces" or "Mechanical Fleas"--as
an English Red Cross corps in the neighborhood has nicknamed our
Fords--has been so severely "punished" that its repair has been beyond
the power of its driver instructed and assisted by the Mechanical
Department.
[Illustration: A "POSTE DE SECOURS" IN THE VALLEY OF THE FECHT]
[Illustration: SHARING MEALS AT A POSTE]
We receive the one sou a day, which, in addition to allowances to wife,
if any, and to children, if any, is the wage of a French _poilu_. We
draw, as has already been mentioned, an ordinary soldier's rations:
plenty of nourishing but rather solid bread, which, with the date
of its baking stamped upon it, comes in big round loaves that we
hold against our chest and cut with our pocket knife in true _poilu_
fashion; rice or potatoes, generally rice; coffee, sugar, salt, and
sometimes fresh meat, but ordinarily canned beef, called by the French
private _singe_, or monkey meat. At our own request we get the cash
equivalent of our wine and tobacco allowances, and this is used to
help defray the expenses of having our food cooked and served in the
best hotel the town offers. But with these exceptions--French tobacco
especially may be put in the category of acquired tastes--we take and
eat everything that is given to us with a very good grace. And although
it is possible, especially at Saint-Maurice, to add variously and
cheaply to this diet at one's own expense, it probably is a fact that
those of the Section who, in a spirit of "playing the game" all the way
through, have stuck to the rations weigh more and feel better than when
they first took the field, in spite of the constant drenchings one gets
and the stretches of work without sleep.
The hours of our meals--served by the untiring, red-cheeked Fanny--are
a little more American than military for those taking their turn on
the reserve list "at home." But Mr. Hill's rule requires military
punctuality on penalty of washing the dirtiest car in the square. This
is also the punishment inflicted upon any one who does not get his car
properly ready for morning inspection, who is not in his room by nine
o'clock, who has any trouble on the road from an insufficient supply of
"gas" or oil, who is tardy in handing in reports, or breaks in any way
the rules from time to time posted in the mess-room.
"In a word, you are military and not military, but I am going to pay
you the greatest compliment in my power, by treating you as I would
any French soldiers under my command," the Commandant in charge of
the Automobile Service of the army to which we are attached said
to us on one occasion. And it has been the clear purpose of our
two chiefs--first Mr. Lawrence and now Mr. Hill--to live up to the
responsibilities of that compliment. This is mainly done by example and
through the force of a very real _esprit de corps_, but washing another
man's car has been found a useful daily help for daily disciplinary
needs.
Away from our base, in our nomadic dressing-station-to-hospital
existence, we are often pretty much "on our own." This part of our life
begins in a valley reached through a famous pass. Starting from the
valley of the Moselle easy grades along a splendid highway crowded with
trucks, staff cars, wine carts, and long lines of yellow hay wagons,
bring one to a tunnel about three hundred yards in length. In the
middle of this tunnel is a low white marble stone with a rounded top
that until a year ago last August marked the boundary between France
and Germany. To an American driving an automobile in the dim tunnel
light this stone is simply something not to be hit. To the French who
have fought so bravely that it may no longer stand for a boundary it is
a sacred symbol. I have seen the eyes of returning wounded glisten at
the sight of it. I have heard companies of chasseurs, as they passed
it going to the trenches, break into singing or whistling their famous
Sidi-Brahim march.
Beyond this tunnel the road, wrapping itself around the mountain like
a broad, shining ribbon, descends into a fertile commercial valley in
sweeping curves sometimes a kilometre long: on one side are high gray
rocks where reservists seem to hang by their teeth and break stones; on
the other, a sheer drop into green fields, behind the tunnel-pierced
summit, in front the red-roofed houses of several Alsatian villages
nestling against yet another line of mountain-tops. And along this road
we have made our way at midnight, at daybreak, in the late afternoon,
running cautiously with wounded and running carelessly empty. We are
at home, too, in the villages to which it leads, with the life-size
portrayals of the Crucifixion that are everywhere, even in fields and
nailed to trees in the mountains, with the gray stone churches and
their curious onion-shaped towers and clamorous bells.
