[Sidenote: The nurses stay with the wounded.]
One of our workers, who was at the hospital, told me that her first impulse was to run for an _abris_ as we would do at the canteen, but when she looked about her and saw everybody composedly going on with duty, she gathered herself together and did the same--"Although," she added, "my teeth just rattled at first." Some of the wounded were terrified and begged not to be left; and that called out the mother instinct in the women, so that they forgot to be afraid.
The Germans swept the hospital with their machine guns and did their best to bomb it, but fortunately made no hits. It was finally necessary to put out all lights and to cease work. It was a most trying ordeal, because the buildings were of pine, close together, and a direct hit probably would have started a fire which would have burned the wounded as they lay.
[Sidenote: The sound of battle draws near.]
About half past one I went up to our mess and crawled into an empty bed.
The next morning when I awakened it was to the sound of distant cannon.
This meant that the battle was drawing nearer.
[Sidenote: A ride on an ambulance.]
An especially hard day kept me on the strain from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and when I returned to the mess I found no dinner and no servants. Our directrice, antic.i.p.ating evacuation, had dismissed them. Only a little Belgian refugee, a sort of "slavey," hung on, because she had no other place to go. Tired out, I managed to make an omelet and a cup of tea, and to fry some griddle cakes to replace the bread which was conspicuous by its absence. Then I stationed myself in front of the canteen hoping to flag a pa.s.sing ambulance. An American driver stopped his car, and a Frenchman, who was beside him on the front seat, jumped down to help me up. This man had a bandage around his throat, and when I asked him if he was wounded, he made a hissing sound in reply. The American driver explained that he could not speak because he had a bullet through his windpipe. There were six badly wounded men on the stretchers inside, but we heard not a sound from them.
[Sidenote: A night of horrors.]
I shall not soon forget that night I had steeled myself to meet horrors, and knew that I _must not_ let them affect me. Yet in spite of terrible wounds, there was little sound of suffering. The place was wonderfully quiet.
When I got inside of the receiving room, a group of our women who had been at work all afternoon were still moving about, white and hollow-eyed with fatigue. A French doctor asked if I could not bring some food there from the canteen. It was Thursday. Some of the men had been wounded on Tuesday, and had had no food and little water.
[Sidenote: Bringing up food for the wounded.]
I found an English girl with an empty ambulance, who risked a reprimand for leaving without orders, and we flashed back to the canteen, and loaded up with twenty gallons of hot chocolate, bread, about three hundred hard boiled eggs, some kilos of chocolate, and raw eggs and sugar. We flew back to the hospital; but there was a big convoy of ambulances just in, so that we could not get up to the main buildings.
We scouted around in the dark to find a place to deposit our stuff and open a temporary kitchen, and, returning to the ambulance, we came across a wounded boy who had sunk on a bench. The ambulance driver had pa.s.sed him, making his way on foot, but being full-up, she was unable to give him a lift. He was wounded in the chest, was exhausted, and had no great-coat. It was absolutely necessary to get him under cover and to give him warmth and nourishment. We put our arms around him and tried to help him along, but soon it was apparent that he had not the strength to make the reception ward.
[Sidenote: Holding up a boy too weak to stand.]
The English girl said, "You hold him up while I get a stretcher"; so I jammed myself up against the side of a building and put my arms about the boy while his weight grew heavier and heavier against me. I could not let him slip, because the roadway was narrow and a long string of ambulances, without lights, was pa.s.sing. He never uttered a sound, but his arms moved convulsively. As he felt himself growing weaker, he put them around my neck, and clung to me precisely as a frightened child would. It seemed an age while I waited there, warning off ambulances that were about to shave us too closely. I could not help wondering where that boy"s mother was, what she was doing, or if he had a mother.
And I thought some terrible thoughts about war and some wicked ones about Germans.
[Sidenote: Dispensing food to the wounded.]
The girl came with her stretcher at last, and we got the boy on it.
Then we went about setting up our feeding station. Hungry men limped in, bandaged mostly about the head, and _how_ they consumed hard boiled eggs and drank hot chocolate! I left the English girl dispensing food and drink, while I took to the badly wounded a mixture of beaten egg, hot milk and sugar. Here and there men asked for a piece of chocolate or bread, but most of the wounded wanted only the liquid food. They would say with their awful English c.o.c.kney accent, "Ah! that"s good!" or "Prime stuff!" or "Could you spare a little more, sister?" In spite of dreadful wounds, they were full of pluck.
[Sidenote: Great numbers of wounded in stretchers.]
For the next two hours I gave water and egg mixture to all sorts and conditions of men--English, French, Canadians, Moroccans, Senegalese.
The doctor asked if I knew enough to administer morphine hypodermics, and I regretfully admitted that I did not, while I registered a vow to learn. Then some American Red Cross men appeared, and some English doctors. Before midnight three or four long Red Cross trains had been filled with wounded, and sent out. Yet at that hour more than five hundred wounded men still lay on their stretchers on the gra.s.s outside.
And all the while, as I worked, I thought of how, as soon as the moon came up, we should hear the familiar roar and rattle of the bombs, and of how the shrapnel and machine gun bullets would rain down on those upturned faces.
[Sidenote: The hospital floors are crowded.]
But, grace to heaven, the Germans did not come that night! At midnight I went into Ward 4, where some of the worst wounded had been placed.
