The Project Gutenberg eBook of Old Glory and Verdun, and other stories
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Title: Old Glory and Verdun, and other stories
Author: Elizabeth Frazer
Release date: December 5, 2025 [eBook #77406]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Duffield & Company, 1918
Credits: Tom Trussel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD GLORY AND VERDUN, AND OTHER STORIES ***
OLD GLORY AND
VERDUN
[Illustration:
_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information._
_Copyright, 1918, by Underwood & Underwood, New York City._
_Reproduced from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia._
WHAT REMAINED OF A FRENCH FIELD HOSPITAL AFTER A
GERMAN INCENDIARY SHELL HIT IT.]
OLD GLORY AND
VERDUN
And Other Stories
BY
ELIZABETH FRAZER
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1918
Copyright, 1918, Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright, 1918, Duffield & Company
CONTENTS
PAGE
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 3
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 39
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 77
THE CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 107
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 143
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 186
BEHIND CHÂTEAU-THIERRY 223
THE SPITE ATTACK 269
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
What Remained of a French Field Hospital After
a German Incendiary Shell Hit It _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Refugees from the Gassed Districts 110
The Commanding Officer of the Citadel of Verdun 188
Tent-Ward Showing Damage by German Bombs 270
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN
WARD EIGHTY-THREE
It was my first morning at the hospital. The clock in the _vestiaire_
stood at five minutes to eight. At eight I was to begin work. “Report
for duty” was the way the formal summons ran. I was to report to Ward
Eighty-three, the biggest, the heaviest and the most interesting ward
in the hospital. Mrs. Monroe, who had charge of the untrained and
unpaid volunteer nurses--or _auxiliaires_, as they are termed--had
told me to await her in the _vestiaire_. Accordingly I waited, feeling
awkward and strange and timid, like a Freshman on his first day at
college.
To say that I was nervous would be considerably understating the case.
Ever since entering the stone portal of the big American war hospital
that morning, I had been smitten with a deadly ague of fear--fear lest
in my abysmal ignorance I should do the wrong thing at the wrong time,
or fail to do the right thing at the right time, and a man should
die as the consequence--a man; a real, live, breathing man--one of
those gay, muscular, bright-eyed little boy soldiers of France, with
cigarettes perched rakishly behind their ears, that I had seen crowding
the streets of Paris on their brief _permissions_ from the Front!
Suddenly it came to me that fastening a handkerchief round the eyes
of a blinking but obliging friend was a vastly different affair
from fastening a firm, nonslippable bandage across the sockets of a
man whose eyes have been torn out by a ball. And how did one stop
a hemorrhage? You tied something somewhere. That was the extent of
my knowledge on that point. In the confusion of my mind, I had even
forgotten how to rescue a drowning man, a formula which has always
fascinated me and which I have memorized at intervals ever since the
age of ten, thinking that some day in such a fashion I might rescue
my future husband. In short, all the carefully acquired artificial
knowledge I had been able to absorb in a three-months’ First Aid Course
in New York, all the data, the neat lists of questions and answers, had
faded clean out of me, like a cheap dye, now that I was faced up with
the immediate and grim reality.
That course, and the light-heartedness with which I had pursued it,
seemed all at once to me very remote, irrelevant to the present
situation, and somehow like a joke in bad taste. I perceived, or I
believed I perceived, that I was in a false situation. I had no
business in that _vestiaire_, in that white uniform and coif. If at
that moment there had been a train waiting outside the _vestiaire_ door
bound for the Grand Central Station, I should have taken it without
a second’s hesitation. There being none, I consoled myself with the
reflection that, after all, I had not asked to come; that, on the
contrary, I had been sent for and urged to begin without delay, as
the hospital was undermanned at this summer-vacation season, and the
wounded were pouring in, a great steady stream, from the base hospitals.
Moreover, I should not be alone, like a sentinel on his post. Over me,
the _auxiliaire_, was the trained nurse; over the trained nurse was the
head nurse; over the head nurse was the doctor of the ward; over the
doctor was the assistant surgeon; over the assistant surgeon was the
chief surgeon, or _médicin chef_; and over all of us, interlocking us
together, was the French military system and the invisible but potent
Papa Joffre. So that if I, alone, could not stop a hemorrhage, I could
call my trained nurse; if she could not stop it, she could call the
head nurse; if the two of them could not stop it, they could call the
ward doctor; and if he could not stop it--but at this point I felt
myself on safe ground. The affair was out of my hands!
“Have you ever had to stop a hemorrhage?” I voiced my secret fear to
a young Englishwoman beside me, who was rapidly changing from her
civilian costume into the crisp white linen _infirmière’s_ blouse of
the wards.
“_Mon Dieu_, no!” She laughed as she pinned on her coif. “Not a chance,
with so many nurses round. You’ll have plenty of chance, though, to
wash their feet--those that still have feet,” she added soberly. “Is
this your first day?”
I nodded.
“And did you have any training--I mean any real training--before you
entered?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I took an examination in London; but the examiner
was so weary by the time he got to me that he merely said, ‘Have you
had the usual course?’ And when I replied ‘Yes,’ he simply passed me
through. But it doesn’t matter. You soon pick things up. What’s your
ward?”
“Eighty-three.”
She raised her brows at that and glanced at my feet.
“I hope you have comfortable shoes! That ward is the hardest in the
hospital--nothing but big primary cases; every single _blessé_ in bed.
You’ll have no chance to go to sleep at the switch,” she added with
a smile. “If your feet hurt to-night, rub them with cold cream, then
alcohol; and lie with them up on the footboard of your bed. It takes
the swelling out. Have you read the rules?” She waved her hand toward a
printed sheet tacked upon the wall, nodded and hurried off.
I faced round, feeling more than ever like a Freshman on his first day,
and read the following:
“AMERICAN AMBULANCE
“CONDITIONS FOR AUXILIARY SERVICE
“The _auxiliaires_ work under the trained nurses. They do not, as a
rule, attend at operations; nor do they do the dressings, although
they might be called upon to do a minor dressing, should the nurse
consider them sufficiently experienced. The hours are from eight
A. M. to six P. M. daily, with one whole day free one week, and
one afternoon free the following week. _Auxiliaires_ are asked to
stay three months at least; six months if possible. The service
is entirely voluntary, and _auxiliaires_ must meet all their own
expenses. Luncheon is provided at the Ambulance at a cost of 1.50
francs a meal----”
At this juncture the _vestiaire_ door opened again. I wheeled--I had
been wheeling every time it opened for the last ten minutes!--and Mrs.
Monroe’s brisk voice said:
“‘Ah, there you are! Sorry to have kept you waiting. I’ll just take you
to Miss Brooks, the head nurse of Salle Eighty-three, and she’ll tell
you where to begin.’”
Five minutes later introductions had been effected. Miss Brooks, who,
together with the doctor, two other nurses and an orderly, was bending
over a bed from which proceeded loud screams of “_Oh, là là! Oh, là
là!! Oh, là là!!! Bon Dieu! Doucement! Oh, là là!_” turned to the nurse
beside her and said briefly:
“Here’s your auxiliary, Miss Ransome. Is there anything she can start
on?”
Miss Ransome did not even glance up. She was holding, firmly grasped
in both hands, a man’s leg, stiffly extended, while the doctor lifted
pieces of gauze from what appeared to be a deep bloody and suppurating
crater in the thigh.
“One moment, please,” she murmured.
The dressing of the wound continued. The man renewed his high agonized
cries: “_Oh, là là! Oh, Nom d’un Nom! Doucement!_--Gently there!”
I stood aside and drew a deep breath. The quality of anguish in those
tones had already turned me pale. Later I was to learn to discriminate
between sounds of pain. There is the loud outcry of the man who is
not in extreme pain, but whose nerves have been so battered by shock,
exposure and continued strain that he is no longer master of himself.
Second, there is the scream of the man, also suffering from shock and
abnormally sensitive, who howls at the mere approach of the doctor.
And finally, there is the cry of the plucky soul, strong to endure,
but whose agony has passed the limit of human endurance. Such a cry,
bursting out across the ward, simply stampedes the nerves; heard
suddenly in the middle of the night it would fetch one out of bed in a
single leap, panic-stricken with horror; and even in a big hospital,
where innumerable sounds of pain blunt the ear, it still takes the
right of way, momentarily stilling the air. As the days went on I
was to learn these fine discriminations; but at present all screams
were alike to me. I gave each one full value, one hundred per cent of
anguish.
While the dressing proceeded I looked about me. Salle Eighty-three was
a spacious airy room, lofty-ceiled, with tessellated stone floors, and
long French windows on two sides. One set of windows gave upon the rear
of the building, and the other side opened on a charming French garden
round which the huge structure is built, one room deep, in the shape of
a hollow square. Inside the salle the beds were ranged round the four
sides and came halfway down the center, forming thus two passages that
were none too wide for the busy morning traffic.
Everyone, I perceived, was already working under a full head of steam.
Two doctors were in the ward, one on each side, and the dressings were
progressing steadily from bed to bed. A nurse preceded the doctors,
cutting down the bandages. The air was thick with cries and groans, the
cry of “_Doucement!_ Easy there!” prevailing high above all others like
a monotonous refrain. French military orderlies were hurrying about,
their arms piled high with stained linen; two blowzy-cheeked little
_femmes de chambre_ were down on their knees scrubbing the stone floor,
their tongues and their _sabots_ clattering together. Ahead of them
a bent old woman, with a great red hooked nose and a wide toothless
smile, hideous as one of Shakespere’s witches, was passing from bed to
bed, gathering up the cigarette butts, chaffing the men and exchanging
with them jests as broad as they were good-natured.
It was evident she was a prime favorite, for it was “_Grand’mère!_”
“_Grand’mère!_” straight down the line, and chuckles followed in the
wake of her sallies like bubbles on a stream. Here and there patients
able to sit up in bed had removed their _chemises_ and were soaping
their chests with gusto. These _Grand’mère_ favored with take-offs on
their manly beauty. Bursts of laughter punctuated her hits.
“Here are your men,” said Miss Ransome, joining me--“these twelve.
You’re not responsible for the others. Suppose you begin with Claudius
there. Wash him. Rub his back with alcohol. Then make his bed. Watch
out for his broken leg!” she cautioned.
And she nodded toward that unfortunate member, which, swathed as stiff
as that of a mummy and dotted with numerous little rubber tubes that
sprouted up through the bandages like unnatural flowers, was swung out
upon an extension and held taut by a jungle of pulleys and bags and
weights.
“He’s had a hard time,” she continued in a lowered voice. “What with
losing his eye and getting his leg infected--you see, he lay wounded
four days and four nights on the battlefield, without water, before he
was finally rescued--he’s had a tough pull. For weeks we thought he
would die. But he fooled us all--didn’t you, Claudius?”
As she spoke English, the boy did not understand. He lay regarding
her with a bright dark eye, all the brighter for the black patch
which covered its companion; and finally he asked in tones of weary
politeness:
“You said, mees?”
“Change all his linen,” she pursued unheeding. “He can raise himself an
inch or two. When he’s finished, go straight down the line and do the
same to the others. I can’t help you much this morning.”
And she hurried away, leaving me with my first task--to wash the back
and change the entire bed linen of a man who could not stir more than
an inch or two without exquisite pain!
“_Bonjour_,” I said by way of commencement. “_Comment ça va?_--How goes
it?”
“Bad. Very bad. That imbecile pig of a leg! Not a moment’s rest did it
give me last night. Cramp, cramp, cramp!” He clenched and unclenched
his fist with nervous irritability to indicate the nature of the pain,
while the flare of crimson in his thin cheeks testified to a heightened
temperature. “I wish you’d cut it off to-night,” he growled, “and stand
it over in the corner.”
“I will--with my scissors,” I promised. “And to-morrow, if it’s been
good, we’ll fasten it back on with safety pins.”
“You needn’t bother,” he grinned.
With many gaspings and painful grimaces he got hold of an overhead
hand grip, dug his head deep into the pillow and managed to raise
himself until his back described a parabola perhaps two inches above
the bed. “Quick! Quick!” he commanded breathlessly. I washed him as
best I could. Afterward I glanced up at the chart hanging behind his
bed and read there: “Simondon, Claudius. Age, 21. Wounded May 25, 1916.
Admitted June 7, 1916.” Claudius, aged twenty-one, had already white
hairs in his head, and his slight figure was shrunken and yellow and
dry, like that of a little old man. At the same time there was about
him something unquenchably boyish and debonair, which made one wish to
weep.
“Have you ever been in a charge?” I asked, to divert his attention.
“Yes; ten of them. Not interesting! Not interesting at all! You stand
there in a trench, water up to your knees, holding your gun and waiting
for the order. You are cold, and still you perspire. You tremble with
agitation. Maybe you stand thus for hours. Or you climb over the
parapet and run. If the Boches retreat, yes, then it is interesting.
If they come on, no, not interesting. Not interesting at all!” And
he looked up at me with his sardonic grin. “War,” he added, “is the
stupidest game that a fellow with wits can play at.”
A minute later he confided to me that he was to receive a decoration.
He was to receive the Croix de Guerre.
“But that is fine!” I exclaimed.
“Ah, you think so?” jeered Claudius. “It’s very fine, without doubt;
but as for me, I’d rather have my eye than that pretty little medal
hung on my chest. Can I see the world with that little medal? _Zut!_ I
prefer my eye--thanks.”
For the moment his nonchalance completely deceived me. It was not
until several days later when I came upon him unobserved, poring over
the official notice of his decoration, and caught the look of pride,
of emotion in the young face, that I really got the matter straight.
Twenty-one is twenty-one the world over, and always hides its loves.
After washing Claudius and rubbing his back with alcohol, I made his
bed. In France the bed is a sacred institution and the making of one
is not a proper subject for jest. But I am not jesting when I say that
the ordinary, casually made American bed, with its opportunities for
ventilation and its light loose covers which one may kick joyously down
to the foot in the morning, would fill the average Frenchwoman with
amazement and scorn.
A French bed is something in the nature of a cocoon, with a hole
in the upper right-hand corner, into which one artfully insinuates
oneself at night, and from which one artfully disengages oneself in the
morning. All apertures, save the small one at the top, are hermetically
sealed--so tightly are the sheets drawn under the mattress, so smoothly
are the covers laid on, so exquisitely are the corners mitered. One is
all but sewed into bed.
To make such a bed is to produce a work of art, a creation. Thus, Jean
and Marie made my bed every morning at the hotel, folding on each layer
as close as the successive skins of an onion, while I watched them with
respectful admiration. Once, feeling too warm in the middle of the
night, I tried to remove a blanket. I struggled until four o’clock the
next morning. Next time I am going to send for professional wreckers.
But the making of such a bed is, after all, a comparatively simple
affair--for I am not in it! Let us denominate it Class C in order of
difficulty. Class B is the making of such a bed with an occupant, but
an occupant who can help himself--stir about. Class A is the making of
such a bed with an immovable man in it; a man, moreover, attached to a
network of apparatus--cords, pulleys, overhead weights and drains, all
in such delicate adjustment that to jar any of them will wrench a cry
of torture from the occupant.
To this last class belonged the bed of Claudius. When, after
three-quarters of an hour’s labor, punctuated by many exclamations of
“_Doucement! Doucement!_” I straightened myself, Claudius was rather
white and I was perspiring freely. Still, that bed was made--it really
should be written Made!--and I surveyed it proudly. The lower sheet in
particular had been difficult to dispose properly. To me it appeared
at least twice too long for the mattress, and in the end I had simply
wadded up the extra yards of length and tucked them under the pillows.
It was during this latter operation when Justin, the orderly, came
upon me. Justin is a squat, grotesque little old man, with the head
of a gargoyle set on powerful Atlas-like shoulders. Being an orderly
is his _métier_. He has been one in a French military hospital for
twenty years, which is to say that Justin is a very wise man. I believe
he could give points to Solomon, for Solomon was not a Frenchman. He
regarded my bungling efforts for a moment in silence, and then said in
tones of grave reproach:
“Ah, mademoiselle, it is not thus we make a bed in France! Permit me.”
Saying which, he stripped the bed bare to the mattress and made it
afresh, with the subtle perfection of Jean and Marie. My crumpled
undersheet was drawn taut as a drumhead. Followed in swift succession
the drawsheet, the top sheet and the blankets, smooth as rose petals
and as firmly fixed.
Where, meantime, was Claudius, with his weak back, his smashed leg and
his jungle of apparatus? Not a single cry had escaped him. A glance
showed his thin dark face alight with amusement as he watched old
Justin teach the strange “mees” how to make a bed with a live Frenchman
in it.
“_V’là!_” said Justin, straightening himself. “That’s the way we make a
bed in France!” And he padded noiselessly off in his battered blue list
slippers; it had taken him exactly six minutes by the ward clock.
The next bed, when I turned down the covers, revealed a patient whose
linen was saturated and stiff with blood. Another undersheet to
manipulate!
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” came a faint moan from the pillows.
“Where are you wounded?” I inquired, for this is the first fact a maker
of beds must determine.
“Both legs broken below the knees,” was the feeble reply.
“Don’t stop to do him now,” said Miss Ransome, approaching the bed.
“He’s just been brought in and is going up for operation. You can make
his bed while he is away. Look at those feet!” she exclaimed, pointing.
I looked. Beneath the caked and dried blood from his wounds the mud of
the Somme was ground into his skin until it was blackened as if from
powder.
“Some of them are worse than that!” said she. “Last week there came
in to us a little _poilu_, straight from the first-line trenches of
Verdun. How long he had been without a wash even he himself did not
know. The doctor gave one long-range sniff and said hastily: ‘Send him
to the baths!’ It seemed, however, that he was not acquainted with
baths--at least not in the ‘all-together’ and in an American bathtub;
for the attendants said that he fought like a wild cat--and when he
came back he was crying! He had faced the cannon at Verdun; he had
been smashed to pieces by a shell, and had his leg cut off up to his
thigh with only a local anæsthetic without flinching; but he wept with
fear at sight of an American bath and demanded to be sent back to the
trenches!”
The bedmaking went on, somewhat raggedly to be sure, for on those first
days I was obsessed by an absurd and fantastic fear that sometime when
I pulled away the drawsheet I should pull away also a mangled leg upon
it. There was one bed, however, which I grew to enjoy making, and that
was the bed of Grandpère--fat, dirty, profane, cross-grained, whimsical
old Grandpère. He was notorious in the ward as a grouch. Claudius
declared that he had been jilted in love and had had the “black
butterflies” ever since. He was what is known as an endless-chain
smoker. He lighted one cigarette from the end of another and kept
going the entire day through, with the result that his _chemise_ front
was always full of little burnt holes and powdered thick with ashes.
Nor was his bed much better. One swept out of it each morning aluminum
filings, chunks of bread, apple parings, handkerchiefs, books,
nutshells, letters, as well as innumerable little pillows and pads
with which Grandpère combated the hated “currents of air” from the
open windows. The fact was, he got no peace day or night from a badly
infected leg, and sometimes he was hard driven for diversion.
Between him and a certain substitute nurse in the ward there
existed a violent and mutual antipathy. She was an excellent nurse
professionally, but hard, brusque in manner, and without a single
word of French to build a bridge of sympathy between herself and
her patients, among whom she was known as the old _mitrailleuse_.
Between her and Grandpère was waged a fierce battle each morning over
the making of his bed. She lectured him roundly in English for his
untidiness, and Grandpère retorted volubly in French, with a vocabulary
that would have enchanted a cow-puncher. She was displeased with the
state of his _chemises_, and Grandpère was highly displeased with her
displeasure.
“What is she saying, the old _mitrailleuse_?” he would whisper to me,
his little gray eyes gleaming with mischievous humor. “Why has she
always the great anger?”
“She says you smoke too much--that your bed is full of trash.”
“But, _mon Dieu_, that is my sole distraction! And what else?”
“She says you burn holes in your _chemise_ and that it is always
covered with ashes.”
“But--my word!--does she know nothing, then, of the laws of Nature--the
old Anglaise!--that ashes always tumble downward, not upward; and that
fire always burns? Can I make the ashes go upward into the air? I am
not God. I am only a Frenchman.”
An hour later he would beckon me secretly over to his side, point to a
fresh perforation of his _chemise_, a fresh sprinkling of ashes, and
whisper gleefully:
“Tell the old _mitrailleuse_ to come and sweep me out again!”
He enjoyed the encounters! And as they were, indeed, his sole
distraction through weary days, I sometimes humored him.
The dressings, meantime, continued, with their unceasing accompaniment
of groans and cries of “_Doucement!_” A young surgeon told me that
_doucement_ was the first French word he acquired; and undeniably it
is the word oftenest heard during the dressings period. This does not
signify that the patients are, as a rule, given to outcry. On the
contrary, these young Frenchmen endure the intensest pain with a kind
of smiling white fortitude that brings a furtive tear to the eye.
Let me take, for example, the demeanors of the three whose beds are
on a little sleeping porch on the terrace--Claudius, François, Emile.
Their being on the terrace carries its own significant hint of special
weakness. Of these three, Claudius, when under extreme stress, shuts
tightly his one eye, thrusts his knuckles into his mouth and bites them
until they bleed. If the pain has shaken him unendurably, when the
doctor and the nurses depart he puts a pillow over his face and weeps
into it silently.
François, on the other hand, an idyllically handsome aristocratic youth
of twenty-one, with a smashed arm and leg, takes an opposite course.
He looks his pain squarely in the face as if it were an adversary,
with an assumption of nonchalant scorn. Under a particularly painful
dressing or probe his eyes grow steely and narrow, while his lips
under the little golden brown mustache begin to smile sternly. As the
pain increases, that smile becomes more distinct, more contemptuous
and challenging. I have a notion that secretly François loves pain for
the opportunity it affords him to test the fine unblunted steel of his
young courage.
Emile, a Breton lad of twenty-two, with a ball through his lungs, has
a different reaction. He hoists himself painfully up in bed, stares
out upon the garden with his mystical blue eyes, coughs, winces; and
at the end he lays himself down again, gasping, and says gently, “Sank
you, mees!” That is all, a soft “Sank you, mees!” spoken in English to
please me! Of those three reactions Emile’s is the hardest to bear.
In lively contrast to these is the conduct of Grandpère. Grandpère no
longer has any romantic illusions to sustain, no youthful reticences.
The first article in his creed is that if you suffer pain you should
yell. If it makes you feel better, begin to yell beforehand. And curse!
Use all the powers of protest the good God has given you. Accordingly
from the first to the last moment of a dressing he lets himself out, so
to speak, and the entire ward chuckles over his choice list of epithets.
But, despite the amount of concentrated pain that it holds, the big
airy ward is much more a place of laughter than of depression and
gloom. When the dressings are finished, and the aftermath of painful
throbbing has died down, the natural life and vivacity of fifty
Frenchmen reassert themselves. They banter and chaff each other and
discuss every discussible or undiscussible subject under the sun.
Naturally the present struggle comes in for the lion’s share of debate;
nor is the feeling concerning it by any means unanimous. In that small
bedfast community are ardent imperialists, conservatives, radicals,
syndicalists and philosophic anarchists; and each one of them takes a
hack at the great conflict from his own angle of vision. Nor have they
within them the hate for the German that seems to animate some of the
spectators on the side lines. At any rate he is not a monster; in
fact, one was forced to believe from their many stories of good will
that the average German was really almost human!
“What do you think of the Germans?” a young soldier asked me suddenly
one day as I was taking his temperature.
“Their methods, you mean? I thought there were no two opinions on that.”
“Very well!” he retorted. “Then you take the French side and I’ll take
the German side, and we’ll discuss the subject. Begin, if you please.”
“No; you begin!” I said, rather curious to hear what a wounded
Frenchman would have to say in defense of his foe.
He talked for ten minutes, brilliantly, earnestly, caustically, holding
the thermometer like a cigarette in one corner of his mouth; and at the
end of that time he had proved not indeed that the Germans were right,
but that war itself was so intrinsically degrading and hellish--despite
what romanticists might say to the contrary of its elevating spiritual
effect on the soul--that it exerted a debasing influence on whoever
engaged in it, be he German, French, English, Russian or American.
“War is a rotten business for the individual,” he wound up soberly.
“And don’t let them sidetrack you by saying it’s the Germans. They’re
not monsters. It’s war itself that’s the monster. It’s a bad microbe.
A mean little soul it poisons, and a big soul it poisons also. The
physical wounds--like this,” he touched his bandaged shoulder--“you can
see. The wounds on the soul are invisible. But, believe me, they exist
just the same, and are even more ghastly. I know!” And he handed back
the thermometer with a smile.
The real word-battles, however, take place between themselves.
Sometimes an argument lasts for weeks, and they have a go at it every
fine afternoon, wrestling with each other like the conversational
experts they are. Sometimes it is only a brief but hot dispute. It
was one of the latter that took place about a month after my arrival,
between François and Claudius. That particular afternoon a concert was
impending. It was to be given in the garden by a crack Belgian military
band, and programs had just been handed round.
Claudius looked over his card and I saw his expressive face darken.
“The Marseillaise isn’t down!” he exclaimed. “If they haven’t the
courtesy to play the French national air to wounded French soldiers in
a French military hospital, I, for one, shall not listen to their old
concert. I shall sleep!”
Saying which, he scornfully tossed the program over into the garden and
composed himself for slumber. But François, who was feeling gay that
day, could not permit such a remark to pass.
“I don’t think so highly of that Marseillaise!” he remarked languidly,
but with the light of battle in his eyes. “It’s not a good song. On the
contrary, it’s a very bad song.”
Claudius’ one eye popped wide open. He fairly leaped into the combat.
“What!” he exclaimed, flushing with anger. “You say the Marseillaise is
not a good song? You say this is not good?” And, propping himself up on
one elbow, his eye still blazing, he chanted the immortal battle cry:
“‘_Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons! Marchons!
Qu’un sang impur,
Abreuve nos sillons._’
“_Voilà!_” cried Claudius, his voice shaky with emotion. “You dare to
say that is not a good song?”
“Ah, the music’s all right,” admitted François loftily. “It’s the
words.”
“And what’s the matter with the words? Why aren’t they good?”
“Why?” said François coolly. “Because they incite to carnage! ‘_Formez
vos bataillons!_’ But what for? To kill somebody! No, no; such words
are not good.”
The irrefutable logic of this, Claudius chose to ignore.
“You are not a true Frenchman,” he declared scornfully.
François began to smile--the cold distinct smile of the dressing hour.
He glanced round for a weapon. A cup of wine stood on his bedside
table. His fingers closed round it.
“Say that again!” he remarked pleasantly.
Claudius’ hand had likewise gripped his wineglass. Of the two he was
much more passionate. He glared hardily and began:
“You’re not a----”
The head nurse appeared opportunely on the threshold.
“François,” she said severely, “you know you mustn’t drink that wine
when you’re going up for operation!”
François looked at the nurse, at me, at the wine in his cup, and from
thence to Claudius, who by now was grinning broadly.
“I wasn’t going to drink it,” he observed mildly. “I was going to give
it to the _camarade_, there!”
And he proffered it gravely to Claudius, who drank it down with equal
politeness; then suddenly both of them tumbled back on their pillows
and went off into boyish little yips of laughter under the startled
eyes of the nurse. And, to finish off the episode, the Belgian band
really played the Marseillaise after all.
The first few weeks I was in the ward we were enlivened each morning
by the performance of Clarice. Clarice was a hen; and every day, at
precisely ten o’clock, she laid an egg. It happened in this way: There
was a young one-armed soldier, an opera singer before the war, who, for
the amusement of his companions, would lie upon his bed and with his
voice conjure all the animals of the farmyard into lively existence.
The deep growl of the watchdog, the grunting of a pig, the whickering
of horses down in the meadow, the lordly crow of the cock, the busy
cackling of the hen--he reproduced them all with startling realism. The
hen, in particular, he loved to delineate.
The sound would start suddenly under one of the hospital beds--the
low Tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck! of a hen talking softly to herself as she
scratched in the hay.
“Sh! It’s Clarice! She’s going to lay an egg!” somebody would cry; and
all the ward held its breath during the operation.
After a period of soft clucking--Tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck, tuck,
tuck, tuck!--which Clarice required to dispose herself suitably and
discreetly upon her nest, a profound silence ensued. Clarice was laying
her egg! The men lay perfectly still, smiling expectantly, glancing now
and again at the clock. The hush was absolute. It was Clarice’s moment.
Presently a loud, triumphant cackle issued forth: Tuck-tuck,
tuck-a-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck! The egg was an accomplished fact.
And Clarice, her proud duty done, flew straight to her lord and
master, who added his crow of patronizing approbation. The illusion of
the performance was perfect, and little Clarice was a source of great
delight to the men, who built round her all sorts of romances.
“That’s our little Clarice!” Emile explained to me the first time I
heard her. “But she is admirable, that Clarice! She lays an egg each
morning; and we give it to a sick _camarade_ for his _déjeuner_!”
By the time the beds are made, clean bandages adjusted, vacant beds
disinfected, the individual tables scrubbed and hot drinks fetched from
the diet kitchen, the day is well under way. The dressings, meantime,
proceed steadily down the ward. Sometimes, after a new offensive, when
the big war hospital has received a fresh influx of the wounded, every
bed contains a battered wreck, these dressings fill the entire morning
and continue straight through the afternoon.
Those are trying days for heart and head and feet. Through all the
hours the busy stream of traffic flows constantly through this, the
heaviest ward. There are men going up to operations on stretchers; men
coming down from operations, unconscious, on stretchers; men being
discharged, with their meager little sack of possessions, also on
stretchers. Good-bys are shouted--“_Bon voyage!_” “All aboard!” “_En
voiture!_” Or the orderly enters with a batch of letters--letters from
home.
“Simondon!” he bawls cheerily.
“Present!”
“Girod!”
“Present!”
“Coussin!”
“Discharged!” a voice volunteers.
“Morel!... Morel!... Morel?”
“Give me that letter,” says the head nurse quietly, for Morel cannot
receive it; Morel is dead.
At about half past ten, when the ward is in fair order, and the
_blessés_ under their fresh linen look like rows of good children in
bed, the _médicin chef_, or chief surgeon, makes his rounds. As he
approaches a bed its occupant salutes, and then listens with intense
concentration to the strange English jargon of the ward doctor, who is
making his daily report. Perhaps he catches the word “operation”--which
every soldier knows. After the surgeon has passed he beckons and
whispers eagerly:
“What did he say? What did the _médicin chef_ say? Operation?”
I nod. “Only a little one. But no lunch to-day. No good _pinard_!”
_Pinard_ is the trench slang for wine, corresponding to the English
“booze.” That word, upon my lips, will nearly always bring a laugh from
a _poilu_. But no laugh greets me this time. He sinks back upon his
pillow, a little white and very quiet. The day has suddenly lost its
color for him.
After the great _médicin chef_--or God, as he is irreverently termed
in the ward--has departed, with his halo of dread, _déjeuner_ is
the next important feature of the day. Serving a community of fifty
a three-course meal--soup, meat and vegetables, and dessert--is a
man-size proposition. Serving it on bed tables, often cutting up the
food and feeding the armless patients, further complicates the task.
The first day I completely lost my head. My clamorous young brood, nine
of whom were under twenty-two, reminded me of nothing so much as a
nestful of yawping baby robins waiting to be fed.
It was: “Look out for my leg, mees!” “More bread, mees!” “My
_serviette_, mees!” “Have you forgotten me, mees?” “My God, my soup’s
tipped into my bed! I’m afloat, mees!” And all in a rapid bubble
of French that made my head spin. At last, in sheer desperation, I
addressed them in the American language: “You darned kids--shut up!” As
was usual in those first days, it was old Justin who came to my aid and
disentangled me.
The patients’ _déjeuner_ over, the _auxiliaires_ have three-quarters
of an hour off for their own, which they may get at the hospital or
at some of the neighboring _pâtisseries_. As for me, that first day I
choked down a few mouthfuls and then retired to the _vestiaire_ to rest
my feet.
The afternoon was cut off the same piece of cloth as the morning--more
beds, more dressings, more bandages, more high shrill cries, more
gayety and laughter. But about four o’clock in the afternoon something
began to happen. It began to happen in bed Number Ten. Its occupant,
a handsome dark lad of eighteen, had a gangrenous arm, the sight of
which, with its deep gashes to let out the poison, turned one faint
with horror. All the morning, at intervals, I had held a basin while he
retched, or fetched hot-water bottles.
About four o’clock he began to babble of his mother, his brothers and
sisters, and his home in the country. He laughed, chatted, cried out
“_Maman!_” repeatedly, and tried to rise to go to her. Presently it was
found necessary to strap his supple, strong young body to the mattress.
At the time I had not the faintest notion that he was already in the
antechamber of death, so alive he was, so palpitant with restless
energy.
Suddenly he lay still. I had turned to get another hot-water bottle.
“Never mind!” said the nurse, and at some quality in her voice I
paused, startled, and looked again. He was gone. His passing had been
as light and unpretentious as a breath of air through the open window.
After he was carried out I disinfected his bed and made it afresh, in a
strange convulsion of soul. Thus I had my first glimpse of that vast,
interminable procession which must haunt the dreams of ambitious kings.
As yet, I have been to no battlefronts. I have letters, to be sure,
which if presented in the proper quarters, I am told, would result in
personally conducted trips to lines not engaged in an actual offensive.
But those letters still lie, unsent, in my trunk. I may use them some
day. But at present there is within me a reluctance to visiting ruins
and battlefields. Perhaps it is because I have seen so many ruins who
have returned from those battlefields.
Moreover, I have already been to the Front and I have made a charge. It
was a hand-grenade charge, under the leadership of one Sergeant Girod,
who since then has been awarded the Croix de Guerre. The announcement
of the award reads, “For conspicuous bravery in leading a brilliant
hand-grenade attack against the enemy while under fire from our own
_mitrailleuses_.” I know it was a brilliant attack, for I made it with
him. It happened in this way:
It was six o’clock in the evening, and the big _salle_, with its forest
of overhead apparatus, was wrapped in warm darkness, through which
the bright, glowing ends of cigarettes bloomed like tiny stars. The
electricity was out of order and the sole lights--two tall candles on
the head nurse’s desk in the middle of the room, with their straight
still flames--lent an air of enchantment to the place. The men, their
suppers over, lay smoking tranquilly, or chatted in undertones. To
me it was the pleasantest hour of the day. I had lingered to make up
another bed, the occupant for which, a fresh arrival, had not yet come
down from the operating room.
“Can you stay a few minutes?” called the head nurse as she hurried past
me. “I am called away; the nurses are down at first supper, and someone
should be here when your man arrives.”
I promised to remain. A few minutes later the big double doors were
flung open and a dark jumbled mass appeared. The same instant a loud
shout shattered the quiet gloom:
“_En avant, mes enfants! Vive la France! En avant! Toujours en avant!
Ils approchent! Les Boches! Les infidels! Les brigands! Ils approchent
à gauche! Regardez à gauche! A gauche!_--They’re approaching on the
left! Look out on the left--_En avant, mes enfants! Toujours en avant!_”
It was a shout that would send a thrill along a dead man’s spine. A
ripple of laughter went round the room. Raised heads peered eagerly.
The _brancardiers_ came forward, two wheeling the stretcher and two
more holding down the occupant, who was struggling convulsively to
raise himself and shouting hoarse commands in a voice that could be
heard a block away.
“Where does he go, mees?” came Justin’s steady tones.
“Here--Bed Eight.”
“_En avant! En avant, mes enfants! Regardez à gauche! A gauche! Ils
approchent à gauche! Les Boches, ils approchent!_” The hoarse shouts
did not cease for an instant.
“He’s leading a charge,” said Justin, grimly pleased, as they paused
beside me. “Hand grenades! He’s a terrible fellow. He killed ten Boches
coming down the stairs!”
Then, all together, with a “_Un, deux, trois--Allez!_” the four lifted
him from the stretcher into bed.
He was a powerfully built man, fair, with blue eyes and a blond
mustache, and his _chemise_, torn away in the struggle, revealed a
torso that gleamed like ivory. Suddenly he looked up and gripped me
with a hand of iron.
“_Criez avec moi: ‘Vive la France!’_”
“_Vive la France!_” I repeated in a low voice, to soothe him.
“Louder! Shout louder: ‘_Vive la France!_’”
“_Vive la France!_” I said more loudly. “Lie still now. It’s over. The
attack is finished.”
“And the Boches?” he queried eagerly. “They are gone?”
“All gone.”
“No, no!” he cried violently, trying to rise. “They’re not gone!
They’re still coming on! My God, see them! Wave on wave! _Regardez à
gauche, mes enfants! Les Boches! Les brigands!_ Ah, my poor comrades!”
he murmured. “See them fall!” He turned to me, whom evidently he took
for one of his grenadiers: “Citronne went down just then. Did you see
him? Was he killed?”
“No; only wounded. Be quiet now. It’s done.”
“But not well done,” he retorted impatiently. “We hadn’t enough balls.
To-night we attack again. Listen well!”
And then he gave me my orders. It appeared that on each side of us were
Moroccan troops who were to follow our attack with a charge. For a few
minutes Girod was silent. Suddenly he broke out:
“Boom! _Soixante-quinze!_”--the French seventy-fives. “Boom! _Les
canons!_” He appeared to be listening to the bombardment. Presently he
sighed. “Ah, my poor wife! My poor Cécilie! You know, I have a wife and
three children--two boys and a girl.”
It was evident to me that the sergeant had a presentiment that he was
going to fall in the attack. After a long silence his voice came to me
abruptly out of the dark:
“What time is it?”
I named the hour.
“Well, then, my friend, we have still ten minutes. Let us smoke a
cigarette before we part.” A second later he was shouting at the top of
his powerful voice:
“_En avant, mes enfants! Ils approchent! Les Boches! Regardez à gauche!
A gauche!_”
Over and over he issued his commands to his grenadiers; over and over
he shouted his warning cry, calling frantically for bombs that were
not forthcoming; and always he was driven back, despairing, by the tide
of Germans on his left. His brain, like a talking-machine record, had
recorded faithfully every detail of that last wild, brilliant attack,
terminating so disastrously because of the shortage of balls; and in
his delirium he played that one record ceaselessly, with no thought,
action or sensation omitted. But as the hours went by the record played
slowly and more slowly, with gaps of silence in between. Finally he
slept.
There is another chapter to add to this episode concerning Girod. It
happened some three weeks later. And as this is not fiction, but a
plain reporting of facts, I hasten to add that Girod did not die.
Passing his bed, however, one afternoon, I laid my hand casually on
the iron bed-frame. It was trembling. The entire bed was vibrating
steadily, gently, as if to the oscillation of some remote earthquake.
Astonished, I looked at Girod. And Girod was trembling too. It was he
who caused the tremor of the bed. Beneath the white coverlet his big
body shook with a ceaseless, mysterious agitation.
“What is the matter?” I cried. “Why are you trembling like that?”
He gave a faint, apologetic smile.
“I’m afraid!” he said simply. “I’m afraid of that operation this
afternoon.”
“But it’s nothing,” I assured him--“really nothing at all. Only a
slight incision in the shoulder.”
“I know. But--I’m afraid! You see----” He broke off, knitting his
brows. “It was not always thus. Once I did not know what fear
was--before---- That’s why they made me leader of the bombing squad. I
was reckless. But now--I’m afraid. I’m afraid of that little operation!”
“You’ve been under a strain,” I said.
I recalled Girod’s history. He had narrated it to me one rainy
afternoon. From his wife, Cécilie, and his three children, he had
not heard a word since the war opened, as they lived in the invaded
territory. For the last six weeks before he was wounded he and his
comrades had been in the first-line trenches, unrelieved, without food
save for their reserve stores; and without water, unless one crawled
on one’s belly at night to a spring in the dangerous strip of No Man’s
Land between them and the enemy’s trenches.
Each night he crawled to the spring, filled his canteen and crawled
back to his wounded companions. And then came one night when the spring
failed.
“I crawled out there, as usual,” Girod related, “and found it full of
cadavers!”
“And after that?” I persisted.
But Girod made no reply.
“It’s the strain, the heavy strain,” I said again.
A nurse--the one known as the _mitrailleuse_--at that instant passed
his bed.
“What’s the matter with him?” she demanded brusquely. “What’s he
shaking for?”
“The operation,” I said. “He fears it. It’s the strain he’s been under
so long----”
“Pooh!” she broke out impatiently. “Some of these men can’t stand pain
any better than a baby!”
As the days and the weeks go by the ward changes. Men recover or die,
or are discharged to convalescent hospitals; and fresh wrecks appear in
their places, sleep in their beds, and smile up to one from the pillow.
The big _salle_ is an antechamber, with exits leading both ways--out
into the great adventure of life and out into the still greater
adventure of death. At the end of three months scarcely a single
familiar face remains. But the exit leading back into life is always
open. The recovered men return.
An aviator, whose leg had been amputated at the hospital, comes to
announce that he is to have the honor of returning to the Front. He is
the last of his class of eight--and he must fly with a wooden leg.
Even Claudius has been discharged. He has gone home to his mother and
sister, of whom he is the sole support. A letter from him lies before
me.
“My leg is no good,” he writes, “and I never shall be able to use it
to work. What shall I do? I shall have to ride that leg all day in a
carriage! But where am I to get the carriage? I shall go to America! Do
you think some rich--and pretty--young American mees would marry me
and let me ride in her carriage?”
That, indeed, would be a solution for Claudius! And I am making his
modest wants known, with the hopes that some pretty--and rich--young
American “mees” may wish to take a flyer on a young Frenchman,
considerably smashed but with his sense of humor intact. If she should,
and can guarantee the carriage, I will send her Claudius’ address.
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED
Every hour wounds;
The last one kills.
_Old French Couplet on the Clock Tower of the American
Ambulance, at Neuilly._
When, one morning in Paris, I received orders to report without delay
to the big American war hospital in Neuilly, and begin work there
as a volunteer nurse’s aid, I suddenly found myself reluctant, even
rebellious; though it was precisely for that reason, and no other,
that I had come to France. But I had just arrived in Paris and already
that city of enchantments had cast its spell on me. I did not want
to work--I never want to work. I wanted, I scarcely knew what: to
taste Paris again; to breathe her air, which affects one like a
mild champagne; to stroll about and enjoy her noble proportions and
beautiful distances. I did not wish to be swallowed up immediately by
another piece of work, no matter how fine or inspiring.