The appearance of an American Ambulance in the villages is no longer a
novelty, sentries let us pass without a challenge, school children do
not any more rush over to us at recess time, or soldiers crowd around
us and say to one another, "_Voilà la voiture américaine_." And we have
friends everywhere: the officer who wants to speak English and invites
us so often to lunch with him, the corporal of engineers who was a
well-known professor, the receiving sergeant who was a waiter at the
Savoy Hotel in London, the _infirmier_ who was in charge of the French
department of one of the largest of New York's publishing houses.
But cooks are the people we cultivate the most assiduously. It is
forbidden to leave your car and eat in a café. Besides, the time
of day when we are hungriest is the time--maybe midnight or early
morning--when no cafés are open or when we are marooned on some
mountain-top. For single cars and small wandering detachments there
are only informal arrangements for "touching" rations. So we depend
upon the good-will of the chief cooks and we seldom go hungry. But the
stanchest sustainer of every American Ambulance driver presides over
the kitchen of the largest sorting-point in the valley. We call this
cheery-voiced, big-hearted son of the Savoy mountains, who before the
war washed automobiles in Montmartre, "Le Capitaine," "Joe Cawthorne,"
"Gunga Din." He is never tired or out of spirits. He never needs to
sleep. It will be a rush period. We will leave our ambulances only to
get gasoline, oil, and water while the wounded are being discharged.
"Le Capitaine," too, will be up to his neck in work, cooking a meal
for a hundred people, hurrying out at the _médecin chef's_ order, soup
for thirty and tea for twenty more--and still he will find time to run
out to our cars with a cup of coffee and a slice of cheese. The only
occasion on record of anything from "Joe Cawthorne" but a word and a
smile of cheer was once when one of the fellows, who felt that to his
coffee he owed his escapes from sleeping at the wheel and running off
the bank, and therefore his life, returned to America, first giving "Le
Capitaine" an envelope with some money in it. "_Jamais, jamais_" he
said, returning the envelope and viciously picking some flies out of
his _coffee chaudron_.
There is no place like the front for the Long Arm of Coincidence to
play pranks. I have known two university football stars to meet for the
first time since their gridiron days on a shelled curve of a narrow
road--each in charge of an ambulance and each down in the road driving
some wandering cows out of their way. I have known two young men to
celebrate the Fourth of July on their voyage over to do ambulance work,
in a way that drew forth the gentle rebukes of a Protestant minister
who happened to be a passenger on the same boat. They left him on the
docks at Liverpool and, along with his advice, he passed out of their
minds until two months later one of them met him in a general's car in
Alsace. He stopped and told this fellow that he was preaching a series
of sermons at the front and invited him to come and hear him the next
Sunday in a near-by town, adding that among other things he thought he
would touch upon the question of "War and Temperance."
Speaking of the Fourth of July reminds me that on the national
French holiday of the Fourteenth of July, I saw General Joffre in
never-to-be-forgotten circumstances. He was spending this day in
Alsace, and when early that morning I approached a little village in an
empty ambulance, I was stopped by a sentry and, after being asked if I
had wounded aboard, told that General Joffre was making a speech in the
town square and that I would have to wait until he had finished before
I could get through.
[Illustration: LA TERRE PROMISE]
Of course I at once left my ambulance and ran to the square, knowing
how rarely one ever saw quotation marks after the Généralissime's name.
I was, however, too late to hear what he had to say, for, laconic as
ever, he had finished speaking when I came within earshot. Opposite a
gray brick church was a line of eight flag-bedecked automobiles, six
for the Généralissime and his staff and two for emergencies which, I am
told, is the way he always travels. General Joffre himself, standing
on the ground and surrounded by officers ablaze with decorations, was
listening to fifty little Alsatian girls singing the "Marseillaise."
They were finishing the last verse when I arrived, and when their
sweet childish voices no longer rang out in contrast to the brilliant
but grim surroundings, General Joffre, stepping out from among his
officers, held one of the prettiest of the little girls high in his
powerful arms and kissed her twice. The next day driving through this
town again I noticed the following sign:--
Le Général JOFFRE,
Généralissime des Armées de la République
a déjeuné dans cette maison.
