Chapter II: Part 2

A French lieutenant and an official interpreter are also attached to the Section. We are partly under the control of the Sanitary Service and partly of the Automobile Service. The French _personnel_ are a link between the Automobile Service and our unit, and they are busy from morning until night keeping abreast of the required reports, for five-day reports must be made on the consumption of gasoline, the number of miles run, the number of wounded carried, the oil, carbide, and spare parts needed, the rations drawn, and, in great detail, any change in _personnel_.

There are no orderlies or mechanics attached to our Section and each driver is responsible for the upkeep and repair of his own car. We do as much of this work as possible in the square where we park our cars. So we patch tires, scrape carbon, and change springs while the church bell rings persistently and mournfully for masses and funerals and while the people who sit and watch us from their shop windows laugh at our language as much as if they understood it.

In general charge of this work and of a blacksmith shop that we have turned into a workroom is a so-called Mechanical Department composed of the two drivers who know the most about automobiles. And so successfully has the system worked out that, laymen though most of us be, none of our "Chinese Rolls Royces" or "Mechanical Fleas"--as an English Red Cross corps in the neighborhood has nicknamed our Fords--has been so severely "punished" that its repair has been beyond the power of its driver instructed and assisted by the Mechanical Department.

We receive the one sou a day, which, in addition to allowances to wife, if any, and to children, if any, is the wage of a French _poilu_. We draw, as has already been mentioned, an ordinary soldier's rations: plenty of nourishing but rather solid bread, which, with the date of its baking stamped upon it, comes in big round loaves that we hold against our chest and cut with our pocket knife in true _poilu_ fashion; rice or potatoes, generally rice; coffee, sugar, salt, and sometimes fresh meat, but ordinarily canned beef, called by the French private _singe_, or monkey meat. At our own request we get the cash equivalent of our wine and tobacco allowances, and this is used to help defray the expenses of having our food cooked and served in the best hotel the town offers. But with these exceptions--French tobacco especially may be put in the category of acquired tastes--we take and eat everything that is given to us with a very good grace. And although it is possible, especially at Saint-Maurice, to add variously and cheaply to this diet at one's own expense, it probably is a fact that those of the Section who, in a spirit of "playing the game" all the way through, have stuck to the rations weigh more and feel better than when they first took the field, in spite of the constant drenchings one gets and the stretches of work without sleep.

The hours of our meals--served by the untiring, red-cheeked Fanny--are a little more American than military for those taking their turn on the reserve list "at home." But Mr. Hill's rule requires military punctuality on penalty of washing the dirtiest car in the square. This is also the punishment inflicted upon any one who does not get his car properly ready for morning inspection, who is not in his room by nine o'clock, who has any trouble on the road from an insufficient supply of "gas" or oil, who is tardy in handing in reports, or breaks in any way the rules from time to time posted in the mess-room.

"In a word, you are military and not military, but I am going to pay you the greatest compliment in my power, by treating you as I would any French soldiers under my command," the Commandant in charge of the Automobile Service of the army to which we are attached said to us on one occasion. And it has been the clear purpose of our two chiefs--first Mr. Lawrence and now Mr. Hill--to live up to the responsibilities of that compliment. This is mainly done by example and through the force of a very real _esprit de corps_, but washing another man's car has been found a useful daily help for daily disciplinary needs.

Away from our base, in our nomadic dressing-station-to-hospital existence, we are often pretty much "on our own." This part of our life begins in a valley reached through a famous pass. Starting from the valley of the Moselle easy grades along a splendid highway crowded with trucks, staff cars, wine carts, and long lines of yellow hay wagons, bring one to a tunnel about three hundred yards in length. In the middle of this tunnel is a low white marble stone with a rounded top that until a year ago last August marked the boundary between France and Germany. To an American driving an automobile in the dim tunnel light this stone is simply something not to be hit. To the French who have fought so bravely that it may no longer stand for a boundary it is a sacred symbol. I have seen the eyes of returning wounded glisten at the sight of it. I have heard companies of chasseurs, as they passed it going to the trenches, break into singing or whistling their famous Sidi-Brahim march.

Beyond this tunnel the road, wrapping itself around the mountain like a broad, shining ribbon, descends into a fertile commercial valley in sweeping curves sometimes a kilometre long: on one side are high gray rocks where reservists seem to hang by their teeth and break stones; on the other, a sheer drop into green fields, behind the tunnel-pierced summit, in front the red-roofed houses of several Alsatian villages nestling against yet another line of mountain-tops. And along this road we have made our way at midnight, at daybreak, in the late afternoon, running cautiously with wounded and running carelessly empty. We are at home, too, in the villages to which it leads, with the life-size portrayals of the Crucifixion that are everywhere, even in fields and nailed to trees in the mountains, with the gray stone churches and their curious onion-shaped towers and clamorous bells.