There were a few special, little, no-account personal things I wished
to do first; I wanted to revisit the tomb of Napoleon and ask the
little old gentleman reposing down there below what he thought of the
present situation; I wanted to renew acquaintance with Rodin’s statue,
The Thinker, in front of the Panthéon, to see whether it cast as big
a shadow as ever; I wanted to wander through the leafy alleys of the
Luxembourg Garden, decorated with marble gods and goddesses and given
over to the naïve delights of student lovers; I wanted to stroll once
more up the Champs-Elysées in the twilight and see the Arc de Triomphe,
gravely beautiful, looming solidly against the sky; I wanted to view
again the statue of Jeanne d’Arc; I wanted to taste once more some
Vouvray and see whether the world would turn into an enchanted bubble
again; I wanted to discover whether the same immemorial fishermen were
still fishing on the banks of the Seine--for dead cats, Mark Twain
declared. These are but seven samples of the things I wanted to do. In
brief, I wanted to loaf.
“But you can’t!” said the crisp English nurse executive at the
hospital, to whom I confided these noble ambitions. “In the first
place, we need you. In the second place, we’ve got to have you. And
in the third place, Paris just now is no place for loafers. With this
present offensive on and so many of our staff completely worn out--do
you know there are women working here who have not had a day off in
twenty months?--we need every pair of hands that are available. Now,
when can you come? Monday?”
This was Wednesday, and there was a nurse’s outfit to buy,
matriculation papers to procure at the Préfecture, and other odds
and ends of official red tape to tie, which would take every hour of
my time. But I was conquered. I acquiesced. My hopes of a holiday
went a-glimmering. Hereafter, what I see of Paris in wartime will be
hasty glimpses, caught on the fly; for it will be dark when I rise,
at six-thirty, button myself into my _infirmière’s_ blouse, swallow
my morning draft of chicory _au lait_, whose sole virtue is that it
is so hot it scalds me all the way down; and it is dark again when in
the evening, at six-thirty, the day’s work done, I bundle into the Red
Cross omnibus, which takes the auxiliary workers back to the Subway.
During the first week in the hospital the sheer physical strain was
terrific. It seemed as if I were in a strange, mad, nightmare world,
where everything was reversed; instead of health--disease, and mangled
and torn bodies and suppurating wounds, some of them hideously green
and yellow, like decayed meat; and smashed wrecks of men, with arms and
legs swung up on apparatus that resembled nothing so much as the old
torture racks of the Inquisition; as if shrieks and cries and groans
and smells were the natural and normal order of things. For days I
was nauseated. The sight of raw mangled flesh, the blood-saturated
linen, the stench of gangrenous wounds, the nervous strain of bandaging
freshly amputated stumps, and the screams of the dressing hour simply
bombarded the unaccustomed senses and hit the newcomer fairly in the
pit of the stomach. When I confessed this to the ward surgeon he
laughed.
“That’s nothing--the rebellion of healthy nature against disease. When
I was at the Front, at the commencement of the war, at one of the base
hospitals, I used to retire and gag at regular intervals. It was awful,
for we had nothing to work with. But mobilize your emotions. Don’t let
them mobilize you. Imitate the sang-froid of the _poilu_. Yesterday I
stopped by the bed of a youngster who’s had a leg off and is dying of
gangrene. ‘Well, how goes it?’ I asked him. ‘_Ça va. Ça va mieux._’--It
goes. It goes better, he replied simply. And he was dead up to his
waist already! He was a dead man he knew it, and he knew that I knew
that he knew it; and still he looked me straight in the eye and said
‘It goes. It goes better!’ There’s mobilization of spirit for you!”
Nevertheless, when the dressings were over I breathed relief. Never did
I learn to control my nerves completely; to listen without a tremor to
the cries of pain, the high, piercing screams, “_Oh, là, là!_” “_Ah,
Nom de Dieu!_” “_Ah, doucement, docteur!_ Easy there!” “_Oh, bon Dieu_,
how I suffer!” The quality of pure agony in those broken cries was too
much for me.
It was on trying occasions like these that Justin, the old French
orderly, came to my aid, showing me exactly how to hold a broken leg;
how to wind a difficult bandage with comfort and security; how to lift
a heavy patient without injury to myself or to him.
Justin deserves a separate paragraph all to himself, a separate little
niche in heaven. Kipling’s celebrated Gunga Din had nothing on him--for
Gunga Din had no sense, only goodness; while Justin is a Frenchman,
with all a Frenchman’s natural intelligence and sardonic humor. He
had been an orderly in a French military hospital for twenty years;
and what he did not know about sick humanity--their weakness and
irritability, their heroisms and long, long patience--was not worth
knowing. From morning to night he went trotting noiselessly about the
ward in his old blue list slippers; dirty aproned; squat, ugly and
strong as a gorilla; vulgar, gay, resolute and as tender-fingered as a
woman. And the men leaned on him as on an elder brother.
All day long it was: “Justin, a basin--quick!” “Justin, lift me up!”
“Justin, this plaster cast is killing me!” “Ah, Justin, how I suffer!”
And Justin’s steady, cheerful voice would reply: “I come, _mon
enfant_.” “There, _mon petit_!” “That goes better, _mon petit brave,
eh_?”
Once only did I see him in a passion. Some negligent person had bound a
damp bandage too tightly about a fractured leg; drying, it contracted
still further; the result was acute torture. The soldier, a modest, shy
lad, had appealed once or twice to a passing nurse; but the first big
morning rush of dressings was on and no one heeded him. Minutes passed.
The pain increased. Silently he began to weep. It was old Justin
trotting past with a pail of soiled dressings who first noted the
writhing young figure and caught a faint groan. He paused long enough
to inquire: “What’s the matter, _petit_?”
The soldier indicated his leg. The orderly’s face darkened as he
looked. He set down the pail, undid the bandage and rewound it
properly, muttering angrily between his teeth the while. Presently a
nurse bore down upon them. She was the one whom the men had nicknamed
the old _mitrailleuse_--for reasons obvious. Competent enough
technically, she had neither tenderness nor humanity nor gay spirits
to commend her services to the men. She was like a soured, fibrous old
schoolmistress, and the soldiers detested her cordially and, after the
fashion of mischievous school-children, amused themselves by devising
fresh nicknames for her each day.
Frenchmen love charm in a woman, and hate the reverse like a deformity.
Accordingly, when she paused belligerently at the bedside, both Justin
and the lad instinctively stiffened themselves.
“What are you doing, Justin?” she cried sharply. “Let that bandage
alone!”
For an orderly to dare to rewrap a certificated nurse’s bandage is,
of course, a breach of etiquette. It is a situation that requires
tact; but Justin at that moment was far too angry for tact. Stolidly
he continued his task. When the last safety pin was refastened he
straightened himself and faced the nurse squarely.
“Some imbecile, some _cochon_ of an _infirmière_,” he began, mentioning
no names, “put a wet bandage on the leg of that poor child!” And then
he continued suavely, in French--of which the nurse understood nothing
beyond a few scattering words: “Ancient female camel! Daughter of the
union of a cannon ball and a hippopotamus: Do you conceive that I, a
Frenchman and a soldier, shall not do what is good for these, my little
children? _Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_” And with a shrug of contempt he
gathered up his slops and trotted away.
It was not long after this late one afternoon, when Justin beckoned me
with a stealthy finger. By this time we had become firm allies. At noon
I saved him a cup of wine from the men’s lunch and let him rest his
aching feet and smoke a cigarette undisturbed behind a screen. And in
return Justin taught me all the fine subtleties of his art.
“You are very amiable, mees,” he began now in a carefully lowered
voice. “Will you help me?”
“What is it?” I asked; for by his conspirator air and his secrecy I
knew he intended to achieve something, by his own initiative, which
was against the rules.
“It’s Simondon, out on the _terrasse_,” he murmured, still in guarded
tones. “His new cast hurts him. Last night he did not sleep for pain,
and to-day the _pauvre petit_ has a temperature of thirty-nine. I’m
going to take off that plaster and rewad it!”
“But why don’t you ask the nurse? It’s her job, really. You and I have
no right to touch that cast without permission.”
“Simondon won’t let her come near. He’s crazy with the pain. They’ve
decided to wait for the doctor. But the doctor is up in the operating
room, and the Sacred Virgin alone knows when he will return.” He led
the way to the terrace, a sleeping porch which gave on the garden.
I knew this Simondon. He had lost an eye and had a badly infected leg,
due to four days and four nights spent on the field of battle, without
food or water, before help came. As a consequence, of the five months
spent in the hospital each separate hour had been a desperately fought
struggle, a superb resistance of the spirit.
Small wonder that, after all these long months, the cool nerve that
rarely deserts a Frenchman had worn down to rather a fine thread!
Upon the terrace we found him, a dark, painfully emaciated lad of
twenty-one, his black hair already plentifully sprinkled with white
from the hardships he had undergone. His cheeks were scarlet with
fever, and in his torture he had bitten his lips until they were
covered with a thin, bloody froth.
“No, no! You shan’t touch it!” he began fiercely as we came up.
“_Courage, mon petit brave!_” soothed Justin. “Ten minutes, and
it’ll all be over and we’ll have you up in the wheel chair. Say, old
_embusqué_! Will you have a small glass of cognac first?”
“Don’t you touch it!” breathed Simondon passionately between his teeth.
“Get out of here!”
“Hold up his leg, mees!” commanded Justin calmly. “Thus!”
Obediently I held the leg, incased from thigh to heel in an open
plaster cast, at the desired angle. Simondon let out a piercing yell.
“_Oh, bon Dieu! Oh, là, là! Wait!_” Tears of agony streamed down his
wasted cheeks. Wildly he tried to seize my hands. “Can’t you hear me?”
he sobbed. “Imbeciles! Stop!”
“Maybe we’d better,” I murmured.
But, with swift and sure precision, Justin had already begun to strip
the bandages.
“Higher!” he ordered briefly.
Again Simondon made a furious swing at my wrists. Again he screamed
madly.
“Let’s wait for the doctor,” I urged.
Justin never looked up.
“Don’t heed him, mees,” he said simply. “’Tis only his sickness
speaking.” Wise old Justin! “Rest tranquil, _petit_,” he added; and he
nodded to the young sufferer, who, suddenly docile beneath the firm,
ministering hands, returned him a quivering smile of obedience. “It’s
almost finished,” murmured Justin.
And indeed, in less time than it takes to tell, the cruelly binding
plaster incasement was shed, extra layers of soft padding inserted, the
cast readjusted and rebound; and Simondon, the tears still wet on his
cheeks, was smiling happily and sipping a tiny glass of cognac. A half
hour later, his fever abated and his red tasseled cap cocked rakishly
over his one good eye, he was up in the wheel chair--for the first time
in five months--and Justin was trundling him off for a brief promenade.
By the sheer authority of his spirit, the squat, grotesque, vulgar
little old man had achieved in a few minutes what two nurses had
labored vainly over for an hour. Shortly after he was on his rounds
again, at his perpetual dog-trot, carrying a basin and making, as he
passed me, his invariable joke--that he was taking a small gift to the
Kaiser!
The first month in the big ward I was worked to death. But so was
everybody else. Some of the nurses were ill, some of the auxiliaries
were away, and an offensive was at its height. Consequently the rest of
us worked under a terrific pressure. Ward Eighty-three, at that time
the heaviest in the hospital, had over fifty beds, each one filled
with a _grand blessé_. Fifty backs to wash; fifty beds to make; fifty
dressings to cut down, change and rebandage; fifty bedside tables to
scrub; fifty meals to serve on individual tables; fifty temperatures
and pulses to take--to say nothing of a thousand and one odd jobs, such
as hot compresses every hour, hot drinks, medicines, diets, wounds to
irrigate, beds to disinfect, which kept nurses and aids racing dizzily
straight through the day. And even then we were always behind our
schedule! The work was never done.
If anyone is suffering from a broken heart or a general stagnation of
life--what O. Henry called “slow pulse”--a big hospital ward during
the rush of an offensive is a good place to lose it. But there are
compensations; for a sick warrior is nothing after all but a sick
child, docile, naïve, craving for sympathy. He wants to be consoled for
his suffering; he wants to be cured. He demands everything and gives
everything. And at night as I passed, dog tired, down the ward, heads
were raised, hands outstretched; and the shower of cries of “_Bonsoir_,
Mees!”--“_à demain_, Mees Californie!”--were sweeter than bouquets of
roses thrown across the footlights to a reigning star.
There were twelve soldiers for whose welfare I was specifically
responsible, and who had the right to call me to their bedsides and
demand whatsoever they pleased, from an extra piece of cotton batting
over their toes to the reasons why there are so many divorces in my
country. Of these twelve, nine were under twenty-three and two looked
not a day over sixteen, rosy cheeked and downy. After the first mists
of strangeness had cleared away, and I began to view things more
normally, that was the first thing that struck me--the amazing youth of
the men. Despite their wounds and the stress of trench life in a brutal
wintry climate, they fairly shouted life and vivid vitality. Their eyes
were as clear as those of children, their laughter as fresh, their joy
as spontaneous.
One morning I was washing the back of a young Breton lad whose torso,
with its clean, flowing lines, would have delighted a sculptor.
“Claude,” I laughed, “you have a back almost as nice as Apollo’s.”
“Yes, mees? Truly?” he cried, blushing and deeply pleased.
I was puzzled by his delight, for Claude was a young coal miner who
could not even sign his own name, and I knew he did not know Apollo
from Moses. The next morning, as I was rubbing him down with alcohol,
he twisted about to ask shyly:
“Mees Californie, is my back still as nice as Apollo’s?”
As I stared at him blankly he repeated the query in slightly different
form; and then the truth dawned upon me: he thought Apollo was some
other boy in the ward whose back didn’t have any bedsores!
It would be a great mistake to conclude that the ward of a military
hospital, simply because it is the container of so much concentrated
pain, is, therefore, the natural abode of sadness and gloom. In the
first place, the soldiers, taken as a whole, are not sick: they are
only wounded--a vast difference. Save for their injuries, the majority
of them are practically well men. In the second place, they are young,
and, speaking again, in the large, magnificently healthy.
Consequently the large airy ward, with its community of bedfast
inhabitants, resembles a menagerie of fifty playful cubs--each chained
to his own post, to be sure, but capable, nevertheless, of considerable
mischief--rather than the classic conception of a sick room, with
lowered lights and voices.
Pain there is, certainly, up to the limits of human endurance; but this
is borne with a spirit, an ironic fortitude, which is a Frenchman’s
most natural possession. A soldier suffering the refined tortures of
hell during the dressing of an infected wound is yet capable of making
a jest with twitching lips that will send his comrades off into spasms
of laughter.
Nor is this humor an affectation. It is his instinctive reaction to
pain. And, as a reverse side of the same shield, he is also capable at
such times of the finest flower of courtesy, such as saying simply,
“Thank you, doctor!” to the man who has just cut off his leg without
ether.
But if he can and does endure intense pain superbly, it is no sign,
as the schoolboys say, that he intends to endure lesser, or what he
considers unnecessary ones, with like dignity. As a matter of fact, a
pain in the great toe, a crease in the drawsheet, or, above all, that
thing most dreaded by every Frenchman, a _courant d’air_ from an open
window, will produce loud lamentation, which will set the entire ward
in an uproar. For these are the small ills that can be righted, and
therefore must be--and instantaneously, if you please.
An incident in point took place recently in the ward. The chief
surgeon, when making his morning rounds, decided that a superficial
incision of perhaps an inch should be made in a certain wound in order
to permit the free passage of the Carrel-Dakin solution, the famous
antiseptic irrigation which keeps down bacterial poisoning. It was
not considered sufficiently important to remove the patient to the
operating room, or even to administer ether. Three or four snips by
the ward doctor and the thing would be done. But Georges, the party of
the first part in the operation, had decided he wanted an anæsthetic.
He did not intend to be hurt. He had understood that in this grand
hospital _de luxe_ the Americans had the latest methods; that they did
not chop a poor soldier up without first “putting him to sleep.” Vain
were my efforts to soothe him.
The other men, delighted by this fantastic grievance--for most of them
detest the anæsthetizing process--egged him on with a gayety that soon
became riotous. They exchanged bets on the possible chances of recovery
from such a grave operation. They promised to write to his mother and
to his fiancée in the event of his death. One soldier, an erstwhile
opera singer, consented to chant his mass. Another offered to confess
him, and adjured him to make a clean breast of all his sins. At lunch,
with their wine, they drank to him a solemn _morituri te salutamus_!
The day became a Fête of Death dedicated to Georges and his inch-long
cut. And when at length the crucial hour arrived, and the doctor and
nurse entered with a tray of glittering instruments, every man of them
was up on his elbow in bed, and the opera singer began softly to chant
the mass. But Georges was nowise abashed by all this jest and _blague_.
As the doctor approached his bedside he began to writhe, and gasped:
“_Mon Dieu_, how I suffer! Oh! Ah! _Doucement!_--Gently!”
“_Un!_” murmured the opera singer at his side.
The nurse pulled down the covers and elicited another loud groan.
“_Oh, là, là! Doucement! Doucement!_”
“_Deux! Trois!_” counted his neighbor.
The ward meantime was one gurgle of suppressed laughter. The nurse
started to undo the bandage.
“_Doucement!_” sang out Georges lustily.
“_Quatre!_”
The doctor picked up an instrument from the tray and touched the
wound-opening tentatively.
“_Oh, Nom de Dieu! Oh, docteur! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement!_”
“_Cinq! Six! Sept!_”
“What’s biting you, old man?” laughed the doctor in English. “You know
this doesn’t hurt.”
“_Doucement!_” roared Georges in reply.
“_Huit!_”
“I don’t understand this,” said the nurse, glancing at the chart. “He
has no temperature.”
“_Doucement! Doucement!_” moaned Georges.
“_Neuf! Dix!_” registered the opera singer.
The doctor snipped off an infinitesimal flake of dead cuticle.
“_Oh, bon Dieu! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement! Oh, cher
docteur! Doucement!_”
“_Onze! Douze! Treize! Quatorze! Quinze!_”
By this time the men were in a broad ripple of laughter--all save
Georges, who continued to howl with every move the doctor made. But
finally the operation was over. Doctor and nurse disappeared.
“How many?” I inquired.
“Twenty-eight!” grinned the opera singer.
Georges had screeched _Doucement!_ eight-and-twenty times inside of
five minutes, at a practically painless operation! And now the opera
singer began to mock him by singing _Doucement!_ in every conceivable
accent up and down the scale.
“Son of generations of monkeys!” grunted Georges contemptuously. He
turned to me: “A drop of cognac, mees! Regard how my hand trembles.”
And he lifted that member and waggled it before my eyes without the
faintest glimmer of a smile. Needless to say, he got his cognac; he had
earned it. The men had expected amusement and Georges had done his best
not to disappoint them. Such a mirth provoker in a ward is worth any
amount of drugs. Moreover, it is only justice to Georges to add that,
in a subsequent operation, he had his leg taken off above the knee with
a coolness, a gay devil-may-caredom that touched even his pain-hardened
comrades. Upon that occasion never a single _Doucement_ fell from his
lips. He was far more concerned over the noon meal he was forced to
miss, and cursed like a pirate because he must lose both his lunch and
his leg at the same fell clip!
But even Georges, with all his impudence and nerve, had his black
moments, his fits of melancholy, of piercing nostalgia, of deadly ennui
of the soul. _Cafard_ the soldiers call these seasons of gloom. “Blue
devils” is our equivalent term. While the Russian muzhik says simply:
“My soul suffers!”
The men dread this _cafard_ more than an operation. To fight off its
approach they reread old letters, finger over beloved relics in their
small sacks of personal belongings, smoke miles of cigarettes, read
endless romances, or write up their simple histories--poor, meager,
ill-spelled and laboriously penciled narratives of the individual rôles
they played in the present mighty conflict.
But sooner or later the _cafard_, lying in wait, gets them. That
Georges, however, witty, jeering, pungent as Javelle water, should fall
a victim filled me with surprise. But one morning I came upon him with
his head smothered under a pillow. And when I lifted it off, fancying
him asleep, his young face startled me with its look of utter and naked
misery, which he was too proud to show his little world.
“Why, what is the matter?” I cried.
He looked at me silently with brooding, gloom-filled eyes.
“I have the _cafard_,” he said simply at last.
Despite himself, his mouth quivered. Every one of those arid and
sterile hours of his sickness had piled its heavy weight upon his soul.
“Ah, when will it all be finished?” he breathed. “When shall I see my
mother, my little sister, again?”
For this I had no reply. Georges’ chances of recovery at that time were
about fifty-fifty.
“Do you see that verse?” He pointed to the high clock tower of the
hospital, which bore, in old French script, the following couplet:
_Every hour wounds;
The last one kills._
Georges repeated it slowly, with intense bitterness.
“The other day I counted how many hours I had lain couched here. Three
thousand three hundred and twenty hours!” He held up to the light a
yellow, emaciated hand. “Pretty, isn’t it? Every hour wounds, and the
last one kills, eh? Well, I’ll take my killing all at once, thanks. I’m
tired, you know. I’ll dispatch myself some day!”
A tender word on my part at that instant and Georges would have wept
outright--and never forgiven me for disgracing him! I tried a joke--his
own favorite weapon.
“Well,” I said, smiling, “if you want to die right away, this very
minute, here’s a method.”
And I picked up from his bedside table a broken and rusted knife.
It was his trench knife, a battered old wreck of an affair, the big
blade of which was still crusted with dried blood--Georges’ own blood,
spilt there when he got his wound, and carefully preserved by him as a
souvenir. As a lethal instrument that knife was a joke, and I trusted
he would see the point. But I underestimated the depth of blackness in
his soul. For a long moment he stared at me, silent. Then suddenly,
with a swift and violent movement, he tore open his chemise at the
throat.
“_Voilà!_ There you are!” he exclaimed. I laid the knife out of reach
in a hurry.
“_Peu!_” he said contemptuously, and turned his back on me.
It later appeared that the _cafard_ in this particular case had its
origin in a girl. Following hard upon his operation, as soon as he
could grasp a pen, Georges had written to his fiancée, telling her
that he was now a cripple and releasing her from her engagement. And
it seemed that the girl had taken him at his word. Not a single line
had he received from her! And added bitterness lay in the fact that,
deep down in the unplumbed depths of him, Georges had a fine upstanding
confidence in himself, and believed that, cripple or no cripple, he was
a pretty fine match for any girl.
As the days filed by without news he began to bleed inwardly. But one
afternoon, shortly afterward, as I passed down the ward I beheld by
Georges’ bedside her hand tightly locked in his, a small, pale-browed
but radiant young person, in a heavy veil of black crêpe. Georges,
exultant and gay, beckoned me over.
“_C’est ma fiancée!_” he introduced proudly.
Upon receipt of his letter she had waited only to bury a relative, and
then hastened up from their native village to give him her reply in
person.
In the hospital there were innumerable love affairs that came under my
eye as the busy, monotonously diverse days flowed by; and the soldiers,
one by one, made me their confidante while I wrapped their bandages,
made their beds, or scrubbed the ingrained mud of the Somme from their
feet with liquid soap and a flesh brush. But there is one that lingers
in my mind because it became a game, half playful, half serious,
between me and the soldier lover.
On visitors’ day the spacious _salle_ was always crowded by a throng of
wives, mothers, sweethearts and friends. Before the big double doors
were thrown open each soldier had his tiny pocket mirror out, combing
his mustache and grooming himself for the occasion. Among these, I came
to observe Coussin, a jeweler by trade, who, with his wife and small
son of three, lived in Montmartre before the war.
Coussin was a quiet young man with an understanding eye and an
unfailing sunny smile. I always hated to hurt him in dressing his
wound, because it hurt him so to hurt me. As the hands of the clock
approached two he would shift on his pillow so that his glance could
reach the door without obstruction. He was one of those rare Frenchmen
who do not smoke; and he would lie thus, motionless, a little pale from
emotion, his eyes glued to that distant door. They never left it save
to consult his watch. And when finally, on the stroke of two, his wife,
Fabienne, appeared, a pretty, dark young woman, trimly veiled, pushing
her son ahead of her, Coussin would lift himself abruptly out of
bed--despite stern orders to the contrary, for there was still danger
of hemorrhage--and wave his uninjured arm.
And Fabienne would lift her wee son for a salute to _Papa_! After
which she would start down the long, crowded aisle. Smiling, her eyes
still clinging to those of Coussin, she moved sedately, controlling
her eagerness; but at the end she always ran. The kiss that followed
was--well, indescribable. You will have to imagine it. And the look
which they exchanged afterward was even more than a kiss, more
passionate, tender, revealing.
As the afternoon drew on to a close the bell rang, warning the visitors
that it was time to begin to get ready to think of departure. It was
at this juncture that the comedy with Coussin began. Earlier in the
day he had secretly set his watch half an hour back. If he could have
got hold of a stick long enough to reach from his bed I am convinced
he would have unblushingly turned back the hands of the ward clock to
match, without a single compunction. As it was, he and Fabienne blandly
ignored the first bell, as none of their private concerns. But when it
rang again, and the orderlies began shooing the dilatory ones out into
the corridor, Coussin would glance guilelessly at his watch, start,
compare it hastily with the ward clock, and then exclaim with an air of
surprise, mingled with indignation:
“Again too fast! But it is no good--that big old clock. This admirable
little watch of mine has not been out a minute in five years!”
And Fabienne would regard lovingly the admirable little watch of her
admirable little husband. In the end, of course, he won his extra half
hour, and after the departure of his wife his timepiece and that of the
ward would somehow mysteriously synchronize. But this was not quite all
of the comedy. When the visitors had gone basins were passed round and
the men bathed themselves before supper. But on the day of his wife’s
visit Coussin always refused to bathe.
“I don’t wish to!” he would say with gentle obstinacy.
“But you must. It’s the rule. It’s good for you.”
“Not to-night. To-morrow.”
“But to-night it’s very necessary. Many visitors--many microbes.”
“I don’t wish to--to-night.” He would shake his head with smiling
decision.
“But why don’t you want to wash to-night?” I asked him on the first
occasion.
He gave me a single full look, and the truth dawned upon me: He did not
wish to wash away the kisses of his wife and little son!
“To-morrow night I will wash twice!” he added magnanimously; and upon
that we compromised.
There are certain French words--one can hardly call them slang--which
have come into popular usage since the war, and which one hears
constantly on the lips of the soldier. One of these is _pinard_, the
trench word for wine, corresponding loosely to our term “booze.”
Another is _copain_. A _copain_ is a pal, a chum, a trench comrade;
one with whom a soldier shares his bed and his blanket and whiles away
the long dull hours of inactivity. Not to have such a friend at the
Front--or _là-bas_--Out There--as the soldiers call it--is a severe
deprivation; for it means spiritual isolation; one puny soul bearing
alone the terrific impact of the war. To illustrate this tender feeling
toward a _copain_:
One day I was given the task of taking down the histories of the men
in my ward; and I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that a postman,
a quiet, drab, nondescript little man with a bald spot, had won both
the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire. To me, his tale was
astounding in its valor, for this timid, oldish little person seemed
the sort to flee for his life, like a frightened rabbit, at the first
big thunder of the guns.
It appeared that one night he had volunteered to go out upon the
battlefield, still under French and German fire, to rescue a fallen
soldier. While carrying his charge a shell exploded near at hand,
injuring both his legs and wounding his companion afresh. At this point
he might have saved himself by deserting his comrade. Instead of which,
he remained all night beside him; made his dressings; fed him the dew
that collected on the adjacent leaves, drop by drop; remained beside
him throughout the following day, under constant bombardment; and at
nightfall got him, like a sack of meal, up on his shoulders, and,
crawling on his hands and knees, dragging his injured legs--“_Grâce
à Dieu_ it was not my arms,” he said, “or I never could have made
it!”--he eventually reached a dressing station, five kilometers away.
But he had paid the toll of that long wait upon the infected field of
glory. Gangrene set in and it was found necessary to amputate both
feet. Never again could he be a postman.
“That was very splendid of you!” I said at the end of his recital.
“But no! But no!” he denied swiftly. “You see, ’twas my _copain_!”
There is still another word the war has brought into being; an epithet
that, falling in anger from the lips of a soldier, is the supreme and
ultimate insult. It is the word that has been coined to cover the
case of the man who evades military service. _Embusqué_ is the French
term. Literally it means one who hides in ambush. But practically it
has come to embrace all who, through graft or influence, hide in easy
administrative jobs, soft snaps, sinecures, saving their pusillanimous
skins instead of taking their chances with their fellows in the
trenches. The contempt for this particular brand of coward is great,
and insults are extremely likely to be the portion of any civilian who
walks the streets of Paris these days in mufti.
An American ambulance driver on the field service at Verdun told me
that, on a recent _permission_ in Paris, he had taken all his uniforms
to the tailor to be cleaned.
“It seemed bully,” he said, “to have a real American all-over bath and
get into real American clothes again--that is, it seemed bully until
I ventured out upon the boulevards _en civile_. But presently I began
to hear ‘_Embusqué!_’ ‘_Embusqué!_’ all round me in the air. Sometimes
it was hurled in my face in passing; sometimes it was hissed close to
my ear. And finally there approached four _poilus_ abreast, _mutilé_
every one, taking the entire width of the pavement, stumping along on
their wooden pegs, gay as larks, and chattering seventeen to the dozen.
Convalescents, I figured them, out on their promenade. When they came
alongside, naturally I gave them the road. But they halted, confronted
me contemptuously, and cried: ‘_Embusqué! Embusqué vous!_’ Well, it was
too much for me. I beat it back to the tailor and got into respectable
clothes.”
Like many opprobrious epithets, however, _embusqué_, among friends, has
a different slant; used thus, it becomes a term of endearment, a sort
of rough caress. A soldier, fresh Out There, muddy-booted, unshaved,
bristling with the accouterments of war, will clump awkwardly into the
hospital, bend over his wounded comrade, salute him on both cheeks,
and exclaim jovially: “Well, old _embusqué_, how goes it?” And on the
morning following my weekly afternoon off the men never failed to
greet me: “Aha, Mees _Embusqué_! You deserted us yesterday. _Embusqué
vous!_”
Used so, it was a term of affection. Nevertheless, it is a word to be
handled with discretion. Returning from the hospital late one night to
my quiet hotel, I found the place in a tumult. The police had invaded
the kitchen; and the Dutch chef, a stout, pompous white-capped tyrant,
before whom the entire establishment walked in terror, lay on the floor
with his head smashed in, weltering in his own gore. Over him stood
the head waiter, a tiny sprite of a Frenchman, hands clenched, eyes
blazing, and looking ready to jump on the chef’s fat stomach if that
prostrate gentleman so much as batted an eyelid.
“What’s the matter?” I inquired.
“He--he called me _embusqué_! Me!” exploded the head waiter, stammering
in his rage. “I knocked the fat swine down and his head hit the stove.”
The police, upon hearing the provocation, vindicated the servant
completely, and the Dutchman went to the hospital to mend his head and
his manners. It was another version of Owen Wister’s famous Western
tale: “When you call me that--smile!”
At the end of three months I was transferred to another ward with only
twelve beds--a small, tranquil family, it seemed to me, after the
continual rush and hurry of the big receiving ward. But still there was
plenty to do. No time to sit like a lady, with folded lilylike hands.
And the first three days, in addition to the regular routine, I had a
dying man in charge. For three days and three nights he lay dying from
general gas infection, a poor wreck, too ghastly to look upon with
composure. His face, under the process of decay, had turned a horrible
greenish yellow; beneath one eye yawned a deep unhealed bayonet gash;
his mouth was filled with poisonous ulcers; and his tongue was so
swollen that he could scarce articulate.
One leg had been amputated at the thigh in a vain effort to arrest the
gangrene; but the infection had immediately showed in the other leg.
The stench of this moribund organism was such that, with every window
flung wide open, the odor was still almost overpowering. And the danger
of infection was no imaginary fear. A nurse, with her hands tender from
being constantly in water, is always crocking off bits of superficial
skin.
Conceive the daily dressing and bandaging of this poor wretch; the
daily changing of linen, soaked through and through with deadly
suppurations, down to the very mattress! In touching him the doctor,
the nurse and the orderlies wore gloves; so, also, did I whenever that
was possible. But at this time there was a temporary shortage of nurses
and I had the ward to myself, save when the head nurse looked in for a
minute to ask if all went well. And perhaps I would be busy when the
cry would come:
“Mees! Mees! Number Two! A drink! Quick!”
Upon which I would drop everything in a panic and fly to his bedside,
barely in time to prevent him from swallowing the contents of the
spittoon; for he had long, lean, powerful arms, this Number Two, which
were always wandering, always in motion. With these he would pull into
his bed whatever of the adjacent landscape he could lay hands on;
for this reason we were forced to discard the bedside screens that
usually inclose the dying. Once this blind, wandering hand discovered
a thermometer on the bedside table of a neighbor. Instantly it was in
his mouth and was broken in two between his teeth. Nothing for it but
to thrust in my bare hand and pull the pieces out. No time for rubber
gloves! He might die of gas gangrene; but I was not going to have him
die of a thermometer.
Happily he did not suffer and at times he was conscious. Once, as I
held up his head--this time with gloves--to give him water, he looked
into my eyes and said, quite matter-of-factly:
“_C’est la fin, n’est-ce’pas?_”--It’s the end, isn’t it?
As he lingered and still lingered on, there came a subtle change over
the attitude of the ward with regard to this long-spun-out dying. At
first, when, after what seemed to them a proper and suitable length
of time, Number Two still stubbornly held on, complaints began to be
heard. No Frenchman loves an open window. Were they all to die of
colds in the head because of one inconsiderate fellow? Frankly, they
had had enough of him. It was not courteous to linger thus!
“_Bon Dieu_, not yet? Will he go to-night, think you?” they would
impatiently inquire.
But as the feeble flame still burned mysteriously on, unquenched, this
feeling gradually altered; it merged into a wondering awe and respect.
The gallant fight of Number Two, his gaspings, his wrestlings with the
invisible foe, commanded their admiration.
“How strong he is!” they would murmur respectfully, “What force!”
“’Tis the force of youth,” commented another.
“’Tis sad to die like that, so young, so brave--_n’est-ce-pas_, mees?”
And when the final spells of periodic shuddering began, showing the
last phase was at hand, they watched him with undisguised interest.
“He’s passing!” announced one.
“Not yet,” retorted another, almost with pride. “See him drink! _Pauvre
brave!_ ’Tis a good warrior.”
“He’ll go to-night--that’s sure!”
They began to argue about it.
But he did not go that night, nor yet the next morning; and the
afternoon found him still battling feebly for breath. Late in the
afternoon of the third day his wife arrived, a shabby, terrified
little peasant woman, infinitely pathetic in her rusty black crêpe
and her gnarled toil-worn hands. Accompanying her was the soldier’s
father, a gaunt Breton, in smock and wooden shoes, with a small,
round beribboned hat like that of a priest, and beneath it deep-set,
intelligent eyes.
Upon me devolved the unpleasant task of breaking the news. I led them
out into the corridor and, for a space, I could find no words. What
is the polite formula in such a case, anyhow? Perhaps the wife read
the trouble in my face, for her eyes upon me were like those of a dog,
piteous, begging not to be beaten. She grasped me by both elbows.
“How goes it?” she breathed. “He is better? Say that my husband is
better!”
The situation was intolerable.
“He is dying,” I blurted out brutally.
With a loud cry she flung herself into my arms. The father gazed
stonily out the window. Soon, however, she had composed herself, and I
asked whether they wished a priest. Was her husband a Catholic? Briefly
they conferred apart, and then the woman turned, with a timid query.
Would it cost anything? And with that the whole bleak truth came out.
They were poor, very poor, it appeared; so poor, indeed, that they had
sold their cow to enable them to come to Paris.
They had counted the expenses down to the last sou; but they had not
counted the expense of a priest.
I assured them we had an abbé in the hospital and that his services
were free. Upon which they decided to have him. An hour later he
celebrated Holy Communion, the soldiers looking on with simple,
unaffected interest. Only one blemish marred the serenity of the sacred
event: At the crucial moment Number Two absolutely refused to receive
the Host. Twice the murmuring abbé bent over him and inserted the holy
wafer, and twice it was rejected by the swollen lips.
“Let’s try it with water,” I suggested.
The dying man drank thirstily as ever, but again refused the symbol. I
was nonplused, for plainly those black eyes staring up into mine were
conscious. After the departure of the abbé a soldier beckoned me to his
side.
“He’s not a Catholic,” he explained softly.
As daylight waned there came a brief respite in the struggle; Number
Two breathed more easily; he lay quiet, relaxed; his invisible
antagonist seemed to have removed a short way off. The men meantime
chatted cheerfully. Some sang.
Presently a knock sounded at the door. It was the X-ray man from
upstairs, who had come to take a photograph of a certain plaster cast,
an extraordinarily fine specimen, made at the Front.
“Who’s the new _blessé_ with the leg cast?” he called out jovially. He
consulted a card. “Peletier’s the name.”
“Present!” came a voice from the corner.
“But you can’t take a picture now!” I protested, scandalized. “A man’s
dying in here. Wait until he’s dead.”
“Can’t! The cast comes off to-morrow morning. Got to take the picture
right away. Here’s the order.”
Perforce I let him come in. And now a lively bustle ensued. The bed
containing the soldier adorned with the desired cast was wheeled into
the center of the room, the leg exposed to the best advantage, bandages
unwrapped, the bedcovers composed neatly, the tripod set up, the lights
arranged.
Then the photographer’s head disappeared beneath the black camera
cloth. It would be vain to deny that the men enjoyed it hugely. They
watched with eagerness as the photographer’s head emerged from the dark
folds. He altered slightly the position of the cast, looked again, and
made a second change.
“Good!” he exclaimed at length briskly; and he held up a warning hand.
“Now! Ready, old man! Tell your leg to smile! Tell it to regard the
little bird.”
At this threadbare joke a veritable shout of laughter went up from the
ward. Even the dying man smiled!
“_Regardez!_ He smiles!” cried a soldier, pointing. “_Bon garçon!_”
The mirth renewed itself. It was the strangest death scene I had ever
viewed.
Number Two lingered through the night and slipped away the next morning
so quietly that none of us knew the exact moment; and his strength and
his smile at the photographer’s jest became a legend in the ward.
There is much talk nowadays of the great number of desertions, and
one’s fancy is fed by all kinds of wild and fantastic tales. Most of
them are pure inventions, or have grown, like snowballs rolling down
hill, from the merest innocent fact. The French are not deserters by
temperament. One does not hear of whole companies of Frenchmen, bereft
of their officers, falling on their knees, lifting up their hands, and
crying: “_Kamerad!_ Spare me; for I am a father!” Simply, that is not
the French note. To drag in his papahood at such a moment would appear
to a Frenchman as grotesquely humorous and absurd.
And yet it would be idle to assert that there have been no French
desertions. But most of them are pathological cases. The human brain
can experience just so much bloodshed, so much killing, without going
a little mad. And the more sensitive, finely tempered and humanitarian
the person, the heavier the spiritual strain.
The following story is a case in point. It was told me by the would-be
deserter himself, a young playwright of twenty-four, called, let us
say, Vernier, who had been invalided back to Paris. He related it with
a certain mordant humor, as being something of a joke on himself. The
background of the story, his repeated wounds and illnesses, his hatred
of killing, which grew with the months into a morbid soul sickness,
were supplied by his mother and a friend:
Vernier, nervous, high-strung, idealistic, had been in the war since
the days of mobilization. Repeatedly wounded, but never gravely,
constantly ill from exposure, he gravitated back and forth between
the trenches and the hospitals, not remaining very long at a time in
either. He took part in a number of attacks and killed a number of
Germans. He didn’t like it. About Christmas he wrote to his mother: “To
be a really successful trench warrior one should be made of pig iron
clean through: no head, no heart, no nerves!” And he added: “Frankly I
am sick, sick, sick to death of it all.”
Shortly after this he was wounded again and went to the hospital; a
month later he was back in the lines. Threatened with a relapse, he was
sent to a shelter behind the trenches. And here the breakdown came.
Fortunately his mother was with him. To her Vernier declared he had
killed his last man in battle. He swore a solemn oath never to take
another human life. He was through! He was going to clear out, escape
to Canada, become a farmer and start life anew.
He spoke wildly, passionately, in tones that carried far beyond the
small room. His mother listened, gray with terror. She implored him
not to be foolish, to hush, to speak lower; to consider himself, his
mother, France. Vernier, however, remained firm.
“But they’ll shoot you, my son, as a deserter!”
And to this Vernier vehemently replied:
“Mother, can’t you conceive that it’s more honorable to stand up
against a wall and die publicly for your faith than to die like a dog
in a hole in the ground for something you don’t believe? No; I’ve
killed my last man, I tell you! If they want to kill me for that let
them kill.”
Frenzied, the mother flung herself upon him, trying to stifle with
her hand that dangerous young mouth; but the damage was already done.
His loud speech had been overheard. Within the hour he was summoned
before the commandant and asked whether the charge were true. Far from
denying, Vernier admitted everything up to the hilt; he even went
farther and embroidered his point of view. The commandant listened
attentively; and at the end he spoke.
“He told me,” related Vernier in excellent English, “that in ordinary
circumstances I should be shot the next morning as a deserter--and
thus achieve what was so evidently my desire. But there was somebody
else to be considered--namely, my mother. For, in overhearing me, they
had overheard her entreaties as well. The son of such a mother must
be worth saving; and, therefore, he was returning my life, plainly
forfeit, to this brave mother of France. But he named a condition. And
after that,” continued Vernier with a reminiscent grin, “he simply cut
loose and lit into me. Asked ironically whether I supposed I was the
only man in France who was opposed to the shedding of blood! I was
a socialist, eh? Well, he was a philosophic anarchist! Went me one
stronger, you see.”
And this was the commandant’s condition: He asked Vernier to remember
that this bloody war was a trial, not to him alone but to all Frenchmen
with a spiritual nature; and, as they were strong for the common
good, he asked Vernier to be strong also--and hold his tongue. Simply
that--to be strong and hold his tongue! And to this Vernier consented.
He had to, he said, after the commandant’s courtesy to his mother. And,
also, he was not going to be outdone in delicacy. When last heard of,
Vernier was still holding his tongue Out There.
There was one question the soldiers asked constantly. They began the
first day I entered the hospital; and I had no reply. On the last day
they were still asking it; and still I had no reply. That question was:
When will the United States enter the war?
Observe the form of that question. They did not say If, but When? For
to most of them it seemed inevitable that, sooner or later, we, the big
sister republic, with kindred form of government and ideals, should
come to see what France, with her fine lucidity, had seen for so long:
that she is battling not alone for her own right to exist as a free,
unenslaved nation--though assuredly she is doing that--but for America
also, and for the doctrine of democracy, as opposed to the doctrines of
force and the gauntleted fist, all over the world.
But also, quite aside from this, the French soldiers want us to come in
because they like us personally. They like us and they want us to fight
upon their side.
Not long ago Georges expressed these sentiments in a nutshell. He
had been lying staring up at the Stars and Stripes, which, with the
Tricolor, was tacked above the ward door.
