Our Part in the Great War. Gleason Arthur

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СКАЧАТЬ one French Medecin Chef travel with the wounded men. It carries 240 stretchers and 24 sitting cases in its eight cars for "Les blessés." The five other cars are devoted to an operating room, a kitchen for bouillon, a dining car, a sleeping car for the surgeons, and the other details of administration. Safety, speed and comfort are its slogan. The stretchers rest on firm wooden supports riding on an iron spring. The entire train is clean, sweet smelling, and travels easily. J. E. Rochfort, who has charge of it, went around to the men on stretchers as they lay on the platform.

      "You rode easily?" he asked.

      "Très bien: très confortable."

      If an emergency case develops during the long ride, the train stops while the operation is performed. It is also held up at times by the necessities of war. For the wounded must be side-tracked for more important items of military demand—shells, food, fresh troops.

      Village and town along its route turn out and throng the station to see the "Train Americain." The exterior of the cars carries a French flag at one end, and, at the other, the American flag. I like to think of our flag, painted on the brown panel of every car of the great train, and brightly scoured each day, riding through France from Verdun to Paris, from Biarritz to Revigny, and the thousands of simple people watching its progress, knowing its precious freight of wounded, saying, "Le train Americain," as they sight the painted emblem. It is where it belongs—side by side with the Tricolor. There isn't a great question loose on the planet to-day, where the best of us isn't in accord with the best of France.

      That is the biggest thing we are doing over there, carrying a message of good-will from the Yser to Belfort, up and down and clear across France, and "every town and every hamlet has heard" not our "trumpet blast," but the whirr of our rescue motors and the sweetly running wheels of our express. It is one with the work of the Ambulance Hospital, where, after the bitter weeks of healing, the young soldier of France receives his discharge from hospital. Looking on the photograph and plaster cast of what shell-fire had made of him, and seeing himself restored to the old manner of man, he has a feeling of friendliness for the Americans who saved him from the horror that might have been. The man whose bed lay next walks out on his own two legs instead of hobbling crippled for the rest of his life, and he remembers those curious devices of swinging splints, which eased the pain and saved the leg. He, too, holds a kindly feeling for the nation that has made him not only a well man, but a whole man. And America has two more friends in France, in some little village of the province.

      This work of the hospital, the train, the motor ambulance, is doing away with the shock and hurt of our aloofness. These young Americans, stretcher-bearers and orderlies, surgeons and nurses, drivers and doctors, are unconscious statesmen. They are building for us a better foreign policy. It is a long distance for friendly voices of America to carry across the Atlantic. But these helpers are on the spot, moving among the common people and creating an international relationship which not even the severe strain of a dreary aloofness can undo. Our true foreign policy is being worked out at Neuilly and through the war-cursed villages. This is our answer to indifference: the gliding of the immense train through France, carrying men in agony to a sure relief; the swift, tender handling of those wounded in their progress from the trench to the ward; the making over of these shattered soldiers into efficient citizens.

      The quarrel none of ours?

      The suffering is very much ours.

      Too proud to fight?

      Not too proud to carry bed-pans and wash mud-caked, blood-marked men. Not too proud to be shot at in going where they lie.

      Neutrality of word and thought?

      We are the friends of these champions of all the values we hold dear.

      War profits out of their blood?

      Many hundreds have given up their life-work, their career, their homes, to work in lowly ways, with no penny of profit, no hope of glory, "just because she's France."

III

       Table of Contents

      THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS

      This is the story of the American Ambulance Field Service in the words of the boys themselves who drove the cars. Fresh to their experience, they jotted down the things that happened to them in this strange new life of war. These notes, sometimes in pencil, sometimes written with the pocket fountain pen, they sent to their chief, Piatt Andrew, and he has placed these unpublished day-by-day records of two hundred men at my disposal. Anybody would be stupid who tried to rewrite their reports. I am simply passing along what they say.

      One section of the Field Service with twenty cars was thrown out into Alsace for the campaign on the crest of Hartmannsweilerkopf. Here is some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Hartmannsweilerkopf is the last mountain before the Plain of the Rhine, and commands that valley. The hill crest was taken and retaken. Here, too, is the one sector of the Western Front where the French are fighting in the enemy's country. Alsace has been German territory for forty-three years. The district known as Haute Alsace is a range of mountains, running roughly north and south; to the east lies German Alsace, to the west the level country of French Alsace. On the crest of the mountains the armies of France and Germany have faced each other. The business of the ambulances has been to bring wounded from those heights to the railway stations in the plain.

      John Melcher, Jr., says of this work:

      "The mountain service consists in climbing to the top of a mountain, some 4,000 feet high, where the wounded are brought to us. Two cars are always kept in a little village down the mountain on the other side. This little village is a few kilometers behind the trenches, and is sometimes bombarded by the Germans. The roads up the mountain are very steep, particularly on the Alsatian side. They are rough and so narrow that in places vehicles cannot pass. These roads are full of ruts, and at some points are corduroy, the wood practically forming steps. On one side there is always a sheer precipice."

      "If you go off the road," writes one of our young drivers, "it is probably to stay, and all the while a grade that in some parts has to be rushed in low speed to be surmounted. Add to this the fact that in the rainy (or usual) weather of the Vosges, the upper half is in the clouds, and seeing becomes nearly impossible, especially at night. Before our advent the wounded were transported in wagons or on mule-backs, two stretchers, one on each side of the mule. Two of us tried this method of travel and were nearly sick in a few minutes. Imagine the wounded—five hours for the trip! That so many survived speaks well for the hardihood of the "Blue Devils." Now with our cars the trip takes 1½ or 2 hours. We get as close to the trenches as any cars go. Our wounded are brought to us on trucks like wheelbarrows, or, at night, on mules, about one-half hour after the wound is received. This is hard service for both cars and drivers, and it is done in turn for five days at a time; then we return to St. Maurice to care for the cars and rest; the ordinary valley service is regarded by us as rest after the spell on the hills.

      "Car 170 (the E. J. de Coppet Car) has been doing well on this strenuous work. The two back fenders have been removed, one by a rock in passing an ammunition wagon, and the other by one of the famous "75's" going down the hill.

      "The men appreciate it. Often, back in France, we are trailed as the 'voitures' they have seen at Mittlach, or as the car which brought a comrade back. They express curiosity as to our exact military status. The usual thing when we explain that we are volunteers is for them to say "chic." When they learn that the cars are given by men in the United States whose sympathy is with them, they nod approval."

      Another СКАЧАТЬ