Chapter IV: Part 4

In such a crisis as those first days around Verdun, ammunition and fresh men are the all-essential things. The wounded are the _déchets_, the "has-beens," and so must take second place. But the French are too gallant and tender-hearted not to make sacrifices. I remember one morning I was slapped off the road into a ditch with a broken axle, while passing a solitary _camion_. The driver got down, came over, and apologized for the accident, which was easily half my fault. Then we unloaded four cases of "seventy-five" shells that he was carrying, and put my three wounded in on the floor of his car. He set out slowly and carefully up the ice-covered road, saying to me with a smile as he left, "Don't let the Boches get my _marmites_ while I'm gone." For some time I sat there alone on the road, watching the shells break on a hill some miles away to the north, and wondering when I could get word of my mishap back to the base. Then a staff car appeared down the road making its way along slowly and with difficulty, because, being without chains, it skidded humorously with engine racing and the chauffeur trying vainly to steer. There was a captain of the _Service des Autos_ sitting on the front seat, and he was so immaculately clean and well groomed that he seemed far away from work of any kind. But when the car stopped completely about halfway up the little hill on which I was broken down, he jumped out, took off his fur coat, and using it to give the rear wheels a grip on the ice, he swung it under the car. As the wheels passed over it, he picked it up and swung it under again. So the car climbed the hill and slid down the other slope round the curve and out of sight. It was just another incident that made me realize the spirit and energy of the French Automobile Service. But the captain had not solved any of my difficulties. He had been too busy to notice me or wonder why an American ambulance was sprawled in a ditch with four cases of shells alongside.

I had been waiting there in the road about two hours when another American came by and took back word of my accident and of the parts necessary to set it right. Then about noon my friend came back in his _camion_ to take up his cases of shells and report my wounded safe at the railway station. We lunched together on the front seat of the _camion_ on bread, tinned "monkey meat," and red wine, while he told me stories about his life as a driver. He had been on his car then for more than twenty days without leaving it for food or sleep. That morning his "partner" had been wounded by a shell, so he had to drive all that day alone. Usually the two men drive two hours, turn and turn about; while one is driving, the other can eat, sleep, or read the day before yesterday's newspaper. The French _camions_ are organized in sections of twenty. Usually each section works in convoy, and has its name and mark painted on its cars. I saw some with elephants or ships, some with hearts or diamonds, clubs or spades, some with dice--in fact, every imaginable symbol has been used to distinguish the thousands of sections in the service. The driver told me there were more than ten thousand trucks working between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. There is great rivalry between the men of the several sections in matters of speed and load--especially between the sections of French and those of American or Italian cars. The American product has the record for speed, which is, however, offset by its frequent need of repair.

My friend told me about trips he had made up as far as the third-line trenches, and how they were using "seventy-fives" like machine-guns in dug-outs, where the shells were fired at "zero," so that they exploded immediately after leaving the mouth of the gun. The French, he said, would rather lose guns than men, and according to him, there were so many guns placed in the "live" parts of the Sector that the wheels touched, and so formed a continuous line.

As soon as we had finished lunch he left me, and I waited for another two hours until the American staff car (in other surroundings I should call it an ordinary Ford touring-car with a red cross or so added) came along loaded with an extra "rear construction," and driven by the Chief himself. It took us another four hours to remove my battered rear axle and put in the new parts, but my car was back in service by midnight.

That was a typical instance of the kind of accident that was happening, and there were about three "Ford casualties" every day. Thanks to the simplicity of the mechanism of the Ford, and to the fact that, with the necessary spare parts, the most serious indisposition can be remedied in a few hours, our Section has been at the front for a year--ten months in the Bois-le-Prêtre, and two months at Verdun--without being sent back out of service for general repairs. In the Bois-le-Prêtre we had carried the wounded from the dressing-stations to the first hospital, while at Verdun we were on service from the hospital to the rail-heads. In this latter work of _évacuation_ the trips were much longer, thirty to ninety miles, so the strain on the cars was correspondingly greater. As our cars, being small and fast, carried only three wounded on stretchers or five seated, our relative efficiency was low in comparison with the wear and tear of the "running-gear" and the amount of oil and petrol used. But in the period from February 22 to March 13, twenty days, with an average of eighteen cars working, we carried 2046 wounded 18,915 miles. This would be no record on good open roads, but with the conditions I have already described I think it justified the existence of our volunteer organization--if it needed justification. Certainly the French thought so, but they are too generous to be good judges.

Except for our experiences on the road, there was little romance in the daily routine. True, we were under shell fire, and had to sleep in our cars or in a much-inhabited hay-loft, and eat in a little inn, half farmhouse and half stable, where the food was none too good and the cooking none too clean; but we all realized that the men in the trenches would have made of such conditions a luxurious paradise, so that kept us from thinking of it as anything more than a rather strenuous "camping out."

