The Note-Book of an Attache Part 10

It is very curious to see how virtually all fatally wounded men know that they are going to die and how they grasp it with a certainty which exceeds the certainty of anything else in life. They often realize it sooner than the surgeons. It is most uncanny. Perhaps it is because their nervous system senses that its foundation has suddenly crumbled. It is very impressive to see the quiet, optimistic calm with which they face the end, and the bigness of it. It makes one feel confident that there is an after-life, or that it is at least right to die for an ideal.

_Monday, November 2d._ Francis Colby, who drove me when I went to get the children of the Countess X., has recently enlisted in the American Ambulance. He is at present organizing one of the new trains of ambulances of which he will probably have charge when it is complete.

These new trains are to be made up of large cars, each carrying six sitting or four lying cases. They will be able to travel five hundred kilometers without taking on gasoline, oil, or other supplies and are to carry repair outfits and food supplies. Every man in service with these trains, no matter what his position, must have a French chauffeur's license, thus providing not only greater elasticity in action but enabling the men to drive in relays. The amount of detail connected with the preparation of such units is immense.

_Sat.u.r.day, November 7th._ Two ambulances are being shipped from England to Boulogne, and Colby and myself with two other men are to be sent out to get them. The necessary permits from the General Staff have been applied for.

_Monday, November 9th._ We received this morning the permits for the trip to Boulogne. Dr. Walker and William Iselin are to accompany Colby and myself; we expect to leave early tomorrow morning. We are to drive an ambulance--a twenty horse-power (English rating) Daimler--and on our way shall follow close to the battle line in order to hunt suitable locations for the new ambulance trains. We go by way of Montdidier, Amiens, and Doullens, all of which contain base hospitals.

_Tuesday, November 10th._ We left Paris at ten this morning by the Porte St. Denis and proceeded through Aubervilliers and Ecuen to Chantilly, where we stopped for lunch. The motor had been running very badly, and as no one else seemed willing to try conclusions with it I undertook the task. The trouble proved to be in the carbureter. After I had taken this to pieces and put it together again everything went smoothly. While I was at work, the other members of the party wandered about the town and talked with the inhabitants, whose village had been occupied by the Germans for several days during their dash toward Paris. It was well that the most valuable articles in the museum of the chateau had been hidden away before the Germans arrived, as they carried off pretty much everything that was in sight.

The first Germans who had entered the town had not worn the characteristic spiked helmet and many of the inhabitants had mistaken them for English troops. Early in the war this error was frequently made by French peasants, to whom the British and Germans were equally unknown. The townspeople were still laughing at one old innkeeper who had freely given of his choicest supplies to the supposed Englishmen, and had spent the better part of an afternoon enthusiastically and vigorously grooming their horses, meanwhile keeping up a stream of frightfully abusive remarks "a propos de ces cochons des _Boches_,"

much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of his Teutonic audience.

We arrived in Amiens after dark and there encountered an old friend in Mr. Richard Norton, the American archeologist, who is at present commanding a British Red Cross unit in the field. We had dinner with him and obtained from him much valuable information.

Mr. Norton's train has its base at Doullens. He is tonight in Amiens on official business and has with him only his scout car and its driver. His train has received orders to report early tomorrow morning at a field hospital near the village of Bouzincourt which is only a little more than two miles from the "German" town of Albert. His train is to a.s.sist in the evacuation of some two hundred gravely wounded French soldiers who are threatened by heavy German infantry attacks and are even now under sh.e.l.l fire. At dawn he is to go direct to Bouzincourt in his scout car and there meet his ambulances. We have decided to accompany him to aid, if possible, in removing the wounded.

_Wednesday, November 11th._ After an early breakfast, we followed Mr.

Norton's scout car through a deluge of rain as it proceeded at a dizzy pace toward the sound of battle. We pa.s.sed through the villages of Querrieux, Lavieville, and Millencourt, getting into a "hot"

neighborhood near the latter place.

On arriving at Bouzincourt we found that the German attacks had been decisively repulsed at sunrise this morning and the French surgeons in charge of the field hospital had reconsidered their decision to move the wounded, nearly all of whom were in a precarious condition. The ambulance train therefore returned empty to its base at Doullens, travelling by protected roads, while Mr. Norton's car, with our own, followed along the battle-line, his purpose being to scout for possible wounded in order better to direct the afternoon operations of his train.