“It’s pretty,” he remarked pensively, “that starry flag. It’s not bad
at all, truly! And it goes well with ours. It would be pleasant to see
them both flying at large over Verdun--_n’est-ce-pas_, mees?”
As I write this, that wish of a wounded French soldier boy has come
true.
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING
“Watch that man!” said the nurse to her volunteer aid, nodding toward
a bed that had been tilted at an angle by means of wooden blocks
inserted under the legs, so that its occupant, a wounded Frenchman,
lay downhill, his feet higher than his head. He looked as if he were
past the need of watching and were dead already, that rigid, immobile,
white-draped figure. His face was a livid mask, with heavy shadows
beneath the closed lids, pinched nostrils, deep carved lines of pain
round the bluish mouth, and a black unkempt bristle of beard that
showed up startlingly against the white of the pillows. Not a movement,
not a stir or visible breath or touch of warm living color. He was a
fresh arrival, thirty-six hours from Verdun, and in the morning--if he
lasted that long!--he was going up for operation. Both of his legs were
broken above the knees.
“Watch that man!” warned the nurse again from the door. “I’m going off
duty for two hours. Lord, I’m tired!”
“Oh, I’ll watch him all right,” promised the young aid confidently.
“That’s what I’m here for,” she added with dreamy sweetness.
The nurse walked over to the bed, bent down and took the soldier’s
pulse.
“He seems all right,” she murmured dubiously. “Pretty weak. Well, keep
an eye on him.” She sighed a sigh of pure fatigue and departed.
Left to herself, the auxiliary fussed about the ward for a few minutes,
after which she, too, crossed to the bedside of the man on whom she
had been commanded to keep an eye. For a space she stood staring down
watchfully upon him. That was what she had been told to do, and she did
it conscientiously.
Then, her duty performed, she returned to her seat at the table and
commenced a letter to a girl friend. And while she is thus engaged, and
the stage is set for action--and probably tragic action--let me give a
brief thumbnail sketch of her.
It was a big war hospital in France, and the volunteer aid was a girl
from the Middle West who, in a fine white flame of enthusiasm for
the Allied cause, had come all the way from her native town as fast
as train and ship could bear her in order to nurse the fine, brave,
glorious and magnificent French soldiers. For it was with such glowing
adjectives that she described them, and she could not even think of
them without springing tears. The dear, rugged, war-torn heroes, flat
upon beds of pain, with romantic white bandages bound about their
brows, gazing up at her with unutterable gratitude in their dying
eyes. For it was thus, movie-wise, she pictured them; and she pictured
herself as a nurse, a sort of ministering-angel-of-mercy ingénue cast,
divinely compassionate, dressed for the part in pure spotless white
garments, on her head that very becoming French coif--it had looked so
attractive in the pictures; she really must have one of them--bending
over a dying _poilu_, soothing his fevered brow with cool white
fingers, murmuring gentle words of hope, promising to write to his
mother, and finally kissing him good-by into Heaven. She had read of
nurses doing that, of soldiers whispering faintly, “Kiss me good-by for
my mother!” And she knew--she had a sure instinct--that she would be
good in that part. For, as she told her girl friend, she had so much
sympathy and tenderness in her nature!
So great had been her zeal to help along the above lines that she had
not tarried to take any tiresome, humdrum courses in nursing. For the
war might be over any time, she argued, and she couldn’t bear to lose
a single precious instant. And so she had come right on. She had come
right on, and with fool’s luck she had arrived in Paris at an opportune
moment--for her. A mighty drive was on on the Western Front, and the
backwash of French wounded was pouring in--a vast, unending, sanguinary
tide. It was the tail end of summer, a terrific, heart-breaking summer,
on top of a terrific heart-breaking spring, and no let-up in sight.
Doctors and nurses and aids were exhausted, pegged out, at the end of
their tethers. Some of the workers had collapsed under the abnormal
tension, and the rest toiled on, showing their fatigue by curt crisp
orders, by quick bursts of irritation or sudden explosions of savage
temper. It was into this dynamic atmosphere that romantic little
Miss Greenhorn walked one day, utterly incompetent technically and
spiritually, but self-confident, unabashed, full of her dream of those
fine, splendid French soldiers--poor, wounded darlings!--and strong
in the belief of her own divine function to succor and save--in that
very attractive coif: And they gave her a place. Such was the stern
necessity of the hour. Here was another pair of hands, another pair
of feet; certainly they could scrub tables, carry slops, run errands,
and thus divert fatigue from the more important trained members of
the corps. And so Miss Greenhorn donned her coif--her premonition
concerning it was right; it was, indeed, very fetching--and prepared
blithely to materialize her Florence-Nightingale-Mary-Pickford dream.
They assigned her to a small ward of ten. The orderly had not arrived,
which is a salient characteristic of orderlies, and the nurse bade her
take a pail of slops to the lavabo. It was a heavy pail, too heavy for
her slight shoulders. After that she carried piles of blood-stained
linen to the same destination, and following hard upon that several
morning bedpans. It was not distinguished work, and dainty little Miss
Greenhorn performed these lowly duties with a disdainful nose in air.
’Twas not for this she had traveled all the way to France! The ward
doctor, noting the contemptuous, gingerly fashion in which she held her
burdens at arm’s length from her immaculate linen costume, murmured
ironically to the nurse:
“We’ve got a queen in disguise among us. Look out!”
Presently she was set to make a bed. Now in the course of all her
fair young life Miss Greenhorn had not made half a dozen beds, and,
moreover, she did not deem it a matter of grave importance. Still she
was willing to oblige.
“Poor man!” she breathed, hanging above him tenderly.
“How grateful he must feel toward me!” And, smiling her
Florence-Nightingale-Mary-Pickford smile, she began pulling away a
sheet at random. The soldier let out a yell of fury:
“Imbecile! Are you trying to kill me? Oh, _mon Dieu_! Get out!”
The nurse dropped her work and came running. It appeared that, instead
of the bed sheet proper, the novice had got hold of another which,
quadruple-folded, formed part of the padding of a wooden fracture-box
that held the soldier’s broken leg; and with the first tug she had all
but capsized the entire apparatus and spilled fracture-box, leg and
soldier out upon the floor.
Miss Greenhorn backed off from the scene, deeply mortified. Her
sensitive feelings were hurt. The man had called her an imbecile!
The very first words a French soldier had addressed to her--to her
who had traveled five thousand miles to nurse him--had been not “You
are heavenly kind, miss!” or “Kiss me, for I am dying!” but a brutal
“Imbecile! Get out!” It was a rude jolt to her rosy dream. In addition,
the nurse reprimanded her sharply, and for the next two back-breaking
hours she made beds under a dragon eye of supervision, made and remade
them.
Everything she did was wrong, clumsy, maladroit, and had to be altered
twice, thrice, while the men turned pale under the prolonged strain and
sweated or muttered nervously “Let be, mees! Enough! Oh, good God!”
After her first mishap they were deadly afraid of her. And so sensitive
spots went unbathed, uneased; temperatures shot up, and infected wounds
began to throb, while little Miss Greenhorn took her first lesson
in nursing. It was hard upon her, for everyone within the circle of
her inexpert activities became irritated and vented their irritation
freely; but it was even harder on her victims, the soldiers of France
she had come so far to serve.
After two hours of constant stooping, kneeling and lifting heavy and
helpless men, little red lightnings of pain began to play up and
down her spine, her shoulder muscles ached cruelly, and there was
a dull roaring in her ears. Her feet, too, already swollen in their
fashionable white buckskin pumps, began to hurt atrociously and to show
a congested purple beneath the transparent white-silken hose. Above all
things on earth, she desired to sit down five minutes and rest. Instead
of this the nurse bade her disinfect a bed. Another unwieldy mattress
to tug and haul about!
“Do I have to put this strong stuff into the water?” she demanded
plaintively, holding up the disinfecting fluid. “It’ll spoil my hands!”
She was proud of those hands. They were delicate and cool and white.
And, besides, they were part of the stage property of her movie dream.
“If you intend to disinfect the bed, do so,” returned the nurse dryly.
“The case in that bed died of gas gangrene, and I shouldn’t care to
expose another patient to the microbes, even at the risk of spoiling
your hands.”
“May I have a pair of rubber gloves then?”
“We’re short of rubber gloves just now. What we have are needed in the
operating room.”
Miss Greenhorn bent to her task in silence. Her cheeks were burning and
her eyes were blurred with tears of rage and fatigue. As she stooped,
dabbing futilely here and there with her cloth, the blunt voice of the
nurse came to her:
“Don’t shirk your work that way. That isn’t half disinfected. Here,
give me the rag.” And, squatting comfortably, she proceeded to give a
thorough demonstration. “Don’t be afraid to use a little elbow grease,”
she concluded ironically.
Miss Greenhorn bit back an angry retort. She had not come over to
France to do low, menial, scrubby, grubby work and then be treated like
a servant. At home she gave orders instead of receiving them. But aloud
she only said “Thank you!” so low that the nurse glanced at her keenly
and added: “Never mind. You’ll learn some day. Now suppose you wash all
the bedside tables. Remove everything from them first. And after that,
if there’s time, scrub the big table. Then the men’s _déjeuner_ will be
coming along. Have you got the hot drinks from the diet kitchen? Ah,
but I told you to do that always before eleven o’clock! The kitchen’s
closed now and the poor chaps have lost their nourishment for the
morning. Try not to fail on that again. Oh, before you begin on the
tables, please make me a hot compress for Number Two. You don’t know
how? Very well!” And with a smothered exclamation of impatience she
hurried off to make it herself.
Somewhat subdued, Miss Greenhorn began on her tables. A few minutes
later a peculiar sound from the adjacent bed caused her to look up and
then cry hastily:
“Oh, nurse! That poor man--Number Six--he’s vomiting.”
But the nurse, with the hot compress and a patient’s broken arm in her
hands, could not disengage herself instantly. Moreover, her patience
for the moment had gone into complete eclipse.
“When a man vomits, don’t call me!” she barked savagely. “Hold
something!”
But unfortunately little Miss Greenhorn could find nothing to hold.
Terribly disconcerted, she flew round wildly in a circle, like a kitten
chasing its tail, seeking a suitable vessel. But nothing seemed to
present itself to her distracted gaze. The pail? Obviously too large!
The bedside wine cup? Obviously too small! Oh, where---- But by this
time the nurse had caught up a basin and was supporting the sick man’s
head.
“He’s gone through everything,” she said wearily. “We’ll have to change
the entire bed. Fetch some linen. And next time use a little horse
sense, if you’ve such a thing concealed about your person.”
During the change the patient groaned horribly. The sweat of exhaustion
poured from his face. His flesh was clammy.
“Get some hot-water bottles,” the nurse ordered tersely. “No, never
mind, I’ll do it. You’d probably scald him!”
Miss Greenhorn returned to her tables, the corners of her mouth dipping
like those of a baby whose hands have been slapped. And during the rest
of the morning Number Six’s white face reproached her mutely.
In the afternoon she left another wide swath of errors behind her.
The men thanked her politely, but declined her kind offers to
shake up their pillows. When she took the temperatures she broke
three thermometers hand-running, and French thermometers were rare
commodities.
“I think they must have been cracked,” she apologized. “They snapped so
easily.”
Later, marking up the temperature charts, she made atrocious blunders.
Normal patients suddenly exhibited fever peaks high as the Himalayas.
The astounded ward doctor, discovering such a one and its source,
swore fervently and voted her a pest, with a double-barreled profane
adjective attached. That night her feet ached so that she cried when
she removed her shoes. And for that night and many nights thereafter
she had her dinner in bed and fell to sleep immediately from sheer
exhaustion.
And now, the résumé complete, let us skip a week and return to Miss
Greenhorn as she sat writing a letter to her friend. Every few minutes,
true to her orders, she had risen for a look at the patient she had
been set to watch. She watched him dutifully, ignorantly. She was
still Miss Greenhorn, with one short week of experience. Not once
did it occur to her to query: What am I to watch this man for? What
is likely to happen? What shall I do if it does? And yet she was
not a particularly stupid girl. She was rather above the average in
intelligence and eagerness; but so firmly had she riveted her gaze
upon the romantic, the false, the pseudo-æsthetic aspects of her job,
that she was temporarily blinded to its actual features. But that the
unriveting process had already begun and was somewhat painful was
evidenced by her letter to her friend. And as the man she was set to
watch seems quiet, ominously quiet, let us peep a moment over her
shoulder:
“DEAREST AMELIA: This is the very first time I have had a chance to
sit down since I entered the hospital a week ago to-day. And oh,
Amelia, before I say another word, I want to tell you: Don’t come
over! Don’t, Amelia, don’t! With your delicate health you never would
be able to stand it. The work is simply terrible--hard, brutal,
back-breaking, menial. You should see my poor hands! And my feet! And
never a single word of thanks from anybody. They just seem to take
you and your sacrifices for granted, and they expect you to know how
to do things letter-perfect, right off the reel. Of course I don’t
know anything.
“The other day a soldier called me an imbecile, and that’s exactly
what I am, Amelia, a proud, presumptuous, ignorant little fool! But I
never dreamed how dangerous it is to be so ignorant. The nurse gives
you some mean, insignificant little job that does not seem to amount
to a hill of beans, and in the end it turns out to be something
horribly important, fraught with terrible consequences. For example:
The other day a man had a relapse and all but died simply because
I couldn’t find something quickly for him to vomit into. The first
consequence was that we had to change his bed. The second consequence
was that the extra effort fatigued him so he couldn’t eat any
lunch. The third consequence was that, having eaten nothing, in the
afternoon he had a relapse. For a while I thought he was going to
die. Those were dark hours for me, Amelia! That night I offered to
sit up with him--to make it up, you see. But the ward doctor said,
‘No, let’s give the poor devil a fighting chance!’ That was horrid,
wasn’t it? He’s atrocious, that young ward doctor, and he never loses
a chance to intimate what he thinks of my presumption in offering my
untrained services. He says my nerve, if he could get an X-ray of it,
would make the celebrated Colossus of Rhodes look like a pygmy. He
asked me seriously if I wasn’t ashamed when I woke up in the middle
of the night ‘to be so dumb--not damn, but dumb--ignorant!’ And I am,
Amelia. But I really think I’m beginning slowly to learn. There’s a
sick soldier they’ve set me to watch right now. So horribly pale! So
still! One----”
At this point Miss Greenhorn’s pen trailed off and she sat bolt
upright, staring before her into space. A sudden thought had smitten
her, almost with the force of a blow. Why was he so pale? Why was he
still? Why, in short, had she been set to watch him? She rose rather
hurriedly and went to his bedside. She would ask him what was the
matter. Really it was an inspiration!
“How are you?” she questioned gently.
“_J’ai froid_,” came the faint murmur from rigid lips.
“Ah! Cold, are you? Then I’ll get you some hot-water bottles and
they’ll make you warm. Nice and warm!” And Miss Greenhorn sped away
on her mission, delighted to be of service. “_Voilà!_” she cooed
soothingly a few minutes later, slipping the heated bags into the foot
of the bed. “Now you’ll soon be warm! Nice and warm and cozy!” And she
leaned above him solicitously, still vaguely troubled. Certainly he was
ghastly pale!
It was at this juncture that the ward doctor, a busy, brusque,
discerning young gentleman, blew into the room with a--
“Hullo, Miss---- How’s that fellow----” A single glance at the fellow
in question stopped the words as if a sudden hand had been clapped over
his mouth. He sprang forward and threw down the covers. The soldier lay
in a pool of blood. “My God! Hemorrhaging! Why didn’t you call me?”
He wheeled on her savagely. But Miss Greenhorn’s face had blanched
almost as white as the counterpane. Her hand went up to her trembling
lips.
“I--I--I didn’t know!” she whispered. “He complained of feeling cold,
and so I--I gave him hot-water bottles.”
“Yah! In case of hemorrhage, when a man’s bleeding to death, for
first-aid apply hot-water bottles! Fine! Where’s that tourniquet? I
tied it onto the foot of the bed myself.”
“The--what?” stammered Miss Greenhorn, immeasurably terrified. She
quailed before the look in his eye.
“Tourniquet! That piece of rubber tubing.”
“O-o-oh! That terra-cotta rubber thing, you mean! It made the bed look
untidy and so I undid it. Let me see. Where----”
But the door had already slammed upon the doctor, who returned
immediately with a tourniquet from the adjacent ward. Fortunately it
was not an arterial, but a slow, oozing hemorrhage, and so the man did
not die; but that was not Miss Greenhorn’s fault. And the doctor did
not spare her:
“Why did you suppose his bed was tilted up so that his feet were higher
than his head? Don’t you know that in itself is a sign of hemorrhage?
Why did you suppose that tourniquet was tied to the foot of this
particular bed? Do you see it on any of the other beds? That’s another
sign! And what did you suppose you were set to watch him for anyhow?
Zeppelins? You’ve been here a week now. Tell me, are you solid ivory
from the neck up?”
I am not going to repeat the remainder of his scathing remarks,
for he was angry and his nerves were none of the best. In justice
to Miss Greenhorn it must be said that she took her whaling like
a gentleman. She did not once glance at the doctor, but kept her
eyes fixed on the French soldier whose life she had jeopardized by
her criminal ignorance. And in that moment she jettisoned the last
fragments of her ministering-angel dream. Cool hands, fevered brows,
the kiss-me-for-I-am-dying business--all the false, sentimental rubbish
with which she had stuffed her romantic young head she let go by the
board forever.
And that, for us, is the end of Miss Greenhorn, save to mention that
she is a real person. She told me the tale herself six months later,
with tears only half of laughter in her eyes. And then she affixed the
moral, which in brief is this: That not all of France’s enemies are
behind the German guns.
From this solitary episode one may deduce most of the qualifications,
both natural and acquired, that a volunteer nurse’s aid should possess
before ever she sets foot inside a war hospital. First of all she must
have health. She must have the kind of health that does not break or
crack or crock or show signs of wear in bad weather; the kind of health
that can pile one hard day on top of another hard day, and one hard
week on top of another hard week, and one hard month on top of another
hard month, and keep right on without flagging or asking the captain
to stop the ship so she can get off and walk. Every auxiliary signs
on for a period of at least three months, preferably six months; and
in some hospitals abroad they sign on for the remainder of the war.
The work is too severe for a delicate constitution; it has been known
to put a crimp in a tough one; and it is unfair both to the soldier
and to the hospital plant to have human machinery that is apt to break
down any minute. This implies youth, resiliency, reservoirs of stored
strength, the unspent increment of physical endurance; and, therefore,
anyone outside the ages from twenty to forty should ponder deeply
before entering this most exacting branch of the service.
Aside from good general health, the volunteer aid should possess what
physicians term a high threshold to disease. She should not catch
things readily. Microbes should be unable to obtain a foothold. In this
respect even healthy people vary widely. One person will take the mumps
if there is a case in the next county; another may sleep in the same
bed with the victim and go unscathed. There was a young woman in our
ward who caught everything. Every little pirate microbe that sailed the
invisible seas of air with his jolly skull-and-crossbones flag knew her
for a friendly island, had her marked down in his log book, and put in
for food and repairs, sure of safe harborage.
Tonsillitis, grippe, infected finger, swollen glands, infected eye,
tonsillitis again--she had them one after another as fast as she
could, and she finally came home with the jaundice!
But let us suppose that the candidate has passed her physical
examination with flying colors; that her back is strong; that her feet
have not the slightest tendency to fallen arch; that she can eat stewed
horse without a regretful pang; that she sleeps like the traditional
top at night, and rises from her slumbers fresh as the traditional
daisy. There are still other natural qualifications to reckon with:
She must be able to subordinate herself to the will of others, to take
orders, to take hard, disagreeable, and often what she may consider
unjust orders from her superiors without opening her mouth to complain.
In the first year of the war the hospitals were nearly swamped by
the sudden rush into them of grand ladies who were naught but little
Miss Greenhorns in more arrogant guise. These women had not the
faintest notion of subordination, or of the mental and spiritual
discipline involved in nursing. Their conception, in a word, was the
unreal conception of Miss Greenhorn. They, too, were devotees of the
Florence-Nightingale-Mary-Pickford canned brand of dream. They had not
left their beautifully appointed homes to carry slops, et cetera, but
to nurse the gallant British and French lads! And for a time doctors
and nurses were driven almost to insanity under the double pressure
of caring for the wounded, and training--or quietly assassinating and
smuggling down a well some dark night!--these ignorant ladies who
descended on the hospitals like an Egyptian plague. Nor were all of
the untrained, emotional incompetents of English origin. America sent
her quota--women who from infancy had never obeyed anything outside of
their own vagrant fancies, who were congenitally incapable of sinking
their own personalities and becoming privates for the good of the
cause. They wanted to be colonels at the very least or they wouldn’t
play, and a field-marshal’s baton was even more to their taste. Boss
was the middle name of every one of them. They had elephantiasis of the
mind. Such a person in the minor position of nurse’s aid can disrupt
the entire ward of a hospital, which, more than any other branch of
service, resembles the army in its authorities, its hierarchies and
gradations of rank, and the severe monotony of the daily routine.
For a time there was such a Great Person in our ward at the American
Ambulance, the sort who “my-good-man’s” the soldiers. As for the rest,
she blandly did what she pleased, and set the nerves of all of us on
edge in consequence. For what she didn’t please to do, we had to, you
see!
One afternoon the head nurse said to her:
“Mrs. X, will you disinfect that bed?” And it was none the less a
command even though it was issued mildly in the interrogative form.
Mrs. X responded in her best drawing-room drawl:
“Oh, my deah Miss C., I am so sorry! But it is my tea time! And
besides, really that is not my bed, you know!” With which piece of
insolence she drifted languidly off to tea.
“What am I to do with her?” exclaimed the head nurse despairingly to
the ward doctor, who had witnessed the insubordination.
“Shoot her at sunrise,” he suggested jovially. “This is a military
organization. Shoot her at sunrise, and put over her grave: ‘Here lies
a deserter. Shot for refusing to obey a superior officer in action.’”
Of course he was right. That is precisely what should have been done to
her. And I would have joined the firing squad with pleasure--for I had
to disinfect that bed!
To be strong, healthy, adaptable, able to sink one’s identity and
to take orders--these are some of the natural qualifications of
a successful volunteer aid. In addition she must be prepared for
disagreeable tasks. The sight of blood, of poor fellows smashed to
pieces, the hideous stench of gangrenous wounds, the screams of the
dressing hour--these are the inevitable concomitants of a surgical ward
in war-mangled Europe to-day, and are sufficiently disagreeable. But
these are not what I mean. I mean the monotonous, prosaic, inglorious
tasks that everybody loathes but somebody has to perform. And that
somebody, eleven cases out of ten, is the nurse’s volunteer aid. For
you have not read thus far without discovering that the position of an
auxiliary resembles closely that of a printer’s devil. Not his the high
responsibility of getting out the paper or deciding the politics of the
editorial page; his not to reason why, his but to be on the living,
red-hot jump every second of the time or get sacked by his irate boss.
In one respect, however, the printer’s devil has the haul over the
nurse’s assistant, for he receives a weekly envelope, while she labors
for love.
As a specimen of these monotonous tasks, an English volunteer aid
confessed to me that for two months in an English base hospital, three
miles behind the lines, she did nothing all day save carry heavily
loaded trays of food from the diet kitchen to a certain table in the
corridor. Day after day, from eight in the morning until seven at
night, back and forth, back and forth, remote, solitary, with aching
shoulders, this plucky young private drudged. Never a wounded soldier
did she see. At times the hospital shook under German bombardment; but
so far as romance and illusion were concerned, she might as well have
been a slavey in a twilight basement restaurant beneath the dull roar
of the Sixth-Avenue elevated trains. Another young woman told me that
for six weeks she carried nothing but bedpans. And at the American
Ambulance, the _auxiliaire_ who roomed next to me had a job of which I
did not envy her the possession. Every evening she used to offer to
trade it in even barter for mine. And every evening I refused to take
a cowardly advantage of her generosity. The position which my friend
was so generous with was up in the operating room. And it was her
particular duty to carry off the amputated members in a basket.
The points thus far in the natural qualifications of a nurse’s aid
are health, resiliency, ability to take orders and to stick at mean,
disagreeable jobs. Let us add a final one that is really the keystone
of the entire arch. For without it the others are as sounding brass and
tinkling cymbals. Nor is it acquirable: it is a grace, a gift. Some
successful doctors and nurses possess it to a high degree; others,
lacking it, turn into dried-up turnips. There was a certain young
surgeon in the hospital who undoubtedly possessed this qualification.
Whether he was an expert technician I do not know, for he left the
hospital before I arrived and it was only the soldiers’ memory of him,
the reflected echo of his personality, that I received. But that was
sufficient. They loved him. “Ah, mees,” they would exclaim, “do you
know Docteur James d’Amérique? _Non?_” And they made me feel that not
to have known him was a profound personal loss. “Ah, how he was kind!
How he was good!” they would murmur fondly, and they would drag forth
a tiny snapshot of him for me to look at, and laugh with delight at
beholding his face. “See, mees! Here he is! Aha! Bonjour, Docteur
James!” They wished me to share with them the fragrance of that
memory. One could not ask for a better epitaph than the tribute paid
by these _poilus_ to the unknown Docteur James d’Amérique! Another did
not possess this gift. Brusque, impatient of address, he would pull
away the gauze sticking to an infected wound with an abruptness that
invariably raised a howl; and exclamations of “_Brutal!_” “_Imbécile!_”
“_Sale cochon!_” followed his ministrations down the ward. “Oh, shut
up! Shut up! Shut up!” the doctor would retort in English. Now the
soldiers did not know exactly what “Shut up” signified; without doubt
in their minds it was some extremely naughty English profanity. But
they had their revenge. They nicknamed him “Docteur Shut Up.” That was
his epitaph.
A nurse who failed in this one respect they dubbed the old
_mitrailleuse_. I have seen them sham sleep when she approached their
bedsides for a chat. There was one, however, whom they loved. She was a
slim, gold-haired Scotch miss, not much higher than the bedposts, but a
grenadier for all that, and the quality I am speaking about rayed out
from her in an almost visible aura. Not that she was “soft” or easy
with the men. On the contrary, she cracked a whip over them and made
them walk a chalk line of discipline, which they did with an open,
unabashed delight in her. They would feign all sorts of ailments to
lure her to their bed for a chat and massage.
“I suffer bad here, mees!” they would begin. “No, not there--higher
up. No, _chère_ mees, not there. No--yes! _Voilà! Parfaitement!_
A-ah! _Mais, continuez, continuez!_” And not a thing the matter with
the frauds! But they sunned themselves in her presence and all but
fought for her smiles. That little Scotch miss had a way with her.
Moreover, she loved her job. She loved it from the ground up, over and
under and beyond and through. She loved it in all of its aspects and
ramifications; she loved it in all the hours. She had the faculty, the
gift I have been attempting to describe. She had a vocation. And unless
one possesses in some degree this natural delight in humanity, in sick,
diseased and often dirty humanity, the hour soon strikes when nursing
begins to pall.
Thus far I have dealt only with the natural qualifications that a young
woman should possess if she desires to do volunteer nursing in this
war. All those who, after searching their inmost hearts with sincerity,
cannot pass on the above-mentioned points with an all-round grade of
at least seventy-five per cent, need waste no further time on this
article. They may get out of the procession right now and go round next
door and sign in for canteen cooking, or join the hoe brigade. Step
lively, please!
At the present moment there does not exist in the Red Cross
organization any course of instruction that has for its direct and
primary object the training of volunteer nurses’ aids for work in
surgical hospitals here or abroad. There does not exist in the Red
Cross curriculum, as it is now constituted, any course that is adequate
for the present crisis. The teaching manuals are the same that were
in use before the war, unrevised, unchanged. They were not written
with war in mind. Their purpose and goal is not our purpose and goal.
And, as the textbooks have remained unaltered, it is inevitable that
the various courses of instruction based upon them should be more
or less beside the point, congested with material that is useless
or irrelevant, and barren of certain fundamental facts which every
volunteer aid should know. Sometimes when these lessons are given by
nurses or doctors who have seen actual war service they are of more
value, but these are exceptional, random cases; and in general the
courses, instead of hitting the bull’s-eye of to-day’s grim necessity,
are faced off in another direction and shooting at an imaginary mark.
There are four courses of instruction in the Red Cross curriculum that
have a bearing, more or less indirect, on the subject of volunteer
nursing in surgical hospitals during the present war. Let us glance at
each in turn.
Most popular of all is the course in First Aid. This is the course
that nearly every woman in the land flew at and swallowed down whole
at the outset of the European conflict, and, it is safe to say, with
very slight benefit. This is not surprising, for First Aid was not
the proper choice. To teach nursing is not its object. The punishment,
so to speak, does not fit the crime. Almost purely educational
in character, it is designed for the accidents and emergencies
of our ante-bellum, peaceful past rather than for the precise,
up-to-the-minute scientific requirements of our belligerent present.
And from the point of view of the nurse’s assistant there are entire
chapters that should be ruthlessly scrapped. Methods of resuscitating
a drowning man; cures for snake bite; the way to tell an intoxicated
gentleman from one who has merely fallen down in the street in a
fit--these matters are interesting and valuable in their place;
but their place is not in a manual used to instruct in the art of
nursing under present conditions. It would seem advisable that the
First-Aid manual be taken in hand by some eminent surgeon who has
seen war-hospital service during the present year--for example, Dr.
George W. Crile, head of the Cleveland Hospital Unit, that was recently
ordered to France--and blue-penciled unsparingly with actual conditions
in mind. The residue, plus a chapter on the recent discoveries and
improved methods in caring for wounds, such as the treatment of burns
from liquid gas, and the Carrel-Dakin system of antiseptic irrigation
of infected wounds, to mention but two examples, would form an
invaluable nucleus of instruction.
The second course in the Red Cross curriculum is that known as
Elementary Hygiene and Home Care of the Sick. “The primary object of
this course,” according to the pamphlet, “is to teach women personal
and household hygiene in order that they may acquire habits of right
living which will aid in the prevention of sickness and the upbuilding
of a strong and vigorous people, and to give them simple instruction
in the care of the sick of their own homes which will fit them to
render intelligently such service as may be safely entrusted to them.”
Admirable three years ago in peace times, but not at all what we are
after now. Here again, so far as the purpose of the volunteer nurse is
concerned, the emphasis, as in First Aid, is on the wrong foot from the
start-off. There are entire chapters that might be omitted with profit,
such as the house, the care of the house and the laundry, the household
medicine closet, the hygiene of infancy and childhood. They should be
dropped, and a more thorough, intensive and leisurely training be given
in actual conditions prevailing in war hospitals of to-day.
In addition to these courses there are two others of minor importance.
One in Home Dietetics is entirely too elaborate for the simple
requirements of the nurse’s aid, who needs to know only the general
food values and the compounding of invalids’ drinks. Three or four
lessons in connection with the nursing course should amply cover this
field. The fourth course, the Surgical Dressings, is practical but
limited.
These are the popular courses given under the auspices of the Red Cross
to-day. Each, taken by itself, has grave defects; and even when all
four are combined there is such a ponderous dead weight of irrelevant
material, pre-war nursing and medical junk, that for practical purposes
it would seem better to throw them all out of the window and devise
another course, a course compounded of the valuable elements of all
four, but thorough, scientific, modern, and above all specifically
adapted to the actual conditions of the present fight.
It may be argued that the necessary eliminations will be made by each
individual. But to let the immature, embryo nurse decide what she will
and what she won’t eliminate is a dangerous business in practice. It
would be all right in peacetime, when she does not have to try it out
on the dog. But she might elect to eliminate the wrong detail, and
then find herself in the quandary of Miss Greenhorn, with a human
life hanging in the scales. For though in theory an auxiliary has no
authority and no responsibility, in actual practice that is far from
being the truth. There are hours, even days, in the absence of the
nurse, when the entire care of the ward falls on the shoulders of
the assistant, with the head nurse looking in at rare intervals. In
textbooks untrained persons are not supposed to be in positions of
responsibility. In this or that emergency “Call the doctor!” or “Call
the nurse!” they say. But suppose the doctor is up in the operating
room, blocks away. Suppose the nurse is off duty. Suppose also that
the nurses in the adjacent wards are down at lunch. For such precisely
was the stage setting of a mishap that occurred in the jaw ward of the
American Ambulance. The auxiliary was alone in the room. Suddenly,
without warning, one of the jaw cases began to hemorrhage from the
mouth and nostrils. Bright arterial blood spurted high as the ceiling
and stained adjoining beds. In less than ten minutes the man was dead.
What should the auxiliary have done? The event proved that in that
particular case not a whole regiment of doctors could have saved the
patient; but the responsibility was there. And it is for just such
tight corners of actuality that a volunteer nurse should be prepared.
And for such preparedness the teaching manuals and the lectures based
upon them should deal, not with the diffuse and general matters of
health, but exclusively and incisively with the realities of the
present crisis. In addition, it should be noted that the Red Cross, in
connection with its nursing course, “hopes that a limited number of
hours of practical experience will be provided by the base hospitals”;
but such practical experience is not deemed essential to a certificate.
Aside from these courses, there is a course given by the Young Women’s
Christian Association of New York City, which for practical purposes
covers the requirements of the present situation in an almost ideal
fashion. It is, in fact, the most admirable course of instruction on
the market--scientific, modern, intensive, complete. It is called the
Trained Attendant Course, and is given by Johns Hopkins nurses of the
highest standards of excellence, who are trained teachers as well. The
course covers eleven weeks of daily instruction and practice, with an
obligatory companion course in invalid cookery.
With the natural and technical qualifications of the volunteer nurse’s
aid thus disposed of, one may look about and query where suitable
material is to be found. The answer is at hand: In the colleges.
College women of the two upper classes form a compact body, already
listed, easy to mobilize. Young, supple, adaptable, mentally and
physically fit, with a background of discipline behind them, they are
excellent instruments for the purpose. Sharpen them to a point by an
adequate course of instruction, and three months should produce a corps
of workers sufficient for a year. These might then be registered and
called upon at need.
It is a feature of the present disaster that no one can gauge the
future. One man’s guess is as good as another’s. It is safe to say that
two years ago no one foresaw that to-day the United States would be in
the arena as the protagonist of democracy. Nor can anyone predict with
assurance what the next two years will hold: Whether we shall have a
big expeditionary force in France; whether by that time we may not be
fighting on our own soil; or whether the whole infernal business may
not burst like a bubble before the month is out. But this much seems
certain--American surgery and American hospitals are counted the best
in the world both in the preventive and in the follow-up field. And
since our entry into the war the governments of the United States,
Great Britain and France have had under consideration a proposition for
placing the entire French ambulance service, and later on the entire
British ambulance service, under the United States army medical corps.
So there you are, dear procession, right up against your job! I hope
you like its dimensions. As the darky says, “You done chawed off a
mouthful!” And that is all for this time, except--God bless you, girls!
Go to it! And remember, it’s our own men this time!
THE CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE
“Guard well the little ones to-day, Marthe. Don’t let them out of sight
or play too far from home. You know Emile hates to wear his gas mask.
He tears it off and hides it, the naughty rogue, soon as the back is
turned. There! Listen! It has commenced again--the bombardment!”
Marthe’s mother, a short, stocky French peasant with a heavy,
weather-roughened face and deep-blue eyes, held up her hand for
attention; and Marthe, a slim gypsy child of seven, dirty and unkempt,
with great gleaming black eyes and an uncombed mat of curly black
hair, cocked an indifferent ear to listen; in fact, she was somewhat
scornful of her mother’s continued terror of that distant muffled roar.
Heard thus, ten kilometers or more away, it was not unlike the shock
of a heavy surf breaking on a rocky coast. For three years now Marthe
had heard that sound. She had heard it near at hand when a big shell
had exploded bang! right on top of her own house and knocked all one
side out open to the sky--after which they had dragged the furniture
downstairs and lived in the cellar; she had heard it farther off when
bing! bang! the spire of the old mossy stone church across the way had
crashed down into the street and all of the saints save only Mother
Mary and her little Son had tumbled, face down, from their niches; she
had heard it the last thing at night when she went to sleep, and she
had risen to its sound in the morning.
And familiarity had bred contempt. It was part of the everyday tissue
of her life, common as the Boches’ avions, which went sailing high
overhead in the sky, tiny as minute dragon flies, and disappeared into
fleecy clouds. For Marthe and her mother lived in a little village in
the war zone, just in front of a line of concealed French batteries
which the enemy had long been striving to demolish.
And when the Boches became enraged at their failure in locating the
French batteries which roared nightly defiance they would deliberately
turn their guns upon the defenseless civilian villages in between,
abandoned by all save a few old people and poor families who had
nowhere else to go; and perhaps they would kill an old woman or mangle
a child playing in the deserted streets; after which sport, encouraged
and refreshed, they would go after the French batteries again. Jean, a
village boy, had explained all this to Marthe. His entire family had
been killed in an explosion, and since then he had turned into a wild,
moody character, following the army or roaming the countryside.
Marthe listened to the distant struggle of artillery and then she
shrugged her shoulders and said calmly: “It is not near. To-day it is
not as near as yesterday. I do not think they will bother us any more.
For yesterday Jean and I went through the village and counted, and
every single house had been hit. They have finished with us, _maman_!
If the guns do not come after us this afternoon may I take Emile and
gather flowers for the shrines?”
Her mother shook her head. The frugal breakfast of soup over she was
fastening on her apron of coarse ticking to go to work in her field. It
was for the sake of that precious plot of five hectares of wheat that
she had stayed on in the village, taking fearsome chances, after the
enemy had started to gas the entire district and the French orders of
evacuation had come.
“You would let little Emile be gassed,” she murmured reproachfully,
“while you run off to gather flowers!”
“_Zut!_ They have not gassed us for ten days. And it is cold down here,
_maman_. Even in the middle of the day it is cold--and dark. Emile
sneezes all the time. And he is getting as white as plaster.”
Her mother sighed. “Very well,” she consented grudgingly, “you may go.
But for an hour only. I do not like it, though. Tie Emile’s mask behind
his back where he cannot find it.”
“Yes, _maman_. But they are not going to gas us any more. Jean said so.”
“That Jean!” cried her mother angrily. “What does he know about it?
Even the good God Himself does not know any more what they will do!
And I will not have you playing with that scamp, that _jeune sauvage_.
He is not respectable. Chasing all over the country! Following the
soldiers! _Hélas!_ What is our poor country coming to? A fine crop of
young vagabonds we shall have after the war!”
She thrust into her pocket a hunk of dark sour bread and a fragment of
cheese, kissed Emile and Marthe, caught up from the mattress a pallid,
somber-eyed girl baby, and went out to the field.
Left to herself, Marthe took Emile, climbed the few steps leading up
from her cave home and sat watching the German aëroplanes. They passed,
singly or in groups, frequently. The thin drone of their motors coming
from the north could be heard long before even Marthe’s keen eyes could
pick out the black speck far up in the pale-blue ether. The thunder of
artillery had grown fainter and died away. Certainly Jean was right.
What was the fun of shooting at houses that were already knocked down?
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1917, by The Curtis Publishing Company._
_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information. Reproduced
from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia._
REFUGEES FROM THE GASSED DISTRICTS]
That afternoon, with Emile clinging to her fingers and every now and
then looking up with a delighted smile into her eyes, Marthe led the
way to the ruined church. From the leather belt which secured the
boy’s diminutive black cotton apron dangled the gas mask. According
to orders Marthe had tied it behind his back, and at every step it
bobbed up and down like an absurd little antiquated bustle. The sun
shone brilliantly. It was an ideal day in which to be out of the
cellar. Arrived at the church, with its small inclosed garden of silent
inhabitants, Marthe ensconced Emile, always obedient, smiling and
tender, upon a grave close under the wall of the old stone chapel, and
then rambled off to gather bouquets for the shrines.
How long she remained away, how far she wandered, she did not know;
but when she returned little Emile had mysteriously vanished. In her
absence the old stone church had altered also. One entire side had
fallen out and lay prone, a chaos of tumbled broken granite, upon the
mossy ground. And now Marthe recalled having heard an explosion, but
so accustomed were her ears to the sound that at the time she had but
vaguely marked it. That accounted for the church certainly.
But Emile--where was Emile, obedient, tender little Emile? She ran
about, peering behind gravestones, calling shrilly, and at length,
smitten by a nameless anguish of horror, scared in every atom of her
small being without knowing why, she fled, sobbing wildly, to her
mother and poured out her story.
That night there was a hurried exodus. Marthe’s mother, broken by the
death of her small son--for if his disappearance was a mystery to the
girl it was not to her mother after one glance at the high-piled
broken granite--decided to give up her field; but it was like wrenching
her heart out of her body. Jean, chancing by that way at dusk, offered
his company as far as the next village, for Marthe’s mother, a true
peasant, had never in her life traveled more than a dozen kilometers
from her own doorstep, and knew less of the outside world than she
knew of heaven. So Jean had taken charge. And now he walked beside the
refugees, carrying a huge blanketful of their possessions strapped
across his shoulders and holding by the hand Marthe, who still wept
bitterly at the thought of abandoning her little Emile to the cold
and the dark of the deserted churchyard. She pictured him sobbing and
stumbling among the mossy stones, and calling in sweet, plaintive
tones for his sister. That the fall of the church wall had anything to
do with the vanishing of Emile did not once enter her head. The two
were separate catastrophes--the one, familiar, ordinary; the other,
mystifying, terrible. She, too, bore a sack of household goods upon her
back, and from her free hand dangled a small, battered bird cage.
Behind them trudged Marthe’s mother, harnessed to the shafts of a dump
cart piled high with mattresses and bedding, and bearing on top the
small slumbering Georgette, cozy and warm, nested deep in pillows.
Since viewing the fallen wreck of the church not one sound had the
mother uttered. If she had marked Jean’s opportune appearance on the
scene she did not betray any sign of his presence. And now she plodded
forward, shoulders bent, gripping the shafts, dry-eyed, stolid, mute.
What were her thoughts upon that twilight road?
Ahead of her Marthe and Jean held low-voiced conversation as to the
probable whereabouts of Emile. The boy, who upon hearing her tale had
instantly divined the truth, declared it was his opinion that the
sacred Mother Marie, looking out through the window from her shrine in
the church, had seen Emile, and noting what a gentle and gay little
kid he was had borrowed him for a time to play in the sky with her
own small Son, who without doubt must be horribly bored among all
those solemn, grown-up saints and angels. And this idea of the _jeune
sauvage_, the vagabond of the fields, comforted Marthe greatly.
In time they arrived at a village which thus far had escaped shelling.
A shelter was found for them. And for a month the peasant mother
remained in her new, strange surroundings. But her heart was so heavy
that she could not sleep or eat or speak. She suffered as an animal
suffers, dumbly. A stranger would have called her sullen--a clod. For
hours on end she sat in the same chair, heavy, immobile, and stared out
upon a field of grain and poppies and thought of her own plot lying
untended in the sun. And finally the tug of the soil became too strong.