During the first days of the attack, the roads were filled with refugees from the town of Verdun and the country north of it. As soon as the bombardment started, civilians were given five hours to leave, and we saw them--old men, women, and children--struggling along through the snow on their way south. It was but another of those sad migrations that occur so often in the _zone des armées_. The journey was made difficult and often dangerous for them by the columns of skidding trucks, so the more timid took to the fields or the ditches at the roadside. They were for the most part the _petits bourgeois_ who had kept their shops open until the last minute, to make the town gay for the troops, who filed through the Promenade de la Digue in an endless queue on their way to and from the trenches. Most of them had saved nothing but the clothes on their backs, though I saw one old woman courageously trundling a barrow overflowing with laces, post-cards, bonbons (doubtless the famous _Dragées verdunoises_), and other similar things which had been part of her stock-in-trade, and with which she would establish a Verdun souvenir shop when she found her new home. There were many peasant carts loaded with every imaginable article of household goods from stoves to bird cages; but no matter what else a cart might contain, there was always a mattress with the members of the family, old and young, bouncing along on top. So ubiquitous was this mattress that I asked about it, and was told that the French peasant considers it the most important of his Lares, for it is there his babies are born and his old people die--there, too, is the family bank, the hiding-place for the _bas de laine_.

All the people, no matter what their class or station, were excited. Some were resigned, some weeping, some quarrelling, but every face reflected terror and suffering, for these derelicts had been suddenly torn from the ruins of their old homes and their old lives after passing through two days of the heaviest bombardment the world has ever seen.

I did not wonder at their grief or terror when I had seen the town from which they fled. Sometimes it is quiet, with no shells and no excitement; at others it is a raging hell, a modern Pompeii in the ruining. Often I passed through the town, hearing and seeing nothing to suggest that any enemy artillery was within range. But one morning I went up to take a doctor to a near-by hospital, and had just passed under one of the lovely old twelfth-century gates, with its moat and towers, when the Germans began their morning hate. I counted one hundred and fifty shells, _arrivées_, in the first quarter of an hour.

After making my way up on the old fortifications in the northeastern quarter, I had an excellent view of the whole city--a typical garrison town of northern France spreading over its canals and river up to the Citadel and Cathedral on the heights. Five and six shells were shrieking overhead at the same time, and a corresponding number of houses in the centre of the town going up in dust and débris, one after another, almost as fast as I could count.

During this bedlam a military gendarme strolled up as unconcerned as if he had been looking out for a stranger in the Champs Elysées. He told me about a dug-out that was somewhere "around the corner," But we both got so interested watching the shells and their effect that we stayed where we were. The gendarme had been in the town long enough to become an authority on bombardments, and he could tell me the different shells and what they were hitting, from the colored smoke which rose after each explosion and hung like a pall over the town in the windless spring air. When the shells fell on the Cathedral--often there were three breaking on and around it at the same time--there sprang up a white cloud, while on the red tiles and zinc roofs they exploded in brilliant pink-and-yellow puffs. The air was filled with the smell of the burning celluloid and coal-tar products used in the manufacture of the high explosive and incendiary shells. It was very impressive, and even my friend the gendarme said, "_C'est chic, n'est-ce pas?_ It is the heaviest rain we have had for several days." Then he pointed to the left where a column of flame and smoke, heavier than that from the shells, was rising, and said, "Watch them now, and you'll understand their system, the _cochons_. That's a house set afire with their incendiary shells, and now they will throw shrapnel around it to keep our firemen from putting it out." And so they did, for I could see the white puffs of the six-inch shrapnel shells breaking in and around the column of black smoke, which grew denser all the time. Then two German Taubes, taking advantage of the smoke, came over and dropped bombs, for no other reason than to add terror to the confusion. But the eighty firemen, a brave little band brought up from Paris with their hose-carts and engine, refused to be confused or terrified. Under the shells and smoke we could see the streams of water playing on the burning house. "They are working from the cellars," said the gendarme. It was fortunate there was no wind, for that house was doomed, and but for the fact that all the buildings were stone, the fire would have spread over all that quarter of the town despite the gallantry of the firemen.

The bombardment continued steadily for about two hours and a half, until several houses were well alight and many others completely destroyed. Then about noon it stopped as suddenly as it had started. I wanted to go down and watch the firemen work, but the gendarme, who had produced an excellent bottle of no ordinary _pinard_, said, "Wait a while, _mon vieux_, that is part of the system. They have only stopped to let the people come out. In a few minutes it will start again, when they will have more chance of killing somebody."

But for once he was wrong, and after waiting with him for half an hour, I went down to the first house I had seen catch fire. The firemen were still there, working with hose and axe to prevent the fire from spreading. The four walls of the house were still standing, but inside there was nothing but a furnace which glowed and leaped into flame with every draught of air, so that the sparks flew over the neighboring houses, and started other fires which the firemen were busy controlling. These _pompiers_ are no longer civilians. The black uniform and gay brass and leather helmet of Paris fashion have been replaced with the blue-gray of the _poilu_, with the regulation steel shrapnel casque or _bourguignotte_. The French press has had many accounts of their heroism since the beginning of the attack. Certainly if any of the town is left, it will be due to their efforts among the ruins. There are only eighty of them in the town. Half of them are men too old for "_active service_," yet they have stayed there for two months working night and day under the shells, with the strain of the bombardment added to the usual dangers from falling walls and fire. They are still as gay and eager as ever. Their spirit and motto is the same as that of every soldier and civilian who is doing hard work in these hard times. They all say, "It is war," or more often, "It is for France."