The appearance of an American Ambulance in the villages is no longer a novelty, sentries let us pass without a challenge, school children do not any more rush over to us at recess time, or soldiers crowd around us and say to one another, "_Voilà la voiture américaine_." And we have friends everywhere: the officer who wants to speak English and invites us so often to lunch with him, the corporal of engineers who was a well-known professor, the receiving sergeant who was a waiter at the Savoy Hotel in London, the _infirmier_ who was in charge of the French department of one of the largest of New York's publishing houses.

But cooks are the people we cultivate the most assiduously. It is forbidden to leave your car and eat in a café. Besides, the time of day when we are hungriest is the time--maybe midnight or early morning--when no cafés are open or when we are marooned on some mountain-top. For single cars and small wandering detachments there are only informal arrangements for "touching" rations. So we depend upon the good-will of the chief cooks and we seldom go hungry. But the stanchest sustainer of every American Ambulance driver presides over the kitchen of the largest sorting-point in the valley. We call this cheery-voiced, big-hearted son of the Savoy mountains, who before the war washed automobiles in Montmartre, "Le Capitaine," "Joe Cawthorne," "Gunga Din." He is never tired or out of spirits. He never needs to sleep. It will be a rush period. We will leave our ambulances only to get gasoline, oil, and water while the wounded are being discharged. "Le Capitaine," too, will be up to his neck in work, cooking a meal for a hundred people, hurrying out at the _médecin chef's_ order, soup for thirty and tea for twenty more--and still he will find time to run out to our cars with a cup of coffee and a slice of cheese. The only occasion on record of anything from "Joe Cawthorne" but a word and a smile of cheer was once when one of the fellows, who felt that to his coffee he owed his escapes from sleeping at the wheel and running off the bank, and therefore his life, returned to America, first giving "Le Capitaine" an envelope with some money in it. "_Jamais, jamais_" he said, returning the envelope and viciously picking some flies out of his _coffee chaudron_.

There is no place like the front for the Long Arm of Coincidence to play pranks. I have known two university football stars to meet for the first time since their gridiron days on a shelled curve of a narrow road--each in charge of an ambulance and each down in the road driving some wandering cows out of their way. I have known two young men to celebrate the Fourth of July on their voyage over to do ambulance work, in a way that drew forth the gentle rebukes of a Protestant minister who happened to be a passenger on the same boat. They left him on the docks at Liverpool and, along with his advice, he passed out of their minds until two months later one of them met him in a general's car in Alsace. He stopped and told this fellow that he was preaching a series of sermons at the front and invited him to come and hear him the next Sunday in a near-by town, adding that among other things he thought he would touch upon the question of "War and Temperance."

Speaking of the Fourth of July reminds me that on the national French holiday of the Fourteenth of July, I saw General Joffre in never-to-be-forgotten circumstances. He was spending this day in Alsace, and when early that morning I approached a little village in an empty ambulance, I was stopped by a sentry and, after being asked if I had wounded aboard, told that General Joffre was making a speech in the town square and that I would have to wait until he had finished before I could get through.

Of course I at once left my ambulance and ran to the square, knowing how rarely one ever saw quotation marks after the Généralissime's name. I was, however, too late to hear what he had to say, for, laconic as ever, he had finished speaking when I came within earshot. Opposite a gray brick church was a line of eight flag-bedecked automobiles, six for the Généralissime and his staff and two for emergencies which, I am told, is the way he always travels. General Joffre himself, standing on the ground and surrounded by officers ablaze with decorations, was listening to fifty little Alsatian girls singing the "Marseillaise." They were finishing the last verse when I arrived, and when their sweet childish voices no longer rang out in contrast to the brilliant but grim surroundings, General Joffre, stepping out from among his officers, held one of the prettiest of the little girls high in his powerful arms and kissed her twice. The next day driving through this town again I noticed the following sign:--

Le Général JOFFRE,
Généralissime des Armées de la République
a déjeuné dans cette maison.
Le 15{ème} Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins occupant cette région.
Délivrée par lui le 7 Août 1914.

Alsace has been for forty years German territory. For forty years young Alsatians have been forced to learn German in the schools, to serve in the German army, to be links in the civil and military chains which bound them to the Kaiser's empire. A few days ago I took the photograph of an Alsatian girl standing in the doorway of her home, which she said she was going to send through Switzerland to her brother in the German army "somewhere in Russia." But French hearts doubtless beat under many a German uniform, and those of us who have lived in Alsace are confident that re-annexation by France will not be a slow or a difficult process. Alsace has been tied to France by something which forty busy years have not found a way to change. The armies of the Republic have been received with an open hand and an open heart. I know of a fine field hospital organized and staffed entirely by Alsatian ladies happy to be nursing wounded French soldiers. I know of Alsatian boys, at the outbreak of the war not yet old enough to have commenced their German military training, who are to-day volunteer, and only volunteer, French soldiers.

We have drawn our impressions of Alsace chiefly from five or six towns in a commercial valley. They are subject to long-range shelling and bombs dropped from aeroplanes. Indeed, my first day in Alsace was spent in the yard of a hospital contrived out of a schoolhouse. Our cars were parked beneath the windows of one of its wings, and all day long one heard the pitiful moans of a mother and her two little daughters who had been wounded the night before when the Germans had dropped half a dozen shells into the town where they lived.