She returned.
Established once more in the damp cellar of their wrecked home she
became herself again, and the first night she chatted volubly with
Marthe, to whom she had scarcely addressed a word since their flight;
she even sang as she hushed the small Georgette to sleep.
“Listen, _petite_!” she said to Marthe after supper. “I am going down
the street a moment to see Madame Barrois. She tends the field next
mine. Perhaps also I can get some goat’s milk for the _bébé_. _Ne bouge
pas! Sois sage--hein?_” And Marthe had promised soberly not to budge
and to be good. She felt lonely the first night, and she wished that
Mother Marie would see fit to return Emile. There was such a thing as
keeping a borrowed article too long!
Half an hour later her mother burst into the cellar, tears upon her
cheek and a strange light in her eye. In her arms she bore a child who
bit and wailed and kicked and screamed without cessation: “_Maman!
Maman! Maman!_”
“_Ça y est! Tais-toi, mon petit gosse!_” (Enough! Enough! Keep still,
my little boy!) murmured Marthe’s mother, pressing the small head close
to her bosom. “Thy _maman_ is gone, _pauvre enfant_!”
She placed the sobbing child in Marthe’s arms. “Listen to me,” she
said. “Emile was taken from us----”
“I know. The Mother Marie borrowed him to play with the infant Jesus.
Jean said so.”
“Very good. For once that Jean was not so far off. And now the good
Mother Marie has given us this poor little one to nourish in Emile’s
stead.”
To Marthe this exchange seemed only simple justice and she did not
trouble her head with the details of the transaction. Nor did her
mother explain that on arriving at the dugout of her friend she had
knocked repeatedly without receiving a response and was on the point
of leaving when from out of the darkness behind the door had sounded a
shrill, angry, sobbing little voice: “_Maman! Maman! J’ai froid! J’ai
froid!_”
Hastily Marthe’s mother forced the door, made a light, and discovered
her friend lying upon the floor, the victim of a shell, and the child
beating the still, inanimate figure with his puny fists and crying:
“_Maman!_ Wake up! I’m cold!”
After this Marthe’s mother tended her own and her neighbor’s field, and
Marthe joyfully tended little Emile’s substitute.
One afternoon shortly afterward she took her new acquisition out to
wash him in the canal and see what kind of bargain Mother Marie had
made with her anyhow. And while she was thus employed, down on her
knees scrubbing absorbedly, there drew up quietly behind her a large,
military-gray automobile, from which two men descended. It was, in
fact, Prefect Mirman with an American friend. M. Mirman was prefect
of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, a portion of the country
bordering on Alsace, which included a large area of the battling
frontier of France. The prefect himself held a position comparable in
importance to the governorship of New York, and he had in his heart a
deep overflowing love for his suffering people which resembled that of
Lincoln’s.
But Marthe could not know that. She sprang to her feet, terribly
startled, staring behind the men at the big, gray, snorting, quivering,
smoking beast--the first she had ever laid eyes on--and instinctively
threw her new little brother behind her. The prefect, reading her
intention of flight, laid a restraining grasp on her shoulders. Marthe
faced him, pale, hostile, her pupils steadily enlarging.
“Poor unfortunates!” said the American. “Why are they permitted to
remain?”
The prefect smiled slightly. “They are not. They stay without
permission. It is impossible for you Americans, who are always
traveling about, to conceive the love, the passion with which our
poor people cling to the nourishing soil. Transplant them rudely,
scientifically as you may say, and they pine, they die. That is
the simple truth. Well, what are we to do? For example, take this
situation. All throughout this northern-frontier district the civilian
population was ordered to evacuate when the enemy started its
deliberate bombarding and gassing of defenseless open towns.
“Some of these little villages lie directly in the line of attack. It
is conceivable that, given a temporary reverse of our army, they might
fall into Prussian hands. And should that unfortunate event occur I
do not want left in those villages any women, any young maids, any
half-grown lads or any infants! The majority of the population, of
course, get out instantly when the evacuation orders come. But there is
always left a residue of those who cannot or will not go, poor people
in villages or farmers who have never traveled farther than twenty
kilometers in their lives, and whom it is as hard to uproot, even in
this time of stress, as it is to uproot a hardy old tree. Simply they
prefer to remain here and take their chances. But that must not be!
“So for the past two months, since the evacuation orders became
effective, I have driven from one end to another of my department,
searching out those who remain behind. And I explain, I beg, I urge,
I entreat. I promise that they shall not go far from home; that their
children shall remain with them; that as soon as it is safe they shall
return; and if they have crops in the ground they may go certain days
to tend them, leaving the children in safety. It has defects, of
course, this plan of mine, for often our shelters are bombed, but just
at present it is the best I can do.”
And here the prefect, one of the most romantic and truly great figures
in France, looked down at the reluctant young person he had been
holding fast while he discoursed, and said: “Well, little mother! How
goes it, eh?”
Silence. Marthe simply stared at him, clutching tightly behind her the
substitute Emile, naked save for a pair of diminutive trousers.
“Where is _maman_?”
Silence.
“Who is that you are hiding behind you?”
“Nobody. There’s nobody behind me!” At this mendacious statement the
prefect, father of his district, laughed. “Ha! ’Tis a little angel
then? I’m going to see!”
He bent over her shoulder. But Marthe, who had been edging out from
under the restraining hand, suddenly whirled, caught up the boy,
scudded to her cellar across the way, and shut and barricaded the door.
She was not going to risk a second disappearance!
The prefect approached, knocked, and addressed gentle, persuasive words
to the invisible occupants. There was no response.
“We shall have to wait,” he said, returning to the automobile. “Of
course we could use violence--but there’s been enough of that!”
And wait they did for more than two hours, the prefect calm, patient,
determined. In the interval he related some of his experiences as
prefect in connection with the German capture of French towns at the
commencement of the war. That the iron had entered the soul of this
strong, tender governor of his people was evident, for with all his
manifold duties he had taken time to compile a book of officially
vouched-for cases of outrages occurring within his own department, for
the benefit of those who pooh-poohed the idea of German atrocities. The
first sentence of that poignant little book reads: “_Voici un livre
d’horreurs; c’est, hélas! un livre de vérité_.” (This is a book of
horrors; it is, alas, a book of truth!)
And those Americans who hold that the Germans are really very
fine fellows, but simply misled by their overlords, should have a
confidential chat with Prefect Mirman, the great-hearted governor of
that frontier section of France.
It was deep twilight before Marthe’s mother returned from her work.
With two fields under bombardment to tend instead of one, life was no
joke. To her the prefect explained the object of his visit. Since the
fathers of France were away fighting, he, the prefect, was trying to be
father to all the children in his department, to watch over them, to
keep them decent boys and girls, in church and in school, to teach them
trades and safeguard them until their parents’ return.
Marthe’s mother listened, pondered, put a few practical questions. The
place to which he would take them--it was far? No, close at hand; in
effect, just behind that hill. And her children, they would be with
her? But surely! And she could return when necessary to care for her
fields? The prefect gave her his word. Whereupon Marthe’s mother, so
sparing of emotion, suddenly burst into tears and consented.
Three days later saw the entire family transported to Toul and safely
installed in a temporary barracks provided by Prefect Mirman. It was a
big, bare, uncomfortable, insanitary affair, and it seemed as if all
the young ragamuffins of France had been collected there in one sorry
regiment. The story of Marthe might serve as a type for most. But there
were some whose histories, written in their small peaked faces and
sullen gaze, had a more sinister cast; some had lost an eye; some had
lost a hand; some had lost parents; and most of them had lost their
childhood gayety. Gathered up from miles along the frontier where the
artillery fire was hottest, out of dank, dirty cellars or unspeakably
foul dugouts and caves, living without air, baths, change of garments
or the simplest sanitary arrangements, they were a dismal, pallid,
vermin-infested, scarecrow little crew--and yet they were the budding
hope of France, as nobody knew better than the prefect.
But what to do with them after he had got them together? It was a sore
question. For what these small unfortunates needed beyond everything
were baths, doctors, nurses, teachers, someone to teach them to
smile again--and always more and more baths. Out of the three hundred
and fifty, twenty-one were babies under one year; many of them had
contagious skin diseases; a few had tuberculosis; and all, sick and
well, were crowded together without discrimination.
Food and shelter were all the prefect could be sure of, for these
the French Government furnished, but more in the present stress it
could not promise, for all the French doctors and nurses were already
occupied with the war. And the worst of it was that more and more
children and mothers would be arriving as the wave of battle swept
toward other villages or wholesale gassing set in. It was a thoroughly
bad piece of business all round--a kind of vicious circle with no
visible outlet. But not for one moment did these difficulties stump
the prefect of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. He had rescued
these children and got them together--that was his job. Now somebody
had to take care of them; he couldn’t, the French Government couldn’t.
Therefore--somebody else had to!
And it is exactly at this point, at that “somebody,” that the American
Red Cross enters the story. For in the acute and immediate need the
prefect telegraphed for aid to a well-known American woman in Paris.
She brought the telegram to Major Murphy, Commissioner for Europe of
the American Red Cross, and he at once got into action. Within a few
hours eight workers were on their way to Toul--a doctor, a nurse, two
aids, and women to take charge of the administration. At the same time
there started a camionette loaded with clothing and food.
Thus began the first activity of the American Red Cross for the civil
population of France--and it began very appropriately with the children.
When, one morning several weeks later, I visited this refugee center
high up on a sunshiny hill, a general transformation had taken place.
The children, numbering by this time about five hundred, with sixty
mothers, had been moved into a newly constructed barracks of brick
and cement furnished by the French Government, which also supplied
heat, light, rations, cooks, unskilled labor and camion service for
transportation. This plant, in its bare elements, was then turned over
to the American Red Cross to supplement and run as it pleased. And
when I arrived the American administration was in full swing. To me
the children looked surprisingly well and happy--almost too happy, in
fact, in view of their grim past! And I remarked upon this fact to the
director.
“Well,” he laughed, “if you are after local color you should have seen
them--and smelled them!--when we first took hold. The very first thing
we did was to establish louse clinics--‘de-lousing’ is the technical
term. Don’t shudder! They’re about clean now, but in the beginning we
had some horrible little heads. The soldiers in the winter trenches had
nothing on those children in the way of vermin and filth. And at the
same time we inaugurated the good old American institution of shower
baths.”
“And what did the mothers think of these?”
The doctor chuckled. “Scandalous! Immoral! Indelicate! Designed to
murder their poor children outright! Some of these peasant women, you
know, have never taken a bath in the altogether in their lives. They
still continue the customs handed down to them since the time of Louis
XI. They bathe little boys in their trousers--put ’em in the tub with
their trousers on; indelicate to remove ’em, you see! They bathe little
girls with their chemises on. And babies they don’t bathe at all. Yes,
the shower bath was a novelty. But I may add that it was a novelty
which took with the children from the start. Now they fight for a
chance at it!
“Come here, Marthe, and say ‘_Bonjour_’ to the lady.” He caught by the
hand a passing little girl with great bright dark eyes and dark curls
neatly twined. Beside her trotted a small boy, decked in his Sunday
best. Thus I had my introduction to Marthe and the substitute brother
whom the Mother Marie had sent down to replace the borrowed Emile.
“She is never without that boy,” continued the director. “She seems
to be afraid somebody is going to steal him.” And then he told me
her story, narrated above. “Here is her mother,” he added as a woman
approached along the path. “She has walked all the way from her home
to spend a few days with her children. These peasant mothers come and
go as they will; they visit with us a few days and then return to their
fields. _Bonjour, madame_,” he said, turning to her. “How goes that
crop of wheat?”
“Not bad, monsieur. But yesterday--what a misfortune! An _obus_ fell
right in the middle of the field where the grain is highest and dug a
crater wide as this.” She extended her two arms. “_Sale brute!_” (Dirty
brute!) “_Grâce à Dieu!_ I was off in another corner of the field.”
“You are very courageous,” I said, “to work like that for your children
in those bombarded fields.”
“But no! But no! It is not for the infants. It is that the soldiers of
France may have food.”
“There you are!” exclaimed the director in English. “That’s what
they all say--and just as unselfconsciously. They don’t know what a
magnificent piece of work they’re pulling off!”
At this moment Marthe interrupted to show me her sewing and the mother
passed on to her baby, the little Georgette. Later I saw this tiny,
woeful creature, born in a cellar, under sound of heavy guns. Frail,
transparent, pale as a snowdrop, she lay in her mother’s arms. Not once
in her two years had she been seen to smile. I did not blame her. Such
a world was not worth smiling on! She showed a rare judgment beyond
her age. Nevertheless, for five minutes I held her in my arms, hating
the Germans, and trying by all arts to bring a flash of mirth to that
solemn, drooping little mouth. Vain enterprise. I might as well have
tried to make the Sphinx laugh.
After that, accompanied by the director, I made a tour of the
buildings, built after the usual fashion of military cantonments,
in the form of a hollow square. Everything was scrupulously clean,
the floors scrubbed, the windows flung wide open, and fresh sunshine
flooded the dormitories, where the mothers sat chatting together, their
babies at their breasts.
“This beats caves as a summer resort!” I said.
The director nodded rather grimly. In company with M. Mirman he had
made rescues from some of those caves.
“And we’re going to beat them still more before we’re through. Here
in this small settlement we are trying to achieve a model community.
Already we have a clinic, an infirmary, a hospital of eighty beds, a
kindergarten, a church, schools, a store, a recreation teacher--in
short, a welfare center for children as scientific and humane as
anything to be found in America. But that is not enough. Compared with
the need this one single unit is only a drop in the bucket. And so we
are planning to make Toul a kind of nucleus from which we shall ray out
in all directions. Already we have a traveling dispensary starting from
this point, with a doctor and nurse, which visits through twenty-five
villages, treating the children in their homes and fetching back to
the hospital the contagious and tubercular cases. Such a system keeps
up the general health par in the areas visited and prevents the sudden
spread of epidemics.
“At Nesle, a town in the devastated district, we have established
another unit--a small hospital and another automobile dispensary which
carries aid to the outlying districts. In that region, of course, the
problem is somewhat different from our own, because the Germans, having
retreated, the children do not need to be collected in one place to
protect them from gassing or bombing. They remain in their homes--if
one can call homes those ruined and burned shells, despoiled of every
stick of furniture, every kitchen utensil, and even the orchards cut
down and the wells defiled!--and we go to them. We go to them with
our traveling clinics in an ambulance containing a full outfit of
medical stores--and a bath! We carry the makings of that bath right
along with us on the floor of the machine--a tub, tubing, a spray
and a pumping apparatus. And when we arrive at a home where a child
needs a clean-up we heat water in the kitchen, stick the small victim
into the tub--without trousers or chemise, you bet!--and we bathe it
after the rules laid down by the Greek nymph Arethusa, who lived in
a fountain and who, according to the Limerick, used to wash, _sans_
mackintosh--b’gosh, _sans_ anything!
“It is the simple, serious truth that baths are the greatest hygienic
need of these children at the present time; and by bringing baths
into their homes we are helping to restore the health of the entire
district. So successful have been our efforts at Toul and Nesle that
the French authorities have earnestly requested us to broaden our
scope and establish centers in other needy districts. And this is what
we are doing as fast as we can. Eventually we intend to have a chain
of centers, linked together by automobile dispensaries, strung along
that whole northern frontier just behind the battle lines, in order to
care for the thousands of children who, no less than the men in the
trenches, are giving their lives in this war.
“As the situation stands to-day France is burning her candle at both
ends; she is at one and the same time losing her men and her children.
With our American soldiers once in the trenches we are going to check
the colossal loss of man power; and in the interval until our fellows
arrive, with our hospitals, our clinics, our traveling dispensaries and
our schools we are doing our best to check the loss of her child power.
This type of scientific social work is the sort of thing America excels
in; for the last ten years we’ve gone in hard for it. I suppose we’ve
got a flair for it, just as the French have for pure science. Anyhow,
as a nation we can do that particular job better than anybody else on
earth. And for the American Red Cross to throw into the breach our
finely trained child specialists is to render France in this hour an
inestimable benefit.”
This sketches the effort of the Red Cross for the children of the war
zone in free France. But not all of France is “free,” as the French
themselves touchingly call it. And that portion of it which still is
not free, the immensely rich mining and manufacturing district under
German rule, has also its child problem. That problem the Germans have
dealt with in their characteristic brutal fashion. They are simply
sweeping out of the country, as with a gigantic broom, all these small,
food-consuming nonproducers. Across the Northern Swiss frontier they
are being thrust into France at the rate of nearly five hundred a
day--more than ten thousand a month! Here is a child problem with a
vengeance! Of course it is not the children alone who are being swept
out, but all the nonproducing inhabitants. If they can’t work--_heraus
mit_ ’em! Dump the refuse out the back door into France. Shift the food
burden of all those hundreds of thousands of useless inhabitants onto
the enemy. From a purely materialistic point of view this wholesale act
of dispossession is a fine move--and France is glad to have her people
back at any price! Also, she has food to burn!
Evian-les-Bains is the gate of entry for these exiles--_rapatriés_ the
French call them--and accordingly to Evian I went. It is a beautiful,
quaint little town on Lake Geneva, high, Alp-encircled, and with an air
like iced champagne. Formerly a fashionable watering place, it has now
been transformed into a kind of Ellis Island receiving station for the
refugees, who pour in by trainloads, twenty thousand a month.
Here daily is to be witnessed one of the most tragic processionals
that history has ever yet offered to man--a nation on the march! But
a nation dispossessed, broken and diseased, old men and old women and
mothers with children--the past and the future generations--with the
present generation strikingly absent! For the young men are held to
work the mines and the factories, and the young women are held--but
even in France one rarely speaks of that phase of the subject, which is
the blackest of all black pages of German occupation. What “efficient”
explanation is Germany going to offer, at the big post-bellum tribunal
of the nations, for the girls sent into white slavery in the Ardennes?
Three years have elapsed since the Germans conquered the northern part
of France, and since then the inhabitants have lived in a state of
complete isolation, cut off from news of their families in free France,
sons and husbands who fled before the invaders; cut off also from any
reliable information concerning the war or the great outer world. Not
a single letter are they permitted to send or receive. This incredible
act of mental cruelty I did not believe until I arrived in Evian,
questioned the refugees themselves and the authorities, and entered the
famous letter room, where hundreds of thousands of letters are filed,
often months ahead of time, awaiting the possible return of some exile
relative.
Newspapers these people have, to be sure, but they are journals printed
by the Germans in French, ostensibly to give current events, but
actually to spread German propaganda and despair. I glanced through
some of these papers. According to them England is speedily starving to
death; Russia is about to conclude a separate peace; France has been
bled white; America is a noisy four-flusher--and _Deutschland_ is _über
alles_! Under ordinary conditions such a crude tissue of lies would
merit only a burst of scornful laughter; but given a captured civilian
population as isolated from their loved ones as if they were ghosts,
a prey to constant anxiety concerning the welfare of France, and this
daily insidious attack upon a morale already enfeebled by adversity is
bound to have a damaging effect.
Of these journals the Gazette des Ardennes is the most notorious.
The first evening I waited at the station I do not know exactly
what I expected to see--but, anyhow, something that would rend the
heartstrings. I forgot that this station represented to those pilgrims
the end of a three-years’ captivity; that every kilometer of the
long, wearisome three-days’ journey from Belgium, where they had been
quarantined, brought them nearer letters, nearer a resumption of family
ties, nearer a tender welcome from free France.
It was cold. A light snow had fallen on the circle of mountains, and
a chill wind blew up from the lake. The Red Cross ambulance drivers
had backed their machines close to the platform to care for the sick
and the old, and now they stood by the tracks, ready to lend a hand
to the incoming crowd. I was in the mood of Antony: “If you have
tears, prepare to shed them now!” when the refugee train pulled into
the station; and to my surprise I saw flags bursting from every open
window--the French Tricolor, the Stars and Stripes, Red Cross flags,
handkerchiefs, bundles, any old thing--frantically waving a welcome
from a thousand eager hands! Who said anybody was sad? Besides flags,
the windows were crowded full of heads--happy, excited children,
mothers holding up babies, and smiling, seamed old countenances
wreathed in white hair. And from within the cars, above the noisy
hubbub, ascended high and sweet the strains of the Marseillaise.
The train slowed to a dead stop. Suddenly an old man leaned far out
of a window, waved both arms, and shouted fiercely: “_Vive la France!
Vive----_” He broke off sharply, looked down into a face below him on
the platform and queried in low, anxious tones: “Say! We are in France,
_hein_?” What an indiscretion if he had yelled that in German territory!
“Yes, you are in France. But descend, _papa_! Descend, _maman_!
_Allons mes enfants, descendez, s’il vous plait!_”
It was the cheerful voice of the Red Cross man, M. Barrois, himself
a _rapatrié_, with a wife and six children left behind in Lille, who
assisted daily at the detraining of the refugees.
“But these people are not sad!” I objected to M. Barrois, still full of
surprise. “They do not even look tired. Are they always gay like this?”
“It’s a lively crowd to-night,” he replied soberly, “on account of so
many children. But some days they do not have a word to say. And you
must not be deceived by their surface gayety. The sadness is there,
underneath, just the same. You’ll find it if you stay.”
He was right. The first evening I caught only the false glow of
excitement of the returning pilgrims. But as I watched night
after night the endless procession of those who passed I began to
discriminate, and to note beneath the happy eagerness on those faces
the deeper substructure of strain, of suffering so long endured
that it had become a habit. And as the thousands marched before me,
successive waves of exiles, always different and yet mysteriously the
same in their look of subdued suffering, of strain, I had a fleeting
realization of what France has borne in this war.
With such throngs pouring daily into this one small receiving station
a very careful organization has of necessity been evolved in order
not to congest the transportation. The following is the order of each
day: At the last station on the Swiss frontier French Red Cross nurses
enter the train and tag the sick and aged. At Evian these are put
into ambulances, the others walking the short distance to the Casino,
where await them an ample hot supper, music, and a tender speech of
welcome by the mayor of Evian. After which they register, receive their
letters, pass a medical examination, and are assigned lodgings in the
town.
The first night I waited to see the last _malade_ and the last baby
safely stowed inside before I climbed into the front seat with the
ambulance driver. As we struck the open lake road an icy wind straight
off Mont Blanc made me shiver. A soldier on permission clinging to the
running board beside me turned up his collar, muttering: “This is worse
than the trenches in the Vosges.” He had come up to search for his
refugee wife, from whom he had not heard in three years.
“But she might arrive any day!” he argued hopefully. “I will teach you
something extraordinary,” he continued. “A comrade of mine came up here
looking for his wife; he had dreamed a dream about her. And what do you
think--the very first woman who stepped off the train was she!
“I had another friend, whose wife had died in Lille leaving a little
daughter of two, whom the father had never seen. He did not even know
what had become of her, for he could get no word. A _rapatrié_ friend,
who informed him of his wife’s death, could give no news of the little
maid. Nevertheless, he came to Evian hoping to find some trace. And
each day at the station as the throng passed he stood quietly holding
out in his hand what looked like a postal card. And whenever a little
girl appeared he thrust that card under her nose. Absurd, eh? A fool,
a lunatic, sticking a piece of cardboard into every child’s face! But
one day when he held it in front of a little maid she suddenly burst
into tears and cried out: ‘_Maman! Maman!_’ That postal card bore the
picture of her mother. And that’s the way he found his child!”
It was twilight when we arrived at the Casino, and already the place
was packed. Seated at long tables the refugees had stowed their
precious bundles beneath their feet and were falling upon supper with
a will. Between the tables passed the women of Evian with tureens
of steaming soup, huge platters of meat that the Germans would have
bartered their very souls for, and great pitchers of hot milk and of
wine. And how those children gobbled! And how their elders followed
their example! The platters passed and repassed. Through the big double
doors facing Switzerland gleamed Lake Geneva, dimly purple through the
gloom. Overhead in the balcony the band began to tune up.
Suddenly all over the hall the lights flashed on strongly and the same
instant the band burst into the stirring impetuous strains of Chasseurs
Alpins! As that gay beloved air broke across the room an electric shock
of emotion seemed to pass along the tables. Men leaped up, shouting
“_Vive la France!_” Women began to weep softly. Handkerchiefs were out
everywhere. Yes, the long blight of captivity, of isolation, was past
forever! That tune proved it!
And it was just at this chosen moment that the mayor of Evian came
forward to make his speech. It was brief, simple and touching, and at
certain portions of it women bowed their heads on the table and sobbed
aloud.
“My dear fellow citizens!” began the mayor. “At a moment when, after
long and cruel trials, you step foot again upon the sacred soil of _la
Patrie_, I come in the name of the city of Evian to address to you all
a very cordial, a very warm and a very affectionate welcome.
“We know all that you have suffered. For many months convoys like yours
have traversed our little village, and we have heard recounted each day
the long martyrdom you have endured. We know that you have suffered
cold and hunger; we know that your houses have been burned, that your
rich harvests have been destroyed and the beautiful industrial region
of the north has been systematically destroyed; and, what is most
terrible of all, we know that young daughters have been torn from the
arms of their mothers and taken away to slavery in the Ardennes. And it
is because we do know all this, dear fellow citizens, that we receive
you to-day with all of our heart and with all of our soul!
“I said just now that you have suffered greatly, but your sufferings
have not been alone physical; they have been also, and even above all,
spiritual. You have suffered to be without news of those who are dear,
and at not knowing exactly how things were going in free France. As for
that which concerns the news of the war and of France I am going to
tell you at once, in one word, that all you have read in Le Bruxellois
and the Gazette des Ardennes is one tissue of lies, and that, thanks
to the armies of France and her Allies, victory will finally crown our
banners.
“And now, courage, my dear fellow citizens! Your long martyrdom is
about to end. Soon you are going to hear, standing, our sacred hymn,
which has not greeted your ears for so long a time, and meantime join
me in an act of faith and hope in our well-beloved country, and shout
with me: ‘_Vive la France immortelle!_’”
The shout that followed was a shout indeed!
In closing, the Marseillaise was chanted, and by now all the audience
was frankly in tears. A Red Cross doctor standing beside me cleared his
throat.
“I’ve seen this thing a dozen times,” he observed, “and still I choke
up every time!”
Supper over the _rapatriés_ registered and passed to the rear to
receive their letters. This letter room is a marvel of perfect
arrangement. Here every inquiry from anxious relatives is received,
sorted alphabetically, and a note of it filed on an index card as if it
were a library book. Thus, when a refugee hands his registration card
across the counter, all the girl standing behind has to do is to look
him up in her index catalogue and see if he has any mail.
Ah, those long moments of suspense while the girl is looking up a
name! Those hundreds of greedy, outstretched hands across the counter!
Those faces, so schooled to endurance, twitching now with unconcealed
excitement! How slow the girl is! “No, there is nothing for you.”
An outstretched hand drops from the counter. Those mutely borne
disappointments are horrible.
Some of the tales of this famous letter room are harrowing, some
humorous. There arrived one day in Evian a woman refugee, with four
sons at the Front from whom she had not heard a single line in three
years. Her excitement may be conceived. Were they all alive? Were some
dead? Which? Impossible that all four should be preserved for three
years. The thing was outside probability. For long months she had
brooded over the chances, selected for death first one and then another
of her sons. Perhaps all had been killed by this time, for she knew
her sons were brave! There was her youngest in particular, a dashing
daredevil in the Alpine Chasseurs--the pacemakers in every attack. Yes,
undoubtedly he had gone! She must make up her mind to it. And so she
did, and unmade it, a hundred times a day. When she arrived in Evian it
was five in the afternoon, and before she stood at the mail counter,
registry slip in hand, it was nine--four mortal hours of heart-piercing
suspense, during which she had buried one, two, three, four of her
sons, and resurrected them again in a passion of hope. And now she was
going to know! Yes, there was a letter for madame--two letters. Blindly
she got herself out of the throng. The next moment there was a loud cry
and she fell face down in a dead swoon.
“And for two days,” continued the doctor who told me the incident, “she
raved with acute dementia.”
“Poor soul!” I said. “All four were killed? Her intuition was right.”
“Not a bit of it,” laughed the doctor. “All four of ’em were not
killed! All four were alive and kicking. And that was the very trouble.
It was a chance, of course, in a million. And winning that chance in
the great lottery was too much for her. She had steeled herself for
disaster. The strong shock of joy was a knock-out blow! But in a few
days she was up and speeding on the way to her sons.”
What the American Red Cross is doing for the children in this
situation may be grouped under two heads: First, immediate, temporary
aid; second, permanent work. Whatever the French Government wishes
in the way of personnel, equipment, drivers, and so on, to meet an
urgent relief need, the American Red Cross stands ready to deliver
at an hour’s notice. But--and this is important and not generally
understood--the French themselves must first express the desire, extend
the invitation for aid. We are the guests; they are the hosts. And
it is not the policy to rush in, take over the whole French problem,
willy-nilly, and begin to run things off on brisk American methods.
France has her national pride, like ourselves; and it is her pride,
even in this stress, to care for her own wherever she can. Such a
course of procedure on the part of the Red Cross may mean a little more
slowness at the outset; but it means a deeper and more sympathetic
bond between the two nations in the end--and in the end it is not less
successful than the crude head-on attack. Thus in the Evian problem the
French struggled for months to care for the thousands of refugees, and
with a pitifully scant nursing and medical staff accomplished marvels.
Still, to make a complete medical examination of every incoming
_rapatrié_ with such a staff would need a day of a hundred hours. And
without such medical attention contagious diseases and epidemics were
bound to creep into France, which, in fact, they did.
When these defects were called to the attention of the French
Government it at once frankly called for American aid. The same week
a dozen ambulances and drivers, in charge of an American _chef de
service_ who had won distinction before Verdun, were dispatched to
assist in the transportation. In passing it should be said that the
winter work of these Red Cross ambulance drivers upon the borders
of that glacier lake, in an ice-box temperature, with a keen zero
wind thrusting playful darts between the shoulder blades, deserves a
special mention. It is not a spectacular service or, save for pneumonia
microbes, especially dangerous. It is simply a plugging, monotonous
grind in freezing isolation.
After the ambulances had been dispatched a group of medical specialists
were sent out to study the problem on the ground and suggest plans of
permanent value. The result of their examination was the establishment
of a receiving hospital of one hundred beds in Evian to care for the
sick; a second hospital in Lyons for the chronic cases; and still a
third hospital on the Mediterranean for the tuberculosis patients.
In addition to the hospitals, a clinic has been established right in
the Casino itself, so that no child leaves the building without a
medical examination. And these two agencies, the inside clinic and
the outside hospitals, render the situation, so far as the danger
to the state is concerned, practically water-tight. For the clinic
catches the small, microbe-ridden victim and shoots him straight to
the hospital, thus turning a secure lock upon the spread of disease.
As is the case on the northern frontier, these children suffer chiefly
from malnutrition, contagious skin diseases and tuberculosis. It has
been estimated roughly that about ten per cent of the _rapatriés_ need
hospital attention each day, and about one-third of that ten per cent
are tuberculous.
The hospital at Evian is as modern and complete in its child equipment
as expert thought can achieve. At present there is a colony of about
fifty workers on the ground. One phase of the hospital service, as the
head nurse outlined it to me, is of especial educational value.
“All of our nurses’ aids, our _auxiliaires_, are French refugee
girls,” she explained. “This means practically a training school for
nurses. And when it is realized that the French nursing standards are
as low as the French surgery standards are high the need for general
instruction in this line becomes apparent. We shall teach these raw,
untrained peasant girls simply the first principles of caring for the
sick. But if we do no more than instill into them the fundamentals of
cleanliness, convince them that all-over baths are not scandalous, that
babies do not thrive on wine, that fresh air does not kill, that sheets
should be changed slightly oftener than once a month, that pneumonia
and tuberculous patients do not prosper in hermetically sealed rooms,
and a few other modern, common-sense maxims, I for one shall be very
content!”
These hospitals for children, established in needy zones throughout
all France as fast as may be, constitute one of the most effective
and long-range pieces of work that the American Red Cross has
undertaken, for they minister to the immediate want and at the same
time strengthen permanently the general health tone of a nation. That
the French appreciate our effort in this field is undoubted, and one
of their statesmen has said that the impetus given by America to the
conservation of child life in France is one of the most beneficial
by-products of this great war.
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE
Hooray! _Vive la belle France!_ I’m going to France! I’m going to be
a canteener! Maybe I shall go right up to the Front just behind the
first-line trenches and be under shell fire and be bombed by boche
avions and hear the _alerte_ and have to scurry to _abris_ and all that
sort of thing. I don’t know any of the details yet--nobody over here
does--but anyhow I’m going! That’s the chief thing.
I’m so excited and thrilled I scarcely know what I’m doing, but
outwardly I try to keep poised and calm, for mamma has been
disappearing at intervals into her handkerchief ever since she gave
her consent; and as for papa, he doesn’t say much; in fact, the dear
old sport is quieter than ever--but I catch him looking at me, when
he thinks I don’t see, in a way that makes me realize I’m the only
girl he’s got down here below and that he’d never send me if he had
a son to give. Not having a son and being a true-blue American with
generations of fighting blood inside of him--for the man who said
“Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!” was my father’s
great-grandfather--he’s figured it out that the best he can do is to
send his girl instead. That’s the ground of his consent. And mamma’s a
Daughter of the American Revolution, so that lets her out.
It was pure accident--or fate--which made me run into Edith on the
street a week ago to-day and thus start the wheels of destiny.
“Come in and have some tea,” she said after congratulating me on my
engagement, which had just been announced, “and tell me all about
it--and him. You deep little mouse--to pull this off right under
everybody’s nose and keep as secret as the grave! Who is he, anyhow?”
“He’s Major B----, of the Fifty-blank Infantry. He’s just received his
majority and he’s just twenty-nine.”
“Major, eh? That’s not so bad.”
“And, oh, Edith, he’s leaving for France sometime this month, and I--I
don’t know what to do!”
“What would you like to do?” asked Edie, laughing a little at my
blushes.
“I’d like to go over there, too,” I replied without hesitation, staring
straight into her deep blue eyes. “It doesn’t seem as if I could stand
it--the long, long separation. Irregular letters. And when they go into
action, not knowing, not hearing, maybe never hearing. Never. Just the
silence!”
“You’re in the same fix as a million other American women right now,”
replied Edith grimly. “And you’ve got to stand it. That’s our job.”
“I know,” I said heavily. “But it doesn’t make your own toothache any
better to know that there’s an epidemic of toothache raging over the
whole civilized world.”
Edith sat looking at me with a smile deep down in her eyes. She has
been married three years, the first of our class; and now she looks
at the entire outside world with that same air of tender smiling
abstraction.
“It’s all part of the game,” she said finally. “And we women must keep
the flag flying. Jack”--Jack’s her husband--“is going over next month.
He doesn’t have to, of course, being over the age limit. But he foresaw
this two years ago, and went and prepared himself at Plattsburg. He
wouldn’t volunteer then on account of me and baby. But now the call has
come it finds him ready. He feels the whole situation deeply. I’m glad.”
“Oh, Edie, you--brick!” I breathed, squeezing her hand hard. I thought
of her left alone with her child--and not any too much money either.
“Edie’s all right,” she murmured unsteadily, her blue eyes bright as
diamonds. “Don’t you fuss about her! But now about you--I have an idea.
What can you do? Practically, I mean.”
“I’ve had a six-months’ course in the hospital----”
“They don’t take anything but graduate nurses now.”
“----and I’ve had two years of domestic science and food values. Then
last summer I operated a cafeteria in the suburbs for the Women’s
League--did all the buying and accounts myself. It was fun. In college
I was head of the basket-ball team and the tramping club, and I’ve
never been sick a day in my life.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“A bit young. However,” said Edith briskly, rising, “I’ll see what
I can do. There’s just a bare chance--but I’m not going to tell you
beforehand, for fear we burst the bubble. Run home now. Stick round the
telephone. There may be a long-distance call. Put a few things into
a bag while you’re waiting. Do you think you could go on to New York
to-night?”
I suppose my eyes must have been as big round as saucers with
excitement, for suddenly Edith bent right over and dropped a kiss on my
cheek. “You darned little kid!” she whispered. “I know exactly how you
feel. Now trot!”
I trotted--walking on air.
For the next two hours I hung round the landing where the telephone is,
and finally settled down on the top stair.
“For goodness’ sake, child!” cried mamma, stumbling over me as she came
out of the sitting-room, “what on earth are you doing here, all bunched
up in the dark?”
“I--I’m----”
Just then the telephone rang. I sprang to the receiver.
“Oh, I see!” said mamma, laughing as she went downstairs.
But she didn’t.
Central got the long-distance line cleared and then over the wire there
came a woman’s clear, crisp, businesslike voice: “I wish to speak to
Miss Carlotta Murray.”
“This is she.”
“Miss Murray, could you sail for France a week from Saturday?”
My heart gave a sort of big thrilly jerk and I had a sudden shock as if
my nerves had got short-circuited.
“Ye-yes!” I gulped faintly.
“What? Speak louder.”
“Yes!” I shouted into the mouthpiece, holding on to the wall for
support. “Dee-lighted!”
“Very well. Be at our office at eleven to-morrow morning. You’d better
come prepared to go straight on to Washington to arrange about your
passes. Good-b----”
“Wait!” I cried excitedly. “Who is it speaking? I don’t know who you
are.”
“Red Cross Headquarters. New York office. Good-by.”
She hung up and left me gasping in the darkness on the stair. Well, I
was in deep over my head now; and so I found mamma and put it straight
up to her: Would she give her consent if papa did? At first she
refused up and down, but by six o’clock I had her coaxed round to the
point where she was packing my suitcase and making up lists of things
I’d need in France--woolen underwear and galoshes and sweaters and
first-aid outfits and what nots. And all the time we didn’t either of
us know what I was going to do when I got over there any more than the
man in the moon. The call had tumbled right out of a clear sky. But
once I’d got mamma to see the situation as it really was, outside her
motherhood so to speak, she was as keen as mustard for it.
We had dinner upstairs in my room. Delia served it on a tray. And
when she heard I was sailing for France she just said, “Oh, my Gawd!
Submarines!” and dropped the tray and burst into tears. You’d have
thought the submarines were right under my bed. At that mamma broke
down altogether and Delia embraced her--Delia’s been with us ever since
I was born--and there followed a hectic half hour. I was beginning to
think Delia had spilled the beans for me with her “Oh, my Gawd!” when
all of a sudden mamma glanced at the clock, pulled herself together and
exclaimed sharply:
“Good gracious, child, get into your clothes--quick! Do you want to
miss that train? Delia, run down and phone for a taxi.”
Delia went, still dribbling tears and tomato bisque. Then mamma rushed
off a telegram to Uncle Jim to meet me in New York, rushed me into
my things, rushed me down to the station, through the gate, onto the
train, gave me a swift breathless hug and departed. That’s the way she
is, all tears one second and a regular little whiz-bang field marshal
the next. But it was some evening!
The next morning in New York Uncle Jim and I breakfasted at the
Belmont, after which I walked over to Red Cross Headquarters, had an
interview, and took the train to Washington. I had already wired papa,
who was down there on business, to meet me, and told him to watch out
for a life-size jolt. When I stepped off the train, there he was,
leaning against a pillar and looking, as the novelists say, singularly
handsome and debonair.
“Hello, Miss Murray!” he said, taking my bag away from the porter. “Now
come on with your jolt.”
“_Vive la France!_” I said by way of commencement.
“Ha! So that’s the bill of fare? With all my heart. May she _vive_
forever. But what’s that got to do with the price of winter umbrellas?”
“The _Rochambeau_ sails a week from to-morrow.”
“Well,” said papa, still bluffing away, though I could see from the way
he started that I had landed him one right over the heart, “I haven’t
any stock in her. The submarines may go as far as they like.”
“They want me to sail on her--as a canteener.”
“As a whatter?” demanded papa.
“A canteener. A person that works in a canteen. You know--serves hot
drinks and food and all to the soldiers.”
“Who wants you to go?” he growled in his crossest
cross-examining-witness manner.
“President Wilson. God. American Red Cross. Mamma. Delia. Me.”
“Pretty good references,” observed papa dryly. “Especially Delia. But
not worth a single red cent in the present instance--unless indorsed by
me. Now let’s get down to brass tacks. What is this all about?”
That’s the way papa always talks with me, straight from the shoulder,
just as if I were his law partner and we were threshing out a case.
And so I told him. I told him how the high commissioner for Europe
of the American Red Cross had cabled to Washington for women to be
sent immediately to France to work in canteens; how Washington had
telegraphed to New York to collect a group of workers without delay;
how New York had telegraphed to Boston for names of suitable persons
with training along that line; how Edith, the president of her Red
Cross chapter, had been called into council--and how that led to me.
“It’s the finger of destiny, papa,” I wound up; “and it’s pointed
straight at me--like the man in the ad. There’s just one hitch.”
“Only one?” observed papa with his grim little half smile.
“The cable says women over thirty.”
“Well,” chuckled papa, “I guess that lets you out--for about six years
anyhow. And by that time the war will be over. Though Bairnsfeather
says that the first seven years will be the worst, and after that every
fourteenth year.”
“I’m within the draft limit,” I protested. “And if they take infants
of twenty-one to be soldiers I don’t see why a college graduate of
twenty-four, captain of the basket-ball team and with a record in
Greek, hasn’t enough gumption to stand behind a counter and deal out
sandwiches and coffee. It makes me sick!”
“Well, all that’s a minor matter,” said papa. “It’s fitness, not age or
lack of it, that counts. But let’s waive that for the moment and get
down to the kernel of this proposition. Why are you interested in this
thing? Why do you want to go--or think that you want to go? Now don’t
hand out any cheap sentimentality. Don’t insult the cause by any tawdry
emotionalism. Come clean. What are your reasons?”
Followed a conference--or moral examination, rather--which lasted
for over four hours, straight through dinner, up to eleven o’clock;
and still we sat on at table, papa smoking one cigar after another,
until the big hotel dining-room was deserted and the lights went out.
There was no question from the first of a downright refusal. He simply
talked to me, eye to eye and man to man. He spoke as if I were his
son, a soldier, going off to war, and he charted the cardinal points
of conduct. He saw the thing big from the start, and I loved him
for it. Then we talked about life and love and marriage, the rights
of men and nations, and how this war was going to temper and fuse
America like steel that’s been through fire; we talked about personal
responsibility, the Red Cross, and he showed how any human institution
rested straight back on the individual, so that if I fell down on my
job the whole organization would feel the shock. He didn’t give me a
whole decalogue of “Don’ts” to guide me over there, but he did give me
three big “Do’s.” Here they are:
Number One: Get round your own job and leave it to the other fellow to
get round his.
Number Two: Keep alive and lovable. Women, he said, are a little more
apt than men to go to seed.