I left them saving what they could of the house, and walked on over the river through the town. It is truly the Abomination of Desolation. The air was heavy and hot with the smell of explosives and the smoke from the smouldering ruins. Not a sound broke the absolute quiet and not a soul was in sight. I saw two dogs and a cat all slinking about on the search for food, and evidently so crazed with terror that they could not leave their old homes. Finally, crossing over the canal, where the theatre, now a heap of broken beams and stones, used to stand, I met an old bearded Territorial leaning over the bridge with a net in his hand to dip out fish killed by the explosion of the shells in the water. He did not worry about the danger of his position on the bridge, and, like all true fishermen, when they have had good luck, he was happy and philosophical. "One must live," said he, "and it's very amiable of the Boches to keep us in fish with their _marmites, n'est-ce pas, mon vieux_?" We chatted for a while of bombardments, falling walls, and whether the Germans would reach Verdun. He, of course, like every soldier in that region, was volubly sure they would not. Then I went up on the hill towards the Cathedral, by the old library, which was standing with doors and windows wide open, and with the well-ordered books still on the tables and in the shelves. As yet it is untouched by fire or shell, but too near the bridge to escape for long.

I continued my way through streets filled with fallen wires, broken glass, and bits of shell. Here and there were dead horses and broken wagons caught in passing to or from the lines. There is nothing but ruins left of the lovely residential quarter below the Cathedral. The remaining walls of the houses, gutted by flame and shell, stand in a wavering line along a street, blocked with débris, and with furniture and household articles that the firemen have saved. The furniture is as safe in the middle of the street as anywhere else in the town. As I passed along I could hear from time to time the crash and roar of falling walls, and see the rising clouds of white stone dust that has settled thickly everywhere.

The Cathedral, with its Bishop's Palace and cloisters,--all fine old structures of which the foundations were laid in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,--must, from its commanding position overlooking the town, be singled out for destruction. I watched ten shells strike the Cathedral that one morning, and some of them were the terrible 380's, the shells of the sixteen-inch mortars, which make no noise as they approach and tear through to the ground before their explosion.

The interior of the Cathedral, blurred with a half-inch layer of stone dust, is in most "unchurchly" disorder. Four or five shells have torn large holes through the roof of the nave, and twice as many more have played havoc with the chapels and aisles at the side. One has fallen through the gilded canopy over the high altar and broken one of the four supporting columns, which before were monoliths like those of St. Peter's at Rome. Of course, most of the stained-glass windows are scattered in fragments over the floor, and through the openings on the southern side I could see the ruins of the cloisters, with some chairs and a bed literally falling into them from a room of the Bishop's Palace above.

This destruction of the Cathedral is typical of the purposeless barbarity of the whole proceeding. The wiping out of the town can serve no military purpose. There are no stores of munitions or railway communications to be demolished. Naturally there are no troops quartered in the town, and now all extensive movements of convoys are conducted by other roads than those leading through the town. Yet the bombardment continues day after day, and week after week. The Germans are sending in about £5,000,000 worth of shells a month. "It's spite," a _poilu_ said to me; "they have made up their minds to destroy the town since they can't capture it; but it will be very valuable as an iron mine after the war."[7]

FRANK HOYT GAILOR

[7] Since the writing of this chapter, five Sections of the Ambulance have been sent to the vicinity of Verdun: Section 3 to the region about Douaumont; Section 4 to Mort Homme; Section 8 to the neighborhood of the fortress of Vaux; Section 2 to the immediate neighborhood of Verdun; and Section 1 to the region of Fort Souville and Fort St. Michel.

VII

ONE OF THE SECTIONS AT VERDUN

I

IT gave us rather a wrench to leave Pont-à-Mousson. The Section had been quartered there since April, 1915, and we were attached to the quaint town and to the friends we had made. The morning of our departure was warm and clear. Walking along the convoy, which had formed in the road before our villa, came the _poilus_, and shook hands with each _conducteur_. "_Au revoir, monsieur._" "_Au revoir, Paul._" "_Bonne chance, Pierre!_" We took a last look at the town which had sheltered us, at the scene of the most dramatic moments in our lives. Above the tragic silhouette of a huddle of ruined houses rose the grassy slopes of the great ridge crowned by the Bois-le-Prêtre, the rosy morning mists were lifting from the shell-shattered trees, a golden sun poured down a spring-like radiance. Suddenly a great cloud of grayish white smoke rose over the haggard wood and melted slowly away in the northeast wind; an instant later, a reverberating boom signalled the explosion of a mine in the trenches. There was a shrill whistle, our lieutenant raised his hand, and the convoy swung down the road to Dieulouard. "_Au revoir, les Américains!_" cried our friends. A little, mud-slopped, blue-helmeted handful, they waved to us till we turned the corner. "_Au revoir, les Américains!_"