Le 15{ème} Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins occupant cette région.
Délivrée par lui le 7 Août 1914.
Alsace has been for forty years German territory. For forty years young
Alsatians have been forced to learn German in the schools, to serve in
the German army, to be links in the civil and military chains which
bound them to the Kaiser's empire. A few days ago I took the photograph
of an Alsatian girl standing in the doorway of her home, which she
said she was going to send through Switzerland to her brother in the
German army "somewhere in Russia." But French hearts doubtless beat
under many a German uniform, and those of us who have lived in Alsace
are confident that re-annexation by France will not be a slow or a
difficult process. Alsace has been tied to France by something which
forty busy years have not found a way to change. The armies of the
Republic have been received with an open hand and an open heart. I know
of a fine field hospital organized and staffed entirely by Alsatian
ladies happy to be nursing wounded French soldiers. I know of Alsatian
boys, at the outbreak of the war not yet old enough to have commenced
their German military training, who are to-day volunteer, and only
volunteer, French soldiers.
We have drawn our impressions of Alsace chiefly from five or six towns
in a commercial valley. They are subject to long-range shelling and
bombs dropped from aeroplanes. Indeed, my first day in Alsace was
spent in the yard of a hospital contrived out of a schoolhouse. Our
cars were parked beneath the windows of one of its wings, and all
day long one heard the pitiful moans of a mother and her two little
daughters who had been wounded the night before when the Germans had
dropped half a dozen shells into the town where they lived.
But these towns seem to be, on the whole, cheerful, prosperous places.
Soldiers resting from the trenches flirt the time away with bilingual
Alsatian girls. Horns, claxons, and the hum of motors make in the
little mountain-smothered streets the noises of Broadway or Piccadilly.
The cafés and stores are full from morning until eight o'clock, when
all lights must be put out.
Nothing is taken by the soldiery without being paid for, a fact that
was brought sharply home to me on one occasion. We needed wood for the
kitchen-fire of a little dressing-station hidden on a tree-covered
mountain-top. I picked up an axe and started to get some exercise and
the wood for the fire at the same time; but the cook excitedly told me
that not even in that out-of-the-way place, unless he had the proper
military authorization, would he dare cut down a tree, because the
commune must be paid for, every twig of it.
But, interesting as these towns are, it is beyond them that we do our
most useful work. I am writing, as it happens, at a dressing-station
between the artillery and the infantry lines where two of our cars are
always on duty. The driver of the other car, eight months ago, was in
charge of a cattle ranch in the Argentine, and last May, a passenger
on the ill-fated Lusitania, was rescued after four hours in the water.
He is on his back tightening bolts underneath his car, and a hole in
the left sole of his projecting shoes tells of hours with the low speed
jammed on, for this is the way we have to drive down as well as up hill.
We are at one end of a valley which, opening gradually, runs into the
basin of the Rhine. Our two ambulances are backed up against a hay-loft
dressing-station among a little group of houses frequently mentioned
in the _communiqués_. At this minute the place is as peaceful as any
Florida glade; it does not seem possible that war can be so near, so
completely hushed. There is little military in the appearance of a few
stretcher-bearers, dressed in the discarded clothes of peace, throwing
stones into an apple tree; there is not a gun to be seen; there is not
a sound to be heard unless you listen to catch the splash of a mountain
stream or the tinkle of the bells tied around the necks of the cows
grazing high up on a green but ladder-steep mountain-side. Coming down
the road towards me is a little barefooted boy driving a half-dozen
cows to where some girls are waiting in a pen to milk them. A little
later, when my companion and I sit down to dinner with the young
_médecin auxiliaire_ in charge of the post, there will be some of this
milk on the table.