Number Three: Keep your sense of humor.
Altogether, it was the best talk I’ve ever had on earth, and when it
was done he kissed me; and then we sailed out arm in arm for some
ice-cream soda at the corner drug store, and I treated him and he
treated me--our immemorial custom.
It was all settled the next morning that I was to go to war. They
didn’t even query my age!
That morning, after breakfast, papa said, “Guess I’ll just walk over
with you to that shebang of yours, in case you need identification.”
“No, you don’t!” I said. “I’m going to get this on my own
credentials--my cafeteria credentials!--and not because I’m the
daughter of Judge Murray, alias Old Silver Tongue. ‘Get round your own
job and leave it to the other fellow to get round his.’ Axiom One.”
Papa grinned. “Strike one--right over the plate. All right. Let me hear
what the jury decides.” And we went our separate ways.
At the office in the Women’s Bureau it took less than ten minutes to
get through the red tape and settle my future, as follows: I’m to be
a canteen worker. I pay all my own expenses. And I literally do pay
them, with my cafeteria money and a check I received for writing a
movie. I’ve signed on for six months, during which time I can’t marry
an American army officer--without losing my job and getting sent home
to America. Wow! For further orders report to Number Four, Place de la
Concorde, Paris, France, seat of a world war for civilization. Think of
it, oh, my soul! Well, sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish,
the Murray family gives its heart and its hand to this vote!
The last week has been one mad, wild, excited scramble--with
canteen uniforms, French lessons, gum boots, telephones, typhoid
and paratyphoid injections, girls dropping in to say good-by, mamma
dismal as a corbie crow weeping off in odd corners, and papa humming
mournfully: “‘I didn’t raise my kidlet to be a soldierette.’”
On Tuesday night I said good-by to Robert. We dined together downtown
and then Bob said, “Let’s go round to Lucille’s and dance.”
And so we did. But I just couldn’t seem to put any spirit into it.
“Do you realize, Bob,” I said, “that this is our last dance together?”
I suppose my voice sounded rather wabbly, for Robert gave me a sharp
look and said, “Not on your life! Where did you get hold of that
notion? Are you going to throw up the sponge?”
And then I remembered that my case was exactly that of a million other
women scattered all over the land, who were still keeping the flag
flying, as Edith had said; and so I bucked up and we finished up with a
very good time.
ON SHIPBOARD, November 12th.
I begged papa and mamma not to come down to New York to see me off,
but of course they would. However, it turned out all right. Papa blew
us to a two-course dinner without wine downstairs in a famous grill
frequented by successful actors and artists and writers, after which
he packed us off to a musical comedy and kept up a light artillery of
jokes all through the evening, and we both laughed so hard that mamma
finally lost patience and declared we were a perfect scandal. There was
just one awful moment at the last. That was on the boat when papa gave
me a big still hug and then held his cheek close to mine the way he’s
done ever since I was a baby.
“Papa,” I whispered fiercely into his ear, “if you make me cry now I’ll
kill you!”
“Shucks, honey!” he murmured back. “If Miss Rankin can cry in Congress
I guess a green little soldierette can shed a few tears when bidding a
fond farewell to native land and mother, without grave dishonor. Still,
I don’t want to cramp your style. Cable us when you land. Be a good
girl--but not goody. And now, so long, dear. God bless us all together!”
And still smiling and steady he shook hands with me just as if I were
his son, and then marched mamma, sobbing audibly, gently off by the
arm. I went downstairs to my cabin.
No danger of my being sick. My bunk mate is! I hardly know how to
describe my feelings after we had really started and there was time
to look about--it all seemed so sort of natural and matter-of-fact,
and France still merely a small pink dab on the map. It wasn’t a
bit startling to be out of sight of land and hear people discussing
submarines and lifeboats, but it was a horrible sensation to have the
boat plunge down and leave your stomach in midair. A gorgeous sunset
to-night, but it’s rough and going to be rougher, I fear. I walked
about some, and then decided discretion was the better part of valor
and retired to my deck chair.
November 15th.
Three awful days in my cabin, too sick to stir. But to-day it’s
smooth and the air is marvelous. After a fine salt bath I came up and
pranced about the deck; and there were lots of nice people to prance
with--naval officers, Belgian generals, French _permissionnaires_, and
any number of Y.M.C.A.-ers and Red Cross men. Played shuffleboard;
tried the dining-room for ten minutes, and then decided to have all my
meals on deck in order to watch for the submarines.
November 24th.
Land is in sight--a long low ribbon of mist away on the starboard.
That’s France! It still doesn’t seem reasonable. The trip has been
nothing at all. Evenings we would sit out on deck. It was weird with
never a light, even cigarettes forbidden; inky blackness on deck, and
stumbling and pitching into someone at every step. It was awesome from
the stern to see two big black funnels silhouetted against the starry
sky, the phosphorescence of the water rivaling the splendor of the
heavens; and to realize that all the time this huge mechanical monster
beneath our feet was plowing steadily, silently forward, carrying seven
hundred human lives across three thousand miles of water.
PARIS, November 26th.
Paris at last, beautiful, soft, gray, in a blur of rain. I reported at
Number Four, Place de la Concorde, heard a speech by the commissioner,
and was assigned right away. It’s just exactly what I wanted and didn’t
dare to dream I’d get! I’m to work in a canteen in one of the biggest
aviation camps in France. With our own American men! We’ll live in
barracks, get up at reveille, five-thirty a.m., and---- But I’m somewhat
hazy as to our duties. Time will reveal. After the conference I met
Lucile B----, a Bryn Mawr girl, and found she’s to canteen with me
at the same barracks. We embraced and nearly fell downstairs in our
excitement. Lucile has moved her things over to my hotel so we can chum
together.
November 27th.
Slept--off and on--and had a breakfast in bed, after the luxurious
Continental fashion,--wouldn’t Delia sniff?--and then I read Baedeker’s
Paris aloud while Lucile unpacked. We lunched and did accounts and
then walked over to Red Cross Headquarters. After reporting there
we got our provisional cards of identity and went down to a shop on
the boulevard and ordered bracelets of identity. Had my hair washed
by a poilu on permission and tried out my Boston French on him. He
understood me better than I did him! Later Lucile and I taxied over
to Napoleon’s tomb, saw the German airplanes in the court of the
Invalides, and then went on to Notre Dame. It is wonderful inside,
so high and spacious and old and gray, with a scented misty twilight
air as though dimmed by many prayers. I made two prayers myself--one
personal, and the other impersonal for our army, and I only hope they
come true.
November 28th.
While waiting to be sent to camp I delved into the subject of canteens
in general. And I found that the old canteen idea is as different from
the new canteen idea as day is from night. A canteen before this war
meant simply a place where a soldier could buy a drink and perhaps
procure notions, buttons and needles and thread. But that old idea has
expanded and developed until now it really comprises a whole welfare
center, a regular community plant for dispensing food and comfort and
good cheer. There are restaurants, writing rooms, infirmaries, sleeping
quarters, pianos, phonographs, entertainments--everything you can
possibly think of to keep a collection of men far from home happy and
sane and sound. Of course not all these canteens are alike, for each
one caters to some particular need and thus develops along a particular
line. Its location determines its special bent.
There are, I was told at headquarters, several types of canteen.
Number One: These are the metropolitan canteens of Paris, situated at
the big railway stations--the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est and the
Gare Saint Lazare--which catch all the troops coming into or leaving
the city.
Number Two: These are the canteens of the _Grande Ceinture_, at little
stations on the environs of Paris, where innumerable troop trains pass
through daily, carrying thousands of soldiers from England, Italy,
America, Saloniki, Portugal, Africa. These troops never even enter
Paris, but are shifted on the outskirts of the city.
Number Three: Canteens in the French war zone behind the actual
fighting lines in the big transportation centers.
Number Four: Canteens right on the French Front, in dugouts and
_abris_. In these canteens there are no women helpers.
Number Five: Canteens in the American training camps, behind the war
zone. That’s the kind I’m assigned to. It’s the biggest American
aviation center in France.
Number Six: Canteens for American soldiers dotted along the lines of
communication from the coast ports to the final training centers. All
these canteens are under the control of the American Red Cross.
December 1st.
In barracks! Yesterday was my first day. I got up in the dark at
bugle call, five-thirty A.M., and dressed in the cold--our stoves are
not up yet and I don’t know who’s going to start the fires when they
are!--had some hot coffee and went over to serve behind the counter,
serving coffee, chocolate and sandwiches. A long queue of soldiers
stood in line straight through the morning, and, work as hard as I
could, the line constantly augmented. Some wanted to linger and chat.
It was good, they said, to see a real live American girl who could talk
God’s language, and not that scrambled-egg affair the Frenchies handed
out. One confided he’d not seen a genuine honest-to-goodness girl for
four months; since he’d left home, and added that he liked ’em on the
American plan better than on the European plan. I couldn’t do much more
than smile in answer, for the orders flew thick and fast.
By noon the place was so crowded you couldn’t see for the forest of
campaign hats. A babel of voices; a rattle of dishes; the phonograph
going; the piano banging; a bunch of enlisted men trying out Mine Eyes
Have Seen the Glory; canteeners running back and forth with meals for
the officers, whose tables were in behind the counter; rain trickling
down my neck from an overhead leak; sleet and windy rain shaking the
windowpanes; sneezes and coughs mingling with shouts of laughter; and
always the far door opening to let in the storm and still more and
more men, till they were packed like sardines in rows--these are my
impressions of that first noon hour.
Suddenly: “_Otto, Sie haben etwas vergessen!_” I heard a low guttural
voice speaking close behind my ear.
“_Ja, ich weiss_,” replied another.
I whirled, visions of spies, explosions and poisoned soup rushing
wildly through my brain.
“What’s this?” I cried. “German? In an American aviation camp? What are
you two doing here?”
They stared at me stupidly. One held a mop and the other held a broom.
Of course they were spies!
“You are Germans--_Deutsch_?” I challenged again, sure that I had
uncovered a regular Guy Fawkes plot.
“_Ja_,” admitted the one called Otto, and jerked a thick dirty thumb
toward his working blouse, on the chest of which was inscribed in big
black letters “P G” with a slim little “i” between, so that it read
“PiG.”
“Pig!” I said wonderingly.
A soldier across the counter came to my aid. “Prisoners of war,” he
explained briefly. “P. G. stands for _prisonnier de la guerre_. Some
joker slipped the middle “i” over onto him. And it’s not so far wrong
at that! Look at the beggars’ fat jowls. They help round the camp,
unloading trucks, scrubbing up the barracks, and so on. For obvious
reasons they’re not allowed in the kitchens. They have their own
quarters behind barbed-wire entanglements--but you just bet they don’t
try very hard to get away. This is better than machine-gun fire.”
“Are they good workers?”
“Not so you’d notice--but they make up by being fine eaters. You should
see them tuck away the grub that Uncle Sam sends three thousand miles
across the sea to feed his Allies. I reckon they figure that the more
they eat the less there’ll be for the enemy, and there’s more than one
way of killing a cat. The French are too easy on them, and that’s the
fact.”
In the afternoon things went easier for a while. As it was still
raining we had mess in the canteen and then sat and made up jam
sandwiches. Along about five another tremendous rush began. I was put
on the _marmites_. These are big urns of coffee which are constantly
filled and refilled from the boiling-hot vats on the stove. It is
heavy, dirty, back-breaking work, and inside of an hour my clean blue
blouse and spotless collar looked as though I had slid down a chimney.
And my hands--was I ever proud of these red, chapped, grubby-nailed
horrors? _Nota bene_: If you love to be dainty, don’t be a canteen maid.
At nine-thirty P.M. we closed, and I was so dead tired that I tumbled
into bed and unlaced my boots by the feel. The first shift is from
seven A.M. until four P.M., and the second from noon to nine-thirty
P.M. But some of the workers are down with severe colds, their
substitutes have not yet arrived, and that means double duty for the
rest. From five in the morning until nine at night is some day’s job,
believe me! You have to be hardened before you can stand the pace. A
delicate girl would crumple up inside of a week. Of course when we get
organized and a system blocked out things will move more smoothly. At
present we’re a brand-new plant.
December 5th.
Superb aviation weather! For the past week it’s been blowing, hailing,
raining, snowing, thawing, and then beginning all over again _da capo_
with unabated zeal, like a child with only one tune. Water overhead
and slush underfoot. Colds, pneumonia, tonsillitis, dipththeria,
grippe--these are the enemies our soldiers have to face and conquer
or be conquered by, every single day. And yet, despite the hostile
weather, the men go up for practice just the same. And thus far only
one death.
Our stoves are up. The P. G.’s have put them in every room. No more
rising in the dark in freezing temperature and washing in the water
from your hot-water bottle. And we’ve appointed a fireman to build the
fires. We’re to take the job week about. As there’s no water laid on
in our barracks yet, we’ve had also to appoint a water bearer to keep
the jugs filled and on the fire. Each morning the P. G.’s swab down the
green linoleum floors of our quarters fresh and clean--and inside an
hour they are caked with real estate. Entire town lots come away with
our boots.
This morning when I went over to the canteen the cook had not shown up.
And in front a long line of waiting doughboys stood, beating a hungry
tattoo on the counter. What to do? Of course we could have turned them
out while we rounded up another cook, but that’s not what we’re here
for. “Get round your job,” said Axiom One, and feeding these men was
it. So I went into the kitchen. A soldier volunteered his aid. And all
through the morning hours we two worked like firemen at a ten-story
fire. Bacon and eggs, _repas complet_; we cooked and cooked and cooked.
In the afternoon as a change I was assigned to go on a camion to the
neighboring farms and collect butter, eggs, vegetables and fruit. It
was lowering when we set forth, with a raw chill wind that blew every
way at once, and presently the air turned black and the water came
down like a waterspout out of the sky. Nevertheless we completed our
circuit. It was twilight when we returned. I went into the canteen
kitchen.
“Well, he’s been and gone!” a chorus of voices cried.
“Who?” I inquired, catching my breath. They tossed me a card and a note.
It was Bob! He had got a day’s leave unexpectedly and he spent four
hours of it coming down to see me, found me gone, and spent another
four getting back again. He’d sent a wire last night, but of course it
hadn’t reached me. I suppose it will arrive the morning after eternity
and rout me out of bed!
I went back to quarters feeling pretty blue. There were little zigzags
of fiery pain running up and down my neck from bending so long over the
stove; my skirts were sopping; and my feet in their heavy boots with
their excess acreage of mud were so heavy I could scarcely drag them
after me. I opened the door upon a cozy scene. Lucile was making tea.
She had lifted the lid of the small fat-bellied stove in the center
of the room, and with a long fork she was toasting the nubbins of war
bread down over the live coals. Somebody strange was sitting in our one
easy-chair.
“Come in,” cried Lucile, “and shut that door! Here’s a lady from ‘The
Saturday Evening Post’; she’s come down to look at the animals in the
zoo.”
“Well, what do you think of us?” I asked.
“I think,” she replied, looking first at Lucile bending over the
stove, then round at the bare board walls hung thick with mackintoshes
and storm skirts, at the shelves containing each girl’s toilet
articles, at the cots ranged along the sides covered with dark army
blankets, at the trunks standing everywhere, at a leak in the roof from
which the rain was decanting with a steady tap-tap onto my pillow, and
finally back at Lucile again--“I think it’s a cross between a girls’
boarding house, an East Side tenement and a Western mining shack. And I
think you girls are ripping to rough it like this!”
“Pooh!” said Lucile, taking up her banjo and beginning to strum. “We
love the hardships. Of course a weakling couldn’t stand the racket.
You have to be sound through and through, or sooner or later it gets
you. In a month or so, though, we’re going to have enlarged quarters,
and then two girls will have a cubby-hole to themselves and we’ll be
rid of all this clutter. Also we’re going to start an officers’ club
where we serve hot meals to the aviators; in the same building will be
recreation rooms, and just outside a garden and a tennis court. Then
we’ll be _grand luxe_! As yet we’re still in the making, like creation
on the fourth day.”
“How do you keep clean?” the visitor wanted to know.
“You don’t,” I said grimly. “Look! But since Lucile has bought a rubber
bathtub we manage a bath once in a while.”
“She thinks our boots are funny,” said Lucile.
“She wouldn’t think they were quite so funny if she had had to oil them
and keep them clean. You should have seen mine the other day when I
slipped and fell in front of the post-office. I thought the whole camp
and the hangars and the flying field were coming right along with me
like the top of a layer cake. I give you my word, for a second I was
afraid to move my feet for fear I’d lift the town.”
The lady rose to go. Lucile went over to her trunk and got her diary,
which the lady had asked to see. After some debate I gave her mine,
too. I only hope she uses discretion!
December 11th.
Dazzling sunshiny weather. I counted seventeen planes up. Got back my
diary. The lady said she read it in bed and whooped so over some of
the passages that we could have heard her clear out to camp, it was
the parts where I told what I thought about men. She swore, though,
she wouldn’t use them; and I hope she keeps her word! Worked at the
_marmites_ in the forenoon and behind the counter in the afternoon.
Right in the middle of the rush, when I was pushing hot chocolate and
sandwiches across the counter as fast as my two hands could fly, I
suddenly heard a voice say: “One coffee, please--and step lively!”
It was Robert! I was so busy that there was no time then for more than
a handshake. After Robert had squeezed my hand he turned it over in his
palm and stared steadily down at it, all chapped and rough and red. I
cut my thumb yesterday, and the bandage was ragged and coffee-stained.
Altogether, not a hand that you’d enter at a beauty show. But Bob only
said “Bully little flapper!” and couldn’t seem to let go of it. Then
for an hour he helped me. He’d got another leave, he said, and thought
he’d try my camp again.
At four I went off duty and the directrice lent us her sitting-room,
where we had tea together and--well, sort of caught up on arrears.
Afterward we strolled about the camp in the early twilight and came by
the post-office for the mail. Robert and I stood off at one side and
watched the soldiers hurrying from all directions like ants converging
upon that one radiant doorway of warm streaming light. The board walks
resounded to their footsteps. On and on they came, some on the dead
run. It was weird to see those figures suddenly evolve out of the gloom.
“And that’s not all,” said Robert. “This one camp with its thousands of
men is the epitome of scores of other camps over here, where at this
twilight hour exactly the same performance is taking place--thousands
on thousands of lonesome soldiers hastening, with eagerness in their
hearts, to get that word from home. That’s one end of the line. At the
other end are the girls and wives and mothers at home writing those
letters with cheerfulness and faith--thousands of Susie Smiths and
Mamie Joneses! A Whitman could make a fine poem out of that, naming
every girl and her town. And between those two ends so far apart is the
big invisible rope of love. They talk about the necessity of guns and
effectives, but, by George, if they lived in one of these god-forsaken
little villages behind the Front they’d realize that it’s the guns plus
the letters of the Susie Smiths and Mamie Joneses which are going to
win this war!”
December 20th.
Robert left that same night, and ever since I’ve been laid up with
tonsillitis--the first time I’ve been ill in my life. It was a splendid
opportunity to think--only there wasn’t anything to think about. That’s
the bother with this war--it kills thought. But I kept the fires up
and the big jugs heating for the baths, and cleaned the girls’ boots,
and talked with the P. G.’s, and indexed our new library, and counted
the flies on the wall, and made the tea every afternoon. Nevertheless
I could feel my brain begin to disintegrate with idleness. That’s the
worst trouble with the soldiers in the trenches--nothing to do. It
gives them the _cafards_, the black butterflies, the blue devils, the
jimjams, the hump.
Christmas Day.
Raining again, slowly but surely. However, I’m on my job again--in
waders; and with three pairs of heavy woolen stockings underneath.
These frame buildings just can’t help but leak, and they always want to
leak wherever the back of your neck is. To-day we gave out Red Cross
Christmas boxes to all the soldiers and cadets and officers. You should
have seen the rush! Men who at home were used to receiving from their
fathers a six-cylinder car as a gift and then remarking casually “Oh,
thanks awf’lly, old chap!” came crowding up for those boxes, as eager
as kids for tin horns. And there was no put-on about it. They wanted
their Christmas presents!
After a full day we had mess--turkey!--with some of the officers, and
then half a dozen of us went over to the Y. M. C. A. hut to see the
movies. We sat in the front row--six women among five hundred men.
These evening entertainments are a great boon. And the shows are so
well attended that they have to give two performances each night.
Later we danced, overshoes and all. After that we tramped over to the
barracks of the P. G.’s to see their Christmas tree. Altogether it was
a strange Christmas. Where shall we be this time next year? All those
solid husky youngsters who filled the hall with their jolly laughter?
All these slim young aviators with their budding mustaches and their
straight, keen, fearless eyes? What has 1918 in store for us?
December 31st.
I’ve been transferred! There was a call for more workers at a certain
canteen, and so some of us were shifted round. Now I am at X----,
which is a canteen on the environs of Paris, of Number Two Type. Here
thousands of troops pass through each day from all parts of France,
carrying the Allied man power for redistribution upon every Front.
Occasionally soldiers lie over a few hours while new trains are being
made up, but usually they go straight through, with a ten-minutes’
stop for food. Sometimes the men have traveled from thirty-six to
forty-eight hours without a bite to eat. Thus our chief work is upon
the platforms or _quais_, distributing hot coffee, chocolate and
sandwiches. The heavy rushes come between six and eight in the morning,
at noon, and once more at dusk. Often there will be trains on two
tracks at the same time, one full of grim, silent troops bound for the
Front, the other filled with jolly _permissionnaires_ going home on
leave. There is a sharp contrast of mood between those two trainloads
of Frenchmen, so close together upon those narrow parallel tracks. The
incoming ones face home and a brief spell of happiness; the outgoing
ones face--another year! And the unending weariness of it, the bitter
black nostalgia, is to be read in those black eyes straining out at you
from the windows.
This is to-day’s record--my first day here: I rose and was on the
_quai_ by six-thirty. It was dark, and the cold was appalling. It had
been snowing, and a high wind slapped icy particles against my cheek.
The pavement of the _quai_, where it was not covered with snow, was
caked with dirty, slippery ice so that one had to step gingerly for
fear of accident. My feet were freezing, despite the customary three
pairs of stockings and heavy boots.
“You’ll have to get some clogs,” said a white-haired American
worker beside me. “Look!” She lifted her skirts and I beheld thick
wooden-soled boots--sabots with leather tops. “Sweet, aren’t they? But
better than frozen feet!”
The train was late. The _marmites_ of boiling hot coffee stood waiting
by the track, each with its padded flannel jumper to keep the contents
hot. The basket of ham sandwiches, apples and Camembert cheese were
covered with oilcloth as protection from the wet. The workers, some
Americans, some French, in blue blouses and veils, swathed to the eyes
in their mantles, huddled in the sheltered lee of the station and
stamped their feet and swung their arms to keep warm. Those drafty
_quais_ in the raw dawns are the native heath of pneumonia microbes.
Suddenly the captain of the _gare_ blew his whistle.
“Here she comes!” cried the white-haired American, and seized her
coffee cart and started down the track. The rest of us followed with
sandwiches. The long train slowed to a halt. Snow piled high upon
the roofs of the cars; snow upon the steps and vestibules; icicles
dripping from the eaves--and nobody descended! Not a move or a stir. It
looked like a specter train.
“_Café! Café, messieurs! Descendez, messieurs!_ You have ten minutes!”
It was the gay voice of a little French canteener as she ran from car
to car, tapping on the windowpanes. And then--bang! Some of the windows
were let down, heads began to poke out, and tin cups stained with
_pinard_ appeared at the end of arms.
“No, no, messieurs. Descend if you please. You have time. And we can’t
wait on you all up there. Ah, you little monster”--this to a big giant
who suddenly loomed above--“come down from that window. The coffee is
good and hot!”
That cheerful, laughing voice, so absolutely French in its intonations,
roused the silent train. And then they came pouring out like a
cloudburst and almost mobbed the coffee machine. Hundreds of hands and
cups were under the faucet at once.
“_Dix centimes, messieurs! Dix centimes, n’est-ce pas?_”
The little mademoiselle shook her tin cup, and the sous rattled
into it--but still the men did not speak. They drank their beloved
scalding hot beverage in silence. The snow fell steadily, tipping their
mustaches, the visors of their kepis, the edges of their coats--with
a powder of white, like silhouettes. And still they uttered no word!
Remember, it is the day before New Year’s--a day dear to every
Frenchman’s heart--and these men were returning to the Front. The
whistle blew.
“_En voiture!_”
The circle of hands about the coffee machine melted as if by magic.
The train sucked them in. And still not a single word had been spoken!
I turned, that strange grim muteness of a voluble warm-hearted race
sinking into my heart. I turned, and the spell was broken. I heard a
young French voice. It was a soldier, who at the risk of losing his
train had lingered to thank the white-haired canteener for filling his
coffee cup. She was down on her knees in the snow, decanting the last
drop of precious liquid from the machine. Her white hair was powdered
still whiter with shining crystals. Her face streamed with perspiration
and was rosy from exertion.
“Ah, madame,” said the soldier, “it is the sympathy and courage of
women like you that give us strength to go on with this dirty war!”
She did not understand a word of his rapid lingo, but she patted his
arm and smiled. Each comprehended the other! The next instant the train
was a rushing shadow on the blinding white landscape.
And then before we could draw breath or refill our _marmites_ another
train was upon us. This time it was _permissionnaires_ returning home.
They hopped out like joyous schoolboys, with a fusillade of teasing
banter.
“Aha! ’Tis the pretty little Americans! Say! You are all right, you
know, you Americans!”
“I have an American marraine. Will you be my marraine, mademoiselle?
You don’t know how nice I am! Not ‘naughty boy’!”
“Look! Ham sandwiches! My God, we’re in Paradise!”
They bought out the apple basket and had apple fights. And while we
were rushing the growlers cross-tracks for more coffee they marched up
and down arm in arm and chanted in our honor a trench ditty about a new
relative they’ve acquired. The chorus, loosely translated, runs like
this:
“_’Tis my Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam!
He is a fine copain.[1]
He comes from Amérique.
The terror of the German,
’Tis my Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam!
He is sympathique.
The great Républicain.
The victory of demain,
’Tis to Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam!_”
And when at length the train pulled out, heads were thrust from the
windows, cups and kepis were waved, and a rousing “_Vive l’Amérique!_”
floated back to us. For these men were going home.
[1] _Pal._
January 4, 1918.
Aside from the work on the _quais_ we also run a canteen in behind the
station, where we serve meals to the men obliged to wait for their
trains. In addition next month we intend to start a buffet counter
right on the tracks, where the hungry soldier passing through with
only ten minutes at his command may obtain a solid meal of soup, meat,
vegetables and coffee. The benefit of this kind of service to troops
traveling, sometimes in open cattle cars, a day and a night without
food, can never be estimated.
In our canteen we feed all the sons of earth--even German prisoners.
Yesterday was our banner day. We began with some English from the Royal
Flying Corps. Then followed in rapid succession Alpins Chasseurs; a
company of Arabs, whose French officer had a tiny baton with which
he waved them in and out and set them down to table like children in
a row; Senegalese; Annamites; American negroes; Canadians; Hindus;
Chinese; Portuguese; and train upon train of French and American
troops. We were so rushed in the cluttered and cramped little kitchen
that we had to establish a sort of bucket brigade to pass the food
forward to the men.
Our cook, a mountain of jelly, is almost the ugliest woman in France;
and her husband, a cross-eyed, bandy-legged little ogre, is certainly
the ugliest man. And yet each considers the other a perfect paragon
of beauty. Léonie brags about her handsome _mari_; and André chants
the praises of his exquisite “_petit ange_,” and they nod and smile
and coo endearing compliments to each other among the pots and pans.
By profession André is a sexton, and it is only in his off hours, when
he is not sweeping the church or burying the dead, that he consents to
grace our kitchen with his Apollolike form.
Besides serving food, a canteen of this description is a sort of
emergency bureau where almost anything may turn up. Buttons are sewn
on, wounds bandaged, cough medicine administered, letters written home,
and general physical and moral good cheer kept on tap day and night.
After the great Italian débâcle, when thousands of French troops were
being rushed down, our canteeners worked twenty-four hours at a stretch
upon these icy _quais_. The emergency came in a minute, and they had to
handle it in a minute. And the food they served was all the food those
famished troops received. No time to halt and feed hungry mouths, with
the Prussians battering down the gates of Italy! At another canteen,
farther south, a trainload of French wounded came through from Italy.
And the canteeners flew aboard with food, bandages and first-aid
appliances, and in the brief time allotted transformed those starving,
untended sufferers.
The other day a bunch of Montana cow punchers tramped into the
canteen, and when the leader--a loose, lank, lean giant of seven feet
nothing--saw the American flag he took off his hat and said, “Thank
Gawd, boys, we’re found--at last. We’re home.”
It turned out that in the shift of trains they had somehow got
separated from their detachment, and for over two days they had
wandered about the frozen little town, without a word of French,
without money--for they had not yet received their pay--and
consequently without lodging or food.
“But why on earth don’t you ask for something to eat?” I exclaimed.
“You’re nothing but great big sillies!”
The leader drew himself up proudly. “I reckon we warn’t going to let
none of them fly Frenchies get onto our little private plight and give
us the merry ha-ha--was we, boys?”
“Not by a dern sight!” agreed the strayed mavericks stoutly.
We fitted them out with food, postals, an English-French dictionary,
some French money with written instructions as to its value, and
steered them on their way.
Yesterday I had an experience of still another sort. It was in the
middle of a bleak afternoon, and the canteen was empty. I was sitting
in the kitchen by the stove, making up the baskets for the evening rush
on the _quais_--so many slices of ham, so many apples, so many pieces
of cheese--when the far door opened, an American soldier drifted in,
leaned over the buffet for a time, and finally with a strong Texas
drawl said: “I wish you’d write me a letter, ma’am--to my wife.”
“What’s the matter with your writing it yourself?”
“I don’t know exactly what to say. It’s dog-gone delicate, and that’s
a fact. You see, I got a bad die-ges-tion.” He pronounced it as if it
were three words, with a heavy stress on the “die.”
“But you don’t write with your die-ges-tion.”
“No; but it’s this way, ma’am. My wife, she’s went and divorced me.
And it’s all along of my bad die-ges-tion. I don’t blame her no way. I
reckon that bad die-ges-tion did sort of get between her and me. But
that ain’t what I aim to say in the letter. It’s about this here new
insurance. I’ve made mine out in her name.”
“But if she’s divorced you on account of your bad die-ges-tion she has
no claim on you now.”
“I don’t give a whoop in hell about that,” he responded soberly. “I
want her to get it, that’s all. And I kind of thought maybe you might
fix it up for me in a letter, so’s she’d understand, and tell her I
don’t bear no grudge. I got a bad die-ges-tion.”
And so I fixed it up for him in a letter; and there’s one woman in
America who has lost a man with a mighty good heart even if he has a
bad die-ges-tion.
January 10th.
Transferred again. But this time I’m settled for good. This is a
canteen of Type Number Three, in the French war zone, in a big
transportation center within sound of the guns of Verdun. Anywhere
from three to ten thousand troops pass through daily. Here again,
this canteen is absolutely different from the two others, because
the conditions are different. It is a canteen which the French call
_grand luxe_. A beautiful spacious building, given by the French
Government; tastefully decorated interiors; rest rooms with papers,
writing materials, piano, tables and easy-chairs; restaurant; sleeping
quarters, hot baths; gardens with statuary; and _abris_ in case of
aërial attack--altogether the poilu’s delight.
“_Très chic, hein?_” murmurs the Frenchman. He stares about him at the
clean airy place, gay with chintz curtains, painted garlands on the
walls, and even the electric globes veiled with soft yellow Chinese
silk. And he catches the idea at once. “_Pas militaire, pas du tout
du tout._” That’s it exactly. It’s not military at all at all. The
French artist who conceived the scheme was so nauseated with everything
military that he let himself loose on this canteen to make it cozy and
homelike and gay. Its soft beauty delights the poilu; and its baths,
its disinfecting plants where he can rid himself of vermin, its kiosk
where he can buy his beloved _pinard_, its hot chocolate--made with
milk, after an American recipe--contribute to make it a very paradise
of canteens. Its fame is known all over the French war zone. The
poilus come miles to see if it’s as good as report.
At night in the rest room they lie outstretched in those canvas
easy-chairs--just how easy none but a weary poilu can know!--and they
stare through dreamy half-closed eyes at the warm charm of the place,
soaking it in at every pore; the smoke of countless cigarettes rises in
a kind of enchanted mist; there is an occasional bubble of laughter or
the low-toned give-and-take of _copains_ round the brazier; but chiefly
there is silence, luxurious well-earned ease for tired limbs--linked
sweetness long drawn out. Occasionally, when the wind is right, a
vague distant rumble seems to echo in the air. Is it thunder, or is it
bombardment? Or are those ears so accustomed to the ceaseless roar of
heavy artillery that they still hear it resounding, even in this quiet
spot? A poilu rolls over, opens one eye, listens.
“What is that? _Les canons?_”
His companion cocks an ear.
“_Mais non._”
“_Mais oui._”
“You’re crazy! Whence, then?”
The first soldier sits up and takes his bearings.
“’Tis Verdun,” he proclaims. “_N’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?_”
“Yes,” replies the canteener at the desk; “we can often hear the guns
of Verdun on a thick night.”
“Me--I come from Verdun,” says the poilu, always ready for a chat.
“Were you one of those who held Verdun when the Crown Prince made that
terrible attack?”
“_Oui._”
“Ah, those glorious heroes of Verdun!” murmurs the canteener with misty
eyes.
The simple poilu looks at her, puzzled, angry, and finally blazes forth:
“Heroes! Heroes! I’m always hearing about those people--those heroes.
But I never saw anything of them. They weren’t in the fight. I tell
you, it was we, we Frenchmen alone, who won Verdun!”
The canteener apologizes to the unconscious hero.
In a canteen of this description, serving anywhere from three to ten
thousand men a day, the work must be organized down to its last detail.
And it is. The mechanism runs as smoothly as a well-oiled automobile.
For one thing, our directrice has a “flair” for handling people, for
getting along with the French domestics--we have a kitchen staff alone
of twenty--and for making her workers contented and at home. Nor is the
work itself so hard as in the other canteens. For one thing, labor is
plentiful. For another, we live in a town. And in our time off we can
shop or stroll or laze about the comfortable big house we’ve leased for
quarters. Our hours, too, are well arranged. As the canteen remains
open all night and meals are served straight round the clock, the day
is divided into four shifts: From seven A.M. to one P.M.; from one to
seven; from seven to eleven-thirty; and from eleven-thirty P.M. to
seven A.M. In addition there is an extra shift to help at the rush
hours, which occur usually about ten A.M. and four P.M. At these times
the big dining-room resembles nothing so much as a six-o’clock subway
rush. The poilus are packed in tight as they can squeeze--every one
with his head pointed toward the _caissé_, where are sold the tickets
for the _repas complet_. Each meal costs seventy-five centimes.
January 16th.
Of all the shifts I love the morning best. Then the men come storming
in so ravenous that it’s a pleasure to see them eat. And then is when
they’re gayest. The afternoon is apt to be prosaic. But the night shift
is the most interesting of all. Then things seem to stand out, to take
on personality, to become more alive, vivid and real. Then impressions,
pictures, scenes are stamped on the brain as clean as if cut with a
die, true in every trivial detail. Soldiers playing cards by the light
of a flickering candle, their huge ungainly shadows capering up against
the wall.
Now and again from the shadows emerges a clear profile, aquiline,
delicate, a living medallion with closed eyes. Over in yonder corner,
for example, is a boy fast asleep. His head tilted against the wall
reveals a face as finely chiseled as any on an old Roman coin. His
curly lashes lie flat on his thin cheeks. His nostrils are slightly
pinched. Two perpendicular lines run from nose to jaw. How young he
looks, how white and worn! His mobile mouth, softly closed, droops
at the corners, like that of a tired child. He stirs and mutters
something. And now he smiles! He is dreaming, that boy, I know. If his
mother could see him now!... The rear door opens, the guard thrusts in
a head and calls a certain train. The young soldier rouses, staggers
for his pack, drunk with sleep, his face still soft with dreams.
I remember one night a slumbering poilu sprang to his feet, shouting
“_Aux armes!_” And his voice was so thrilling and terrible, so charged
with hoarse command, that all the soldiers leaped up, wide awake on the
instant, and glared wildly about them. The next minute the room was
filled with curses, not loud but deep.
Work of this kind, hard and monotonous as it undoubtedly is, is yet the
most satisfying in the world--provided one has a gift for it. It takes
hold of the heart. It is immediate, it has the warm personal touch,
and it ties you straight up with humanity in the raw. The abstract
philosophy of the war--who is the most to blame and why--ceases to vex
you. You become absorbed in your own little circle. Life beyond it
seems remote. You love the poilu and he loves you--and makes no bones
about it. So let the Huns rage over behind yonder ridge, and imagine
vain things. Somehow, all that does not concern you. You have become
confident, gay, certain of destiny--like the simple little poilu. It’s
service that does it.
Last night when I returned home from work it had stopped raining.
Overhead the great overturned cup of sky glittered and gleamed--with
half its stars dropped down into the dark flowing river by my side.
And there was a second moon down there, pale and drowned. An enchanted
mist, fine as a bride’s veil, hung over all. By night the Marne is
beautiful. Far off came the boom of the Verdun guns, that hammering
which has been going on now for years, “as if two armies of giants were
striking unceasingly at an unshakable gate of bronze.” Here it was
nothing but an echo on the wind. There, as one Tommy put it, it was
“hell multiplied by six.”
They say the Germans will break through this way. I think of the
thousand thousand poilus who have tramped through our canteen, each one
an anonymous hero--and I smile. It’s all right. Let the Huns come on!
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN
In the beginning we did not intend to go to Verdun. We did not dream
that it was even within the bright realms of possibility. At the
moment--a supremely painful and suspense-filled moment, fraught with
danger to France and the Allied world--Verdun belonged strictly to
the forbidden zone. Forbidden to all outsiders, men and women, to all
civilians and civilian affairs; forbidden, indeed, to all the world
save those grim horizon-blue-clad veterans who were rushing northward
by trainloads, together with heavy effectives.
Permission had been stopped. Stopped also the parcels to the Front.
It was not the hour for the manifestation of woman or love or the
transmission of tokens of affection. It was the hour for men and arms.
Paris, a military camp shelled in the day by long-range guns and bombed
in the night by Gothas, was locked to the north with a staunch lock,
and the Grand Quartier General held the key. You could come in if you
chanced to be caught up there when the storm broke, but you could
not get out again. For it was the closing week of March, 1918. The
long-awaited, much-heralded offensive had arrived. For months it had
been the first word in the mouths of privates, officers, statesmen,
editors--the entire civilized world. When, where, how--some one of
those three aspects of the universal question cropped up in every
conversation in the course of half an hour.
Well, now we knew the partial answer to those three questions. For
the shadow of the menace of the long months was beginning to realize
itself; it had become flesh and dwelt among us, a fabulous red monster
of carnage and slaughter up there in the north.
When the Germans struck their first sledge-hammer blow and the Fifth
British Army recoiled before the blow the entire line from north to
south felt the thrill of the shock. Paris, the goal of the enemy, felt
it, too, and there went up from the city a kind of big sigh, a long
exhalation, which was almost a breath of relief. At any rate the long
suspense was past. At the end of the third or fourth day refugees began
to pour in by thousands, a poor, tragic, dazed procession, twice bereft
of their scanty possessions. They brought with them wild, incoherent,
garbled accounts of the terrible sanguinary losses on both sides.
Paris, perhaps all France, possesses the feminine temperament. In
hours of ease she is willful, coy and hard to please--especially with
strangers; she is charming, baffling, impatient, outspoken over the
foibles of her best friends and allies, keenly aware of the ridiculous,
gay with a spice of maliciousness; her caricatures, often grossly
unjust, are masterpieces of fine satirical wit. But in the hour of
trial she gathers herself together with a courage, a poise and a
profound tenderness for those of her people who have been stricken that
are exceedingly good to see.
And that is what happened now. Paris found immediate food and shelter
for the fugitives; printed proclamations that appeared all over
the city, bidding the citizens to remain steadfast and unshaken in
their faith of victory and put no credence in lying rumors; and at
the same time, as the Big Berthas continued their vehement spitting
at intervals, and the air raids harried and took toll of the city’s
innocent poor--for it is chiefly the workers, the servants, the little
people of Paris living in the top stories up under the roofs who had
to descend each night to the caves at the call of the siren--the
newspapers urged all families who could afford it, all those who had
children or old or sick to remove themselves out of the new zone of
danger to the tranquillity of the country. And thousands followed
the wise advice. Hôtels de luxe were emptied inside of a week.
Shopkeepers and workers who could manage to leave ordained a spring
holiday and departed to their relatives in the provinces. It was an
exodus. There were left the big wide empty places of Paris, filled with
a gray-blue gossamer mist soft as chiffon, which wrapped all the city
in an enchanted web; the tranquil garden walks deserted by children,
vivid with rhododendrons and the drifting pink and white petals of
chestnut blooms; and the good solid block of reliable Paris citizens,
neither frightened nor fugitive, who had lived through the Marne and
the Mons and the Champagne and the Verdun attacks, and who read the
disquieting communiqués with composed faces and went about their
affairs as usual.
[Illustration:
_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information._
_Copyright, 1918, by The Curtis Publishing Company._
_Reproduced from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia._
THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF THE CITADEL OF VERDUN.
NEXT, ON LEFT, MISS FRAZER, IN HELMET, CARRYING GAS MASK.
THE TUNNEL-ENTRANCE TO THE FORTRESS IS IN THE BACKGROUND.]
Practically no troops are now routed through the capital, but
occasionally one saw small detachments of _fantassins_ with their heavy
marching equipment filing through the empty squares. They did not look
warlike, those poilus, veterans of four years, when they appeared
in the streets of Paris. They marched slowly, laboriously, one foot
lagging after the other, shoulders bent beneath the weight of the kit,
their eyes fixed on the ground. The horizon-blue uniforms were faded
and patched and their clumsy storm coats with the skirts buttoned
back gave them an indescribably pathetic air. Seen thus at twilight
and melting into the dusky background there was something about these
somber, slow-plodding, burdened figures that hurt the heart. One felt
an overwhelming tenderness, a pity for these brave little men. And
yet these were the selfsame poilus who a few days later stemmed the
furious German tide--and they sang as they went into battle. And nearly
four years they sang!
It would not be untrue to say that underneath her courageous calm Paris
did not feel the cruel strain of that first uncertain week of the
offensive. The strain of the situation was brought home to me, waiting
for my passes, by several incidents. Naomie, the trim little _femme
de chambre_, pretty as a pink camellia, whose voice has the soft deep
throb of a cello, went about with a face as pale as the linen she bore
on her arm. And as she made the bed and swept and aired the room she
wept, quietly, steadily, the silvery globules stealing silently one
by one down her cheeks. When they obstructed her vision she stopped,
brushed them away methodically and went on. My pillow was wet with
Naomie’s tears.