Stretchers had been laid on top of the beds and flat on the floor on both sides of the central aisle, till one could hardly move. Most of the wounded seemed to sleep. Only here and there one begged for water, and these men were usually wounded in the abdomen where not even water could be given. We could moisten their lips and wipe off the hot feverish faces, and that was all.
[Sidenote: Everything possible has been done.]
By one o"clock it was evident that the most of what could be done had been done. Another section of our women had arrived with more food, and I went out to the covered way between the receiving room and the operating room, to steal a ride home on the driver"s seat of some departing ambulance. An English boy, who had been ga.s.sed, asked me hoa.r.s.ely if I could get him a blanket, and I did so. Another man was there, on whose eyelashes and eyebrows something that looked like ice seemed to hang. I think it was an application to soothe gas-burns.
It was two o"clock before I got to bed at the mess. The English officer was still occupying my apartment. I might pa.s.s off my action in resigning it to him as philanthropy, but candor compels me to admit that I was glad of an excuse to stay at the house where there was company in case of a bombing raid.
[Sidenote: The French bills come in.]
Friday was a long, tense day. The French merchants and all the people with whom we had dealings, antic.i.p.ating our withdrawal, swarmed in with accounts. When the G.A.N. (Grand Armee Nationale) sent in its request for a check (previously, I had been obliged fairly to windla.s.s their bill out of them), I knew the French would evacuate. The Commandant sent for the Directrice, and advised her to follow French headquarters wherever it might move. He said he was evacuating all French hospitals and had turned over all evacuation hospitals to the English. No more wounded French were to be brought into E----.
[Sidenote: The German aviators bomb hospitals again.]
All day I worked without food, and after 7.30 got supper for myself and three companions. We hoped for a night"s rest, but the Germans began bombing us at dusk, and kept it up till daylight. They were after hospitals, as we knew by the fact that the dropping bombs were at a distance from us and the regular line. All night the machine-gun battle went on--our own guns at E----, warring with the sweeping planes overhead. We got so tired of going to shelter, and so accustomed to the firing, that we finally stayed in our rooms and even opened our shutters to peer out into the calm summer sky. Sh.e.l.ls were bursting and ground signals of colored lights were streaming skyward. It was too exciting to sleep until we gave out from sheer exhaustion. I managed to get an intermittent slumber from four until seven.
[Sidenote: The town is full of refugees.]
As there was no breakfast at our mess, I went to the canteen for a cup of coffee, and found the place crowded. The French Commander said that our town was due to be sh.e.l.led before long as we were getting in range of the German guns. We decided not to go until we had to, but to cease keeping the canteen open at night; to sell only hot coffee, chocolate, bread, cheese, eggs and apples by day--thus omitting our hot meal--and to divide our forces, one part to run the canteen, another to organize a temporary canteen on the grounds of the evacuation hospital, and still another to maintain the rolling canteen at the railway station. The streets were almost blocked with refugees. I saw one unconscious woman in a wheelbarrow being trundled by a boy. Regiments went through, going up to the front, the men"s faces stern and set. The sound of the battle grew louder and louder.
[Sidenote: An airplane sweeps the street with a machine gun.]
That night we bundled our bedding into the Ford camion, and slept in one of the deep champagne caves. I had volunteered to go on duty at the canteen at six the next morning, and arriving there on time, found two or three hundred tired and hungry men waiting for the doors to open.
The night before a great thermos marmite had been filled with boiling coffee, and we were able to begin feeding the men without delay. All day we did a tremendous business. About half past nine a German plane came over, tried to bomb us, and swept the street with a machine gun. We continued serving and pouring out coffee. The aviator killed a woman and child who were standing in a garden, and then one of our machine guns got him. The plane, a three pa.s.senger one, came tumbling down into the public square. The pilot was caught with both legs under the engine and was badly hurt, but the observer and the gunner were uninjured. An infuriated Frenchman, who had seen the killing of the woman and child, rushed up and killed the gunner as they lifted him out. I got these facts from an American staff car driver who a.s.sisted in extricating the pilot. That morning, our guns got three German planes.
[Sidenote: A German sh.e.l.l hits twenty-seven.]
At one that afternoon I left the canteen, and went home for the bath which I had missed that morning. I had just finished dressing when a German sh.e.l.l pa.s.sed over the house, killing, as they said, twenty-seven persons.
[Sidenote: The distant thunder of battle.]
I elected to stay over night at the hotel instead of going to the champagne cave. No sound disturbed the night except the distant thunder of the battle and the bursting of sh.e.l.ls which were falling about a thousand yards short of the town. The Germans were trying to destroy the bridge over the Marne, to cut our communication with Rheims, but they did not have the range.
Copyright, The Forum, November, 1918.
Volumes of detailed narrative could not sum up more graphically what the American Army did in France than did the summary written by General Pershing, presented in the following pages.
THE AMERICAN ARMY IN EUROPE
GENERAL JOHN J. PERSHING
[Sidenote: Organization of the American army.]
With French and British armies at their maximum strength, and all efforts to dispossess the enemy from his firmly intrenched positions in Belgium and France failed, it was necessary to plan for an American force adequate to turn the scale in favor of the Allies. Taking account of the strength of the central powers at that time, the immensity of the problem which confronted us could hardly be overestimated. The first requisite being an organization that could give intelligent direction to effort, the formation of a General Staff occupied my early attention.
[Sidenote: The division.]