But long before dinner-time the whole surrounding aspect may change as
if by black magic. Tree-hidden batteries, some only a hundred yards
away and some on the tops of neighboring and surrounding mountains,
may speak together with their "brutal lungs" until the echoes, rolling
and accumulating, make a grand, persistent roar. Even trench-weary
soldiers will unconsciously duck their heads and stand ready to run to
the bomb-proofs if the answering German shells begin to fall close to
them. After dark the wounded will arrive, carried on stretchers, rested
on men's shoulders, or pushed in wheelbarrows, to the hay-loft where a
doctor, working almost entirely without anæsthetics, treats such cases
as the doctors in the trench dressing-stations passed without attention.
By this time also, on a night when many wounded are arriving, six or
eight more American ambulances will be summoned by telephone. There
will be no headlights used; only a great swinging of lanterns and much
shouting back and forth in French and English. Although the firing
after dark will not be so general, one or two batteries will continue
to break out sharply every few minutes. One of our squad leaders will
be on hand as driver in charge of the situation. "Are you ready to
roll?" he will call to somebody as the doctor comes up and speaks to
him. A dark figure standing by a car will lean over and spin a crank,
an engine will sputter and pour forth smoke, for we must use a double
supply of oil on these grades. Then an ambulance will back up to the
door of the barn and the driver, leaving his engine throttled down,
will help in lifting the stretchers.
To go from this place to the sorting-point behind the lines to which
the wounded are taken is the worst run we have. It means almost always
wondering if your car will make the grades, if you acted properly in
letting yourself be persuaded to take three wounded instead of the
specified two. It means coming upon comrades _en panne_ and lending
a hand or hurrying on with the distress signal, stopping to pour
water into your boiling radiator, halting to pass convoys, arguments,
decisions, "_noms-de-Dieu_," backing to a wider place, wheels that
nearly go over the edge, pot-bellied munition-wagons that scrape off
your side boxes, getting into a ditch and having to be pulled out by
mules or pushed out by men.
It is a journey fraught with worry, for there is always the danger of
delay when delay may mean death and is sure to mean suffering for the
wounded in your car. And sometimes when, with bad cases aboard, you
are stuck and can't get out until somebody turns up to help you, it is
unbearable to stay near your car and hear their pitiful groans.
But the down part of the journey is full of more acute dangers. You are
at the mercy of your brakes. If they fail you, there is only the bank.
A quick turn of the steering-wheel and you are all right; that is,
there will be only a cruel shaking-up for the men you are carrying and
a broken radius rod or perhaps a smashed radiator. But this is better
than going over the bank and better than running amuck through a train
of mules with their deadly loads of explosives.
Only during the last two months have we been able to use the first ten
kilometres of this road at all. Even now for the climbing part of the
journey we take none but the more seriously wounded, leaving the rest
to be carried in light wagons pulled by mules, until they get to some
mountain-top relay-point where our cars are stationed. Most of these
relay-points are very close to one or several French batteries. Some of
them are established in the midst of thriving cantonments buried in the
woods and within sight of the German trenches on a sister mountain-top.
Others, farther removed from the enemy lines and higher above the level
of destruction, are on summits suitable only for the biggest of the
French guns and reached in turn only by the very long-range German guns.
[Illustration: THE HARVARD CLUB OF ALSACE RECONQUISE]
Such a place is a mountain-top at which we feel almost as much at home
as at our base, for eight of our cars are always on duty at this place,
each man serving for a week at a time, and one man being relieved every
day. It is one of those plateau-shaped eminences which are mentioned
in geographies as distinguishing the Vosges from the Alps and the
Pyrenees. It is treeless through exposure to the wind, and its
brow slopes gradually towards the French side, with a succession of
cuplike hollows tenanted by brush-covered bomb-proofs and dug-outs and
horse-sheds. Other than topographical concealments are also employed;
gray horses are dyed brown and groups of road-builders when at work in
some particularly exposed place carry, like the army that went against
Macbeth, umbrellas of branches.
We are housed here in a long, low shack built against the side of the
crest. Violent storms sometimes take the roof off this shack with the
consequent drenching of the surgeon in charge, ourselves, a half-dozen
stretcher-bearers and as many mule-drivers. Bunks are built crosswise
against the side of the walls, and over some of these bunks the words
"_Pour Intransportables_" are written. The rest, however, are occupied
by people on duty here, for it is merely a relay-point, and the
wounded, unless unable to stand a further journey or arriving by mules
in numbers greater than we can handle, are merely changed from one mode
of conveyance to another and given such attention in passing as they
may need.