“I am ashamed, mademoiselle; I ask pardon to be like this,” she
murmured one morning when I had caught her outright drying her eyes.
“One must be strong these days. But my husband, he has been transferred
up north on the British line. And now I have not heard from him, here
it is over a week. Before he always sent me a little word each day. He
never failed--some little word each day.” She plaited the counterpane
with unseeing eyes as she muttered: “Ten days! Yes, it is that--just.
And not one little word. But one must be strong, _n’est-ce pas,
mademoiselle_?”
The next disturbing thing that happened was the news that B---- had
deserted. His wife was my friend. B---- was a Frenchman in a famous
fighting regiment, sensitive, fine-strung, none too strong, who had
been in the trenches since 1914. What evil of fear, irritation, revolt
or sheer brain collapse led to the decision we shall never know. But
one day he threw down his gas mask in the midst of an attack and walked
out of the trenches. His battalion had been incessantly shelled for
weeks. In the front-line trenches they were hammered by the guns. In
the back areas, _en repos_, they caught the bombs. No sleep in either
place. This kept up week after week. And suddenly, like an elephant,
B---- had “gone bad.”
He appeared suddenly in Paris at a time when not a single Frenchman was
on leave; and he walked the boulevards with the number of that famous
fighting regiment on the collar of his tunic blazing forth for all the
world to see. It was a miracle he was not instantly caught. As it was
he was a prisoner; for he had no papers, and therefore he could not
send a telegram or register at a hotel or take a train or leave the
city. A friend telegraphed for B----’s wife, who was in the country,
sending a noncommittal wire so as not to alarm B----’s mother, an
ardent patriot, who would have instantly handed over her recreant son
to the police. The wife arrived. To her B---- declared his intention
of joining the Foreign Legion. That meant that his brain flare or
momentary cowardice had passed.
Anyone may join the Foreign Legion. There no embarrassing questions are
asked. They take on all comers, and then pitch them headlong into the
very hottest hell of the battle. Accordingly B----, knowing that if he
could once win to their offices he would be safe from arrest, stole
out from his doorway one morning and, avoiding officers and gendarmes,
gained the recruiting bureau.
But here an unexpected blow fell. The recruiting end of the bureau had
been shifted to Lyons. But how to get there! He could not ride in a
train or a public conveyance. He could not dine openly in a restaurant
or sleep in a hotel. And to be seen tramping south in this crisis meant
certain arrest and death. However, there was nothing for it but to make
the attempt--to walk by night and lie hidden in the day. He started
forth--and no word has been heard of him since.
In time the news of his desertion leaked out. And the gendarme on the
beat took it upon himself to rebuke Madame B---- for having such a
villain husband. He is a fat, greasy, bald-headed little man, this
gendarme, who sits long over his grenadine, and has never been nearer
the Front than the city fortifications.
Madame B flew at him like a fury.
“Have you ever been out there--fat _embusqué_?” she shrilled, shaking
her finger under his nose. “Have you fought four years in that hell?
Been wounded five times, had fever, rheumatism, suffered from shell
shock, been made deaf from bombardment, had your nerves shattered so
that you never sleep? Is your hair turned gray at twenty-five years?
Oh, my God! No? Then keep your mouth shut! ’Tis not for such as you to
speak of this war! ’Tis for those who have endured.”
It was this courage made human by the private griefs of the people
of France, who after four weary, crucifying years were still bearing
the cross, filling the breach, saving the day, and saving it with a
superb dash despite individual heartbreaks, that filled my mind as, our
passes obtained, we journeyed northward. It seemed to me that perhaps
the month of March, 1918, was to be made memorable by the fact that at
that particular time America began definitely to shift to her own young
shoulders the weight of the agonizing burden France had borne so long.
For this reason the opening offensive marked a transition period, for
theretofore we had held only quiet sectors.
But it was not the fact of the shifting of the outward burden that
interested me so much as to discover if possible whether that shift
was to extend also to the spirit--whether the soul of France, the
soul of her soldiers, her poilus, was to pass into the soul of this
new, strong, eager young Army. For the quality that distinguishes
the poilu from his enemies and from his allies alike is not brute
force, or body fitness, or stubborn pride, or stiff resistance, or
obedience, or cohesion, or physical valor--but sheer spiritual stamina.
He has an invincible come-back. His soul can’t be beat. The French,
who are an extremely clannish race, say that they feel a closer bond
with Americans than with any other people on earth. This is not mere
diplomatic balder-dash. They declare that aside from possessing the
same democratic ideals, the same passion for scientific research,
there is a decided similarity of temperament. In both peoples there
are the same swiftness of perception, the same suppleness of mind,
lightness of wit and comradeliness toward life and toward each other
which have made France like one great family. And now that the two
nations in this offensive are fighting side by side and brigade by
brigade, the French in their speeches and editorials and communiqués
have announced that the spiritual metal of the two armies is the same;
that the spontaneous, unquenchable, “_En avant! Toujours en avant!_”
quality of attack, attack, and again attack of the French poilu is also
the salient characteristic of the newcomers. It was this particular
declaration that put a keener edge on my observations during my
journey. I was on the lookout for signs in our men of the conquering
will of the poilu.
It is not germane to the subject to describe in detail that eight-day
motor trip through the heart of the American war zone in France. We
covered each day hundreds of kilometers of the lovely rolling meadow
and hill country of Lorraine--orchards, fields and woods radiant in
shimmering green, clothed in primal light of leaf. We passed scores
of red-tiled hamlets, each the identical facsimile of the other, with
steaming manure heaps adorning the front yards of prominent citizens,
hens and bouncing babies scratching therein, and toothless old dames
sitting on the doorsteps peering out upon the world with faded eyes.
We stopped at numerous American base-hospital centers, some in stone
cantonments, formerly army barracks turned over by the French; some
former hotel resorts; and still others brand-new frame buildings,
entire villages with duck-board streets. We motored through endless
series of _repos_ stations, one following hard upon another like
beads on a string, of English, American, French, Italian, Portuguese,
Annamite and Senegalese troops. At the close of the day in the rosy
smolder of the afterglow we hunted aviation camps in the advanced
war zone, and found the vast aërodromes so shrewdly camouflaged that
we could scarcely discern them from the dappled landscape. We passed
through the center where is situated the training school for army
officers, a beautiful old fortressed town set like a coronet high on
a wooded hill. We stayed the night at Army Headquarters in a hotel
packed with the hierarchy of the General Staff, where automobiles with
flags drew up before the door and mackintoshed generals beribboned and
bestarred strode in out of the lashing rain.
Our quest took us from the drowsy, tranquil rear of the war zone clear
up to the Luneville sector beyond Toul, where we witnessed two air
fights in the course of one morning. It was the portion of France
given over to the American effort. We traversed and crisscrossed it
back and forth and from end to end. And everywhere we met the same
phenomenon--the lithe, clean-limbed, khaki-clad American soldier. The
land was alive with him! Several months previously I had been over
this same territory, and then even a Red Cross man was a rare animal
which the natives paused to regard. Now, after eight months, the entire
countryside hummed and buzzed like a vast beehive. It was the visible
result before our eyes of all the sweat and labor and strain of a
mighty nation intent on a single goal--to transport men to France.
Well, here were the men, hundreds of thousands of them, scattered over
a vast camp ground. We met battalions of them swinging along the roads
in step and singing a lively marching air. We came across them in sunny
fields prodding dummy Huns with bayonets; we passed groups of them
in remote and peaceful valleys picking off targets at rifle ranges.
We met them at lonely crossroads, together with a French comrade,
acting as military police. They gave us the salute that is known as the
Pershing--bringing the hand smartly up to the forage cap in an abrupt
little gesture full of style. And they invariably followed the salute
with an infectious aftergrin. The salute was Pershing’s. The grin was
all their own. We saw them tearing along roads at a breakneck clip
in those snorting demons of motor-cycles called “wife-killers.” We
overtook them driving camions and transports and mule teams.
Later we met an entire division on the move--artillery, infantry,
ammunition and cook wagons--a long strung-out procession against the
drab sky line. They were bound up there, they vaguely told us. But we
knew and they knew that they were going to participate in a struggle
compared to which life in the drowsy Toul sector was as but a holiday
fête. We glimpsed them driving powerful American locomotives, beside
which the diminutive French engines seemed like toys that one could
pick up in the palm of the hand--and they leaned far out of their
cabooses to cheer. We saw them packed like herrings in the dingy
low-ceiled dining-rooms of provincial towns, drinking their _pinard_
diluted with water in true poilu style, then fetching out their makings
and rolling a smoke in true American style. We saw them in camp, _en
repos_, in hospital, on the march.
There is a pageantry about war when one sits back thus and views its
effects from the outside--a kind of large, glittering nobility which
thrills and quickens the blood despite oneself--until one sees the
wrecks. And in the hospitals we began to get the wrecks. In ----, a
famous old town turned into a hospital center, we stopped to look up
some missing men. The other members of the party went to visit the
wards, but I wandered about the streets and presently came upon a squad
of privates in wrinkled, freshly disinfected uniforms, the tunics
skin-tight, revealing the owners’ slim waists and finely swelling
shoulder muscles. But they had a pale washed-out look, as if they
themselves had undergone the ordeal of disinfection along with their
uniforms. A lieutenant was calling the roll.
Aside from the line-up a few paces stood a husky private with a sulky
lowering face. He had crowded his battered sombrero down over his
bloodshot eyes and was scowling like a movie pirate. “What’s happening
to those men?” I asked, nodding at the squad.
“They’ve been gassed and now they’re declared O. K. and are going back
to the Front.”
He spoke in a curious broken rasping whisper, which I recognized.
“You’ve been gassed, too?” I hazarded.
“Yes,” he croaked. “And I’m just as well as any fellow in that gang.
We all got it at the same time. But the doc, when he heard my voice,
wouldn’t let me go. But damn it all, a guy don’t fight with his voice!”
“He’s playing favorites, that doc,” whispered another lank,
humorous-eyed young giant strolling up, his peaked forage cap drawn low
so as to shelter, if possible, those bloodshot eyes. “Wouldn’t let me
out, either! Durn the durned docs, I say!”
“But you were burned as well as gassed,” I objected, for the entire
lower part of his face and neck was an angry red peeling blister. “What
kind of gas was it?” I demanded.
“Mustard. Burns your insides out if you get a bad case. I tell you I’ve
had enough to last me one life. No more mustard on cold beef for mine!”
“And how is the gas-mask discipline?”
“Well, that depends on the battalion. In my battalion the commander
was strong for drills. We had them morning, noon and night, and in
the middle of the night. Seemed as if the old man had gone crazy on
gas discipline. But when the big gas attack came we had only a four
per cent casualty list, and the battalion alongside, which had been
going easy on drills, caught it something fierce. Our battalion got
recommended to G. H. Q. I caught my gas in a dugout the next day.”
“And you are still keen to get back into all that?”
“Am I?” he repeated, his eyes hardening. “I’ll tell you how I feel:
When I first came over I had a kind of sneaking notion that Heinie
wasn’t so dusky as he was painted. But I lost that notion pretty quick
when I got up front and saw my lieutenant shot in the back by a boche
prisoner who had thrown up his hands. Now I want to lick the Huns till
they holler, and then keep on licking them for a year after that for
the good of their souls.”
Inside of the hospital were grimmer cases. In one of the wards we
came on a Texan with the bright, clear-gazing eyes that one sometimes
finds in old sailors. They had taken his leg off. When we asked how he
was making it he turned on us those straight deep eyes, and there was
trouble in them.
“There’s just one thing I’m sorry for,” said he.
“What is that?”
“That I didn’t have more time.”
Time for what, I wondered. And then looking down on that wrecked body,
with the covers lifted high over apparatus so as not to touch the
tormented nerves, I thought I understood. He was sorry he didn’t have
more time to get out of the way. That was it. It was what anybody would
wish for--two, three, five seconds of grace to have gotten out of the
way. Lying here through the long hours empty of everything but pain, he
had doubtless worked out the problem to the finest precision, and he
knew to the last trick just how much more time it would have taken to
have dropped to the ground, to have eluded that exploding shell. Now
all his life long he was going to regret the lack of those few precious
seconds.
“Yes,” he repeated slowly, laboriously, the trouble still in his eyes,
“I’d like to have had more time. Don’t seem right somehow. ’Tain’t
fitting to be lying here with the show just begun. I’d like to have
done more damage. But,” he brightened, “I’ve figured there’s still some
jobs a peg-legged man can do over here. And I tell you one thing: I’m
not going home till we’ve licked the Huns or the Huns have licked us.”
He laughed at the latter impossibility, and the laughter shook his
body and turned him pale. And still he laughed on. I thought when he
wished for more time that he was thinking in terms of self and personal
safety, and all the time he had been thinking in the biggest terms of
service to mankind.
It was not until the fifth day of our trip that Verdun loomed on
the horizon as a rosy possibility. We were dining in Nancy at
Voltaire’s with M. Martin, the _sous-préfet_ of the department of
Meurthe-et-Moselle. M. Martin, it appeared, had never been in Verdun.
Since we had business at a French hospital fifteen kilometers from the
citadel he thought it possible, probable--of course, nothing was sure;
absolutely no Verdun passes had been issued for ten days--still, one
never could tell; and if we would like him to try--he paused to beam
and smile--if we would give him our papers he would send them in to the
Grand Quartier General, together with his own, and then--well, in short
we would await the turn of events.
“Whether we shall be accorded permission at this crucial moment is
doubtful,” he concluded. “But at any rate we may hope.”
So we turned in our papers and we hoped. To see Verdun at this
crisis, when to the north millions of men were crashing together in
terrific combat, with an appalling sanguinary back tide of wounded
and dead, lent the occasion a deep significance, for Verdun to the
whole world has become a symbol of confidence, a kind of ark of the
covenant to battling mankind. I did not conceal from myself that what
gave Verdun its specific interest to me was the news that our troops
round Montdidier and Amiens were now engaged in the present titanic
struggle. That fact took the famous fortress out of the list of mere
great monuments of history; it made it in short our own, part and
parcel of America, its glories our glories, its defense our defense,
its high challenge our challenge, its victory our victory. But there
was something more than that in the back of my mind. Verdun was behind
the French, so to speak, finished history. Our Verduns were still of
to-morrow, a promise, a prophecy. The actors were those humorous-eyed
khaki-clad soldiers standing at lonely crossroads who had given us the
smart little salute with the friendly aftergrin. Thus it was with the
feeling of reading ahead of time a page of history not yet evoked but
inevitable that I prepared to go to Verdun.
The past week had been of a piece with the raw spring weather,
lowering, foggy or sluicing water by the liquid ton out of a somber
sky. With one accord we prayed for sunshine in order to view the
surrounding heights, Côte 304, Saint Mihiel, Douaumont, Veau and Mort
Homme. But the day that dawned was brother to the rest--bleak, dark,
with a clinging fog, which muffled the landscape and grew ever thicker
as the hours passed. Our passes had arrived from French Headquarters,
but the final visé, the permission to enter Verdun itself, must be
obtained at V----, fifteen kilometers from the citadel, and if there
was heavy shelling either of the fort or of the surrounding roads we
should certainly be refused.
It was six o’clock in the morning when as guests of the French
Government and of M. Martin in particular we clambered into a military
automobile, one of those lean, powerful drab monsters that go cycloning
along the highways behind the lines at a stupefying rate of speed.
We had estimated that, including necessary stops at French hospitals
containing American wounded, we should arrive at Verdun about noon.
Therefore we had taken the precaution to bring our luncheon, with the
intention of picnicking among the ruins and perhaps obtaining some
coffee from the poilus’ mess. The _chefs d’oeuvrès_ of the provisions
were two tiny cold fowl de luxe weighing about a pound apiece, which
had cost eight round silver dollars.
The next four hours on my part were given to the task of keeping my
hair and my ears on. For the wind as it swooped by tried to drive us
bodily from the car; the cold congealed us in cramped positions and
the fog chilled us to the bone. We could not discern the road twenty
yards ahead. The car roared forward into a barrage of thick mist which
shredded on the hillcrests only to sag more heavily in the valleys.
This, M. Martin assured us, was typical Picardy weather. At crossroads
where we were stopped by the police M. Martin presented his card of
identity, signed in Joffre’s own hand, and we were waved onward with
honorable presentations of arms. As we neared our destination we
diverged from the straight highroad, making a detour, for some routes
are reserved for ingoing and some for outgoing traffic, and these
routes are constantly altered in order to safeguard materials and
confound the Hun.
Arrived at V---- we drew up in a long rank of machines in front of
Headquarters and M. Martin vanished to make his felicitations to
the commandant and to telephone in to Verdun. Our fate still hung
in the balance. The minutes slipped by. Generals--French, American,
British--dashed up in their automobiles, descended, saluted and
vanished or stood talking in earnest groups. Americans, recognizing
compatriots, saluted us from streets and doorways and strolled over to
ask of home and how the Statue of Liberty fared. She was a pretty fine
old girl, _quoi?_--as the French say.
An hour passed. And still M. Martin tarried. At the end of twenty
minutes more he reappeared down the end of a street, his civilian
black standing out in striking relief against the motley of khaki and
horizon-blue uniforms and gold braid.
“_En avant!_” he exclaimed gayly, climbing into the car. “They got the
commanding officer of the citadel on the wire. He expects us and asked
us to mess with his officers in the citadel, but I refused, as it will
be long past one by the time we arrive. This fog after all has served
us well. They are not bombarding the fortress to-day.”
I do not recall the last fifteen kilometers of that journey, save
that we sped like the wind, straining our eyes through the mist for
the first glimpse of the famous stronghold. Presently “There! There!”
broke simultaneously from our lips, and a few minutes later we were
rolling under a noble stone archway, green and mossy with age, which
looked as if it had been reared in the days of Uther Pendragon, and
were being greeted by the commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun.
We were to take everything out of the car, said he, and come right in.
Lunch was waiting. In vain M. Martin protested. The colonel waved his
protests aside with a smile. He led us into the fortress, down a long
underground tunnel, which rang hollowly beneath our feet, to a set of
guests’ dressing rooms, where we repaired the ravages of the long ride.
A few minutes later he returned, conducted us through another series of
corridors, through an enormous mess hall, where the men as he entered
sprang clattering to their feet, and ushered us into the officers’ mess
room.
It was small, that dining room situated forty feet underground in the
stone heart of the citadel, seating scarce a dozen persons, and simple,
lofty-ceiled, severe. And yet it was a veritable jewel, flashing
with rich strong colors, magnificent with its brilliant sheaths of
battle flags, and glittering with the steel and silver and gold of its
souvenirs of valor--armor and medals and trophies which gleamed from
cabinet and wall. Here had collected at one time and another all the
great chiefs of the Allies; and here the presumptuous Crown Prince had
sworn to eat his triumphal banquet.
Over the mantelpiece hung the pennants of all the Entente Powers, a
bright formidable array, topped with the watchword of the impregnable
fortress, “_On ne passe pas_,” a phrase descending from the days of the
Little Corporal. The opposite wall bore medals of honor--the Croix de
Guerre, the Médaille Militaire and the Legion d’Honneur bestowed by a
grateful nation upon the citadel itself, as if it possessed a glorious
soul. Here and there hung heavy-studded shields surrounded by rayons of
ancient swords and battle-axes.
What we ate or whether we ate I cannot recall. The colonel had left
us, bidding us genially to make haste, as there was much to see, much
to recount, and we sat drinking in the spell of that wondrous little
room, steeped in the atmosphere of valor, hearkening to the voice of
the past, rejoicing in the brave prophecy of the future, and trying to
realize that even as we sat French and American troops were rushing
north to stem the furious onslaught of the Hun.
“Well, now,” said the colonel, opening the door, “if you are refreshed
we will begin. We shall take first the view of the heights, then I
shall show you the fortress, and after that the ruins of Verdun.”
We had asked M. Martin to recount the history of the great offensive,
and he had turned over the appeal to the commanding officer of the
citadel, who had promised to describe the climax of the decisive battle
on the exact spot where the Germans made their final stubborn stand and
were beaten back with stupendous loss.
Outside, the weather had settled to a continuous drizzle. We wound
round the hill by a serpentine road and presently attained its crest.
Here we abandoned the car and stumbled over a torn and wrenched
terrain, pitted with shell holes fifty feet across and partially filled
with black filthy water. Filled also with old dismantled cannon,
unexploded cartridges, rusted bayonets, twisted iron fragments of great
shells, and an occasional sodden képi. Between these craters the
hummocks were dotted with graves marked with a cross and the simple
French _cocarde_. Standing under that bleak sky and gazing out across
that sinister smitten landscape with its gaunt shot-off trees and its
deep gashes of trenches marked by blood-red earth was like looking
upon some huge monster frozen in a horrible death agony. It had been
foully murdered, that hill, and it lay like a mutilated corpse, stiffly
outflung, uncovered, indecent, its hideous wounds gaping up to the sky.
The colonel came to a halt. “Here we are,” he began. “Here is the
farthest point that the enemy penetrated. Here he was beaten back--just
at your feet, mademoiselle.” He pointed with his cane, and I stared
down, expecting to see I scarce know what, some visible sign, some
chalk mark or whitewashed tennis-court line, to identify that
tremendous check. But there was nothing. My feet were pressing down a
clump of fresh blue violets, wet-eyed from the rain. I stepped off them
hastily.
The colonel continued his narrative. The wind blew back the heavy
skirts of his greatcoat; his sturdy, compact figure, firmly planted as
a statue, defied the elements; his leonine white head, which reminded
one of Joffre’s, glistened with rain drops; his voice, gentle, level,
dispassionate, filled one with utter conviction. We knew what he said
was true. Here came the enemy from that direction--he pointed--and
from there, and there, all converging on this one point. And when
they were very near, advancing shoulder to shoulder in dense mass
formation, two concealed French batteries, one from either side, opened
on their serried columns a terrific enfilading fire. It was close-range
slaughter--such as was going on even now in the north. Their first
ranks lay in windrows. Their dead covered this hill like a carpet. And
still their thinning numbers were filled with rushing hosts from behind
and they pressed on and on, wave upon wave, the farthest of which had
broken just at the point where we stood. There it was pushed back by a
spirited counter thrust by the French _fantassins_.
“And your own troops, _mon colonel_, I suppose they gave a good account
of themselves?” queried M. Martin.
“You have said it,” replied the colonel with proud simplicity. “My
brave men in that attack covered and recovered themselves with glory.”
In the meantime, he continued, down below--he would show us
presently--another strong enemy force had tried to force an entrance to
the fortress at one of the tunnel exits. This exit, leading by a series
of passages on different levels to the very innermost heart of the
citadel, gave on the outside upon a contracted open space between two
ridges, and was protected first by a deep surrounding fosse filled with
a maze of barbed wire, and second by a fifteen-foot stone wall which
formed part of the outer fortifications. Down this wall the Germans had
leaped like a tumbling cataract. The first wave fell into the fosse and
was followed by another and another, until the ancient moat was heaped
level with a writhing human bridge across which the hostile troops
rushed and gained the narrow space before the mouth of the tunnel.
“And were there no French machine guns playing upon them from the
entrance?”
“Oh, yes--there were two seventy-fives,” said the colonel quietly,
“less than a hundred yards away.” We could perhaps imagine, he
continued, what carnage they wrought in that confined space. Germans
had dropped down from that height like overripe fruit trained against a
wall. The French gunners obliterated the first, the second, the third
and the fourth waves; and the fifth broke right on the flaming snouts
of their guns. The sixth gained the tunnel entrance. Here the garrison
counter-attacked, and the enemy turned tail and ran. But not far. The
wall was before them and the guns were behind. That particular hostile
force was wiped out to a man.
The colonel’s calm voice flowed on and on, describing the desperate
details of that epic attack, and now and again he pointed with his
stick into the fog, locating great enemy batteries which had poured a
deadly hail of shells upon this hill. Altogether, he said, the French
had lost in killed during that six months’ offensive one hundred and
ten thousand; the Germans more than half a million. And most of them
had fallen on and round this height on which we stood. I looked about
that somber, brooding, ghost-haunted hill, where half a million souls
slain violently in battle had flown upward in a thick mist--and as I
looked it seemed that the fog had a ruddy under tinge as if a subtle
crimson reek exuded from the blood-drenched ground.
As the colonel continued his narrative I tried in fancy to reconstruct
the vision of the battlefield. Of German prisoners I had seen a-plenty
with their close-cropped, bullet-shaped heads and furtive yet arrogant
eyes. The French poilus also--those gay, stout-hearted little men, some
of the greatest fighters and the greatest phrase-makers on earth--were
familiar figures in my mind. So that all the ingredients of the picture
were at hand. Nevertheless, all unconsciously I kept making a curious
mental error. The intensity of the combat still raging to the north
somehow drew the picture out of focus, causing it to appear, not past
history but something which was still actually going on. I knew it was
past, and still it fused in my mind with the unfinished present.
Added to that, my brain was so saturated with images of our American
troops as I had seen them the past week, and those images were so
vivid, powerful and real that I could visualize nothing else. Thus,
when the colonel said “_nos soldats_,” my mind unconsciously translated
“our soldiers”; and I saw, not the horizon blue of the poilus but
the clean, lithe khaki-clad Americans with their fresh faces and
good-humored eyes. And when he said “Our brave troops charged here--and
here--and here,” my mind saw “our brave troops charging here--and
here--and here.” I tried to rid my mind of that delusion--for it was
too painful on that dusky death-smitten hill, with the knowledge that
even at that very moment our own brave troops were indeed charging to
the north upon some other hill. But the past week had etched the images
too deeply on my mind; and I could not wipe them out.
M. Martin interrogated the colonel concerning their losses.
“Yes,” replied the colonel soberly, “one hundred and ten thousand of
our men fell.”
“One hundred and ten thousand of our men fell!” reiterated my heart
with a pang. Never before had that figure seemed so monstrous.
Why, that was one, two, three, four, five whole divisions! Our
first division, that I had seen, our second, all those fine Rainbow
fellows--pshaw! It was incredible!
“One hundred and ten thousand are a great many men to die!” I remarked
aloud.
And even as I spoke, my mind, righting itself, said within itself: “But
of course those one hundred and ten thousand men were Frenchmen! Not
Americans. Our men have only just gone north. Don’t you remember, you
saw the --th Division on the move?” Thus mentally I righted myself.
Nevertheless, one hundred and ten thousand were indeed a great many men
to die, and I repeated my remark.
“_Pas trop!_”--not too many!--replied the colonel simply. And those two
words, soberly spoken, were the epitome of the Verdun spirit.
Later he pointed out a cemetery on a distant hillside containing five
thousand fallen heroes. “In that one cemetery,” said he, “lie thirty of
my own officers.”
“And you, you have been wounded, my colonel?” inquired M. Martin.
“Three times only,” replied the colonel with a shrug. “Once seriously.
But I would not leave the citadel. I do not like hospitals--those white
places. They are not for me. If I die I die here where I belong, with
my men.”
The rain still continued, a steady drenching downpour. “But you may
be thankful,” remarked the colonel, wiping his streaming face, “as
otherwise this hill would be impossible. To-day the cannon are giving
us a rest.”
He led the way to the nearest tunnel entrance to the citadel. With the
others I followed, eagerly listening to his explanations. But my mind
was still in a whirl. That dark and desolate blood-soaked hill, the
staunch old colonel, with the dewdrops in his white hair, recounting
the valorous deeds of his fallen heroes, those acres on acres of
graves, the ascending hosts of souls--were not some of them perhaps
still lingering in this lonely spot, dazed by their violent severance
from the flesh, ignorant that they had passed across? Would they not
cry out at night for aid, for news of the battle front: “Why are we
abandoned thus? Who wins? _Vaterland?_ _La Patrie?_”--the Americans,
who had not engaged in this struggle, to be sure, but were now fighting
in an even mightier struggle--all these things mingled confusedly in my
mind like the unmatched parts of a puzzle.
Thanks to my classical education, I had no proper conception of what
constitutes a modern fortress. I had vaguely imagined it as a city
ringed round with a very substantial stone wall, crenelated and
turreted, with dozens of peepholes for the doughty gunners to take
pot shots at the enemy established outside. In the very heart of the
city would be the citadel, which figured in my mind as a big, round,
impregnable stone tower bristling with teethlike rows of cannon, its
foundations naturally extending scores of feet underneath. Accordingly
when we set out to traverse the long series of dimly-lit reverberating
subterranean passages, descended flights of slimy stone stairs to lower
and danker levels, stopped in gun and ammunition rooms, electric-plant
rooms, kitchens, mess rooms, infirmaries, chapels, musées, cinema and
rest rooms, dormitories, cavernous abodes, twenty, thirty and forty
feet below ground, I began to wonder when we were going upstairs.
“But there is no upstairs,” responded M. Martin, laughing in answer
to my query--“not in this citadel. Here it all is, just as you see,
underground. You observed those big iron mushroom affairs six inches or
so aboveground when we were up on the hill?”
“But I thought they were the observation posts of hidden guns--like
that of the Big Bertha.”
“So they are--they are our own Big Berthas. Nevertheless, those
observation posts are all the upstairs there is to this citadel. What
do you suppose would happen to the superstructure of a fort if it were
hit by a shell which made a crater as large as the one we saw on the
hill--fifty feet across and twenty feet deep? Not much upstairs left,
eh?”
So much for a classical education!
“And all the French troops eat and sleep and pray and drill down here?
There are none billeted in Verdun?”
“There’s nobody in Verdun.”
“No old men and old women who still cling to their ruined firesides and
creep out into the morning sunshine after a night’s bombardment?”
“Not a single soul. It’s a blanched city of the dead.”
By this time it was well upon six o’clock and we stopped for a moment
to view a mess hall where, seated at long refectory tables, about four
hundred poilus were taking sustenance from great steaming casseroles
of ragout placed in the centers of the tables. Here indeed were the
veritable heroes of Verdun! The indomitables! I looked for halos,
but found none but the fragrant encircling wreaths of the smoking
ragout, which the heroes were bolting down like one o’clock. These
men, however, were no callow youths, but tough-muscled, tanned and
bearded veterans--or if they were youths they were veteran youths with
lines in their faces and gray in their hair. As the commanding officer
loomed in the doorway they sprang to their feet as one man. The colonel
waved them back to their stew, explaining that here were some of their
allies--American friends. What a cheer it was that rose! Some of the
Americans frankly wiped their eyes. The colonel beamed round upon us
all with a kind of indulgent fatherly grace. His blue eyes caressed his
troops with affectionate regard.
And as we departed he commented: “You will please note one thing: I did
not order that cheer. It sprang spontaneously from the hearts of my
men.”
He continued to speak of America, of the deep fraternal tenderness
existing in the hearts of the French for the splendid young army from
overseas; of the fine morale America was exhibiting in the business of
food conservation; of the hope they had in American aviation. Simple,
brave, friendly words from a brave, friendly soul.
We tramped on through vast resounding twilight caverns, slippery
underfoot with mud and exuding large clammy dewdrops from the
overarching walls. Sometimes it was pitch dark and a pocket torch or
the outstretched hand of the colonel guided our course. Once we climbed
by a kind of vertical ship’s ladder fastened against the solid wall
up into the platform of a monstrous subterranean gun which hurled
annihilation miles away. For months the Germans had been assiduously
trying to locate that gun.
It was the colonel who suggested the idea of Verdun as a Mecca for
tourist parties after the war.
“Here they will come,” he chuckled, “by train and ship loads from
all over the civilized world to view this historic spot. They will
passionately collect every old piece of shrapnel or cap or exploded
cartridge, every stick, every brick, every stone. And when all of the
veritable souvenirs have been snatched up doubtless our ingenious
guardians of the citadel will resow the sacred ground with another
artificial crop from a huge factory established hard by. ’Twill be an
industry. They will charge--let me see--three francs admission.” And
the colonel laughed heartily over his prophecy.
“But they will not have the commanding officer of the citadel for their
guide!” interjected M. Martin slyly.
“If they have the commanding officer of the citadel for their guide it
will be five francs,” said the colonel firmly. “Three francs for an
ordinary tour; five francs with the commanding officer for guide. That
is not too dear!”
They elaborated the idea with gayety. Instead of great rough soldiers
with clattering bayonets and clumping boots, the hollow corridors would
reverberate to soft, pretty laughter and the click-clack of ladies’
high-heeled boots. And downy college lads and pig-tailed misses, with
bespectacled tutors bearing Baedekers--no, _mon Dieu_, not Baedekers;
doubtless American histories!--and peaceful and portly papas and mammas
who vaguely remembered the great war in their extreme youth would
stroll through these echoing passages pensively, hand in hand. For it
would then be a public musée, this impregnable citadel, and its tragic
battles a troubled dream of yesterday.
“But in the meantime,” warned the colonel, laughing, “I am going to
charge five francs!”
After the citadel he proceeded to show us the town, demolished beyond
hope of reconstruction. Fine ancient façades with filigree stonework
delicate as thread lace; matchless old cathedral closes of the
fourteenth century designed and wrought in solid granite by a master
mason who was also a master builder; fortification walls dating back
to the days of the Cæsars; medieval turrets beneath which troubadour
soldier lovers sang; glorious architecture of the Louis the Fourteenth
period--ineffable masterpieces of structural art never to be reproduced
on earth, they lay in smashed and huddled fragments on the ground.
We entered a church, its roof caved in, massive columns rent, holy
statues razed, empty as an eggshell--the result of a single cannon shot.
“_Un coup de canon_--and there you are!” the colonel commented grimly.
We sped past the Big Canal and the Little Canal, tranquil stretches of
twilight water, colored like gorgeous rose windows by a liberated gleam
of the westering sun; reminiscent of Venice, with their overhanging
houses, now glooming ruins whose window holes stared like sightless
sockets of men blinded in battle; past the business and the residence
sections of the city, dead and desolate as the tombs of the Pharaohs;
and finally wound up to the summit of a hill whence, the colonel
explained, we could obtain a comprehensive view of the havoc the Huns
had wrought. And when we had gazed our fill on that tragic exhibition
of arrogance and hate, the colonel, like the fine artist he was, led us
into a lovely quiet garden close whose darkening air was sweet with the
scent of hyacinths, violets, crocuses and spring roses. And kneeling
down on the damp turf and getting out his clasp-knife he proceeded to
gather us each a nosegay in honor of the event.
“For,” he observed sagely, “flowers are better souvenirs than bits of
iron shells.”
When we wondered how he came to be possessed of a garden on this
deserted hill-top among the crumbling ruins he explained it was his
favorite point of observation. Knowing his love for the spot his men
had secretly made this garden for him and tended it carefully and kept
it in fresh bloom.
Returning to the citadel we dined once more in the famous mess room,
this time with the colonel and all his officers. It was nine o’clock
when we finally took leave of him, standing bareheaded in the rain to
assure us of the warm pleasure we had given him! It had been an amazing
day, crowded with images, emotions, events; and not least amazing was
this French colonel, commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun,
bubbling over with gayety and humor, filled with profound tenderness
and knowledge of life, a savant, learned in history and languages,
a distinguished warrior who had been tried in the fiery furnace of
battle, and yet simple-hearted as a child or one of his beloved poilus.
It was long after midnight when we arrived in Nancy. Those two tiny
fowls de luxe which cost eight dollars we had fallen on and devoured
in the night. The following day, on our return to Paris, we learned
that the battle to the north was still raging. But the Germans had been
checked. Our troops, the ones we had seen moving north, were in the
great struggle too. They were being heavily gassed and shelled.
“Worse than Verdun!” said my informant, an American who had just
returned from the British Front. “I saw several hundred of our fellows
who had been mustard-gassed, lying in a field hospital. They lay on
cots, their smarting eyes bandaged with soothing lotions, and they
talked to each other in low broken whispers. It gave one a choke in the
throat to see all those stalwarts lying flat, eyes bandaged, whispering
to the comrades they could not see. I tell you, it made me feel mighty
ugly toward the Hun! I wished some of our peace propagandists at home
might see that sight, hear those low, choking whispers!”
“What were they talking about? Home? Mother? Where is my wandering boy
to-night?”
The officer gave a grim laugh. “Not by a jolly jugful! They were trying
to fix the exact hour of the gas attack in order to reckon how soon
they’d be back in the trenches to tackle the Hun!”
This, then, was the spirit of the Americans who had entered the great
fight. It was the spirit of the poilus before Verdun. It was the spirit
of that indomitable colonel who had replied that one hundred and ten
thousand brave lives were not too many to give for such a cause. Verdun
of to-day was the heritage of these men in khaki who lay with bandaged
eyes and spoke in choked whispers. And the Verduns of to-morrow would
be theirs by the same sign: The conquering force of spirit controlling
the conquering force of arms.
BEHIND CHÂTEAU-THIERRY
This is a story of causes. And those causes produced certain effects. I
hope you will be patient with the causes--which, like all causes, are
more or less dull--and read on until you come to the effects. There I
can promise you some excitement.
When, in the midst of the March offensive, so disastrous in its initial
phase, General Foch took command of the various Allied armies in
France with the intention of merging those several distinct and often
conflicting units into a single compact whole, one and indivisable,
which should be at least as supple and cohesive as that of the foe,
nobody on the outside even dimly realized how fundamental, how
far-reaching would be the changes involved. For after three years and
a half of fighting as separate entities each nation had rutted deeply
into its own peculiar manner of waging war. England held one sector;
Belgium another; France another; and when American overseas soldiers
landed in France they were assigned another portion of the line in
Lorraine.
And of his own particular sector each nation was supreme lord, of
both the front and the back areas, the advanced and the rear war
zones. That was his terrain, his stronghold. Therein he could do as
he pleased, make war as seemed to him best, without let or hindrance.
Thus England built up one policy of war strategy, of transportation
and hospitalization; France another; America a third. There were three
autonomies, three great war chiefs, three grand headquarters. Each
autonomy fought in a water-tight compartment, so to speak--water-tight
so far as concerned the others; but unfortunately not water-tight to
the boche.
So rigorously was this sense of independence held by each country, so
distinctly did each nation cover its zone and its zone alone, that the
fresh divisions held in reserve in back areas in case of a possible
grand attack could not be stationed save in their own respective
territories. French reserves could not be stationed in the British
zone; British reserves could not be stationed in the French zone. Even
if every sign pointed to a powerful massed action in one particular
sector, all the neighboring sector could do was to hold mobile troops,
together with trains and camions, in its own area ready to move.
Naturally this caused great delay; precious time was lost in conveying
troops.
For example, on March twenty-first, when the Fifth British Army fell
back, fighting valiantly, before the furious onslaught of a Hun host
of quadruple strength, and a temporary breach was made in the line
which opened the road to Paris, the French generals, Pelle and Humbert,
rushed up their reserves from Picardy and Champagne. These two generals
had received special instructions from the French High Command to study
the different hypotheses of attack on the British Front and to hold
themselves responsible for all consequences. An agreement had been
entered into by the British and the French commanders, fixing the sixth
day of battle as the one when the French should intervene if necessary
and come to the assistance of their British allies. But so fast and
furious waxed the offensive, so urgent appeared the crisis to the
onlooking French generals, that it was not six days but scarcely more
than that number of hours when the blue casques of the French began to
appear in the frightful mêlée and the German flood in full drive began
to be stemmed.
But it was a narrow squeak. And a good part of its narrowness consisted
in the fact that fresh troops could not be held in readiness behind
the danger zone, but had to be transported by camion, without their
organizations behind them, often without sufficient guns or ammunition,
from a long distance, and then hurled without a minute’s rest into
the very heart of the maelstrom. Had the French reserves been massed
near at hand in the British back areas so that they could have gone
immediately into action, there is no doubt that thousands of British
soldiers, now German prisoners, hundreds of wounded in hospitals, not
to speak of the loss of guns, supplies and evacuation hospitals along
the entire front line of that sector, would have been saved to the
Allied arms. It was a bitter, grim lesson, and its price was high. But
not too high to pay for a unified command.
Now in the present engagements the Germans are meeting French, British,
Americans and Italians, all within a few miles upon the same sector.
They are intermingled and interwoven, as the need arises, regiment by
regiment, company by company, and even man by man. The old partitions
have been completely torn down.
One of the most distinctive features of the old régime was the
hospitalization system. Here as elsewhere each nation carried on in its
own fashion. The British evolved one type of organization; the French
another; the Americans a third; so that there existed side by side
three separate networks of systems, each elaborate, ramified, complete,
which never touched each other. In the British sector, for example, the
seriously wounded are evacuated as rapidly as possible back to England,
where are located most of their big base hospitals. In the French
system the evacuation hospitals are dotted all along the sector a few
miles behind the firing line, with their large base and convalescent
hospitals scattered throughout the interior, in the Midi or down on the
Riviera, far from the rude northern winds. And when the Americans were
assigned their sector in Lorraine they organized their system along
similar lines.
First come the evacuation hospitals, as close up behind the Front as
possible, in order to catch the wounded man within two, three or four
hours of the time he falls on the field. Here he is operated on without
delay, rendered fit for transportation, and then shipped to some big
base farther back in the rear. As the hospital formation recedes
from the advance zone of the army, and therefore from acute danger
and unstable tenure arising from likelihood of capture, shelling and
bombing raids, the bases grow in size and elaboration, until at some
points they are vast beehives, community centers with a capacity of ten
to twenty thousand beds. Between the two extremes of the formation,
the evacuation hospitals just behind that invisible and most uncertain
quantity called the front line and the big solid base situated some
hundreds of kilometers away--between these two types there exists the
greatest difference.
The base, as its name implies, is solid, immobile, permanent, steady as
the Rock of Gibraltar or the skyscrapers of New York. The evacuation
hospital, on the contrary, creeping up as close as possible behind the
fighting forces is light, mobile, supple, easy to move, consisting
largely of tents, stuff that can be loaded swiftly on trucks and motor
lorries and carried away. If during a big push the line begins to sway
perilously, to strain, to crack, with breaches showing here and there,
and the order comes to retire, the evacuation hospital can fold up its
tents like the Arab and silently steal away, not on camels but their
modern substitutes, camions, with the orderlies on the rear truck,
thumb to nose, wagging derisive fingers at the oncoming boche, who if
he does break through will find--just nothing at all.
That is one difference between evacuation and base hospitals. And there
are others. The bases do good straight honest and honorable surgical
and medical work of the type that is known in America. They have a fine
régime, and this régime is rarely overturned. They are, therefore,
prosaic. But an evacuation hospital is dramatic, picturesque, full of
potentialities and surprises, with tragedy, comedy and broad farce
competing for first place every hour in the day.