II

We left Pont-à-Mousson imagining that our Section was in for a month's repairing and tinkering at the military motor park, but as we came towards B. our opinion changed. We began to pass file after file of troops, many of them the khaki-clad _troupes d'attaque_, bull-necked Zouaves, and wiry, fine-featured Arabs. A regiment was halted at a crossroad; some of the men had taken off their jackets and hung them to the cross-beam of a wayside crucifix. On the grass before it, in the circle of shade made by the four trees which pious Meusian custom here plants round a _Calvaire_, sprawled several powerful-looking fellows; one lay flat on his belly with his face in his Turkish cap. Hard by, in a little copse, the regimental kitchen was smoking and steaming away. A hunger-breeding smell of _la soupe, la bonne soupe_, assailed our nostrils. Quite by himself, an older man was skilfully cutting a slice of bread with a shiny, curved knife. The rooks eddied above the bare brown fields. Just below was a village with a great cloud of wood smoke hanging over it.

Late in the afternoon we were assigned quarters in the barracks of B.

III

At B. we found an English Section that had been as suddenly displaced as our own. Every minute loaded _camions_ ground into town and disappeared towards the east, troops of all kinds came in, _flick, flack_, the sun shining on the barrels of the _lebels_, a train of giant mortars, mounted on titanic trucks and drawn by big motor lorries, crashed over the pavements and vanished somewhere. Some of our _conducteurs_ made friends with the English drivers, and swapped opinions as to what was in the wind. One heard, "Well, those Frenchies have got something up their sleeve. We were in the battle of Champagne, and it began just like this." A voice from our American West began, "Say--what kind of carburetors do you birds use?" New England asked, "How many cars have you got?" And London, on being shown the stretcher arrangements of our cars, exclaimed, "That ain't so dusty,--eh, wot?" Round us, rising to the full sea of the battle, the tide of war surged and disappeared. At dusk a company of dragoons, big helmeted men on big horses, trotted by, their blue mantles and mediæval casques giving them the air of crusaders. At night the important corners of the streets were lit with cloth transparencies, with "Verdun" and a great black arrow painted on them. Night and day, going as smoothly as if they were linked by an invisible chain, went the hundred convoys of motor lorries. There was a sense of something great in the air--a sense of apprehension. "_Les Boches vont attaquer Verdun._"

IV

On the 21st the order came to go to M. The _Boches_ had made their first attack that morning; this, however, we did not know. At M., a rather unlovely eighteenth-century château stands in a park built out on the meadows of the Meuse. The flooded river flowed round the dark pines. At night one could hear the water roaring under the bridges. The château, which had been a hospital since the beginning of the war, reeked with ether and iodoform; pasty-faced, tired attendants unloaded mud, cloth, bandages, and blood that turned out to be human beings; an over-wrought doctor-in-chief screamed contradictory orders at everybody, and flared into crises of hysterical rage.

Ambulance after ambulance came from the lines full of clients; kindly hands pulled out the stretchers, and bore them to the wash-room. This was in the cellar of the dove-cote, in a kind of salt-shaker turret. _Snip, snap_ went the scissors of the _brancardiers_, who looked after the bath,--good souls these two; the uniforms were slit from mangled limbs. The wounded lay naked in their stretchers while the attendant daubed them with a hot soapy sponge; the blood ran from their wounds through the stretcher to the floor, and seeped into the cracks of the stones. A lean, bearded man, closed his eyes over the agony of his opened entrails and died there. I thought of Henner's dead Christ.

Outside, mingling with the roaring of the river, came the great, terrible drumming of the bombardment. An endless file of troops were passing down the great road. Night came on. Our ambulances were in a little side street at right angles to the great road; their lamps flares beat fiercely on a little section of the great highway. Suddenly, plunging out of the darkness into the intense radiance of the acetylene beams, came a battery of 75's, the helmeted men leaning over on the horses, the guns rattling and the harness clanking, a swift picture of movement that plunged again into darkness. And with the darkness, the whole horizon became brilliant with cannon fire.

V

We were well within the horseshoe of German fire that surrounded the French lines. It was between midnight and one o'clock, the sky was deep and clear, with big ice-blue winter stars. We halted at a certain road to wait our chance to deliver our wounded. It was a _mêlée_ of beams of light, of voices, of obscure motions, sounds. Refugees went by, decent people in black, the women being escorted by a soldier. One saw sad, harassed faces. A woman came out of the turmoil, carrying a cat in a canary cage; the animal swept the gilded bars with curved claws, and its eyes shone black and crazily. Others went by pushing baby carriages full to the brim with knick-knacks and packages. Some pushed a kind of barrow. At the very edge of earth and sky was a kind of violet-white inferno, the thousand finger-like jabs of the artillery shot unceasing to the stars, the great semi-circular auréole flares of the shorter pieces were seen a hundred times a minute. Over the moorland came a terrible roaring such as a river might make tumbling through some subterranean abyss. A few miles below, a dull, ruddy smouldering in the sky told of fires in Verdun. The morning clouded over, the dawn brought snow. Even in the daytime the great cannon flashes could be seen in the low, brownish snow-clouds.