But these towns seem to be, on the whole, cheerful, prosperous places. Soldiers resting from the trenches flirt the time away with bilingual Alsatian girls. Horns, claxons, and the hum of motors make in the little mountain-smothered streets the noises of Broadway or Piccadilly. The cafés and stores are full from morning until eight o'clock, when all lights must be put out.

Nothing is taken by the soldiery without being paid for, a fact that was brought sharply home to me on one occasion. We needed wood for the kitchen-fire of a little dressing-station hidden on a tree-covered mountain-top. I picked up an axe and started to get some exercise and the wood for the fire at the same time; but the cook excitedly told me that not even in that out-of-the-way place, unless he had the proper military authorization, would he dare cut down a tree, because the commune must be paid for, every twig of it.

But, interesting as these towns are, it is beyond them that we do our most useful work. I am writing, as it happens, at a dressing-station between the artillery and the infantry lines where two of our cars are always on duty. The driver of the other car, eight months ago, was in charge of a cattle ranch in the Argentine, and last May, a passenger on the ill-fated Lusitania, was rescued after four hours in the water. He is on his back tightening bolts underneath his car, and a hole in the left sole of his projecting shoes tells of hours with the low speed jammed on, for this is the way we have to drive down as well as up hill.

We are at one end of a valley which, opening gradually, runs into the basin of the Rhine. Our two ambulances are backed up against a hay-loft dressing-station among a little group of houses frequently mentioned in the _communiqués_. At this minute the place is as peaceful as any Florida glade; it does not seem possible that war can be so near, so completely hushed. There is little military in the appearance of a few stretcher-bearers, dressed in the discarded clothes of peace, throwing stones into an apple tree; there is not a gun to be seen; there is not a sound to be heard unless you listen to catch the splash of a mountain stream or the tinkle of the bells tied around the necks of the cows grazing high up on a green but ladder-steep mountain-side. Coming down the road towards me is a little barefooted boy driving a half-dozen cows to where some girls are waiting in a pen to milk them. A little later, when my companion and I sit down to dinner with the young _médecin auxiliaire_ in charge of the post, there will be some of this milk on the table.

But long before dinner-time the whole surrounding aspect may change as if by black magic. Tree-hidden batteries, some only a hundred yards away and some on the tops of neighboring and surrounding mountains, may speak together with their "brutal lungs" until the echoes, rolling and accumulating, make a grand, persistent roar. Even trench-weary soldiers will unconsciously duck their heads and stand ready to run to the bomb-proofs if the answering German shells begin to fall close to them. After dark the wounded will arrive, carried on stretchers, rested on men's shoulders, or pushed in wheelbarrows, to the hay-loft where a doctor, working almost entirely without anæsthetics, treats such cases as the doctors in the trench dressing-stations passed without attention.

By this time also, on a night when many wounded are arriving, six or eight more American ambulances will be summoned by telephone. There will be no headlights used; only a great swinging of lanterns and much shouting back and forth in French and English. Although the firing after dark will not be so general, one or two batteries will continue to break out sharply every few minutes. One of our squad leaders will be on hand as driver in charge of the situation. "Are you ready to roll?" he will call to somebody as the doctor comes up and speaks to him. A dark figure standing by a car will lean over and spin a crank, an engine will sputter and pour forth smoke, for we must use a double supply of oil on these grades. Then an ambulance will back up to the door of the barn and the driver, leaving his engine throttled down, will help in lifting the stretchers.

To go from this place to the sorting-point behind the lines to which the wounded are taken is the worst run we have. It means almost always wondering if your car will make the grades, if you acted properly in letting yourself be persuaded to take three wounded instead of the specified two. It means coming upon comrades _en panne_ and lending a hand or hurrying on with the distress signal, stopping to pour water into your boiling radiator, halting to pass convoys, arguments, decisions, "_noms-de-Dieu_," backing to a wider place, wheels that nearly go over the edge, pot-bellied munition-wagons that scrape off your side boxes, getting into a ditch and having to be pulled out by mules or pushed out by men.

It is a journey fraught with worry, for there is always the danger of delay when delay may mean death and is sure to mean suffering for the wounded in your car. And sometimes when, with bad cases aboard, you are stuck and can't get out until somebody turns up to help you, it is unbearable to stay near your car and hear their pitiful groans.

But the down part of the journey is full of more acute dangers. You are at the mercy of your brakes. If they fail you, there is only the bank. A quick turn of the steering-wheel and you are all right; that is, there will be only a cruel shaking-up for the men you are carrying and a broken radius rod or perhaps a smashed radiator. But this is better than going over the bank and better than running amuck through a train of mules with their deadly loads of explosives.

