American Volunteers on the Western Front
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pencil, sometimes written with the pocket fountain pen, they sent to their chief, Piatt Andrew, and he has placed these unpublished day-by-day records of two hundred men at my disposal..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 1/2 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 Chemmeille, 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 deco- rated. 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 tip. 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 war 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 8oo 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 Cbs 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 "élite" 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 Detachement 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 tome when this thing is over will be to go to the telephone in New York and call up Francois.
"'That you, Francois? Come and let's have dinner together and talk over the big fight.'
"Francois is a Chasseur Alpin. I've been seeing him up on the mountain. He was the second cook at the Knickerbocker Hotel, and the finest gentleman I ever knew."
from a German-language American magazine 'Deutsch-Amerika'
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 Vauvilars, 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 chateaus. He drives Piatt Andrew on his tours of inspection. He is a gifted and furious driver, and on out 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 baseball 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 over-board 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 75’s 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.
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 pre vent 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 bad 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 night 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 light. 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 under-going 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.
director of the American Ambulance Field Service
French Certificate for Members of the American Ambulance Field Service
