Our Part in the Great War. Gleason Arthur

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СКАЧАТЬ it felt the second flap. We stepped into a little round room, like the dome of an astronomical observatory. It was lit by lantern. Three stretcher bearers were sitting there, and two chaplains, one Protestant, one Roman Catholic. The Protestant was a short, energetic man in the early forties, with stubby black beard and excellent flow of English. The Roman Catholic, Cleret de Langavant, was white-haired, with a long white beard, a quite splendid old fellow with his courtesy and native dignity. These two men, the best of friends, live up there in the shelled district, where they can minister to the wounded as fast as they come in from the trenches. Of one group of thirty French stretcher bearers who have been bringing wounded from Dead Man's Hill to this tunnel, where the Americans pick them up, ten have been killed.

      We went out from the stuffy, overcrowded shelter and stood in the little communicating trench that led from the Red Cross room to the road. We were looking out on 500,000 men at war – not a man of them visible, but their machinery filling the air with color and sound. We were not allowed to smoke, for a flicker of light could draw fire.

      We were standing on the crest of a famous hill. We saw, close by, Hill 340 and Dead Man's Hill, two points of the fiercest of the Verdun fighting. It was the wounded from Dead Man's Hill for whom we waited. Night by night the Americans wait there within easy shell range. Sometimes the place is shelled vigorously. Other nights attention is switched to other points.

      "I shouldn't stand outside," suggested one of the stretcher bearers. "The other evening one of our men had his arm blown off while he was sitting at the mouth of the tunnel. He thought it was going to be a quiet evening."

      But the young American doctor liked fresh air.

      It was a wonderful night of stars, with a bell-like clarity to the mild air and little breeze stirring. A perfect night for flying. We heard the whirr of the passing wings – the scouts of the sky were out. Searchlights began to play. I counted eight at once, and more than twenty between the hills. Sometimes they ran up in parallel columns, banding the western heaven. Sometimes they located the knight errant and played their streams on him at the one intersecting point. Again the lights would each of them go off on a separate search, flicking up and down the dome of the sky and rippling over banks of thin white cloud.

      Star lights rose by rockets and hung suspended, gathering intensity of light till it seemed as if it hit my face, then slowly fell. The German starlights were swift and brilliant; the French steady and long continuing.

      "No good, the Boches' lights," said a voice out of the tunnel. A French stretcher bearer had just joined us.

      Other rockets discharged a dozen balls at once, sometimes red, sometimes green. Then the pattern lights began to play – the lights which signal directions for artillery fire. They zigzagged like a snake and again made geometrical figures. Some of the fifty guns, nested behind us, fired rapidly for five minutes and then knocked off for a smoke. From the direction of Hill 304 heavy guns, perhaps 220's, thundered briefly. We could hear the drop of large shells in the distance. The Germans threw a few shells in the direction of the village through which we had driven, a few toward the battery back of us. We could hear the whistle of our shells traveling west and of their shells coming east. To stand midway between fires is to be in a safe and yet stimulating situation. From the gently sloping, innocent hillocks all about us tons of metal passed high over our heads into the lines. If only one shell in every fifty found its man, as the gossip of the front has it, the slaughter was thorough.

      "It is a quiet evening," said my friend.

      It was as if we were in the center of a vast cavity; there were no buildings, no trees, nothing but distance, and the distance filled with fireworks. I once saw Brooklyn Bridge garlanded with fireworks. It seemed to me a great affair. We spoke of it for days afterward. But here in front of us were twenty miles of exploding lights, a continuous performance for four months. With our heads thrust over the tunnel edge, we stood there for four hours. The night, the play of lights, the naked hill top, left us with a sense of something vast and lonely.

      The Protestant clergyman came and said: "Let us go across the road to my abri."

      He stumbled down two steps cut in clay and bent over to enter the earth cave. "I will lead you," he said, taking me by the arm.

      "Wait while I close the door," he said; "we must not show any light."

      When the cave was securely closed in he flashed a pocket electric. We were in a room scooped out of the earth. The roof was so low that my casque struck it. A cot filled a third of the space. The available standing room was three feet by six feet.

      "You will forgive me for asking it," he went on, "but please use your pocket lamp; mine is getting low and I am far away from supplies. We can get nothing up here."

      My friend handed over his lamp. The clergyman flashed it on a photograph pinned against a plank of wood.

      "My wife," he said; "she is an American girl from Bensonhurst, Long Island. And that is my child."

      He turned the light around the room. There were pages of pictures from the London Daily Mail and the New York Tribune. One was a picture of German soldiers in a church, drinking by the altar.

      "I call this my New York corner," he explained, "and this is my visiting card." From a pile he lifted a one-page printed notice, which read:

      "Declaration Religeuse.

      "I, the undersigned, belong to the Protestant religion. In consequence and conforming to the law of 1905, this is my formal wish: In case of sickness or accident, I wish the visit of a Protestant pastor and the succor of his ministry whether I am undergoing treatment at a hospital or elsewhere; in case of death I wish to be buried with the assistance of a Protestant pastor and the rites of that Church."

      Space is left for the soldier to sign his name. The little circular is devised by this chaplain, Pastor – , chaplain of the – Division.

      At 2 o'clock in the morning we were ordered to load our car with the wounded, one "lying case," three "sitting cases." We discharged them at the hospital, and tumbled into the tent at Ippecourt at 4 o'clock.

       V

      "FRIENDS OF FRANCE"

      American relief work in France has many agencies and activities. I have given illustrations of it, but these are only admirable bits among a host of equals. I have told of the American Field Service. Other sections of young Americans have been at work in the hottest corners of the battle front. The Harjes Formation and the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, known as the Norton Corps, have made a name for daring and useful work with their one hundred cars on the firing line. What the Field Service has done, they too have done and suffered. It was with a glow of pride that I read the name of my Yale classmate, W. P. Clyde, junior, of the Norton Ambulance, cited in an order of the day, and made the recipient of the French War Cross. The commanding general wrote of him:

      "Volunteer for a perilous mission, he acquitted himself with a cool courage under a heavy and continuous fire. He has given, in the course of the campaign, numerous proofs of his indifference to danger and his spirit of self-sacrifice."

      I have shown the contribution of scientific skill and mechanical ingenuity which Americans have made in hospital and ambulance work. There remains a work in which our other American characteristic of executive ability is shown. Organization is the merit of the American Relief Clearing House. When the war broke out, American gifts tumbled into Paris, addressed and unaddressed. There was a tangle and muddle of generosity. The American Relief Clearing House was formed to meet this need. It centralizes and controls the receipt of relief from America intended for France and her Allies. It collects fresh accurate information on ravaged districts and СКАЧАТЬ