On the way to M., two horses that had died of exhaustion lay in a frozen ditch. Ravens, driven from their repast by the storm, cawed hungrily in the trees.

VI

We slept in the loft of one of the buildings that formed the left wing of the courtyard of the castle. To enter it, we had to pass through a kind of lumber-room on the ground floor in which the hospital coffins were kept. Above was a great, dim loft, rich in a greasy, stably smell, a smell of horses and sweaty leather, the odor of a dirty harness room. At the end of the room, on a kind of raised platform, was the straw in which we lay; a crazy, sagging shelf, covered with oily dust, bundles of clothes, knapsacks, books, candle ends, and steel helmets, ran along the wall over our heads. All night long, the horses underneath us squealed, pounded, and kicked. I see in the lilac dawn of a winter morning the yellow light of an officer's lantern, and hear the call, "Up, boys--there's a call to B." The bundles in the dirty blankets groan; unshaven, unwashed faces turn tired eyes to the lantern; some, completely worn out, lie in a kind of sleepy stupor. A wicked screaming whistle passes over our heads, and the shell, bursting on a near-by location, startles the dawn.

The snow begins to fall again. The river has fallen, and the air is sickish with the dank smell of the uncovered meadows. A regiment on the way to the front has encamped just beyond the hospital. The men are trying to build little shelters. A handful of fagots is blazing in the angle of two walls; a handful of grave-faced men stand round it, stamping their feet. In the hospital yard, the stretcher-bearers unload the body of an officer who has died in the ambulance. The dead man's face is very calm and peaceful, though the bandages indicate terrible wounds. The cannon flashes still jab the snowy sky.

VII

The back of the attack is broken, and we are beginning to get a little rest. During the first week our cars averaged runs of two hundred miles a day. And this over roads chewed to pieces, and through the most difficult traffic. In one of the places, there was a formidable shell gantlet to run.

This morning I drove to B. with a _poilu_. He asked me what I did _en civil_. I told him. "I am a _pâtissier_," he replied. "When this business is over, we shall have some cakes together in my good warm shop, and my wife shall make us some chocolate." He gave me his address. A regiment of young men marched singing down the moorland road to the battle-line. "_Ah, les braves enfants!_" said the pastry cook.

HENRY SHEAHAN

VIII

THE SECTION IN FLANDERS

THE Section which is here designated as the "Section in Flanders" has at least two distinguishing characteristics. This was the first Section of substantial proportions to be geographically separated from the "American Ambulance" at Neuilly and turned over to the French army. Until it left "for the front" our automobiles had worked either to and from the Neuilly hospital, as an evacuating base, or, if temporarily detached for service elsewhere, they had gone out in very small units.

Secondarily, it has the distinction of having been moved about more frequently and of having been attached to more diverse army units than any other of our Sections. During the first year of its history, it was located successively in almost every part of Flanders still subject to the Allies: first at Dunkirk and Malo, then at Poperinghe and Elverdinghe, then at Coxyde and Nieuport, then at Crombeke and Woesten, Then after a full year in Flanders it was moved to Beauvais for revision, and since then it has worked in the region between Soissons and Compiègne and subsequently in the neighborhood of Méricourt-sur-Somme.

During most of the time the men have been quartered in barns and stables, sleeping in lofts in the hay or straw, or on stretchers on the floor, or inside their ambulances, or, during the summer, on the ground, in improvised tents in the open fields.

The opportunities for comfortable writing have been few, and no complete story of the Section's experiences has ever been written. The following pages give only glimpses of a history which has been crammed with incidents and impressions worth recording.

The Section's story began in the cold wet days of early January, 1915, when twenty men with twelve cars left Paris for the north. We spent our first night _en route_ in the shadow of the Beauvais Cathedral, passing the following day through many towns filled with French troops, and then, as we crossed into the British Sector, through towns and villages abounding with the khaki-clad soldiers of England and her colonies and the turbaned troops of British India. The second night we stayed at Saint-Omer, the men sleeping in their cars in the centre of the town square, and the third morning, passing out of the British Sector once more into the French lines, we arrived in Dunkirk where our work began.

We were at once assigned to duty in connection with a hospital established in the freight shed of a railway station, and from then on for many a long day our duty was to carry wounded and sick in a never-ending stream from the station, where they arrived from the front by four or five daily trains, to the thirty or more hospitals in and about the city. Every school, barrack, and other large building in the town (even the public theatre) or in the neighboring towns within ten miles of Dunkirk, seemed to have been turned into a hospital. Our work was extremely useful, the Section carrying scores and scores of sick and wounded, day after day, week in and out. The first incident of an exciting nature came on the second day.