Only during the last two months have we been able to use the first ten kilometres of this road at all. Even now for the climbing part of the journey we take none but the more seriously wounded, leaving the rest to be carried in light wagons pulled by mules, until they get to some mountain-top relay-point where our cars are stationed. Most of these relay-points are very close to one or several French batteries. Some of them are established in the midst of thriving cantonments buried in the woods and within sight of the German trenches on a sister mountain-top. Others, farther removed from the enemy lines and higher above the level of destruction, are on summits suitable only for the biggest of the French guns and reached in turn only by the very long-range German guns.

Such a place is a mountain-top at which we feel almost as much at home as at our base, for eight of our cars are always on duty at this place, each man serving for a week at a time, and one man being relieved every day. It is one of those plateau-shaped eminences which are mentioned in geographies as distinguishing the Vosges from the Alps and the Pyrenees. It is treeless through exposure to the wind, and its brow slopes gradually towards the French side, with a succession of cuplike hollows tenanted by brush-covered bomb-proofs and dug-outs and horse-sheds. Other than topographical concealments are also employed; gray horses are dyed brown and groups of road-builders when at work in some particularly exposed place carry, like the army that went against Macbeth, umbrellas of branches.

We are housed here in a long, low shack built against the side of the crest. Violent storms sometimes take the roof off this shack with the consequent drenching of the surgeon in charge, ourselves, a half-dozen stretcher-bearers and as many mule-drivers. Bunks are built crosswise against the side of the walls, and over some of these bunks the words "_Pour Intransportables_" are written. The rest, however, are occupied by people on duty here, for it is merely a relay-point, and the wounded, unless unable to stand a further journey or arriving by mules in numbers greater than we can handle, are merely changed from one mode of conveyance to another and given such attention in passing as they may need.

When one of the beds for _intransportables_ is occupied, it generally means that the man dies in a few days and is buried close by, a corporal of stretcher-bearers, who was before the war a Roman Catholic missionary in Ceylon, borrowing from one of us a camera to take for the dead man's family a photograph of the isolated grave marked with one of those simple wooden crosses from which no mile of northern France is free. Deaths of this sort are peculiarly sad. Anybody who has nursed in the wards of a military hospital will tell you how soldiers, seasoned in trenches that high explosives and mines and hand-grenades have turned into shambles, will grow gloomy when one man in their ward dies. It is the same way with these single deaths and lonely funerals at the front.

Generals, of course, stand for the "larger issues" of the war; it is their decisions that figure in to-morrow's _communiqués_. But at the front, doctors represent destiny in a much more picturesque way: it is no use putting these _blessés_ in an ambulance; death will close over them quite as gently here as twenty kilometres farther to the rear. This man's rheumatism demands that he be sent to Lyons or Marseilles; that one has five days in a base hospital and is in the trenches for the next death revel. A business-like surgeon pronounces his judgments in a ghastly _poste de secours_,--it is nothing compared with "strategical necessities,"--it will have no place beside announcements of yards of trenches taken and yards of trenches lost,--and yet, it is life or death for some brave soldier and all in the world that counts for some family circle.

These mountain-tops are often for weeks on end bathed in a heavy mist varied by rainstorms. At such times when there is no work to do,--and very frequently there are no wounded to carry for twenty-four hours or more,--the surgeon, ourselves, the _brancardiers_, and the mule-drivers, close in around the stove. One of these _brancardiers_, or stretcher-carriers, was transferred after being wounded at the battle of the Marne from the front-line troops to the Service Sanitaire, and before the war he had served five years in the Foreign Legion in Africa. His stories of this period are endless and interesting, and, after listening to them for a week, we all go back to our base calling soldiers nothing but _poilus_; coffee, _jus_; wine, _pinard_; canned beef, _singe_; army organization, _système D_. There is also a good deal of reading done by many of the Section on the rainy days of no work. It is part of the daily relieving man's unofficial but well-understood duties to bring along any magazines and newspapers that he can get hold of, and generally, too, books gradually accumulate and grow to be considered as a sort of library that must not be taken away. Indeed, at one _poste de secours_ our library consists at present of two or three French novels and plays, "The Newcomes," a two-volume "Life of Ruskin," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," and "Les Misérables."

When a group of men are on duty at an isolated _poste de secours_ like this, they take turns in carrying the wounded who may arrive, the man who has made the last trip going to the bottom of the list. And there is something comfortable about feeling that you are the last to "roll" on a stormy night when every plank in the little hut rattles and groans, when the wind shrieks in the desolate outside, when the sinister glare of the trench rockets gleams through the heavy blackness like a flash of lightning, and the wet mule-drivers who borrow a little of your fire shake their heads and pointing towards the road say, "_Un mauvais chemin_" And then, as you settle a little deeper in your blankets and blow out your lantern and assure yourself for the last time as to where your matches are and how much gasoline you have in your tank, you are pretty apt to think, before you go to sleep, of the men a little way off in the rain-soaked trenches.

