[Illustration]
[Illustration]
_Weeks of Quiet_
With the change of conductors N{o} 170 has fallen upon evil times. She
has carried meat and bread for the Section, and even coal; she has run
through miles of snowstorm to bring relief to those who were suffering
from toothache, scarlatina, or mumps; and she has patiently borne
_permissionnaires_ from hospital to railroad station; but the shriek of
shot and shell has become entirely unfamiliar to her ears. At first it
was the fault of the conductor, who had never conducted before reaching
Bordeaux, and only some half-dozen times between leaving Bordeaux and
arriving in Alsace. He was not adjudged capable of conducting up any
mountain in general nor up the slopes adjoining Hartmannsweilerkopf
in particular. He went up once or twice without 170, to inspect and
experience, but it is an experience of which a little goes a long way
when not prompted by duty. Afterward it was the fault of those who sit
in the seats of the mighty, and still is, and apparently will remain
so; but at no time was 170 to blame.
We left Alsace one morning early in February when the valleys were
filled with tinted mist and the snowy hill-slopes were glowing pink
with sunrise, and we hated doing it. Various reasons have been offered
for our departure by various persons in authority,--but none of them
satisfactory and convincing,--and we still look back upon it as the
Promised Land. We formed a convoy of twenty-three cars, in which 170
was placed immediately behind the leader--an arrangement to which
twenty-one persons objected. Every time the side boxes came open and
the extra tins of gasoline scattered over the landscape, or when the
engine stopped through lack of sympathy with the engineer, three or
four cars would manage to slip by. It was a sort of progressive-euchre
party in which 170 never held a winning hand. No one concerned had the
least idea whither we were headed. The first night we spent at Rupt,
where there is an automobile park. We took it on hearsay that there was
an automobile park, for we left the next morning without having seen
it; but when two days later we joined the Twentieth Army Corps--the
Fighting Twentieth--at Moyen, we were reported as coming straight from
the automobile park at Rupt. Consequently we were assumed to be ready
for indefinite service "to the last button of the last uniform," and
when we had explained that mechanically speaking our last uniform was
on its last button the Fighting Twentieth shook us off.
However, we spent a week at Moyen--in it up to our knees. The
surrounding country was dry and almost dusty, but Moyen has an
atmosphere of its own and local color--and the streets are not
clean. Yet to most of us the stay was intensely interesting. It lies
just back of the high-water mark of German invasion, and the little
villages and towns round about show like the broken wreckage tossed
up by the tide--long streets of roofless, blackened ruins, and in
the midst the empty skeleton of a church. The tower has usually been
pierced by shells, and the broken chimes block the entrance. Nothing
has been done to alter or disguise. The fields surrounding are pitted
with shell craters, which have a suggestive way of lining the open
roads; along the edge of the roads are rifle pits and shallow trenches
filled with a litter of cartridge boxes and bits of trampled uniform
and accoutrement, blue and red, or greenish gray, mixed together, and
always and everywhere the long grave mounds with the little wooden
crosses which are a familiar feature of the landscape. It lacks,
perhaps, the bald grim cruelty of Hartmannsweilerkopf, but it is a
place not to be forgotten.
From Moyen we moved on to Tantonville, a place not lacking in material
comforts, but totally devoid of soul; and from there we still make
our round of posts--of one, two, or four cars, and for two, four,
or eight days. In some, the work is fairly constant, carrying the
sick and second-hand wounded from post to hospital and from hospital
to railroad; in others, one struggles against mental and physical
decay--and it is from the latter of these in its most aggravated form
that the present communication is penned.
At Oëlleville, we saw the class of 1916 called out,--brave,
cheerful-looking boys, standing very straight at attention as their
officers passed down the line, and later, as we passed them on the
march, cheering loudly for "_les Américains_"--and so marching on to
the open lid of hell at Verdun. The roads were filled with soldiers,
and every day and all day the troop-trains were rumbling by to the
north, and day after day and week after week the northern horizon
echoed with the steady thunder of artillery. Sometimes, lying awake
in the stillness of dawn to listen, one could not count the separate
explosions, so closely did they follow each other. The old man who used
to open the railway gate for me at Dombasle would shake his head and
say that we ought to be up at Verdun, and once a soldier beside him
told him that we were neutrals and not supposed to be sent under fire.
I heard that suggestion several times made, and one of our men used to
carry in his pocket a photograph of poor Hall's car to refute it.
There was a momentary thrill of interest when a call came for four cars
to Baccarat--a new post and almost on the front; there was an English
Section there in need of assistance, and we four who went intended
to "show them how." But it seemed that the call had come too late and
the pressing need was over; the last batch of German prisoners had
been brought in the day before and the active fighting had ceased.
We stepped into the long wooden cabin where they waited--the German
wounded--and they struggled up to salute--a more pitiful, undersized,
weak-chested, and woe-begone set of human derelicts I hope never to
see again in uniform; and as we stood among them in our strong, warm
clothes, for it was snowing outside, all of us over six feet tall, I
felt suddenly uncomfortable and ashamed.
The officer in charge of the administration said that a car was needed
to go down the valley to Saint-Dié, but we must be very careful for
Saint-Dié was under bombardment. Once we were startled at lunch time
by an explosion near the edge of town. Three of us stepped to the
door. We were eating the rarity of blood sausage and the fourth man
kept his seat to help himself from the next man's plate. As we looked
out there came a second explosion a little farther off, and then in
a few moments a telephone call for an ambulance, with the news that
a Taube had struck a train. When I reached the place the train had
gone on, carrying ten slightly wounded to Lunéville, and I brought
back the other two on stretchers--one a civilian struck in a dozen
places, but otherwise apparently in excellent health and spirits; the
other was a soldier in pretty bad shape. It must have been excellent
markmanship for the Taube, since we had seen nothing in the clear blue
sky overhead nor heard the characteristic whir of the motor, and yet
both shell craters were very close to the tracks. In Alsace they were
constantly in sight, but seldom attacked and almost never scored a hit,
while the French gunners seemed perfectly happy to fire shrapnel at
them all afternoon with the same indecisive result. One could not even
take the white shrapnel clouds as a point of departure in looking for
the aeroplane--though the French artillery is very justly famous for
its accuracy of fire. In this instance as in all air raids the success
scored seemed pitifully futile, for it was not a military train,
and most of the wounded were noncombatants. It had added its little
unnecessary mite of suffering, and of hatred to the vast monument
which Germany has reared to herself and by which she will always be
remembered.