Here during a big offensive, when Allied and enemy wounded are
pouring in in a continuous stream, surgeons, nurses and personnel
work like fiends under a tremendous pressure, twelve, twenty-four,
even forty-eight hours at a stretch. Here are to be witnessed in the
operating room running fights with death as tense and thrilling as
anything upon the battlefield. Sometimes the wounded man is exactly
upon the great divide, hovering between life and death, an extra hair’s
weight capable of sending him to either side; shrapnel in his chest,
his lungs full of blood, breathing like a trumpeter, suffering from
shock, exhaustion, lack of food--and still able to smile up into the
surgeon’s eyes and say faintly: “I’m all right, sir. Take that other
poor guy. He’s worse off than me.”
In cases like these, three minutes more or less in the length of the
operation spells all the difference between time and eternity. The
surgical team works with the perfect union of a football eleven. In
their white aprons, caps and masks they look like priests performing
a rite. The sweat stands out on their foreheads. Their expert fingers
move like lightning, yet precise, unhurried, sure.
In an operation of this kind, with life and death in the saddle and
both riding hard, I have seen the assistant hold a watch on the
operating team, as if it were a horse race, and call aloud the minutes,
thus: “Three! Five! Seven! Ten!” Two minutes too long, and the patient
may expire on the table, or die of pneumonia from the added strain of
ether on the lungs. Here margins are short and time more precious than
the weight of iron in rubies.
Here also is to be seen what is known as the new war surgery. The
wounded men are X-rayed before entering the operating room, and the
exact position of the foreign body indicated by an indelible cross
on the patient’s skin. Consequently the surgeons need not go delving
and exploring and guessing all over the landscape, but make a clean
straight dive for the intruder. As the greatest danger in all these
wounds is that of infection from the gas-gangrene germ, which infests
the soil of France and therefore every particle of the soldier’s
clothes, and as in addition the wounded are often forced to lie twelve,
twenty-four or even thirty-six hours on the field on account of a
violent enemy barrage, these wounds are often badly infected by this
germ before ever they reach the evacuation hospital, near as that
may be. In order, then, to prevent the further spread of the poison
throughout the body the wound is laid wide open, the crushed and
torn tissues shorn clean away, and a big clean wound created. This
is thoroughly cleansed, packed with gauze soaked in Carrel solution,
after which the entire area is wrapped in compresses, solidly bandaged,
strapped or splinted--and the patient is ready to be shipped a hundred
miles.
From this it will be seen that it is at the outset of the game, after
the man is first wounded, that the time element is most precious. Upon
the speed with which an ambulance can deliver a soldier to the nearest
evacuation hospital, divest him of his dirty, infected clothes and
lay him on the life-saving operating table depends largely the speed
of his recovery and return to the lines. Delays there are bound to
be--violent shelling of trenches, back areas or crossroads, which may
block every form of transportation for hours. And it is to counteract
these unavoidable delays that evacuation hospitals are creeping closer
and closer up to the Front, risking bombardment and air raids in order
to save a greater percentage of life and limb.
Behind these hospitals, then, stand the big solid bases, imposing,
safe and sane. In front of them is still another formation. Briefly,
it is something like this: A soldier is wounded on the field, in the
trenches, in a wood. If alone, he applies his own first aid. If he
has given it away to a comrade, he uses his belt for a tourniquet,
his bootlaces--anything. If he cannot get at his wound or if he is
knocked unconscious, he lies until he is picked up by friend or foe.
If he is not picked up he “goes West,” joining the great host of
immortal comrades, and all is well. That is the first step, where each
individual attends to himself, is attended to by others or is lost.
The second step consists of getting him to a dressing station,
usually in some _abri_, where he is bandaged, given a hot drink, an
injection of anti-tetanus serum, and an iodine cross is marked on his
forehead to indicate that he has received the same. If he is suffering
acutely he is in addition given a morphia tablet. After this he is
transported by ambulance to the divisional field hospital, where if
he is in good condition he is not even unloaded but sent straight on
to the evacuation hospital a few miles farther back. Thus he receives
personal, regimental and divisional first aid before ever he strikes
the evacuation hospital.
All of which, if he is lucky, he may get inside of two or three hours,
and be safely tucked away in his cot coming out from under ether,
raving not of home and mother but of going over the top, shouting in
stentorian accents: “Shoot ’em to hell, boys! The dirty skunks! Shoot
’em to hell!” to the infinite delight of his comrades in the tent ward,
who cheer him on: “That’s the stuff, buddy! Attaboy! Eat ’em alive!”
Finally, after much batting of wobbly eyelids, he opens his eyes feebly
upon the white-capped nurse at the foot of the bed and murmurs in weak
flat tones of pleasure: “Well, hello, chicken! How’d you ever git here?
Gosh! That’s a foul taste in my mouth. Say, can a guy spit in this
place?” And if he has come through thus far alive the chances are he
will stick. He is the stuff that survives.
This sketches in the large the hospital formation that the American
Army built to care for its wounded behind the Lorraine sector under the
old régime. All of the units, the string of evacuation hospitals, base
hospitals and transportation facilities were designed and constructed
on the principle of America’s holding that particular sector.
And then, presto, General Foch took command.
That simple statement merits an entire paragraph all to itself, for
it wiped out the old order and engendered a whole new realignment of
policies and plans--in hospitalization especially. For manifestly if
American troops were to be shifted here and there, up and down the
Western Front as the need rose--as they must indeed be shifted if the
Allied army was to be as swift and mobile as that of the foe--then
a hospital formation away over east in the Lorraine country was not
going to be a great advantage to American troops fighting up north
round Montdidier and Château-Thierry. Nor could the American Army
all at once, by the wave of a magic wand, conjure into being another
system. And even if it could there would still remain the question of
conflicting French and American traffic over already congested lines.
Yet something had to be done to cover this situation, and done at
once, for our troops were already on the move. The French command, in
collaboration with the American command, solved it in the only possible
fashion. It was decreed that when American troops fought in a French
sector the wounded should be evacuated along with the French through
the French system; when they fought with the British their wounded
should be evacuated with the British to England. And so the affair
stood.
Americans went up to the British Front in Flanders. They went to the
French Front in Picardy and Champagne. They stayed at home on their own
Front in Lorraine. And the wounded began to be evacuated by all three
systems. So far, so good. And yet, not altogether good. Good perhaps
from a purely military point of view; not so good from a human point
of view. For the Americans in the French hospitals were lonesome. There
was no use blinking the fact. They did not do well. Hearing never a
word of their own language, unable to make their wants known, unable
also to comprehend the soft babble of words by which the gentle French
sisters tried to express their sympathy, they sickened, not so much
from their wounds as from pure nostalgia and longing for the familiar
home tongue.
And one man died. But while he was ill in that strange hospital in a
foreign land he kept a little journal which he called The Philosophy
of Loneliness. From that little book of scribbled notes it appeared
that this young soldier grieved and grieved for lack of someone to
speak to him in his own tongue. And at last, when his isolation
became intolerable, he decided to rise up and go in search of human
companionship. But the tall woman in black, with the black veil,
like one of the Fates, kept thrusting him back into bed. Her hands
were gentle but strong. He told her, quite simply, that he only
wanted somebody to talk to. She replied with a torrent of strange
unintelligible sounds. And then he shouted aloud, in order to drown her
babble and hear some good honest American speech.
It was no use; she could not comprehend; she held him down, gently but
firmly, pouring out over his fainting soul the soft strange babble of
sounds. He swooned under the torment. The next day he tried again.
Again the tall black-veiled figure thrust him down with hands that were
gentle but strong. Again the hated sounds. Again he swooned. The third
day, very weak but resolute, he recorded in his journal his intention
to try once more, and strove to rise. But over him, as ever, was that
black unyielding figure, holding him down; and so she held him, gentle,
ruthless, unknowing, babbling into his ears those strange sounds until
he died.
In comment upon this incident Major Perkins, Chief Commissioner for
Europe of the Red Cross, said: “When I read the few pitiful pages
of that journal of one of our men who had gone to his end in utter
loneliness of soul I decided that something must be done. Either
Americans must have their own hospitals or else we must put American
nurses into French hospitals.”
Accordingly American women, nurses, visitors and aids, were assigned to
fifty-two French hospitals containing American men. One day it chanced
in a certain French hospital that one of these aids, a bright, pretty
girl, was working in a ward. And as she moved here and there, busy at
her tasks, she sang softly under her breath the following cheerful
ditty:
“_Where do we go from here, boys?
Oh, where do we go from here?_”
“I don’t want you to go anywhere from here!” came an abrupt voice
from a bed behind her. Turning she beheld a wounded American, a pale
newcomer, regarding her from inflamed, bloodshot eyes.
“Well,” she replied, laughing, “I don’t intend to go anywhere this very
minute. What’s the matter with your eyes? Gassed?”
“Nothing,” he replied laconically. “I’ve not slept for seventy-two
hours. They shelled us up there for three days. That’s where I got
mine. I’ve been lying here watching you for an hour and trying to make
up my mind which I wanted to do most--go to sleep or go on looking at
you. And I decided I’d rather go on looking at you. I don’t know,” he
added wistfully, “whether you consider that much of a compliment or
not?”
“I consider it the finest compliment I ever had in my life, bar
none--from a man who hasn’t slept for seventy-two hours.”
“Yes, but I haven’t seen an American girl for five months. And so I
figured it would rest my eyes more to look at you than it would to go
to sleep.”
This is not an extraordinary case. Nine men out of ten would have felt
the same. Their eyes were starved for the sight of American girls. But
one woman spread out among many men did not go far. It was like trying
to spread a small pat of butter over an acre of bread. However, it was
the best that could be done. French hospitals could not be crammed
with American workers. There was no place to put them. Their plants
were already swamped with overwork.
In the meantime the Army and the Red Cross were not idle. It was felt
that something must be done not only for the morale of the lonely
American soldiers but also to relieve the tremendous pressure on
the French system, which was handling the wounded of three nations.
Accordingly the Army went on a still hunt, not any the less urgent
because it was still, for hospitals already equipped and in action
that could be used for this new American sector. That sector, roughly
described, extended from Amiens on the north down to Château-Thierry,
and then eastward to Rheims, with Paris in a direct line to the rear.
Paris, then, became the logical point for base hospitals. The American
Army would depend, according to agreement, upon French evacuation
hospitals immediately behind the lines, but as soon as possible it
would convey its wounded back to Paris and thus relieve the congestion
in the front zone.
But how to get hold of any hospital? Fortunately the Red Cross, the
emergency department of the Army, had a nucleus of hospitals already to
hand. This nucleus was composed of some half dozen plants--some large,
some small, some militarized, some civilian, but all in excellent
running condition. In addition to this group it had in its warehouses
in complete readiness for just such a crisis whole hospital units,
complete in every detail, from tents down to the final safety-pin,
ready to put into the field at any point the Army should designate.
Moreover, it had the camions for transportation and the surgical teams
and nurses at hand for instant summons by telephone.
All this preparation had been done months before. Now this fine
intensive long-sightedness began to yield its excellent fruit. For the
Army gave orders to these hospitals to double, treble, quadruple their
bed capacity and to hold themselves free for instant action. This was
done. Just outside Paris another Red Cross tent hospital sprang into
being. It sprang up almost overnight, with more than a thousand beds,
its white tents dotting the field like mushrooms.
In Europe the Red Cross has achieved an almost fantastic reputation
for efficiency and speed--those two most commonplace factors of every
successful business concern in America--and in this particular crisis,
grave beyond all other crises so far as the welfare of our own fighting
forces was concerned, it was going to need every ounce it possessed of
both of those qualities. It was going to have the opportunity of saving
hundreds of American lives. It did not know it. The Army did not know
it. Nobody knew it. But so it was to be. A catastrophe was impending.
You have not read thus far, I hope, without realizing the supreme,
the vital importance of those evacuation hospitals crouching up
there close behind the fighting lines. They are the life savers. Upon
their nearness to the Front and the speed with which the wounded are
delivered depend the success of the entire hospital system. They are
the keystone of the arch. Let an army lose its string of evacuation
hospitals and it loses not merely its physical property--a mere
bagatelle--but also the power to save a large percentage of its
wounded. For delay causes infection; infection causes amputation, and
too often causes death.
To summarize briefly the elements of the situation: America, in common
with the other Allies, had her own hospital system behind the Lorraine
Sector, and when our troops moved up into the French sector it was
agreed that the wounded should be evacuated through French hospitals;
to relieve the tremendous pressure a nucleus of Red Cross hospitals in
Paris was constituted to drain this area.
And now perhaps, with these cards in your hands, and in your head the
general outlines of the May offensive, recalling especially the fact
that the Germans made an advance in that very sector of more kilometers
than I like to recall, you may have a glimmering of the nature of
the blow that fell. Yes, the French lost a certain number of their
front-line evacuation hospitals. They were in the area and they were
captured. That was the catastrophe.
It is the catastrophe that always happens when a considerable slice of
territory is lost. It is what happened in Italy. It is what happened
to the British in March. It is what had often happened to the French.
Now it was happening to the Americans. And that is why I am writing
about it. What made the situation more acute was that the French were
handling all of the wounded for that sector. Their remaining hospitals
were rapidly being swamped. Each day the combat raged with increasing
violence. What was to be done with our men? Transport them clear
back to Paris? There was no other course. It was bitter hard, but
inevitable. And the Army was mighty glad to have this port in the storm.
And now let us glance for a moment at Château-Thierry and see what was
taking place up there. On May thirtieth, upon this portion of the line
the French were retreating, and two American divisions were swung in
to stem, momentarily, the tide. All the world knows now which those
two divisions were, for their exploits received the congratulations
of General Pershing and of the French High Command. On June first, in
they came, the first lot, twenty-four trainloads--fresh, cool, gay,
hard-headed youngsters. They came with no organization behind them; not
an American Army hospital in the sector; not an ambulance; not even a
field dressing station. They came with nothing but the packs on their
backs and their rifles in their hands--and five hours later they were
holding the line.
On their way up, as they were being rushed through, their trains
stopped at a station which we shall designate as X----. Here lay
several hundred British wounded waiting for a train to the rear. For it
is one of the ugly necessities of war that, during an offensive, fresh
guns and men take precedence over those who have been knocked out. And
so these British wounded lay scattered about on litters in the station,
on the platforms, on the grounds.
First aid they had received, but nothing more. Their condition was
piteous. At the arrest of the trains the Americans clambered down
briskly from their places and began relieving the immediate wants of
these unfortunates.
“Maybe I’d best clear my poor chaps out of here,” said an anxious
British medical officer to an American captain. “The sight of them may
disturb your men.”
“On the contrary,” replied the American grimly, “it’s the best thing
that could happen. It’ll put the iron into their soul.”
And it did. Even the Hun was amazed at the sternness of that American
reception committee. For though the bombardment was heavier than that
during the height of the Verdun offensive, the shells falling like iron
hail less than five feet apart, with a low raking machine-gun fire that
moved with automatic precision up and down the field, and the hurricane
of high explosives and shrapnel and gas created an inferno compared to
which Gettysburg was as calm as the Elysian Fields--yet those American
troops did not falter.
Step by step they disputed every foot of advance, clinging close to the
ground, fighting for hours against an enemy six times their superior.
The Germans pushed, pushed again and kept on pushing. Assault succeeded
assault, wave followed wave, each one more formidable as the Germans
waxed wroth at the check. But the Americans held on; they dug in with
their spades; they remanned their guns as their gunners fell, wiping
out each successive enemy wave; they even reached out on either wing
and retrieved nests of batteries in the woods, and from these fresh
points of vantage they popped away at the astounded and bewildered
Hun, who could not believe that two divisions alone, and only parts of
these, were blocking his advance.
But as a matter of fact those two divisions were not alone. The whole
United States of America stood solidly behind them, shoulder to
shoulder, a vast shadowy host, warming their hearts and strengthening
their blows.
Now these troops had been planted at that particular point in the
line merely to plug for the moment the passage while the French took
up new defensive positions in the rear. But these aggressive, mordant
young allies did not conceive that merely to stem the boche tide was
the whole of their duty. They dreamed better than that. So after
surprising the enemy by their tenacity and cheek they proceeded to sail
in on a lively counter-attack of their own and drive the intruder back.
And drive him back they did, with a nerve, a grit, a kind of brisk keen
joyousness, intrinsically western, that brought down the applause of
the world. It was in fact a superb bit of fighting. And the best part
of it all was that the men did not consider they had done anything fine
or out of the way. That was on June first, second and third.
A wounded machine gunner, with a hole through his chest, gave me his
explanation of their valor.
“It was like this,” he said: “In those training camps back in the
States they taught us a lot of things about war. And when we came over
on this side they taught us a whole lot more. Seems like we learned
about everything there was to know. But one thing they didn’t teach us.”
He paused, matter-of-factly, to cough up some blood.
“What was it they didn’t teach you?” I asked.
“They didn’t teach us how to quit. And so we didn’t. We just kept on
going!” He added reflectively: “It’s their artillery that counts. Get
those Dutchmen up close and there’s nothing to them. We fought them off
their feet.”
It was the veritable truth.
But it is not to be conceived that this was a bloodless victory. The
first day of June a thin stream of crimson began to trickle to the
rear from the wounded American Army. And those first days that thin
crimson stream trickled all the way from Château-Thierry to Paris, a
distance of fifty-one miles, without intervention or hospital care. One
Red Cross hospital there was, indeed, but soon this was swamped. Men
with nothing beyond first-aid bandages began pouring into the Paris
hospitals. It was one of those inevitable conditions of war that are
bound to occur when evacuation hospitals are lost.
Close up behind the Front the French evacuation hospitals, diminished
in number, crippled in resources, were already glutted with British,
French and American wounded and gassed. They lay on litters in the
corridors, the doorways, the verandas, and overflowed into the yards
and along the roadsides. Several American women canteeners came to help
the French in this dire emergency. They found most of the personnel of
one hospital already flown, the town being under direct shell fire.
And for several days in that swamped hospital, together with a few
brave French doctors and nurses, these American volunteers toiled like
impassioned fiends day and night; ran the kitchen, cooked the meals,
served out hot coffee, bathed the wounded, bandaged fresh amputations,
held up dying heads, wrote letters, injected morphine, assisted at
operations, and continued their labors tirelessly hour after hour, in
an atmosphere of indescribable filth, impregnated with the odors of
gas gangrene.
Twice, two nights in succession, the Red Cross representative in that
sector tore at full speed down to Paris, returning with a camion load
of surgical supplies, ether and bandages. And when they arrived such
was the pressure of the hour that the surgeons themselves ran out from
their operating tables, dived their hands down into the precious box,
caught up an armload and ran back, shouting directions over their
shoulders.
It was during this period of stress that a noble idea occurred to the
Red Cross representative, which he proceeded to act upon at once.
A short distance away was an abandoned French hospital, empty, its beds
scarce cold. He drove over and asked to rent it.
“What for?” demanded the French authorities.
“To use for our American wounded. To relieve the pressure. To take them
off your hands.”
And he struck a bargain then and there. That accomplished, once more
he scorched the road to Paris. This time he loaded up fifteen tons of
stuff--one of those complete hospital units the Red Cross had stored in
its warehouses against just such a crisis as this. That unit contained
tents, beds, bandages, nitro-oxide plants, ether, instruments, and the
entire equipment for three surgical teams. By telephone, surgeons and
nurses were summoned to hurry out by automobile. The representative
himself hastened back to the other end. But while he was still on the
way, by one of those swift military changes the hospital he had rented
became untenable by reason of a shift of the American troops into
another army zone.
So now he had an outfit, but no plant. Nothing daunted, for in his
automobile he was still a lap or so ahead of his slower convoy, he
started to comb the countryside for another hospital. And so successful
were his efforts that by the time his material caught up with him he
was able to direct it to a new location. Then came the installation of
the plant. A château had been taken over for headquarters, operating
and X-ray rooms. Behind the house in a fair open field back by cool
pine woods were ranged the hospital tents, each with a capacity of
about fifty beds.
And now began a piece of spectacular teamwork. A detachment of soldiers
began policing--cleaning up--the grounds; the nurses in the operating
room commenced to boil their instruments; the sergeant began tacking
up on the valuable tapestried walls lengths of white oilcloth; in the
kitchen, the deep-seated heart of it all, the dietitian had already
started the fire and marshaled her minions; the night teams of surgeons
donned caps and aprons--and when a gray dust-covered army limousine
raced up and the chief surgeon of that sector crisply demanded “How
soon do you figure you can handle some wounded?” the commanding
officer of the new evacuation hospital responded: “As soon as you like.
Shoot ’em right along!”
And inside of an hour the army ambulances began to roll in and the
stretcher bearers began to lift out the litters with the recumbent
immobile figures, wrapped in blankets and many of them caked with mud
and blood.
On June first the Americans began to attack. By June fourth this new
Red Cross evacuation hospital had been installed behind Château-Thierry
and was operating day and night on Americans only. And thus the
thin stream of crimson, which for three days had trickled from the
front lines practically without interruption clear back to Paris,
was abruptly tourniqueted. It was a fine piece of emergency work and
an excellent example of the complete collaboration between the Army
and the Red Cross. The preparedness of this latter organization, its
warehouses stacked to the roof with extra supplies so that it could
multiply its entire hospital bed capacity by six without a strain;
its camion service ready to transport these goods to any designated
point in the advance zone; and these two facilities, materials and
transportation put absolutely at the command of the Army in a vital and
trying hour went far to avert what might have been a tragedy.
It was a brilliant sunshiny day when I arrived at this Red Cross
evacuation hospital behind Château-Thierry. At the moment there was
a lull on the Front. Twice during the month of June the Germans had
sought by means of smoke barrages and pontoons to cross the Marne, that
river of ill omen to Prussian hopes, and twice the Americans had held
them. And so aggressively had these gay yet austere youngsters fought
that it was a common jest along that sector that the Kaiser was seeking
peace terms.
There were now other units there, and they divided the honors with the
veteran poilus who flanked them on either side.
The hospital itself, situated in a splendid grove of pines and purple
beeches, was by this time operating as smoothly as if it had been
established months instead of days. The entire bed capacity of that
plant I may not give, but an idea of its elasticity may be obtained
from the fact that upon one night, after an evacuation, the patients
numbered three, and upon a subsequent night, during a rush, the kitchen
fed more than nine hundred persons and showed no signs of pegging out.
Upon the afternoon of my arrival patients were scattered throughout
many of the wards, bringing up the total to quite a considerable
figure. In company with the commanding officer. Major M----, I had
gone the rounds of the tents. Suddenly in the midst of a remark he was
called to the telephone.
It was long distance--that is to say, it was some headquarters up
behind the lines. The major returned with a sober face.
“It’s an order,” said he, “to clean out everybody, make a clean sweep,
get ready the beds. I suppose you can guess what that means.”
“An attack?”
“Well, I dare say the boche will try to pull off something. They’ve
been massing up behind Château-Thierry now for days. But they’re not
the only ones that have been massing, and don’t you forget it. Our men
on this side the Marne are lying in wait, a cordial little reception
party, and if some of their scoundrels do cross the river they’ll
never live to tell the tale!” He laughed--the cheerful buoyant laugh
of utter confidence which prevails upon the Front. “But this order
means that we’ll evacuate this evening. It’s better for the men, even
the serious cases, to be sent back to a quiet base where they can have
constant attention; they must have it, and we can’t possibly give it
to them here. In the midst of a big fight our hands are full with the
fresh influx. Moreover, it stands to reason that the sooner we can get
a patient in fit shape to travel out of this cyclone belt the better
it is for all concerned. And yet it’s the hardest thing in the world
to let some of these men go. Some are special cases where we’ve fought
for their lives. We’d like to guard them through the critical stage. As
for the nurses, they cry like babies when they have to surrender some
of their pets. You’ll see to-night. Just watch my staff; see if they
don’t try to hang on to some of the men.”
This was about five in the afternoon. He disappeared into the château
to have a conference with his head nurse upon supplies. A few minutes
later, Colonel X----, chief surgeon of all the American forces in that
center, stepped down from his limousine, and the first words with which
he greeted the major were these: “How many beds have you filled?”
The major gave the budget of the day.
“Well, clean them right out. If you’ve not sufficient ambulances, send
down the line to X----. But get the men out of here to-night. Get your
beds free. What about supplies--enough to stand a pretty big racket?
How are you on ether?”
Major M---- gave the account of his plant. Everything was in perfect
readiness for the storm.
“Fine!” pronounced the colonel. “Well, I’ve got to beat it. This is my
busy day.”
“Just when and where do you think the Germans are going to attack?” I
ventured to put in my oar.
The colonel looked me up and down with a whimsical smile. Women are
rare phenomena in the landscape of the Front. When they do arrive so
far from their natural habitat, the safe and sober rear, it is taken
for granted they are there with just and sufficient cause, and they are
treated with a deference, a consideration and a fine camaraderie that
are good to experience.
“If I knew the exact reply to your very pertinent question,” laughed
he, “I’d not be standing here; I’d be burning the road to G. H. Q.;
and we’d put something over on the boche to remember us by. As it is,
we can only say things seem mighty imminent. They’re massing guns and
effectives. So are we. Just where the point of the thrust will come no
man can say. Your guess is as good as mine. But we’ve got to be ready.
And we are! Wait. I’ll show you something. But you mustn’t put it in
the POST!”
Whereupon he sat himself down, hauled out his secret map and his secret
notebook--a small black, leather-bound affair, in which were jotted
cryptic figures representing positions and numbers of American forces
which a German spy would have bartered his worthless soul to possess;
and with these two, the map and the notebook, he outlined his plan of
campaign in the event of a German drive. Here and there were troops,
American troops. Here and there behind them were American hospitals,
each one capable of caring for so many wounded each day. All together
they represented an ample bed capacity. Those first unorganized days
of June were well over; by now the Army had arranged a hospital system
that effectively drained the sector. And not only that--alternative
positions had been located in case the evacuation hospitals had to
clear out and reinstall farther to the rear. Every emergency had been
planned for. All was indicated on that secret map.
“By the way, major,” concluded the colonel, snapping to his little
black notebook as he rose, “how soon could you up-stakes and move?”
The major stated the exact number of hours, and when I say that that
number amounted to less than three hundred minutes you may realize how
simple and supple are the component parts of such a plant. “I’ll have
the sergeant get out the tent bags,” he added, “and stack them outside
the tents.”
“May as well be ready,” agreed the colonel, stepping into his car. “Not
that there’s the slightest chance in the world that the boche will
break through, but it would be criminal not to be prepared.”
“We’ll be prepared, sir,” promised the major quietly.
“Good. They may start something about two in the morning. So long!”
“That’s two warnings,” said the major amusedly as the colonel’s car
rolled away.
Later, at mess out in the château grounds in a tent, with the westering
sun over behind the dark pine woods, a great globe of fire drowning the
fields and the tents in a fine golden light, we received a third. This
time it came in the form of a note from the French headquarters hard
by. It was in French and it read:
“We have the honor to announce to you that an important German attack
is hourly expected in our sector. It will be advisable for you to
evacuate instantly as many patients as you possibly can, in order to
have the greatest number of beds free for the emergency.”
“Looks as if the boche really meant business,” commented the major. “Do
you care to watch the evacuation? If so I recommend the rear steps of
the château as a good reviewing stand.”
I took my place as directed, well removed from the traffic. Upon the
road beneath just in front of the hospital tents were lined up a long
string of ambulances. A sergeant was in charge of the affair. Inside
the tents, orderlies and nurses had their hands full preparing the
men for transportation. Some of the patients were up, superintending
their own moving; some, in vivid pink-striped Red Cross pajamas--the
gift of some gay soul--were sitting on their cots, swinging bare legs
and shouting for footgear; some, disdaining such effete trappings of
civilization, had wrapped the drapery of their couches about them,
squaw-wise, and were standing barefoot on the grass outside enjoying
the festal scene. It was like a great gipsy encampment.
Still farther down the road one man had boldly snatched another’s
sole garment of attire, a dressing robe, and the owner, reduced to
his birthday suit, started a chase. Ensued a picturesque race. This,
however, was but a brief kaleidoscopic film, which danced across the
road for a minute like a Greek frieze, and was abruptly censored by the
sergeant. A nurse appeared at the flap of the tent, an anxious look in
her eye. She caught sight of the tall statuesque Indian who, with his
blanket hunched well round his head and his pyjamas swelling gently in
the evening breeze, stood rubbing one big bare foot luxuriously over
the other big bare foot and discoursing to another young Indian buck
thus:
“Yes, sir, I’m telling you, friend, I sure thought the end had come.
There I was, sitting under a little short tree by the road writing home
to my mother. I’d just finished writing ‘Well, mamma, I’ve come through
lucky so far,’ and looked up. There was a whole wagonload of grenades
passing, and at that minute a shell burst in the road right ahead. And
I’m telling you, friend, suddenly it seemed like all the world rose up
in the air but me----”
“You, Fred Murphy,” interrupted the nurse severely. “Where are those
slippers I gave you? Don’t you know you can’t travel in bare feet? It
isn’t done in France!”
“Miles too small for my trilbies,” explained Murphy succinctly. He
turned his face toward her a brief instant and then, turning it back,
continued without a halt: “----but me, and I went down. And when the
lieutenant helped me to my feet he said that nobody but a damn fool or
a Marine could sit under a little short tree like that writing letters
while a whole wagonload of grenades exploded, and get away with it. And
he showed me the tree top blowed clear down the valley and sitting up
there like an open umbrella.”
A medical officer came hurrying over to the nurse.
“The orderly said you wanted me. What is it?”
“It’s that chest case. He can’t go. He’s on the list, but there must be
some mistake. Oh, I think it’s terrible to send a man on the road like
that!”
They passed into the deeper gloom of the tent. I followed. Near the
door on a cot sat a doughboy, a shoulder case, garbed as per army
regulation as far as his waist, and from thence upward his fine torso
naked save for strappings and splints which held his arm in an immobile
apparatus.
With his free hand he was pawing wildly among the effects of his kit,
while he exclaimed in loud excited tones, “I can’t find it! I never
got it. If I had it I’d remember it, wouldn’t I? Say, wouldn’t a guy
remember a thing like that? I guess yes! You never gave it to me--see?”
The orderly--later killed when the hospital was bombed by boche
planes--was down on his haunches lacing up the patient’s boots. He
looked up with a grin.
“What’s biting you, buddy? The last thing I gave you was slum, and I
notice you wolfed that down like one o’clock.”
“It’s my shrapnel. The piece the doctor took outa me. He promised
before he put me to sleep on the operating table to pin it onto my
shirt. Say, look in my pocket, will you?”
The orderly obliged. But the shrapnel was not there. Just then the
doctor passed. “Say, captain, did you operate on this guy? He says you
promised to save his shrapnel.”
The doctor squinted uncertainly through the gloom.
“Yes, sir, you did!” affirmed the private with confidence. “And you
promised, sir, to pin the shrapnel onto my shirt.”
“That’s right. I remember now, old man.” A look passed between the
young surgeon and the orderly. Was it a wink that caused the orderly’s
left eyelid to droop so flat upon his cheek?
“Sir, shall I go get his shrapnel? I think I know where it’s at.”
“Good!” said the surgeon, laughter in his voice. “You’ll find it
wrapped in a piece of gauze.”
“Yes, sir.”
The orderly departed. But just outside the tent he paused, dived down
into his pocket, brought up several objects, examined them attentively,
and then hurried back to the rear entrance, where by the light of an
electric torch the nurse was making up her list.
“S-s-t! Gimme a gauze compress, sister!” said a husky voice in her
ear. Absently she pointed to a parcel on the table. The orderly helped
himself. The next moment he was back in the front tent.
“Here you are, buddy! That’ll hold you for a while!” And he deposited
an object twisted up in a bit of gauze in the soldier’s eager palm. It
was a copper bullet the size of a marble.
“Oh, boy!” ejaculated the private in deep ecstatic joy. “She’s a whale!
A regular Big Bertha! No wonder she stopped me. Say, captain,” he
hailed the surgeon who was passing, “can’t I go back to my outfit? I
don’t want to lose that gang. And I feel fine.”
The orderly chuckled as he warped his man’s free arm into the flannel
shirt. “Feel so darned nifty you’d like to go out and chop down a
couple or three trees just for sport--hey?”
Outside, upon the road, the ambulances were loading rapidly and
rumbling off into the gloom. The sergeant, the man of the hour, oversaw
all.
“Gently there!” This to the brancardiers as they lifted a litter with
a recumbent figure swathed in blankets and shot it into the ambulance.
“You have three in there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, beat it! Now how many more are there left?”
From the steps of the château Major M----, in white cap and operating
apron, surveyed the scene. The procession passed briskly.
Ambulances rolled up, loaded and disappeared. Not a light showed.
The men were mere dusky patches of gloom moving through denser gloom.
Overhead the sky was equally dark, fitting the earth close, like the
stopper of a bottle.
“I wonder how it feels,” I said, “to be lying in the little black
interior of those ambulances and rumbling off to God knows where.”
“Sometimes very dramatic things happen in those same little black
interiors,” observed the major grimly.
An orderly approached, saluted the major.
“Sir, there’s a light shining out of one of the upper windows. It makes
quite a projection. One of the drivers marked it far down the road.”
“Go up and tell the nurse to close the shutter,” commanded the major
tersely. “Tell her to go all over the house. We don’t want a bomb
dropped in the midst of this party.”
“Have you ever had any disagreeable experiences with wounded German
prisoners?” I inquired.
“We’ve not had many of their wounded, but one night we got in a
Prussian lieutenant. I put him in a tent with a bunch of Germans,
all in pretty bad shape. He shouted and swore like a trooper for
being subjected to the hideous ignominy of having to breathe the same
polluted air as his men. ’Twas an American atrocity! He said he was
a Prussian officer, and he haughtily demanded to be changed to an
officers’ ward.”
“And what did you do? Assign him to a private room with a special nurse
and send up iced champagne?”
“Something like that! I ordered his cot changed, and I placed him
between two poor German devils who were dying of gas gangrene. They
smelled to heaven! I thought if our own nurses could tend to those
fellows it might do his lord-highmightiness good to lie between ’em for
a while! In contrast to his conduct I had a young American lieutenant
out in one of the tents, Ward B, and it was not until he was evacuated
that I learned he was an officer.
“‘Why, lieutenant,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me? I’d have placed
you in the officers’ ward.’
“‘Oh, that’s all right, sir,’ he laughed. ‘What’s good enough for my
men is good enough for me.’ And that is the difference in a nutshell
between autocracy and democracy.”
One of the medical staff approached hurriedly. “Sir, I’d like to keep
some few of these cases. They’re in bad shape. I hate to start them on
the road. It--it’s against my conscience.”
“All right. Use your own discretion. You heard the orders, though--to
make a clean sweep. It may seem hard, but the men will receive better
attention than we’ll be able to give them once the rush begins. But
keep them if you feel you should.”
With a breath of relief the officer turned away to countermand his
order.
“Sergeant!” called the major.
“Here, sir!” came a steady reliable voice from the dark.
“Put all the wounded that are left into one tent--Ward A. How many have
you?”
“About twenty-five, sir.”
“Good. Tell your men to clean up all the rest of the wards and get them
into condition. And, sergeant----”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are those tent bags--the ones in which we pack the tents?”
“Upstairs in the storeroom, sir.”
“Get them down. Place one outside each tent and instruct your men in
their use. Maybe you’d better assign a patrol on this road to-night.”
“Yes, sir. The officer of the day has already spoken to me about it,
sir.”
“All right, sergeant. Then I guess we’re about ready for whatever may
turn up. You’d better try to snatch some sleep.”
“I think I’d rather stay up, sir, if you don’t mind.”
The sergeant saluted. We went inside. Already the surgeons and the
nurses had sought their respective quarters to summon what sleep they
might before the storm broke. I said good night also, and was conveyed
to my billet in the village, the major promising to have me roused if
anything occurred. By now the sky was clear, a deep soft firmament of
gleaming stars which blinked friendly reassurance to the troubled
earth atom below.
“It’s all right!” they seemed mutely to say. “See, we’re still here!
It’s all right!”
The wind was toward the Germans. Therefore, though already the big
guns had waked to their nightly orchestra, and vivid lightninglike
flashes from their flaming throats played constantly across the low
horizon, yet not a single sound could be heard. All through the night,
when at intervals I rose to watch, that leaping devil’s dance played
noiselessly across the rosy sky. It was uncanny--lightning without
thunder. Where was the sound? In the upper air reaches?
The next morning I woke to discover I had not been called. The drive,
then, had not materialized. At the hospital I found that such was
even the case. There was a smile in the air, and a whisper that the
Americans, the previous night, had dumped twelve thousand gas shells
down upon the Hun just as he was clambering over the top. The push for
the moment was averted. Nevertheless a few wounded were trickling in,
and upstairs in the officers’ ward I found two bedfast lieutenants.
One, by his soft velvety drawl, was a Southerner. Later I learned
his exact habitat was Memphis, Tennessee. The other young officer
apparently had been recounting some knavery of the boche, for with my
hand on the open door I heard the Tennesseean respond fervidly: “Yes,
suh. They’re dirty snakes. You can’t have no commerce with them. Yuh
just got to kill their souls!”
I drew back and listened, for the Tennesseean was beginning a tale.
“Yes, suh,” his cool, placid voice flowed on, “they was murderin’ us in
that woods. They’d got us in a pocket and from nests of machine guns
they was shellin’ us three ways. We’d had no meat for over two days.
It was tough, I’m tellin’ yuh, suh. So that night I took my sergeant
and went foraging in the village. It was deserted and the shells was
falling right lively. Presently I shoved open the door of a barn, and
there was a fine fat hawg rooting away inside.
“‘Sergeant,’ I says, ‘that hawg in there tried to bite me.’
“‘Well, suh,’ says the sergeant, ‘there ain’t no French hawg born that
can bite my lieutenant and get away with it. We-all ain’t going to
stand that from no hawg. No, suh!’ And so that night we had a fine mess
of po’k chops. Yes, suh, those po’k chops certainly tasted grand.”
I slipped inside to have a look at the _raconteur_. He was a tall,
lean, lank, freckled, solemn-looking young gentleman, with a broken
ankle and a quizzical brown eye. Somehow he reminded me of Lincoln.
“Yes, suh,” he was remarking, “this sure is one damn funny man’s wah.”
After I had established myself I demanded what led him to such a
cynical conclusion. But he refused to be drawn, and asked instead the
condition of a patient in the adjoining shock ward. I told him the man
was dead.
“I’m sure sorry to heah that,” he said simply. “That man was in my
outfit and a bettah boy never spit. He got his after I came in. I left
a squad of five in a dugout on the side of a knoll and I told them not
to stir until the shelling let up. Well, this boy says it got pretty
hot and crowded inside and he stepped out a minute to breathe. And
that very minute a shell dropped. He might have saved his life if he’d
bandaged his leg right off; but no, suh, he told me he couldn’t think
of nothing but hauling those poor fellows from that caved-in wreck--and
him with one leg blowed off. That boy deserves a Croix de Guerre. I’m
goin’ to write to his mothah.”
I was called away for a few minutes, and when I returned the lieutenant
was embarked upon another tale:
“Yes, suh, I just couldn’t bear to see that boy’s body lyin’ out in the
blisterin’ sun. By the clothes he was a Marine, and I expect he’d been
hangin’ up against that bob-wire some time. I didn’t care if it was No
Man’s Land. It wasn’t no fit land for an American’s body to be lyin’
out in the sun, and so I started out to fetch it in.
“‘Lemme go, lieutenant!’ one of my outfit says. I’ve got the finest
outfit of boys, miss, you ever laid eyes on.”
“Maybe that’s because they’ve got such a fine lieutenant!” I said slyly.
“No, suh, that isn’t it at all!” he retorted earnestly. “Well, I says
to him: ‘Man, I can’t ask for volunteers for this. It’s too danged
dangerous.’ And that boy, he says to me: ‘Shucks, lieutenant! I’ll die
for yuh any day with pleasure. But for God’s sake, don’t leave me lie
out there like a dawg.’ So I promised, and he went out and fetched the
Marine in. Two hours later that boy was shot straight between the eyes
by a sniper’s bullet. I remembered what he’d said: ‘For God’s sake,
lieutenant, don’t leave my body lie out like that’--and it kind of hurt
my soul. So I sent him back to the rear. And we buried that boy with
honahs. Yes, suh, this sure is one damn funny man’s wah!”
Downstairs the hospital seemed drowned in a drowsy Sabbath calm. Not a
breath stirred. Roses drooped in the hot stillness. High overhead in a
light azure sky Allied planes swam like gnats across a sun-lit stretch
of water. To complete the note of peace two stray hounds dreamed on
the steps or snapped languidly at blue-bottle flies. Who said there
was a world war on hand? And yet, late the night before, still another
warning had come over the wires, and the remaining twenty-five patients
had been hurriedly transported to safer climes.
Down the road thousands of camions were passing, a steady sluggish
stream. The level, poplar-bordered highway was alive with them as
far as the eye could see. Camions filled with French troops; camions
filled with artillery, guns, guns, guns; camions filled with horses,
two to a vehicle. And after that stream of blue casques had flowed by,
with scarcely a minute’s interval, came another stream--United States
khaki, going up on the line. The heavy American lorries thundered by
in a cloud of dust, their wheels tearing the gravel out of the roads.
The men were covered with a coating of dust, thick as if they had come
through a desert sandstorm. Their eye-lashes were powdered gray; their
eyebrows were bleached white; their fresh skins were burned brick red;
and their eyes, unprotected by that abominable visorless overseas cap,
were inflamed with dust and fatigue and lack of sleep. And yet how they
hurrahed, leaning far out to yell as they flashed by! They were going
into hell, and they knew it.
They had no illusions about war. But the sight of those dirty, sweaty,
confident men thrilled us.
At five, in front of the château, the chaplain read the burial
service over the hero who had given his life to save his comrades in
the dugout. Over the pine box lay the folds of the flag, a mantle
of glory. Upon the rude casket some friend had placed a cross of
crimson ramblers, the rich splendor of their hue and their fragrance
symbolizing mutely the beauty of soul of him who lay underneath. Red
roses for those who die in youth for their country! They seemed to
burn in the quiet air. Their fragrance mounted like rare incense. The
chaplain read the immortal words of hope: “I am the resurrection and
the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he
live....” High overhead the faint reassuring drone of Allied planes
mingled with the murmur of the detachment of soldiers, who with bared
heads repeated softly “Our Father who art in Heaven ...” while off
on the side lines stood a group of French children, awed, curious,
respectful, with bunches of field daisies clutched tightly in their
hands, with which, after the _Americains_ had departed, they proposed
to decorate the strange soldier’s grave.
Later, in search of consolation, I wandered back to the Tennesseean’s
ward. I was not disappointed. That liquid drawl flowed on, soft as the
Mississippi at twilight.