They are certainly not very far away. Only over there on the next ridge where the shells are exploding. They have been there, you know, without relief for ten days. You remember when they marched up the mountain to take their turn. How cheery and soldierlike they were! Not one of them, like you, is sleeping in blankets. They won't, like you, go back to-morrow to a pleasant dinner, with pleasant friends, in a pleasant hotel, and out of sound, too, of those awful guns. Some will come back and you will carry them in your ambulance. And some will never come back at all. Well....

"Did I leave that spark-plug wrench under the car? God knows I can never find it on a night like this and I change a plug every trip!"

"Wake up! Don't talk in your sleep!"

"What, is it my turn to roll? Wounded?"

"No, Steve is _en panne_ halfway down the mountain."

And you begin to take things in with one of the Section's _sous-chefs_ leaning over your cot with the news that the first man on the list has a load of wounded and has met with an accident. The others are waked up too. Some are left to take care of such other wounded as may arrive and the rest form a rescue party. Two ride in the rescue ambulance; two more probably walk. The wounded are moved from the broken-down car to the other ambulance, and then daylight finds three or four of us rain-drenched and mud-smeared, changing a brake-band or digging into a carburetor.

The arrival of the relieving car at one of those posts on a rainy day, when every one of us is to be found within twenty feet of the stove, means a demand in chorus for mail and after that for news, especially Section gossip from Headquarters, which means who has had to wash cars and who has broken down _en route_.

"Number 52 runs like a breeze now. I drove it yesterday and it climbed the _col_ on high with two wounded," the newcomer will say, producing some contribution to the mess.

"And last night, there was a call for three cars at midnight. Didn't any of the wounded come this way? So-and-So had magneto trouble bringing back his first load. He said Henry Ford himself could not have started the boat. So the repair car went out at four o'clock this morning."

"That boy certainly has his troubles. Do you remember the time he had two blow-outs and four punctures in twenty-four hours and then had all his brake-bands go at once? It was two miles he ran to get another car to take his wounded."

"He looked low when he came in about breakfast time," somebody else will put in.

"I tell you he _will_ use too much oil. It goes through these old cars like a dose of salts," a third will add.

On bad days the discussion will go on this way until time for the next meal. But on clear days during summer and early autumn weather, we have stayed indoors very little. The air is champagne-like and the view on all sides magnificent. It is possible, also, from a number of these eminences to follow in a fascinating fashion the progress of artillery duels, and, with a good pair of glasses, even to see infantry advancing to the attack. When the cannonading is heavy the whole horizon pops and rumbles and from the sea of green mountains spread out before you rise puffs of shrapnel smoke, flaky little clouds about the size of a man's hand and pale against the tree-tops, as one thinks of death as pale. They hover, sometimes too many at a time to count, above the mountains and then sink down again into the general greenness. The sky, too, is generally dotted with these same little flaky clouds when aeroplanes are abroad. And aeroplanes are abroad every fair day, for they are seldom or never hit and brought down, although the anti-aircraft guns, especially when hedging them in with "barrier fire," seem to limit their activities.

Soldiers, as I have said, march by these posts on their way to and from the trenches. Whenever they are allowed to break ranks near our cars they crowd around us with little bottles in their hands asking for gasoline to put in cigarette lighters which they make out of German bullets. Most of these men belong to battalions of Chasseurs Alpins, and I do not suppose there are any finer soldiers in the world than those stocky, merry-eyed men from the mountain provinces of France, with their picturesque caps and their dark-blue coats set off by their horison-blue trousers. They are called, indeed, the "blue devils," and when the _communiqués_ say, "After a heavy shelling of some of the enemy heights in the Vosges our infantry advanced to the attack and succeeded in taking so many of the enemy trenches," it is probably the Chasseurs Alpins who have led the way in the face of the hand-grenades and machine-gun fire and the streams of burning oil that, in this country especially, make the "meaning of a mile" so terrible.

One of our Section who was compelled to return to America the other day took with him as his single keepsake a crumpled photograph with a signature scrawled in one corner. It was of a _sous-officier_ of a famous battalion of Chasseurs Alpins. His heavy pack was jauntily thrown over his shoulders; his _berret_ was rakishly tilted to one side; and on his breast gleamed the green and red ribbon of the _Croix de Guerre_, the crimson of the _Légion d'Honneur_, and the yellow of the _Médaille Militaire_.

You could find no better symbol of the laughing gallantry, the sturdy strength, and the indomitable courage of France.

PRESTON LOCKWOOD

IV

LAST DAYS IN ALSACE

BY December 20, the approximate date of the beginning of the French attack upon the German positions on Hartmannsweilerkopf, the headquarters of Section 3 of the American Ambulance had been moved temporarily to a place called Moosch. Here was located a large modern hospital to which the wounded were brought from the dressing-stations in the mountains, two or three kilometres behind the lines of advance trenches. From this hospital the _blessés_ were moved into the interior as fast as their condition would permit. It was the duty of the small American Ford ambulances to bring the wounded from these mountain stations down to the hospital at Moosch.