Not far from Colincamps we stood upon the crest of a hill beside a group of nine French field guns. They were cleverly concealed in an artificial fence line carefully constructed in all its details along the hilltop. Fence posts had been erected and the artillerymen had also set up the trees, vines, and underbrush which normally follow and accentuate the boundaries between fields. The day was so windy and rainy that we had no fear of being observed by German aeroplanes, and therefore stood tranquilly behind the guns and talked with the commanding officer.

A mile below us in the valley we could through our field-gla.s.ses define the position of the French trenches and beyond them locate the German trenches. Between the two stretched that No Man's Land, called "between the lines," which runs from Ostend through Bethune, Albert, and La.s.signy to Soissons and Rheims and from thence to the Swiss frontier. Following its twistings and turnings this strip of land is four hundred and fifty miles in length. It lies wrapt in uncanny solitude for in all its length there moves no living creature. It changes from beet-fields to plowed land, to pastures and back to the eternal beet-fields again. It runs across farms and over hills, through cities and under forest trees. It varies in width, here narrowing to a few feet, there widening to several hundred yards. Five minutes would be ample time to walk across it anywhere, and yet it is the most impa.s.sable frontier ever marked out by man anywhere on the surface of mother earth. No person may cross it, no matter how exalted his position nor how mighty his influence, for throughout its length hosts of trained men lie ever ready to let loose upon any intruder a thousand sh.e.l.ls and a million bullets.

What sights one might behold if one could, himself invisible, follow this ribbon of scarred earth as it winds its way across Europe from the North Sea to the Alps! Its length is mazed with barbed wire and electric death, and menaced by pits and mines. Heaps of dead men lie in the sun or rain, and the wounded cry faintly and more faintly until they too are dead. The plants and trees are blasted and even the earth has been torn and tortured by explosions.

At some point along this line a moment comes when thousands of men start suddenly out of the bare earth like Sons of the Dragon's Teeth and as promptly charge forward. For a brief moment their shouts are heard through the stillness and then their voices are drowned by one great h.e.l.lish din, made up of the roar of guns, the crash of cannon, the scream of sh.e.l.ls, and the shock of ear-splitting explosions. The ground under their feet heaves and shakes and the air about them is filled with a confusion of flying dust and debris.

As we stood on the hill-crest and talked to the French officer a furious cannonade was going on around us. In our rear, hidden behind hills, three different French batteries were in intermittent action, and somewhere off beyond the valley in front lay the hidden German batteries which were returning their fire. Sh.e.l.ls from both sides pa.s.sed back and forth over our heads and the German sh.e.l.ls banged and burst a thousand yards behind our backs.

The guns beside us were silent. They had, undetected, held their present position for a whole day. They watched the two lines in the valley as intently as these lines watched each other, for in front of us was one of those crucial points against which attacks are frequently launched by the enemy. The batteries beside which we stood waited hour after hour for that sudden critical moment when the Germans should attempt to launch any attack between the lines. These nine guns could together fire two hundred rounds a minute, which means seventy thousand shrapnel bullets. These batteries were connected by telephone with the trenches a mile in front, and also with various observation points from which the results of their fire could be accurately judged and cross-checked.

A few hundred yards to our right in plain view across the open fields was the little village of Auchonvillers. Suddenly a great German sh.e.l.l burst with an earth-shaking shock in the open fields about three hundred yards behind it, throwing up a great cloud of inky black smoke nearly as large as a city block. It made a crater more than a hundred feet in circ.u.mference. The French officers said that it was either a twelve-inch or an "eleven-point-two" and prophesied that a second and more accurate shot would soon follow and strike the village itself. We watched intently and some minutes later a great sh.e.l.l did fall squarely into the little hamlet. Again a great cloud of jet black smoke shot up into the air, but this time it was mixed with bits of houses and fragments of earth. The smoke drifted off slowly, and reluctantly floated away on the wind until some minutes later we were able to discern the town as it emerged from the cloud of dust, showing a great gap in its sky-line.

We had lunch in Doullens with the officers of Mr. Norton's train.