We were nearly all at the station, quietly waiting for the next train, when high up in the air there appeared first one, then three, and finally seven graceful aeroplanes. We watched, fascinated, and were the more so when a moment later we learned that they were Taubes. It seemed hard to realize that we were to witness one of the famous raids that have made Dunkirk even more famous than the raider Jean Bart himself had ever done. Explosions were heard on all sides and the sky was soon spotted with puffs of white smoke from the shells fired at the intruders. The rattle of the _mitrailleuses_ and the bang of the 75's became a background of sound for the more solemn boom of the shells. A few moments later there was a bang not thirty yards away and we were showered with bits of stone. We stood spell-bound until the danger was over and then foolishly jumped behind our cars for protection.

This incident of our early days was soon thrown into unimportance by other raids, each more interesting than the last. One of them stands out in memory above all the rest. It was a perfect moonlit night, quite cloudless. Four of my companions and I were on night duty in the railway yard. About eleven the excitement started, and to say it commenced with a bang is not slang but true. Rather it commenced with many bangs. The sight was superb and the excitement intense. One could hear the whirr of the motors, and when they presented a certain angle to the moon the machines showed up like enormous silver flies. One had a delicious feeling of danger, and to stand there and hear the crash of the artillery, the buzzing of the aeroplanes, the swish of the bombs as they fell and the crash as they exploded, made an unforgettable experience. One could plainly hear the bombs during their flight, for each has a propeller attached which prevents its too rapid descent, thus insuring its not entering so far into the ground as to explode harmlessly. To hear them coming and to wonder if it would be your turn next was an experience new to us all. The bombardment continued for perhaps an hour and then our work began. I was sent down to the quay and brought back two wounded men and one who had been killed, and all my companions had about the same experience. One took a man from a half-demolished house; another, an old woman who had been killed in her bed; another, three men badly mutilated who had been peacefully walking on the street. An hour later all was quiet--except perhaps the nerves of some of the men.

About this time our work was enlivened by the appearance of the one and only real ambulance war dog and the official mascot of the squad. And my personal dog at that! I was very jealous on that point and rarely let him ride on another machine. I got him at Zuydcoote. He was playing about, and as he appeared to be a stray and was very friendly, I allowed him to get on the seat and stay there. But I had to answer so many questions about him that it became a bore, and finally I prepared a speech to suit all occasions, and when any one approached me used to say, "_Non_, madame, il n'est pas Américain, il est Français; je l'ai trouvé ici dans le Nord." One day a rosy-cheeked young lady approached us, called the dog "Dickie" and I started my speech. "Il ne s'appelle pas Dickie, madame, mais Khaki, et vous savez il est Français." "Je sais bien, monsieur, puisqu'il est à moi." I felt sorry and chagrined, but not for long, as a moment later the lady presented him to me.

We will skip over the humdrum life of the next few weeks to a night in April when we were suddenly ordered to the station at about 1 A.M. It was, I think, April 22. "The Germans have crossed the Yser" was the news that sent a thrill through all of us. Would they this time reach Calais or would they be pushed back? We had no time to linger and wonder. All night long we worked unloading the trains that followed each other without pause. The Germans had used a new and infernal method of warfare; they had released a cloud of poisonous gas which, with a favorable wind, had drifted down and completely enveloped the Allies' trenches. The tales of this first gas attack were varied and fantastic, but all agreed on the supprise and the horror of it. Trains rolled in filled with huddled figures, some dying, some more lightly touched, but even these coughed so that they were unable to speak coherently. All told the same story, of having become suddenly aware of a strange odor, and then of smothering and choking and falling like flies. In the midst of all this had come a hail of shrapnel. The men were broken as I have never seen men broken. In the months of our work we had become so accustomed to dreadful sights and to suffering as to be little affected by them. The sides and floor of our cars had often been bathed in blood; our ears had not infrequently been stirred by the groans of men in agony. But these sufferers from the new form of attack inspired in us all feelings of pity beyond any that we had ever felt before. To see these big men bent double, convulsed and choking, was heartbreaking and hate-inspiring.