Moosch, a typical Alsatian town, consisting of a few large buildings, the "Mairie," the church, a hotel or two, and perhaps a weaving mill, about which are clustered the homes and stores and cafés or combination of these latter, is situated in the valley of the river Thur. This valley runs up, and west or slightly north of west, to the divide, between the Moselle River and the Thur, this divide making the old boundary between French and German territory; and down in a south of east direction until the mountains end and we enter the plain that forms part of the drainage basin of the Rhine. Moosch is about halfway down this valley and about twelve kilometres from the front, which was on the last row of hills before the beginning of this plain.

The valley itself ranges from one to two kilometres in width and the green forest-clad mountains rise on each side to a height of three hundred to four hundred metres. In the floor of the valley were orchards, open fields, and small towns. Down the centre of it was the broad road which continued up and over the divide into France. It formed, aside from an aerial tramway that the French constructed over the divide especially for this war, the only avenue of traffic for the supplies of ammunition, guns, food, etc., for the armies that were situated in this district. As a consequence it was night and day a scene of activity throughout its entire length. Down the valley this road had two important branches, one at a point six kilometres from Moosch and another at eight. Both these branches followed the course of small creeks that feed the river Thur, up and up the small valleys through which the streams flowed, then turned up the mountain-side and climbed to the top of one of the larger hills. One route was used for traffic ascending, the other for all descending, except for any that was required by Red Cross Stations or artillery posts along the way. In this manner much passing of the up and down streams of wagons, mules, motor trucks, etc., which would have been well-nigh impossible on these steep, narrow roads, was avoided.

On the mountain-top was a small space, somewhat cleared of the forest growth, where three roads met, two that have already been mentioned and another that went over one shoulder of the mountains and down to an advance _poste de secours_, practically under Hartmannsweilerkopf itself. In one angle of the "Y" formed by these roads were a few roughly constructed buildings for taking care of the wounded, cooking, etc., and in another nothing but the steep slope of the mountain with a cabin or two tucked close against it amid the pine woods. In the last angle was a small graveyard where lay the men who had died from wounds there at the station or had been killed during the bombardment of some local artillery post or of the road. Next to this graveyard was a limited parking-space for the ambulances, and beyond this the cosy little building, the _poste de secours_, where the French stretcher-bearers and American drivers ate and slept together when not at work.

This place was popular among the Americans, at first, at least, before the Germans captured a colonel with telltale maps upon his person, and their guns began to find and make uninhabitable a spot that had once seemed a secure retreat. Up in the fresh air and ozone of the pine woods, it was hard, in spite of the graveyard near by and the ever-passing stream of ammunition wagons or pack trains, not to think of this place as a pleasant vacation ground. The Frenchmen, too, were wonderful companions, playful as boys of ten, and kind and generous to a fault. After a snowstorm, unless there was a great deal of work, there was sure to be a tremendous snow battle in progress, and the Frenchmen, old territorials some of them, forty to fifty to sixty years of age, would be as hard after one another as boys in their mimic wars. Their generosity went so far as surrendering their bunks to the Americans while they slept out in the ambulances. At times the little _poste de secours_ would be a scene of revelry, the professional entertainer taking part in the programme of the evening with the country songster. More often, however, the Frenchmen were busy and the Americans would amuse themselves with some deep, protracted argument or read the latest book on the war that some kind friend had sent to a member of the Section. At night the little hut had its bunks filled to overflowing, but sleeping was generally good, unless your bedfellow happened to be a soldier dreaming of battle or a mule-driver dreaming of swearing at his mules. At night there were always one or two interruptions, especially whenever an ambulance-driver was wanted. Those who were sent to call him always succeeded in waking the whole lot of sleepers before finding the man whose turn it was to "roll."

This "night rolling," as it is called, is not the easiest thing to do by any means. The road, steep and narrow and rough at any time, would in snowy or rainy weather cause an occasional sinking of the heart to the best of drivers. To these difficulties was added the necessity of passing the slowly descending trains of ammunition wagons and mules. On one stretch of road no lights were permitted, as they would have disclosed its location to the Germans. On nights when there was no moonlight and heavy mists enshrouded the mountains, it was a trying nerve strain to come down this bit of road. The history of every car would be full of stories of narrow escapes from running into wagons, mules, or men, or running over the edge of the road or against the side of the hill. These difficulties and trials, however, weren't what would occupy the mind when the German shells began breaking near; they lose their importance entirely. One can get used to the blind driving on a dark night, but never to the high-explosive shells. Even on the floor of the valley where the road is level, the thrills might not cease, for here it has been a common experience to run into an unlighted wagon or to be smashed by a heavy, ponderous motor truck. Perhaps it would be a mere matter of getting ditched in the effort to get out of the way of the latter. But with the Ford this was never a serious trouble, as eight or ten men, and they were always to be had in a few moments on any part of the road, could quickly lift it out and put it on the road again. Out of the most severe smash-ups the Fords have emerged supreme and in every case proved the statement that a "Ford car can be bent but not broken."

At the hospital the wounded would be taken out, new blankets and stretchers put in, the gas tank filled, and the car sent up the mountain again to wait for more _blessés_ unless it was time for the driver to turn in and get a bit of sleep.