At one point in the front line we heard this story relative to barbed-wire entanglements. A week ago a lieutenant and several of his men ventured forth at night and succeeded in crawling un.o.bserved under the entanglements. Reaching the German trenches they leapt in among their enemies and did much execution; but becoming too enthusiastic, they overstayed their leave, so that none of them ever returned. The Germans, not wishing to be again surprised in such a disagreeable manner, on the next dark night slipped out of their trenches and hung a great quant.i.ty of cowbells upon the lower strands of their wire entanglements. Before many nights had pa.s.sed another party of daring Frenchmen again essayed to crawl to the German trenches but, ringing up the cowbells, were all killed in the resulting fusillade.

Not content to leave the matter as it stood, an intrepid Frenchman crept out on the following night, unwinding a ball of twine as he advanced. He succeeded in attaching the end of this to a cowbell without making any noise to betray his presence. He then made his way safely back to his own trenches and from their shelter vigorously pulled the string. A most unG.o.dly clank and clatter resulted, wrecking the stillness of the night. This aroused the Teutons and led them into a solid hour of furious but futile shooting. The string was similarly pulled on several succeeding occasions and always produced the desired result of uproar and shooting, until it was finally severed by a bullet.

Our party arrived in Hesdin at half-past six this evening. It was raining furiously and the condition of the roads and the obscurity of the night made it extremely hazardous to proceed farther. The village was packed with British transports and we could find only one vacant bed in the whole place. Two of us slept in that and the other two on stretchers in the ambulance.

_Thursday, November 12th._ At eleven o'clock this morning we reached Boulogne, which is at present a British army base and almost deserves to be called an English city. It is filled with troops, with Red Cross and Royal Army Medical Corps, and with transport wagons, all British.

English is heard on all sides and the London Times is by noon on sale in the streets. Bits of the front freshly arrived are much in evidence; one sees everywhere English Tommies on leave, wounded Ghurkas, and convoys of sullen German prisoners.

At present British wounded are being shipped to England at the rate of more than two thousand a day, which is probably one reason why their forces on the Continent have not, in spite of their strenuous recruiting and of the use of Colonial and Indian troops, exceeded two hundred thousand men.

The basins of the harbor at Boulogne are crammed with a heterogeneous ma.s.s of shipping--transports, warships, submarines, torpedo boats, Red Cross steamers, and great rafts of small sailing vessels which were tied up because of the war. The docks and wharves are piled mountain-high with great ma.s.ses of supplies, and parks of ambulances and war automobiles await call to service.

Ambulances run hither and thither carrying wounded to the half dozen Red Cross boats which are tied up to the wharves. Each of these ships is painted white with a great red cross displayed upon either side.

_Friday, November 13th._ We did not succeed in finding the two ambulances for which we had come. Iselin left for London yesterday afternoon to try to trace them in England.

_Sat.u.r.day, November 14th._ On our return trip to Paris we left Boulogne at half-past two yesterday afternoon and made a "forced march" of sixteen hours straight through to Paris, where we arrived this morning at six. It rained in torrents all day yesterday, all night long, and is still pouring today. We three worked in relays, one sleeping in the ambulance while another drove and the third read maps and showed pa.s.sports to sentries. Dr. Walker and I slept while Colby drove alone over well-known roads as far as Abbeville, where we arrived at half-past seven. We left at eight after a hasty supper, and I drove the car straight through to Paris while Dr. Walker managed the maps.

I reported to the Ambulance Headquarters this morning and found that I had been a.s.signed to duty in a.s.sisting Captain Kipling with the executive details of the organization of the new ambulance trains. In future every train is to be composed of five ambulances, one repair car, and one scout car, and is to be manned by an officer and thirteen men. Each such unit is to be complete in itself and is called a "squad." As such it will be a.s.signed to duty with the Paris Hospital, with field hospitals, or with the French, British, or Belgian armies.

The field work is to be controlled from Paris by Captain Kipling and a board of three staff officers. O. W. Budd is to be Chief of Staff, E.

W. McKey, Adjutant, and during the remainder of my short time of service with the Corps I am to have charge of equipment and material.

The Corps has recently been recognized by the French army, and from now on will virtually be a part of that army. It will receive orders direct from the Minister of War and from the General Staffs.