At ten o'clock we were ordered to Poperinghe, about twenty miles from Dunkirk and three miles from Ypres, where one of the biggest battles of the war was just getting under way. The town was filled with refugees from Ypres, which was in flames and uninhabitable. Through Poperinghe and beyond it we slowly wound our way in the midst of a solid stream of motor trucks, filled with dust-covered soldiers coming up to take their heroic part in stemming the German tide. We were to make our headquarters for the time at Elverdinghe, but as we approached our destination the road was being shelled and we put on our best speed to get through the danger zone. This destination turned out to be a small château in Elverdinghe, where a first-aid hospital had been established. All round us batteries of French and English guns were thundering their aid to the men in the trenches some two miles away. In front of us and beside us were the famous 75's, the 90's, and 120's, and farther back the great English marine guns, and every few seconds we could hear their big shells passing over us. An automobile had just been put out of commission by a shell, before we reached the château, so we had to change our route and go up another road. The château presented a terrible scene. In every room straw and beds and stretchers, and mangled men everywhere. We started to work and for twenty-six hours there was scarcely time for pause. Our work consisted in going down to the _postes de secours_, or first-aid stations, situated in the Flemish farmhouses, perhaps four hundred or five hundred yards from the trenches, where the wounded get their first primitive dressings, and then in carrying the men back to the dressing-stations where they were dressed again, and then in taking them farther to the rear to the hospitals outside of shell range. The roads were bad and we had to pass a constant line of convoys. At night no lights were allowed and one had to be especially careful not to jolt his passengers. Even the best of drivers cannot help bumping on the pavements of Belgium, but when for an hour each cobble brings forth a groan from the men inside, it is hard to bear. Often they are out of their heads. They call then for their mothers--they order the charge--to cease firing--they see visions of beautiful fields--of cool water--and sometimes they die before the trip is over.

At Elverdinghe the bombardment was tremendous; the church was crumbling bit by bit. The guns were making too great a noise for sleep. About 4 P.M. we started out to find something to eat. A problem this, for the only shop still open was run by an old couple too scared to cook. No food for hours at a time gives desperate courage, so on we went until we found in a farmhouse some ham and eggs which we cooked ourselves. It was not altogether pleasant, for the whole place was filled with dust, the house next door having just been demolished by a shell. However, the machines were untouched, although a shell burst near them, and we hurried back for another night's work.

The following morning we decided to stay in Elverdinghe and try to get a little sleep, but no sooner had we turned in than we were awakened by the order to get out of the château at once, as we were under fire. While I was putting on my shoes the window fell in and part of the ceiling came along. Then an order came to evacuate the place of all its wounded, and we were busy for hours getting them to a place of safety. Shells were falling all about. One great tree in front of me was cut completely off and an auto near it was riddled with the fragments. For two weeks this battle lasted. We watched our little village gradually disintegrating under the German shells. The cars were many times under more or less heavy artillery and rifle fire and few there were without shrapnel holes.

The advantage of our little cars over the bigger and heavier ambulances was demonstrated many times. On narrow roads, with a ditch on each side, choked with troops, ammunition wagons, and vehicles of all sorts moving in both directions, horses sometimes rearing in terror at exploding shells, at night in the pitch dark, except for the weird light from the illuminating rockets, the little cars could squeeze through somehow. If sometimes a wheel or two would fall into a shell hole, four or five willing soldiers were enough to lift it out and on its way undamaged. If a serious collision occurred, two hours' work sufficed to repair it. Always "on the job," always efficient, the little car, the subject of a thousand jokers, gained the admiration of every one.

To most of the posts we could go only after dark, as they were in sight of the German lines. Once we did go during the day to a post along the banks of the Yser Canal, but it was too dangerous and the General ordered such trips stopped. These few trips were splendid, however. To see the men in the trenches and hear the screech of the shells at the very front was thrilling, indeed. At times a rifle bullet would find its way over the bank and flatten itself against a near-by farmhouse. One was safer at night, of course, but the roads were so full of _marmite_ holes and fallen trees that they were hard to drive along. We could only find our way by carefully avoiding the dark spots on the road. Not a man, however, who did not feel a hundred times repaid for any danger and anxiety of these trips in realizing the time and suffering he had saved the wounded. Had we not been there with our little cars, the wounded would have been brought back on hand-stretchers or in wagons far less comfortable and much more slow.

Finally the second battle of the Yser was over. The front settled down again to the comparative quiet of trench warfare. Meanwhile some of us were beginning to feel the strain and were ordered back to Dunkirk for a rest. We reached there in time to witness one of the most exciting episodes of the war. It was just at this time that the Germans sprang another surprise--the bombardment of Dunkirk from guns more than twenty miles away. Shells that would obliterate a whole house or make a hole in the ground thirty feet across would fall and explode without even a warning whistle such as ordinary shells make when approaching. We were in the station working on our cars at about 9.30 in the morning, when, out of a clear, beautiful sky, the first shell fell. We thought it was only from an aeroplane, as Dunkirk seemed far from the range of other guns. The dog seemed to know better, for he jumped off the seat of my car and came whining under me. A few minutes later came a second and then a third shell. Still not knowing from where they came, we got out our machines and went to where the clouds of smoke gave evidence that they had fallen. I had supposed myself by this time something of a veteran, but when I went into the first dismantled house and saw what it looked like inside, the street seemed by far a safer place. The house was only a mass of torn timbers, dirt, and _débris_. Even people in the cellar had been wounded. We worked all that day, moving from place to place, sometimes almost smothered by dust and plaster from the explosion of shells in our vicinity. We cruised slowly around the streets waiting for the shells to come and then went to see if any one had been hit. Sometimes, when houses were demolished, we found every one safe in the cellars, but there were many hurt, of course, and quite a number killed. The first day I had three dead and ten terribly wounded to carry, soldiers, civilians, and women too. In one of the earlier bombardments a shell fell in the midst of a funeral, destroying almost every vestige of the hearse and body and all of the mourners. Another day one of them hit a group of children at play in front of the _billet_ where at one time we lodged, and it was said never to have been known how many children had been killed, so complete was their annihilation.