During the day a call would very often mean a trip down the other side of the mountain to the advance posts nearer Hartmannsweilerkopf. While day driving hasn't the terrors of night driving, yet the road near these two posts and the posts themselves were more often the object for German fire, and it was with a little feeling of dread that one went there. The road down to it was exceedingly steep in places and few cars could make the return trip with a full load. There never was any anxiety about stalling, however, for a little assistance from eight or ten soldiers would send the car on its way again. Many a time a driver would unconsciously arrive at the posts at a time of bombardment and be told to leave his machine and hurry to an _abri_. An _abri_ is a cave or dug-out in the side of the mountain offering protection against the German shells. All along the mountain roads these little places of refuge began to appear after the Germans had learned how to drop shells consistently near these routes, and to see them thus was a real comfort to the mind whenever the whistle of a shell sounded unpleasantly loud and near. These caves were not always in a finished state, as a big broad-shouldered driver learned to his discomfort and the vexation of his two comrades. They were taking a look at Hartmanns from a portion of the road whence it can be seen, when the portentous sound of the flying shells began which kept coming nearer and nearer. The Americans turned and ran up the road to one of these _abris_, the big man leading. He darted for the cave entrance, but his body was just too big and he was wedged tightly between the stone sides, while his two comrades pounded on his back clamoring for admittance. He decided it was more comfortable and safe flat against the rocks in front of the car, and safer, too, than in a hole the entrance to which might so easily be closed.

One was not always compelled to be conscious of such unpleasant things as bursting shells. At slack periods when neither side was firing, and the traffic was not too heavy up and down the roads, the trip up and over the mountains could be one of the pleasantest of rides. Sometimes after a snowstorm the mountain forest scenes were magnificent, and there was the occasional wonderful expanse of view over valley and plain below. Away off on the German side could be seen the town of M---- which was brightly illuminated at night. The Germans seemed indifferent to the fact that these lights were a great temptation to the French gunners. As far as known, the latter seldom yield to this temptation to bombard civilians despite the fact that the Germans were shelling towns, needlessly it seemed, in the territory held by France. Many pleasant rides after the attack, in the warm sunshine of the spring days that came in January, will stay in the minds of the drivers, a contrast to the rushing trips taken in slush and mud and snow during the height of the attack.

The time spent in Moosch at the hospital was nearly always a period of activity and interest. There were sure to be minor repairs needing attention, tire-changing to be done, and often more difficult matters to attend to, such as eliminating the knock in an engine, changing brake-bands, or putting in a new rear axle. The hospital itself looked across the valley to the hills beyond, upon one of which was anchored a small sausage-shaped balloon, such as is used all along the French line for observation purposes. One hundred metres back of the hospital rose the hills forming the other side of the valley. On the slope of one of these was the rapidly growing graveyard where the bodies of the soldiers who had died at the hospitals were laid. Among them was the body of Richard Hall, the young American ambulance driver who lost his life during the attack, when his machine was struck by a shell on the road up the mountain. On the east side of the hospital passed a small road that led up to the graveyard, and beyond this was an open field where an aero bomb fell with disastrous results to one fowl and to the windows of the hospital on that side. In the hospital yard on this side were put the ambulances needing repairing, and in rush times part of the other side of the yard was also required. Here was rather a good-sized building, the front end of which was the morgue and the other end the laundry. Behind it was a small shelter where the bloody stretchers were cleaned. It was in these surroundings, with the rows of coffins on one side and the stretcher-cleaning on the other, that much of the repair work was done during the height of the attack. Here, too, would form the military funeral processions that went with the bodies to the graveyard on the hill. Two funerals a day of one to five coffins was the regular schedule in the busy days of the attack. One of the most intensely interesting sights was the gathering of the whole regiment, of those who were left after the attack, about this graveyard to give a last formal salute to their departed comrades.

Hardly a day passed during the period of the attack when the village was not shelled, and when it was clear, the German aeroplanes would appear and drop their bombs or smoke signals, or seek to destroy the observation balloon of the French, descending as near to it as they dared. One of the prettiest sights of the war is to see the little tufts of cloud appear near the course of the speeding machine whenever the shrapnel bombs burst. The cloudlets formed by the French shells are white, by those of the Germans, black. It was surprising how difficult it seemed for gunners to get anywhere near the aeroplanes. They would pepper the sky in every direction except near the moving spot they were trying to hit. At rare intervals both German and French machines were up, and their manoeuvring for an advantage was always interesting. The interest, however, in this sort of thing changes after a few bombs have been dropped and their terrific effect seen.

Such is the general story of the activity and life of the Section's last months in Alsace. Its details would include many stories of tight squeezes, of break-downs and troubles in hot places, of the carrying of soldiers driven mad under the strain of war, of having men die in your car on the way to the hospital, of short side trips right up amidst the French artillery stations, and always of the patient, quiet suffering of the French soldier. There would be stories of the days when the car would have "moods," and refuse to make the grades as it ought, and then again of times when nothing was too much for the engine to do.