When one of the beds for _intransportables_ is occupied, it generally
means that the man dies in a few days and is buried close by, a
corporal of stretcher-bearers, who was before the war a Roman Catholic
missionary in Ceylon, borrowing from one of us a camera to take for the
dead man's family a photograph of the isolated grave marked with one of
those simple wooden crosses from which no mile of northern France is
free. Deaths of this sort are peculiarly sad. Anybody who has nursed in
the wards of a military hospital will tell you how soldiers, seasoned
in trenches that high explosives and mines and hand-grenades have
turned into shambles, will grow gloomy when one man in their ward dies.
It is the same way with these single deaths and lonely funerals at the
front.
Generals, of course, stand for the "larger issues" of the war; it is
their decisions that figure in to-morrow's _communiqués_. But at the
front, doctors represent destiny in a much more picturesque way: it is
no use putting these _blessés_ in an ambulance; death will close over
them quite as gently here as twenty kilometres farther to the rear.
This man's rheumatism demands that he be sent to Lyons or Marseilles;
that one has five days in a base hospital and is in the trenches
for the next death revel. A business-like surgeon pronounces his
judgments in a ghastly _poste de secours_,--it is nothing compared with
"strategical necessities,"--it will have no place beside announcements
of yards of trenches taken and yards of trenches lost,--and yet, it is
life or death for some brave soldier and all in the world that counts
for some family circle.
These mountain-tops are often for weeks on end bathed in a heavy
mist varied by rainstorms. At such times when there is no work to
do,--and very frequently there are no wounded to carry for twenty-four
hours or more,--the surgeon, ourselves, the _brancardiers_, and the
mule-drivers, close in around the stove. One of these _brancardiers_,
or stretcher-carriers, was transferred after being wounded at the
battle of the Marne from the front-line troops to the Service
Sanitaire, and before the war he had served five years in the
Foreign Legion in Africa. His stories of this period are endless and
interesting, and, after listening to them for a week, we all go back to
our base calling soldiers nothing but _poilus_; coffee, _jus_; wine,
_pinard_; canned beef, _singe_; army organization, _système D_. There
is also a good deal of reading done by many of the Section on the rainy
days of no work. It is part of the daily relieving man's unofficial
but well-understood duties to bring along any magazines and newspapers
that he can get hold of, and generally, too, books gradually accumulate
and grow to be considered as a sort of library that must not be taken
away. Indeed, at one _poste de secours_ our library consists at present
of two or three French novels and plays, "The Newcomes," a two-volume
"Life of Ruskin," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," and "Les Misérables."
When a group of men are on duty at an isolated _poste de secours_ like
this, they take turns in carrying the wounded who may arrive, the
man who has made the last trip going to the bottom of the list. And
there is something comfortable about feeling that you are the last to
"roll" on a stormy night when every plank in the little hut rattles
and groans, when the wind shrieks in the desolate outside, when the
sinister glare of the trench rockets gleams through the heavy blackness
like a flash of lightning, and the wet mule-drivers who borrow a little
of your fire shake their heads and pointing towards the road say,
"_Un mauvais chemin_" And then, as you settle a little deeper in your
blankets and blow out your lantern and assure yourself for the last
time as to where your matches are and how much gasoline you have in
your tank, you are pretty apt to think, before you go to sleep, of the
men a little way off in the rain-soaked trenches.
They are certainly not very far away. Only over there on the next ridge
where the shells are exploding. They have been there, you know, without
relief for ten days. You remember when they marched up the mountain
to take their turn. How cheery and soldierlike they were! Not one of
them, like you, is sleeping in blankets. They won't, like you, go back
to-morrow to a pleasant dinner, with pleasant friends, in a pleasant
hotel, and out of sound, too, of those awful guns. Some will come back
and you will carry them in your ambulance. And some will never come
back at all. Well....
"Did I leave that spark-plug wrench under the car? God knows I can
never find it on a night like this and I change a plug every trip!"