For a time every one believed the shells had been fired from marine guns at sea, but sooner or later it was proved that they came from land guns, twenty or more miles away, and as these bombardments were repeated in succeeding weeks, measures were taken to safeguard the public from them. Although the shells weighed nearly a ton, their passage through the air took almost a minute and a half, and their arrival in later days was announced by telephone from the French trenches as soon as the explosion on their departure had been heard. At Dunkirk a siren was blown on the summit of a central tower, giving people at least a minute in which to seek shelter in their cellars before the shell arrived. Whenever we heard the sirens our duty was to run into the city and search for the injured, and during the succeeding weeks many severely wounded were carried in our ambulances, including women and children--so frequently the victims of German methods of warfare. The American ambulance cars were the only cars on duty during these different bombardments and the leader of the Section was awarded the _Croix de Guerre_ for the services which they performed.

In the summer a quieter period set in. Sunny weather made life agreeable and in their greater leisure the men were able to enjoy sea-bathing and walks among the sand dunes. A regular ambulance service was kept up in Dunkirk and the surrounding towns, but part of the Section was moved to Coxyde, a small village in the midst of the dunes near the sea between the ruined city of Nieuport and La Panne, the residence of the Belgian King and Queen. Here we worked for seven weeks, among the Zouaves and the Fusiliers Marins, so famous the world over as the "heroes of the Yser."

Then once more we were moved to the district farther South known as Old Flanders, where our headquarters were in a Flemish farm, adjacent to the town of Crombeke. The landscape hereabout is flat as a billiard-table, only a slight rise now and again breaking the view. Our work consisted in bringing back wounded from the vicinity of the Yser Canal which then marked the line of the enemy's trenches, but owing to the flatness of the country we had to work chiefly at night. Canals dotted with slow-moving barges are everywhere, and as our work was often a cross-country affair, looking for bridges added to the length of our runs. Here we stayed from August to the middle of December, during which we did the ambulance work for the entire French front between the English and the Belgian Sectors.

Just as another winter was setting in and we were once more beginning to get hordes of cases of frozen feet, we were ordered to move again, this time to another army. The day before we left, Colonel Morier visited the Section and, in the name of the Army, thanked the men in glowing terms, not only for the work which they had done, but for the way in which they had done it. He recalled the great days of the Second Battle of the Yser and the Dunkirk bombardments and what the Americans had done; how he had always felt sure that he could depend upon them, and how they had always been ready for any service however arduous or dull or dangerous it might be. He expressed officially and personally his regret at our departure.

We left on a day that was typical and reminiscent of hundreds of other days we had spent in Flanders. It was raining when our convoy began to stretch itself out along the road and it drizzled all that day.[8]

JOSHUA G. B. CAMPBELL

[8] This Section has since added several important chapters to its history, having served successively on the Aisne, on the Somme, at Verdun, and in the Argonne. (_November, 1916._)

IX

THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SECTION

THE night before we were to leave we gave a dinner to the officers of the Ambulance. There were not many speeches, but we were reminded that we were in charge of one of the best-equipped Sections which had as yet taken the field, and that we were going to the front in an auxiliary capacity to take the place of Frenchmen needed for the sterner work of the trenches. We might be sent immediately to the front or kept for a while in the rear; but in any event there were sick and wounded to be carried and our job was to help by obeying orders.

Early the next morning we ran through the Bois-de-Boulogne and over an historic route to Versailles, where, at the headquarters of the Army Automobile Service, our cars were numbered with a military serial and the driver of each was given a _Livret Matricule_, which is an open sesame to every motor park in France. Those details were completed about ten o'clock, and we felt at last as if we were French soldiers driving French automobiles on the way to our place at the front.

About thirty kilometres outside of Paris the staff car and the _camionnette_ with the cook on board dashed by us, and upon our arrival at a quaint little village we found a café requisitioned for our use and its stock of meat, bread, and red wine in profusion at our disposal. In the evening we reached the town of Esternay and there again found all prepared for our reception. Rooms were requisitioned and the good people took us in with open arms and the warmest of hospitality, but one or two of us spread our blankets over the stretchers in the back of our cars, because there were not enough rooms and beds for all.

The next morning was much colder; there was some snow and later a heavy fog. Our _convoi_ got under way shortly after breakfast and ran in record-breaking time, for we wanted to finish our trip that evening. We stopped for lunch and for an inspection which consumed two hours, and starting about ten o'clock on the last stretch of our journey, drove all afternoon through sleet, cold, and snow. At seven o'clock that night we reached Vaucouleurs, had our supper, secured sleeping accommodations, and retired. Our running orders had been completed; we had reached our ordered destination in perfect form.