After the attack we were moved from Alsace farther inland, and after some wandering from place to place through a country that had been the scene of much fighting in the earlier part of the war, and through villages almost completely destroyed by the Germans, we were sent to a town near Nancy--Tantonville--to do ambulance work for the hospitals situated within a twenty-five-kilometre radius and to wait until our cars could be overhauled and repaired.[3]

EVERETT JACKSON

[3] This Section subsequently rendered heroic service in the great battle of Verdun, and has since been sent to Salonica to serve with the French army of the Orient. (_November, 1918_).

V

THE SECTION IN LORRAINE

Though desolation stain their foiled advance,
In ashen ruins hearth-stones linger whole:
Do what they may they cannot master France,
Do what they can, they cannot quell the soul.
Barrett Wendell

AN INTRODUCTION BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT[4]

I VERY cordially call attention to this account of the work of
one of the field sections of the American Ambulance in France,
told out of his own experience by a young man, a graduate of the
University of Virginia, who has been driving an ambulance at the
front. The article came through Hon. A. Piatt Andrew, formerly
Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury, and for two
years treasurer of the American Red Cross. Mr. Andrew has taken an
active part in the organization of the work. He writes that many
American college graduates are engaged in the field sections, and
that they and others "have been working for months with a devotion
and courage which have commanded glowing tributes of gratitude
and admiration from many French officers." In a second letter Mr.
Andrew states that the faithful Mignot (spoken of in this article)
was killed when the Germans bombarded the headquarters of the
field section.

Every young man just leaving college--from Harvard, from Yale,
from Princeton, from Michigan, Wisconsin, or California, from
Virginia or Sewanee, in short, from every college in the
country--ought to feel it incumbent on him at this time either to
try to render some assistance to those who are battling for the
right on behalf of Belgium, or else to try to fit himself to help
his own country if in the future she is attacked as wantonly as
Belgium has been attacked. The United States has played a most
ignoble part for the last thirteen months. Our Government has
declined to keep its plighted faith, has declined to take action
for justice and right, as it was pledged to take action under the
Hague Conventions. At the same time, it has refused to protect
its own citizens; and it has refused even to prepare for its own
defence. It has treated empty rhetoric and adroit phrase-making
as a substitute for deeds. In spite of our solemn covenant to see
that the neutrality of unoffending nations like Belgium was not
violated; our solemn covenant to see that undefended towns were
not bombarded, as they have been again and again bombarded in
France, England, and Belgium, and hundreds of women and children
killed; our solemn covenant to see that inhuman and cruel methods
of warfare--such as the use of poisonous gas--were not used,
we have, in a spirit of cold, selfish, and timid disregard of
our obligations for others, refused even to protest against
such wrongdoing, and, with abject indifference to right, the
professional pacifists have spent their time merely in clamoring
for a peace that should consecrate successful wrong. What is even
more serious, we have wholly failed to act effectively when our
own men, women, and children were murdered on the high seas by the
order of the German Government. Moreover, we have declined to take
any effective steps when our men have been murdered and our women
raped in Mexico--and of all ineffective steps the last proposal to
get Bolivia and Guatemala to do what we have not the manliness to
do was the most ineffective.

But there have been a few individuals who, acting as individuals
or in organizations, have to a limited extent by their private
efforts made partially good our governmental shortcomings. The
body of men and women for whom Mr. Andrew speaks is one of these
organizations. I earnestly hope that his appeal will be heeded and
that everything possible will be done to continue to make the work
effective.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

[4] The account of the American Ambulance in Lorraine by Mr. J. R. McConnell was printed in the _Outlook_ for September 15, 1915, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the editors of that journal. The introduction by Theodore Roosevelt and the drawing by M. Bils also originally appeared in the _Outlook_ and are republished here. (_Editor's Note._)

A SMALL field ambulance with a large red cross on each of its gray canvas sides slips quickly down the curving cobblestone street of a quaint old French frontier town, and turns on to the road leading to the _postes de secours_ (dressing-stations) behind the trenches, which are about two kilometres distant. The driver is uniformed in khaki, and is in striking contrast to the hundreds of blue-gray-clad soldiers loitering on the streets. A group of little children cry out, "_Américain_," and, with beaming smiles, one of them executes a rigid though not very correct salute as the car goes by. A soldier yells, "Good-morning, sir!" another, "Hello, Charley!" and waves his hand, while others not gifted with such an extensive command of English content themselves with "_Bonjour!_" and "_Camarade!_" The little car spins on past companies of tired, dusty soldiers returning from the trenches, and toots to one side the fresher-looking sections that are going up for their turn. A sentinel stands out in the middle of the road and makes frantic motions with his hand to indicate that shrapnel is bursting over the road ahead. "I should worry," comes from the driver, and the car speeds serenely along the way.

It is an ambulance of the Section Sanitaire Américaine, Y, the squad that has just been _cité à l'ordre de l'armée_ (honorably mentioned in despatches).