"Wake up! Don't talk in your sleep!"
"What, is it my turn to roll? Wounded?"
"No, Steve is _en panne_ halfway down the mountain."
And you begin to take things in with one of the Section's _sous-chefs_
leaning over your cot with the news that the first man on the list has
a load of wounded and has met with an accident. The others are waked
up too. Some are left to take care of such other wounded as may arrive
and the rest form a rescue party. Two ride in the rescue ambulance;
two more probably walk. The wounded are moved from the broken-down car
to the other ambulance, and then daylight finds three or four of us
rain-drenched and mud-smeared, changing a brake-band or digging into a
carburetor.
The arrival of the relieving car at one of those posts on a rainy day,
when every one of us is to be found within twenty feet of the stove,
means a demand in chorus for mail and after that for news, especially
Section gossip from Headquarters, which means who has had to wash cars
and who has broken down _en route_.
"Number 52 runs like a breeze now. I drove it yesterday and it climbed
the _col_ on high with two wounded," the newcomer will say, producing
some contribution to the mess.
"And last night, there was a call for three cars at midnight. Didn't
any of the wounded come this way? So-and-So had magneto trouble
bringing back his first load. He said Henry Ford himself could not
have started the boat. So the repair car went out at four o'clock this
morning."
"That boy certainly has his troubles. Do you remember the time he had
two blow-outs and four punctures in twenty-four hours and then had all
his brake-bands go at once? It was two miles he ran to get another car
to take his wounded."
"He looked low when he came in about breakfast time," somebody else
will put in.
"I tell you he _will_ use too much oil. It goes through these old cars
like a dose of salts," a third will add.
On bad days the discussion will go on this way until time for the next
meal. But on clear days during summer and early autumn weather, we have
stayed indoors very little. The air is champagne-like and the view on
all sides magnificent. It is possible, also, from a number of these
eminences to follow in a fascinating fashion the progress of artillery
duels, and, with a good pair of glasses, even to see infantry advancing
to the attack. When the cannonading is heavy the whole horizon pops and
rumbles and from the sea of green mountains spread out before you rise
puffs of shrapnel smoke, flaky little clouds about the size of a man's
hand and pale against the tree-tops, as one thinks of death as pale.
They hover, sometimes too many at a time to count, above the mountains
and then sink down again into the general greenness. The sky, too, is
generally dotted with these same little flaky clouds when aeroplanes
are abroad. And aeroplanes are abroad every fair day, for they are
seldom or never hit and brought down, although the anti-aircraft guns,
especially when hedging them in with "barrier fire," seem to limit
their activities.
Soldiers, as I have said, march by these posts on their way to and from
the trenches. Whenever they are allowed to break ranks near our cars
they crowd around us with little bottles in their hands asking for
gasoline to put in cigarette lighters which they make out of German
bullets. Most of these men belong to battalions of Chasseurs Alpins,
and I do not suppose there are any finer soldiers in the world than
those stocky, merry-eyed men from the mountain provinces of France,
with their picturesque caps and their dark-blue coats set off by their
horison-blue trousers. They are called, indeed, the "blue devils," and
when the _communiqués_ say, "After a heavy shelling of some of the
enemy heights in the Vosges our infantry advanced to the attack and
succeeded in taking so many of the enemy trenches," it is probably the
Chasseurs Alpins who have led the way in the face of the hand-grenades
and machine-gun fire and the streams of burning oil that, in this
country especially, make the "meaning of a mile" so terrible.
One of our Section who was compelled to return to America the other
day took with him as his single keepsake a crumpled photograph with
a signature scrawled in one corner. It was of a _sous-officier_ of
a famous battalion of Chasseurs Alpins. His heavy pack was jauntily
thrown over his shoulders; his _berret_ was rakishly tilted to one
side; and on his breast gleamed the green and red ribbon of the _Croix
de Guerre_, the crimson of the _Légion d'Honneur_, and the yellow of
the _Médaille Militaire_.
You could find no better symbol of the laughing gallantry, the sturdy
strength, and the indomitable courage of France.