“Yes, suh, we called that outfit the Midnight Regiment. I reckon
yuh-all heard of them; they was stationed a while at B----. They was
officered with white folks, and a friend of mine was major. Well, suh,
they put that regiment alongside some French niggers from Upper Africa.
Yuh’d think those two sets would amalgamate, coming from the same
family tree. But no, suh! There was just one perpetual uproar. They was
a-hackin’ and a-choppin’ each up with knives from mawning until night!
Yuh nevah heard such takin’s-on. And the officers couldn’t find what
was the row nohow. So one night the major, he says to his sergeant, a
big negro:
“‘Sergeant,’ says he, ‘I want yuh to go out and make a private
investigation of just what’s the trouble between yuh Americans and
those French niggers, and hand in a confidential report.’
“‘I don’t need to go out and make no ’vestigation, major,’ says that
sergeant. ‘I can report to yuh whut-all’s the trouble right now. Yes,
suh!’
“‘All right, sergeant. What is it?’
“‘Well, suh, it’s like this: Evah since this heah Midnight Regiment
come over to France and been a-takin’ part in this man’s wah, us-all’s
been hearin’ the white folks talkin’ French. All the white folks
gettin’ to talkin’ French. Yes, suh. And now we come up alongside
these strange nigger folks and find them gabblin’ French too! And when
niggers goes to gittin’ stuck up like that and puttin’ on proud white
folks’ airs they’s jest naturally boun’ to be trouble! Yes, suh, that’s
whut it is!’”
The afternoon shaded gently into night; the night’s dark hours slipped
by, silent as bats’ wings; morning came again, calm, sunshiny--and
still no threat of attack. It was ominous, menacing. The hospital staff
rested with taut nerves, like a football team ready at a given signal
to spring into intense action. But the signal was withheld.
Then suddenly one July morning about two o’clock the storm burst. The
atmosphere trembled and shook to the clamor of mighty guns. Even in
Paris, fifty-one miles away, their deep-throated orchestra could be
heard. Pluff! Pluff! Pluff-pluff! Distant, yet clear, unmistakable,
sounded those soft and sinister volleys through the night. Not since
the Battle of the Marne in 1914 had Parisians heard such a violent
bombardment. Some flew to the telephone. Was it a Gotha raid? Was
that the outer antiaircraft barrage? No. It was the long-delayed July
offensive.
THE SPITE ATTACK
The third phase of the great German offensive of 1918 began with the
first light of dawn on July the fifteenth. In Paris, fifty-one miles
behind Château-Thierry, that distant bombardment, violent beyond all
precedent, could be distinctly heard. It could be heard, but the
explosions were not like real explosions. They were like tiny, far-away
echoes, ghosts of explosions--as if baseballs were being hurled with
extreme force against a wall heavily padded with cotton wool. Pluff!
Pluff-pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Distinct, yet muted, they
came, those distant thuds; denatured, so to speak, with all the sound
violence extracted.
Parisians rose from their beds, stepped to the windows and leaned from
their casements to listen. But immediately the nearer night noises
of the city eclipsed those distant ghost roars of battle. The whir
of a belated taxi through the deserted streets, the hollow ring of
footsteps on the pavement, even the blinking of an eyelid--and those
soft sinister booms were completely blotted out. But back in bed once
more, with the windows shutting out the city sounds, the dull pounding
commenced again, steady, persistent as the beat of the blood in the
arteries: Pluff! Pluff-pluff! Pluff!
Thus at Paris, the heart of the world. But up at Château-Thierry,
the seat of alarms, it was a vastly different affair. There was
nothing dim, distant, dissolved, denatured or cotton-woolly about the
cannonading in that sector. It was the storm center of the tornado.
The air was thick with clamor. The heavy guns bellowed incessantly. In
order to hear each other men had to lean close and shout, and then it
was only by the lip movement that they could be understood. It was like
trying to speak during the rushing thunder of an express train. The
Prussian storm troops were attacking formidably, with all their immense
prestige, and the Americans were responding coolly, methodically as the
Concord minutemen, with machine gun and rifle.
It cannot be said that the Prussians were cowards. They had been
ordered to hold their position at any cost; and they fought
ferociously, until they were dropped by the bayonet. In their
machine-gun pits twenty and thirty Hun gunners were found, piled in
heaps, slain by the bayonet, showing they had resisted desperately to
the end; and the path to those same pits could be traced by American
dead. Neither side asked or gave any quarter, and in those first fierce
days of the offensive few prisoners were taken.
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1918, by the Curtis Publishing Company._
_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information. Photo,
by courtesy of the American Red Cross. Reproduced from The Saturday
Evening Post of Philadelphia._
TENT-WARD SHOWING DAMAGE CAUSED BY GERMAN BOMBS. THIS RED
CROSS MILITARY HOSPITAL WAS BOMBED BY GERMAN PLANES DURING THE JULY
OFFENSIVE WHILE THE AMERICANS WERE WINNING AT CHÂTEAU-THIERRY]
Despite the redoubtable blows of the famous iron-disciplined Prussian
Guards and the Bavarian Reserves, shock troops alleged to be
irresistible, despite also the hail of bullets and gas shells and high
explosives right in their faces, the Americans started a counter-drive.
The Germans had initiated this game called “drive,” and now the
Americans, under Foch and Pershing, were ramming that same game down
their throats. And slowly the German line began to recoil. Slowly those
Prussians and Bavarians, fighting like tigers, began to retire. For
the first time since America’s entry into the war she began to land
substantial body blows upon the enemy; for the first time that enemy
began to stagger under the terrible punishing force of those blows,
delivered with the whole weight of a powerful angry nation behind them.
The Germans had started out to stampede the Americans; the Americans
retorted by stampeding the Germans--a little.
And now began two tides: one tide strong, and hourly growing stronger,
sweeping the Hun back, pressing into tighter corners and hotter hells,
victorious; the other tide composed of those who fell--a quiet,
stricken, bloody tide, ebbing slowly toward the rear.
The hospital was waiting to receive them, surgeons and nurses in aprons
and caps. In the kitchen a soldier, told off as cook, stoked the
big kitchen range until it glowed incandescent on top, and the huge
marmites of coffee and cocoa disseminated a fragrant aroma through the
house. Ambulances, a steady stream, began to climb the dark, wooded
hill road. Two lanterns, like bright, glowing eyes, fastened on either
side of the entrance gate, guided them into the grounds. In the rear
of the château, in front of the admission tent, they halted; deposited
their burdens--silent, immobile, blanket-swathed figures, whose white
bandages showed deep crimson stains--retrieved blankets and stretchers;
snatched a hasty gulp of strong black coffee, and rumbled off for
another load. More drew up, unloaded, departed. And still more and more
and more. What a traffic in the dead of night! The traffic sergeant
gave low, terse orders. A hooded lantern gleamed here and there. Over
all was the infernal voice of the cannon, and those swift, stabbing,
crimson flames across the sky.
Inside the admission tent, despite the rush and the constant influx of
fresh stretchers, a clean-cut order prevailed. Men, sorely wounded,
rested on their litters without change for a few minutes, while their
infected clothes were removed and a brief history taken, after which
they were borne off by brancardiers directly to the X-ray and operating
rooms. Thus with all haste and yet with all order a constant sorting
went on, the serious operative cases going forward, the lighter
cases remaining behind. These latter were helped into clean pyjamas,
given hot soup or cocoa--some of them during the fury of the attack
had not tasted food for more than twenty-four hours--their wounds
re-bandaged, and put to bed to await their turn in the long procession
that led to the operating table. And some of these latter, shelled
incessantly, under constant shock and stress, not having closed an eye
for seventy-two hours, took the high dive into deep oblivion with the
coffee cup still in their hands, and slept solidly for a night and a
day on end.
The cots in the admission ward filled up. The stream of badly wounded
moved forward and the fresh stream from the ambulances flowed in
to its place. Everywhere could be heard a continuous low drone of
conversation. There was no excitement. But neither was there silence
nor sadness--though some were dying--nor groaning nor evidence of pain.
They were talking, indeed, but it was noticeable that no one spoke of
his wounds or his sufferings, though some had lain twenty-four hours
and more on the field or in the dugouts under intense barrage before
they could be brought in. But it was not of this they spoke. The
battle, what had happened up there, still intoxicated them, still held
their brains in thrall. They talked of horrible, grotesque, fantastic
and sanguinary things in low, level dispassionate tones, as if they
were discussing the weather:
“I saw my captain and my lieutenant blown straight to hell; it was a
head-on collision with a high explosive. My captain was a fine fellow.
He always seen we had a place to sleep, and if there was anything to
eat going we got it. I was handed one in the chest. We was creeping
up on a nest of their machine guns that the dirty boches had hid in
a tree. I couldn’t bandage my chest wound, and I was spitting blood
pretty bad, so I lay down in a shallow shell hole for the rest of the
day.
“Along toward night I says to a comrade shot through the arm, who had
crawled in alongside: ‘Steve,’ I says, ‘we’ve got to beat it. This
is getting too lively for me.’ By that time the shells was busting
at regular intervals at a distance of about five feet apart. No use
scrouchin’ down to dodge ’em; if you did you lost your interval--see?
And the next one caught you straight! So we just stood up and walked
along kind of slow. We made it that way for about a mile, stumbling
along, not going too fast or too slow, for fear of losing that danged
interval, when suddenly I flopped down. I’d been bleeding pretty freely
right along.
“‘Steve,’ I says, ‘I’m not going to make it. You hike on.’
“But he helped me to stand, and so we kind of leaned up against each
other like some of these funny dead drunks you see, and staggered along
until presently we saw something looming ahead. I let out a feeble
little yip. It was a French machine gun right on top of us, and they
was just drawing off to fire! Yes, sir! That holler, for all it was so
feeble, was the best little piece of business I ever pulled!”
Some of their stories, I am bound to say, were whoppers, and their
figures as inflated as those of watered stock. They saw things
heroic size. This phase of battlefield psychology is well known to
war surgeons. One soldier, for example, declared his entire division
had been wiped out. Another made modest mention of the fact that his
company alone, single-handed, against overwhelming odds, had started
the Hun on his return trip to Berlin.
“Aw, dry up!” groaned out an exasperated realist, with a grimace of
pain. “You four-flushers make me sick, blowing like that!”
“Well, anyhow,” retorted the youth who had boasted of his company, “we
whaled ’em in that pocket!”
The realist lifted himself with labor, for a contemptuous look at the
optimist.
“What’s the matter with your eye?” he demanded.
“Left it on the battlefield to look after things,” said the other with
utter sang-froid. “What’s a little private eye or two in a war of this
size?”
“Well, you’re no tin-horn sport!” admitted the realist grimly. And he
laid himself down again.
Near the entrance to the admission tent lay a man on a stretcher, his
leg bandaged above the knee. The trouser leg had been cut away, the
white bandage gleamed ominously red, and down his leggings, down to the
heel of his heavy boot, oozed slow drops of red which formed a dark
pool on the stretcher. His eyes were closed; his eyelids were violet;
his face, under the gleam of the surgeon’s torch, showed ghastly white;
and a week’s growth of black beard emphasized the pallor.
“Get him right up to the house,” commanded the surgeon after an expert
squint, not so much at the leg as at another bandage round the chest.
“Have you taken his history?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then shoot him in ahead of the others. Tell the nurse to have him
X-rayed at once, and pass him into the operating room. It’s a long
chance at that.”
The brancardiers bore him away.
Down in the other wards the cots were fast filling with the gassed.
For these, in an evacuation surgical hospital, nothing could be done
save to remove their gas-impregnated garments, bandage their blisters
and burns, feed them, rest them--and rush them on to the rear. Upon
one of the beds lay a boy, gassed by phosgene. He lay in a kind of
stupor, wondrously beautiful and pale, a statue carved in pure marble,
the mobile boyish mouth curved in a faint smile. No visible breath. No
pulse. And for him, too, rest--absolute rest.
Still the cannons thundered and their vivid flames painted momentarily
the black sky. The ambulances never ceased their steady rumble.
The drivers got down for a draught of hot coffee, a word with the
sergeant, and then drove off in the dark. It was an unending
procession.
And now another tent down in the grounds, isolated from the others,
began to be filled. Some of the occupants were wounded, some gassed;
some groaned and called out in guttural accents of agony, of fear; some
were too far gone to groan. A guard stood at the door.
“Guess they think we’re going to murder them!” opined he grimly to the
brancardiers as they bore in still another litter.
“We caught quite a bunch to-night between the devil and the deep
blue sea,” remarked a brancardier jovially. “Now then--steady!
One--two--three! Drop the stretcher!” They lifted the silent figure
into bed. “This poor devil is almost in. He’ll be going West before
long. Here’s another. Says his name is Max. All right. Max! You’re
in America now! Nothing but a kid--is he? Can you make out what he’s
chewing the rag about?”
The guard bent down his head. The German prisoner, young, pale, with
still a lingering, childlike softness of contour about the chin, rolled
his head ceaselessly to and fro, to and fro, while he muttered in a
delirium of pain: “Oh, my poor old mother! Oh, my little sister! The
Germans did not want the war!” Over and over again, like a litany.
Up in the pre-operative ward in the château the beds and the floor and
the hallway were encumbered with men on stretchers waiting to be fed
into the X-ray room. Here, as down in the admission ward, there was a
constant circulation, the gravest cases being rapidly pushed forward
and fresh stretchers from the outside filling their places. Suddenly
an orderly, who had been bending above a still figure on a cot,
straightened himself, and with panic in his face stepped across the
room to the nurse.
“That guy in the corner’s dying, I think,” he muttered in her ear.
“Anyhow, he’s stopped breathing.”
Hastily the nurse sought the alleged moribund’s cot, leaned down and
felt his pulse. Normal. She held her palm above his nostrils. The
man was sound asleep! He was slumbering softly, tranquilly, like a
babe in its crib. The orderly, accustomed to the labored, stertorous
respirations of those who fight a running fight with death, thought a
man must be dying if he did not make a noise!
Stepping carefully along that crowded corridor I bent down to rearrange
the blanket of a stretcher case, and ask the soldier how he did.
“I’m all right,” he replied quietly. “It’s only my foot. I was cleaning
my automatic and suddenly it went off accidentally and shot me through
the ankle.”
At that word “accidentally” a kind of cold chill assailed me. Why had
he used that ill-omened word at all? Before now I had heard of the
S. I. W.’s--self-inflicted wounds. These were soldiers who, through
cowardice or momentary panic or spite, raging against some real or
fancied wrong committed by a superior officer, shot themselves in the
hand or foot in order to be sent back to the rear. In any aggregation
of humans mounting up to more than a million there are bound to be
a few such weaklings. But not this youth with the quiet voice and
the clear, candid eyes! A second time he explained the incident,
elaborating the details--with painstaking care--and a second time he
used that fatal word. My heart was troubled. My head--that cool, hard,
alien, dispassionate observer that sits up aloft in us all--whispered
that this foolish lad had given the game clean away by the double use
of that damning word. But my heart cried out that his story might be
true.
Angry at myself, and even more at this savage war, at those monstrous
taskmasters, the guns, which put to the same acid test all men, whether
strong or weak, I passed the closed doors of the operating room to the
deserted veranda and sat down upon the steps. A stray hound, coiled on
the lower step, stirred at my coming, thrust its cool muzzle into my
lap and licked my hand. And so we sat in mute companionship, the dog
and I, and listened to the pounding of the guns. And it seemed to me
that night that the dog had the best of it!
Presently a scream--or, to speak more exactly, a yell--pierced the
quiet of the house and brought me, startled, to my feet. It was not
a cry of terror or of anguish--nothing at all like that. It was the
loud, chesty, rebellious roar of a lusty infant asserting his human
rights. But this particular infant was well within the draft limits.
Softly I crossed the hall, the dog tagging my footsteps, and opened the
door of the operating room. In that brilliantly lighted little theater
of healing and pain three tables were occupied, three teams of surgeons
were working.
On the table nearest the door a big red-headed young colossus with the
chest and huge freckled arms of a Samson, was just going under ether.
Or rather, he was not going to do any such thing if he could help
himself. At the head of the table, behind him, sat the anæsthetist.
With one hand she held the ether cone over his nose while with the
other she poured the ether over the cotton. Perhaps the giant had taken
fifteen or twenty whiffs--just enough to decide he didn’t like the
smell and that he was going to be boss of his nose! At the hot-water
tap stood the major, soaping his hands for this new case while the
nurse tied on a sterile apron.
As I opened the door the young giant, with a swift twist of his
head--the only part of him that was free--whirled the offending cone to
the floor. It was for all the world like the action of an obstreperous
young colt refusing the bridle. The anæsthetist retrieved it, affixed
it firmly to his nose and soaked it in ether.
Sounded a muffled roar: “Stop! Stop, I tell yah! Don’t you know how
to stop?” More ether. “Stop you!” By this time he was struggling
violently. He had taken just enough to be rebellious, and he looked
sufficiently strong to rise up and walk off with the table strapped to
his back. “I want--I--wanta--wanta----”
“Easy there, old man,” counseled the major reassuringly. “Take it easy.”
But Redhead did not intend to take it easy or any other way. Another
whisk of the head. Off flew the ether cone. This time the major himself
picked it up and took the anæsthetist’s chair. But before he could
readjust the cone the blue eyes in the crimson face beneath opened
widely, the giant struggled determinedly and roared in strangled tones:
“I--I--wanta--I wanta s-s-s--I wanta--spit!”
The major chuckled as he lifted the cone. “All right, old man,
shoot! Now then--count. One--two--three. Louder! Breathe deep.
Four--five--six. That’s the stuff! Seven. Keep it up! Loud! Ten----”
The breathing turned into a strong regular snore, and soon the giant
had slid fathoms deep into the state of profound unconsciousness.
Softly I closed the door.
Some of these men, strong husky youngsters, pulsing with life, hard
as nails from their free out-of-door habits, are about as easy to put
under ether as would be a wild steer off the range. Every atom of their
physical nature rebels at surrendering consciousness. Others go under
like lambs. It is largely a matter of temperament. Once a private
laughed as they lifted him upon the table, and catching a whiff of
ether he chuckled: “Hi! Give me my gas mask!” Then he cuddled the cone
comfortably into place over his nose, settled down to snooze, and took
the high dive into complete unconsciousness without a single kick.
The next morning broke into one of those exquisite soft mellow days
for which this part of the country, called by the French the heart
of France, seems celebrated. It was like a perfect rose, a day when
Nature, by her clear sheer beauty, seems to shame man for his deeds
of anger and blood. Still the ambulances climbed the hill, a steady
stream, and vanished to the rear. At the moment, however, they were
carrying more gassed than wounded. And thus the surgeons were snatching
a rest. One or two of them appeared in the doorway for a moment, pale,
with circles under the eyes and heavy lines from nostril to jaw. When
they walked, it was slowly, and I had the impression that they might
make it on a dead level, but that they would stumble over a pin.
When the major appeared he proposed a walk to the laundry plant. The
change of linen on a thousand to fifteen hundred beds a night during a
rush means a well-organized washing system--and this hospital had to
depend on the village women. We strolled through one of the loveliest
woods in France, the branches overhead interlacing into Gothic arches
of lucid green, while far above, great white billowy clouds, like
graceful schooners under full sail, bowled along through the deep
uncharted blue of some unknown port. And as we strolled the major spoke
of something extraordinary that had occurred the night before.
“It was a queer piece of psychology,” he said, “and I don’t know that
I can get it over to you. It will probably sound unreal, exaggerated,
in this calm morning sunshine. But you must try to realize the setting;
try to comprehend the tensity, the strain of that operating room. We
had been operating for twenty-four solid hours without a break, upon
our men. Fine brave fellows, who went on the table without a groan. Men
shot to pieces, horribly mangled, done to death. It’s heart-breaking
work, if one’s got any heart to break. At the end of the night we all
felt mighty blue. Then they brought in an American captain, a medical
officer, already in a moribund condition. Well, to see one of our own
corps in that state touched us pretty close. He was blown to pieces. He
hadn’t a chance, and he knew it. And the sight of his calm, his high
fine courage, hit us hard. But we did what we could for him--which was
just nothing at all. After that was over I called out: ‘Fetch in the
boches!’
“And as they brought in the first German wounded I was aware of a
peculiar atmosphere, a sense of strain, a clear antagonism in the
room. It was like a live magnetic current. You cannot conceive--nobody
can--the terrific night we’d been through trying to salvage our brave
fellows. The emotional stress was stupendous. Well, now we were looking
on those who had caused that ruin, and the revulsion of feeling ran
high. As the anæsthetist fixed the ether cone in place on the Prussian
he said to me: ‘Sir, would you consider it a crime if I were just to go
on pouring ether on this Hun’s nose?’
“That brought a laugh and cleared the strained atmosphere. And we
cleaned up their wounded exactly as if they had been our own. But I’ll
not deny we were glad when it was done!”
Returning to the château the major suddenly stopped and inquired: “Have
you ever seen any cases of shell shock?”
I had not, though I had heard of them in the French and British armies.
“We don’t know exactly what it is yet,” continued the major. “Nobody
does. But we have a special American hospital for its treatment. Look
here: You see those two chaps crouching down by the steps? They both
have it--hard.”
I looked. I had noted those two hunched figures before, and had taken
them for orderlies, dead with fatigue, snatching a few minutes’ sleep.
Now I looked closer. And looking closer I perceived it was not fatigue
that caused them to squeeze themselves into the smallest possible
space; it was not fatigue that caused them to hunch their shoulders
and bow their backs as before a storm, draw their heads down into
the curved hollow of their chests and try to hide themselves in the
ground. It was fear--abject, ghastly, insane fear. They were obsessed,
petrified, rendered deaf and dumb--by fear.
The major bent down to one, laid a hand on his shoulder, spoke a
friendly word. The man’s fixed gaze stared straight through him as
if he had been composed of air. He was deaf to reason, deaf to human
appeal--but not deaf to the roar of the cannon. For each time that an
ambulance rolled by or distant thunder issued from the clouds banking
in the western sky his head jerked in the direction of the sound as
though pulled by invisible wires. But not one word would he utter. Only
his eyes seemed alive, wild, dark, affrighted. For the moment he was
not human, but an effigy galvanized by fear. The noise, the continuous
shelling, with probably some additional culminating shock, had
temporarily bereft him of reason. For both of these men were unwounded,
unscathed.
Later, in the admission ward, with the help of an orderly I induced
one of these men to eat. The other patients watched with indifference.
They had long since become hardened to uglier sights than that of a man
crazed in battle. It was like feeding an infant ostrich. The mouth
opened methodically to receive the food, but not one move, not one
sound would he make. One hand upheld in air, the index finger raised,
marked the tensity of his strained attention. His blue eyes forever
darted from side to side. At each distant volley his body trembled
and shook. And those straining eyes, full of horror, and that raised
index finger followed questing through the air for the sound. It was
infinitely pitiful.
“Don’t coddle him!” called the major, passing through. “It’s the worst
thing in world you can do.”
“May I see if I can get him to talk?”
“Certainly. But treat him like an ordinary individual.”
“He’s afraid to talk,” said the orderly, pausing by the stretcher.
“He’s a nut. He thinks if he opens his mouth the Germans will hear him
and send over a shell.”
In taking his record I discovered his first name was Thomas.
“Why, Thomas,” I said, “I’ve a brother by that name. What do they call
you--Tom?” For the first time his eyes fixed themselves on mine. “No,
no, don’t point up there!” For now his index finger was lifted toward
the canvas roof, upon which the first pattering drops of the storm were
beginning to fall, and his wide blue eyes were straining after the
sound. “It’s raining, Tom,” I explained. “Rain, rain, rain. You know
what rain is! Now put that hand inside.”
With the faint, troubled smile of a child he obeyed. But the next
instant that listening index finger was upraised again in the air.
Resolutely I thrust his hand under the blanket.
“Look at me, Tom. Tom! Look!” He brought his strained gaze down from
the roof. “Look round you and see where you are. Do you see those
nurses? Do you see these beds? You’re in a hospital. You’re not
fighting now. No shells can get you here. So you’ve got to buck up and
feed yourself. We’re all busy here. Take your spoon. Now! Can you find
the road to your mouth?”
With another smile, infinitely pathetic, he managed to convey a very
wobbly loaded spoon somewhere near the region of his face. The second
one found the goal. But it was a prodigious effort. The sweat poured
off him. The startled blue eyes lost their fixed glare. Still he had
not spoken. When finally he finished the soup and started to haul the
blanket up over his head I drew it back and tucked it firmly under his
chin. And again those blue eyes smiled! And now for the first time
he recognized I was a woman. Before then I had simply been a vague
irritant which prevented his proper listening.
With hesitation he pointed to his shirt pocket. This was the first
movement, unconnected with his obsession, he had made of his own
initiative. Thomas was coming on! I drew forth a small worn black
leather Testament and laid it in his hands. With trembling fingers,
for at intervals he still quaked like a leaf, he opened to a
photograph--most obviously himself and his young wife. At sight of this
girl looking out at him with frank laughing eyes a ray of joy broke
across his troubled countenance. He stared hard, his face working--and
then he burst into sobs.
“Who is it, Tom? Your brother?”
He shook his head violently and pointed to himself. And now the
fugitive smile reappeared.
“Not you!” I exclaimed in hearty surprise.
He nodded, fully absorbed. But still he would not commit himself to
speech.
“Then tell me. Say it. Speak!”
He thumped on his chest to indicate it was himself; his face worked;
his eyes begged, implored me not to insist, not to drag him forth from
his cellule of silence.
“Who is that, Tom?”
He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, and with the sweat starting out on
his forehead he pronounced huskily: “Me!”
The sound of his own voice seemed to terrify him utterly, and again he
burst into tears.
“And who is this with you, Thomas--your grandmother?”
Again that ray of vivid joy. No need to ask Thomas’ sentiments about
his wife! That one look told it all. Again the violent head shake.
“Thomas, it’s no use shaking your head at me. You’ve got to tell me who
this lady is!”
And with a tremulous laugh and an effort that brought the tears into
his eyes and mine Thomas responded proudly, brokenly: “My wife!”
The ice was broken. In stumbling accents, like a child, Thomas began
to talk. And when an hour later he was evacuated back to a base which
treats these mental breakdowns it was Thomas himself, from the dark
interior of the ambulance where he lay on a stretcher, who called out
weakly: “Good-by, miss! Good luck!”
Thus Thomas came back from the land of fear.
Later I went down through the wards searching for the man who had shot
himself through the ankle.
“Oh, you mean the S. I. W.?” replied the nurse to my interrogation.
“Well, he’s keeping pretty quiet this morning. There he is.”
“But he’s not an S. I. W.,” I protested rather faintheartedly. “He told
me it was an accident.”
“Maybe he did,” she retorted with a significant smile.
“Well? Did he confess later?”
“No. Not consciously. But after the operation, while he was coming
out from under ether, he gave the whole thing away. He blabbed
the entire story before all the men. It seemed he had a grievance
against some officer and took this way of getting out from under his
command. Somebody,” she finished humorously, “ought to tell those
S. I. W.’s that they can’t get away with those accidental-on-purpose
self-inflicted wounds. Lie as they may, when they’re put under ether
out plumps the truth. All the ward hears it, and the poor devil,
regaining consciousness, wonders why it is that all his comrades turn
away their eyes or look him up and down with a cold, contemptuous
stare. That chap down there is suffering agonies right now. You see he
has pulled up the sheet over his head and is pretending to be asleep.”
A word to the wise is sufficient. Those privates who try to take
the law into their own hands and change the deal by means of a
self-inflicted wound, heed the advice of this friendly nurse--and
don’t. You can’t get away with it. Ether will find your guilty secret
out. Fortunately, cases of this type are few and far between.
As the afternoon waned into evening and darkness fell the cannons
resumed their bellowing, and the ambulances, which during the day had
fallen off, began once more to climb the hill. And this time it was
not only gassed that were flowing in but wounded as well. Despite the
swiftness and the precision with which the hospital machinery moved
the stretchers began to congest, to mass, to lie in the corridors, on
the porch, and down on the moon-blanched grass. Men shattered and torn
to pieces, patient, incomparably brave, with a smile or a joke for the
orderlies who worked among them, lay in the open night under the stars
awaiting their turn at the table.
Ah, those dark, silent, blanket-draped figures, lying so still under
the moon! Those ghastly pale faces smudged with mud and blood,
summoning a smile from their fainting souls as they look up into your
eyes! All the papers were glowing with the magnificent deeds of the
American heroes. Well, here they were, those heroes, lying before our
eyes mangled, torn, bleeding to death with a smile. Somehow in the face
of all this the glory and the bombast of those printed eulogies seemed
tawdry and cheap.
One of the wounded men on a stretcher called attention to the night.
And it was a night worthy of attention. The moon--large, lustrous, flat
as an ancient golden plate of Babylon, chased with strange designs--was
just appearing over the somber pine woods and drowning the fields and
the hospital tents in a glimmering silver mist. But it was not the
beauty that the private remarked.
“Fine night for a Hun raid!” he observed grimly; and raising himself
with effort on one elbow he stared about him at the hospital tents and
the château crowded with helpless men. But if this evacuation hospital
was to be bombed--which at the moment I did not believe--it would be an
act of sheer wanton brutality, of inhuman reprisal because our troops
were winning at Château-Thierry. For on a night of brilliant moonshine
like this those blanched tents and the huge white cross on the
grass--insigne of mercy--were visible at a height of ten thousand feet.
No, certainly the Germans would not bomb this hospital. They had bombed
other hospitals before, it was true, but they would not bomb this one.
Why, they had flown over it dozens of times! Thus we all argued.
The early hours of night passed, to the wounded mortally slow, each
second packed to its full weight of agony. Down in the wards the cases
already operated on were being settled into their cots and, according
to how the ether took them, they were laughing, sobbing or reliving the
grotesque scenes of the battlefield. No lights here, save the blanched
moon rays which filtered in or the occasional gleam of an electric
torch directing the movements of the brancardiers. On the beaten grassy
sod of the tent floor their heavy tread fell noiselessly; their voices
were hushed; and one sensed rather than saw many presences in that dark
place. Some of the men were asleep; some, too ill to sleep, racked
by anguish, by thirst or a mortal restlessness, called feebly for a
drink. One there was, lying high on his pillows, passing in pain, who
punctuated each gasping respiration with a long-drawn “O-o-o! O-o-o!”
By his side another, obviously coming out of ether, babbled, babbled
ceaselessly, in dull drugged tones. A nurse sat by him.
“Say,” his voice, weak, dragging, half submerged in unconsciousness,
came out of the dark, “are--are you--my mother?”
“No, boy. Go to sleep.”
Again the submerged, dragging voice: “Don’t seem--to have no
appetite--for sleeping.... Fine appetite--for fighting.... No
appetite--for sleep.... Haven’t slept--I don’t know when.... Shelling.
Say, they murdered us--in that wood----”
“Sh!” whispered the nurse. “There’s a man in the next bed that’s pretty
bad who’s trying to sleep. You wouldn’t like to wake him, would you?”
“Sure not!” He caught hold of the soothing hand and held it fast with
the instinctive tenacious grip of a drowsy baby. “Worse off than me, is
he?... I’ve not got much the matter with---- Oh, God!”--this in a high
wrenched voice of clear agony--“what have you done to me? I can’t--I
can’t move!”
“Sh! It’s all right. But you mustn’t try to move, boy! Lie right still.”
“Awright!... Say, did you say you was my mother?”
“No.”
“I knew you wasn’t my mother! But you kind of sound--like her.... But
she’s far away from here--I know that.... Can’t fool me!... I’m in a
hospital. Say, are you my sister?”
“No. I’m the nurse. Try to sleep, old top.”
“Awright--anything to please a lady.... Say, my mother’d hate to see me
like this, wouldn’t she? ... Say, the folks at home don’t know a damn
thing about this war--what goes on up here.... I’m not going to write
to my mother about being here.... What’s the use?... Did you say that
guy in the next bed was worse off than me?”
“Yes.”
“Is that him making that noise in his throat?”
“Yes. Does it bother you?”
“Hell, no! Say, ask him what his outfit is.... Maybe he got his in
that wood along with me.” Suddenly, before the nurse could thwart him,
he sprang to a sitting position and shouted in a strong, clear voice:
“Say, are they any fellows here from my outfit?”
“What’s your outfit?” came a husky voice from across the aisle.
“Blank machine guns. Battery C.”
No reply.
“Wait until morning,” soothed the nurse as she eased him gently back
again. “Then you can look up your comrades. And don’t move quick like
that again, sonny. It’s bad for you. It might start you to bleeding.
Lie still. Try to sleep.”
“Don’t want to sleep.... Any fool can sleep.... Say, do you know why
they didn’t answer when I called out to see if any of my outfit was
here?... It’s because there ain’t any of the outfit left but me!... The
whole blank division’s gone--wiped out--shot to hell. They murdered us
in that wood----”
“Sh! Sh! There’s lots left up there, boy! Don’t you fret. They’re
cleaning the boches right out. We’re so proud of you we can’t see
straight. Now go to sleep. Try. Just a little. Won’t you try?”
“Awright!... Say, you sound an awful lot like my mother.... Can I have
a drink?... More.”
“It’ll make you sick, boy. Now lie still ... still ... still ... very
... ve-ry----”
“Say!”
“Sh!”
“No, but say--I want to say something.... Will you write a letter to my
captain?”
“Yes, in the morning.”
“No--right now. I want you to send it off right now--before they move
out.”
“All right, old man. What do you want to say?”
“Write this:” The voice was clear and smooth now.
“‘DEAR CAPTAIN: I’m so sorry I disappointed you that I can’t sleep.
I’m trying, but I can’t. I’m here in the hospital. They’ve took off
my leg, I think, but I’m not sure yet. But what I wanted to say was
this: I gave the orders just as you told me. But the damn cooks ran
away. I couldn’t much blame them. The Huns would have shot them to
hell if they’d stayed. But I gave the orders, exactly as you said. I
wanted you to know.’
“That’s all.”
Still holding the nurse’s hand he appeared to drowse. She breathed a
sigh of relief, and gently, very gently, sought to disengage herself.
Instantly the grip tightened. And the private’s voice, quiet, utterly
rational, sounded out of the dark:
“Say, you know my captain--he was killed. He was standing just a little
way in front of me as I came up to give my report, and a shell busted
straight in front of us and tore his whole----”
“Sh! Sh!”
“My captain, he was a fine captain.... He--sure was kind--to
us--all----”
The voice, weak, dragging, came to a halt, paused, died away. At last
the boy slept.
And now the tremulous moaning sigh of the dying man was the only sound
in the ward.
“O-o-o! O-o-o! O-o-o!” He was passing fast on his lonely road.
It drew on toward midnight. The moonlight, now at full strength, bathed
the tents and the road in a radiant silvery flood. Down behind the
wards a grove of somber pines seemed to draw all the darkness of the
night into its own heart and leave the surrounding air clear and pale
like a halo. One expected to see fairies with lustrous iridescent wings
and morning-glory skirts come trooping out from that solemn enchanted
wood to dance among the crimson poppies.
On the rear porch of the château the line of waiting stretchers had
been moved inside. The stream trickled, man by man, through the X-ray
room into the operating theater. There, under a brilliant concentrated
light, the surgeons toiled, without ever glancing up, under a
tremendous pressure. But they were catching up with the game.
Suddenly, between the moon and the blanched earth, whirled a monstrous
black shape. Lower and lower it swooped. And now the air was filled
with a terrible vibrating hum. The interrupted drone of twin motors
chanted louder and louder. It became an enveloping, stupefying roar.
Not continuous, but rhythmical, rising and falling, savage beating
waves of sound.
C-r-r--ash! A blinding flash. All creation seemed to go up in the
earth-shaking roar of explosion. The air was black with acrid smoke.
C-r-r--ash! Again. A tent, struck squarely, was slit to ribbons. Terror
insensate, blind, gripped one by the throat.
“The boches! They’re bombing us! They’re bombing the hospital!”
Screams, groans, horror indescribable. Men with broken arms and legs
threw themselves out of their beds, sought refuge underneath. Wounds
broke open. A shell-shock patient sprang from his cot with a crazy
yell and ran out into the night. Down, down, he rushed, panting, down
into the heart of those black pines. Another shell-shock case flew to
a heap of army blankets in the corner and burrowed out of sight. He
fancied he was in a dugout. An orderly who kept his head found time to
bend down and tuck his feet in, saying: “Now they won’t find you, old
sport!”
A high shrill scream. Another. The wounded were being hit again. The
dark air was filled with death. Pieces of shrapnel hurtled through the
air like knives. The tent walls gaped with holes like a sieve. And
still that deafening roar of twin motors, which seemed settling right
on their heads. An orderly standing in the moon-blanched road scuttled
like a rabbit to cover. He flung himself under the wheels of an
ambulance. And there his destiny found him. A piece of shrapnel passed
through his body. His soul took instant flight.
Up in the operating room the surgeons worked on, their faces the color
of chalk. Whang! Whang! Pieces of metal bit into the iron shutters.
The windows splintered into a million shards. One flying bit of shell
whizzed through the air, less than four feet from Major M---- and
lodged in the opposite wall. The orderly fled in blind panic.
“Hi! Go and stand in the corner for a dunce!” commanded the major
sternly. Turning to his surgeons he said: “Come on, men. We can’t
let our patients suffer!” and faced back to the table. His cheerful
sang-froid stiffened the nerve of them all. The orderly crawled out
from his corner. The nurse handed round tin hats. Silent, they bent to
their tasks.
And still overhead the terrific ear-splitting bourdon, the infernal
interrupted drone of a machine swooping down to less than three
hundred meters in order to make no mistake! C-r-r--ash! Another blind,
earth-rocking roar. It was the third bomb. And again it hit the mark.
Luckily it was the recreation tent--and nobody was playing just then!
Good-by, phonograph. Good-by, comfortable easy-chairs! Screams from the
adjoining tent as the whistling missiles flew.
But by now another blessed racket had set up. Crack! Crack!
Crack-crack! The antiaircraft guns began to bellow from a dozen
concealed points. Sparks of fire burst in the clear upper air. Would
the boche plane drop its fourth bomb? One waited in anguished suspense.
And now that infernal vibration began to lift; the savage rhythmical
whir sounded less and less fierce, died down, faded away. The French
guns had scared the intruder off.
The surgeons straightened backs, which despite themselves had humped
beneath the iron hail, drew deep breaths, and smiled at each other with
lips that were still a trifle stiff.
“Scared pea green!” admitted one.
“Thought it was going to roost on the rooftop all night.”
“Gee! Some roar!”
Yes, it was over. It had lasted just six minutes! For six eternity-long
minutes hell had yawned wide. Then, suddenly as it came, the danger had
passed.
Major M---- settled his tin hat firmly on his head and, looking like a
mandarin in his long white blouse, started forth to estimate the damage
and collect the rewounded for operation. Fortunately one of the large
tents which had been struck square amidships was empty. Here twisted
beds, gutted mattresses, bits of uniforms and tatters of clothes were
pasted over the landscape as if a degenerate monster had been at play.
In another ward he discovered the patients down on all fours, just
clambering out from under cover.
“What’s all this? What are you doing under those beds?” demanded the
major in mock severity.
An Irishman poked out his head from his refuge, but cautiously, like a
tortoise emerging from its shell.
“We were blown here, sir!” he explained solemnly.
The burst of laughter that followed this mendacious sally cleared the
atmosphere. With the aid of nurses and orderlies the patients were
got back to bed; shattered nerves were soothed by sleeping potions;
the rewounded victims carried up to the château; one shell-shock case
was retrieved from his dugout and the other from the wood; the dead
orderly was tenderly borne away; the wounded nurse, struck in the side
by flying metal, brought in for operation--and a semblance of peace
settled down once more over the hospital.
Up in the operating room, Joe, one of the toughest little toughs
that the Bowery ever reared, and one of the gamest sports, was being
prepared for the table. He was one of the bomb victims. By a perverse
freak of fate a second piece of shrapnel had re-entered his old wound.
He had been struck twice in exactly the same spot. And as that spot was
a sizable hole in his back, and as he had already acquired pneumonia to
boot, Joe was staggering under the envious darts and slings of a very
adverse circumstance indeed. He had grim need for all of his toughness
now!
“Them blanky dash boches,” commented Joe weakly to the orderly who was
stripping him, “they ain’t no slouches when it comes to hittin’ de
mark. Look at me now. They had two shells wit’ my name on, and both of
’em found me out. And I ain’t no general, nor yet a colonel--dem big
guys is easy to find. What’s more, them two shells pinked me twice in
de same spot--a double bull’s-eye. Can youse beat it? If they got a
toid shell wit’ my name on it--it’s good night, chicken, wit’ Joe!”
“If they’ve got a third shell with your name on it, kiddo, you call an
alibi,” advised the orderly.
“I’m a-callin’ one right now, friend, and don’t you fergit it,”
retorted Joe earnestly. “I ain’t takin’ no chances wit’ dem blanky dash
boches!”
They lifted him onto the table.
Outside, the moon, high, pale, tranquil, drenched the dark earth with
a silvery flood. The somber pines sucking the blackness from the
surrounding air still seemed the abode of enchantment. It appeared
incredible that a short half hour ago this quiet landscape had
witnessed such an atrocious deed. The raid had been an act of wanton,
inhuman brutality. In honest, open warfare the Americans were winning
at Château-Thierry, and in revenge the Huns had wreaked their rage on
helpless wounded men. It was a futile, insane act.
Nor did it achieve its end--to terrorize the enemy. On the contrary,
that enemy, with a white flame of wrath burning high in its heart, kept
steadfastly on with its appointed work. The surgeons, the nurses, the
orderlies, the drivers--redoubled their vigilant care. The ambulances
continued to rumble in, a steady stream. From their dark interiors
stretchers were lifted gently out and deposited on the grass. Again it
was a wave of gassed. Among them moved orderlies and nurses with food
and soothing lotions for the burns. When the tents were filled the
lighter cases lay out on their blankets under the moon. It was like a
vast gypsy encampment. The men leaned on their elbows, drank hot coffee
and talked of horrible, grotesque, fantastic and sanguinary things in
low, level, dispassionate tones as if they were discussing the weather.
Up there the battle still raged with a ferocious violence unconceived
of in far-away safe America. Overhead the sullen German cannon still
boomed and boomed and boomed.
And still the Americans advanced--advanced--advanced!
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain. Obvious errors in punctuation and accents have been
silently corrected in this version, but some inconsistencies and
archaic forms have been retained as printed.
The following alterations have been made:
p.34 Soisante-quinze! to Soixante-quinze!
p.50 man to men
p.68 semed to seemed
p.104 three to there
P.236 best best [repeated word deleted]
p.240 divisons to divisions
p.275 mater to matter
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