Our Part in the Great War

"And this is worse yet," he added, as he took out from the inner breast pocket a brown leather wallet. Through one flap the same shrapnel bullet had penetrated. Together, coat and wallet had saved this young man's life.

"That's the sort of thing that wouldn't go anywhere," Pierce went on. He is a Maine man, and has a pleasant drawl.

Wheeler's car was shot through, the slatting ripped at the driver's place, the sides a mess. A man on his right and a man at his left were killed. The stuff passed over his head as he knelt before a tire. The boys have been playing in luck. A dozen fatalities were due them in the June drive at Verdun. This was the fiercest offensive of the four months, and they stood up to it.

We were looking west, and as we looked an aeroplane burst into flames. As it fell, it left a trail of black smoke, funnel shaped, and always at the point of that funnel the bright spark, and at the heart of that spark a man burning to death. The spark descended rather slowly, with a spiraling movement, and trailing the heavy smoke. It burned brightly all the way to the horizon line, where it seemed to continue for a moment, like a setting sun on the earth's rim. Then it puffed out, and only the smoke in the sky was left. In another moment the light wind had shredded the smoke away.

It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and we had been coming from Paris at full tilt to get to the Etat Major and report ourselves. So, after watering the car and shaking hands all around, we started off, and straightway the rear left tire went flat, and its successor went flat, and for the third time it went flat. So we crawled to a village at midnight, and laid by for repairs.

At 3 a.m. we rose. There was no dressing to be done, as we had rested in our clothes. We ran out past the city of Verdun on the road going east to Fort de Tavannes. Wheat was ripening to the full crop in a hundred fields about us. All the birds were singing. The pleasant stir and fullness of summer were coming down the air.

Then on a sudden the famous Tier de Barrage broke out – the deadly barrier of fire that crumbles a line of trenches as a child pokes in an ant hill: the fire that covers an advance and withers an enemy attack. Here was what I had been waiting for through twenty-one months of war. I had caught snatches of it at a dozen points along the line. I had eaten luncheon by a battery near Dixmude, but they were lazy, throwing a shell or two only for each course. But here, just before the sun came up, 200 feet from us, a battery of twelve 75s fired continuously for twenty minutes. Just over the hill another battery cleared its throat and spoke. In the fields beyond us other batteries played continuously. Some of the men put cotton in their ears.

We ran through a devastated wood. The green forest has been raked by high explosive into dead stumps, and looks like a New Hampshire hillside when the match trust has finished with it. The road is a thing of mounds and pits, blown up and dug out by a four months' rain of heavy shells. The little American cars are like rabbits. They dip into an obus hole, bounce up again and spin on. They turn round on their own tails. They push their pert little noses up a hill, where the road is lined with famous heavy makes, stalled and wrecked. They refuse to stay out of service.

We rode back through the partially destroyed city of Verdun, lying trapped and helpless in its hollow of hills. We drove through its streets, some of them a pile of stones and plaster, others almost untouched, with charming bits of water view and green lawns and immaculate white fronts. The city reminded me of the victim whom a professional hypnotist displays in a shop window, where he leaves him lying motionless in the trance for exhibition purposes.

Verdun lay seemingly dead inside the range of German fire. But once the guns are forced back the city will spring into life.

Then we returned to the ambulance headquarters and in an open tent shared the excellent rations which the field service provides for its workers. We were sitting with the French lieutenant and discussing the values of rhythm in prose when the boys shouted to us from the next field. An aeroplane was dipping over an anchored sausage-shaped observation balloon. The aeroplane had marked its victim, which could not escape, as a bird darts for a worm. The balloon opened up into flame and fell through thirty seconds, burning with a dull red.

The hours we had just spent of work and excitement seemed to me fairly crowded, but they were mild in the life of the field service. They pound away overtime and take ugly hazards and preserve a boy's humor. More young men of the same stuff are needed at once for this American Ambulance Field Service. The country is full of newly made college graduates, wondering what they can make of their lives. Here is the choicest service in fifty years offered to them.

Even a jitney wears out. Bump it in the carburetor enough times, rake it with shrapnel, and it begins to lose its first freshness. More full sections of cars should be given. The work is in charge of Piatt Andrew, who used to teach political economy in Harvard, was later Director of the Mint, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and secretary of Senator Aldrich's Monetary Commission.

As soon as twilight fell we started on the nightly round. Here was Section 4 of the American Ambulance doing hot service for Hill 304 and Dead Man's Hill. It was on this ride that I saw the real Verdun, the center of the deadliest action since men learned how to kill. The real Verdun is the focused strength of all France, flowing up the main roads, trickling down the side roads and overflowing upon the fields. The real Verdun is fed and armed by the thousands of motor cars that bray their way from forty miles distant, by the network of tiny narrow gauge railways, and by the horses that fill the meadows and forests.

Tiny trucks and trains are stretched through all the sector. They look like a child's railroad, the locomotive not more than four feet high. They brush along by the road, and wander through fields and get lost in woods. The story goes in the field service that one of these wee trains runs along on a hillside, and just back of it is a battery of 220's which shoot straight across the tracks at a height of three feet. The little train comes chugging along full of ammunition. The artillery men yell "Attention," and begin firing all together. The train waits till there seems to be a lull, and goes by under the muzzles.

We were still far enough from the front to see this enginery of war as a spectacle. The flashing cars and bright winged aeroplanes, the immense concourse of horses, the vast orderly tumult, thousands of mixed items, separate things and men, all shaped by one will to a common purpose, all of it clothed in wonder, full of speed and color – this prodigious spectacle brought to me with irresistible appeal a memory of childhood.

"What does it remind me of?" I kept saying to myself. Now I had it:

When I was a very little boy I used to get up early on two mornings of the year: one was the Fourth of July and the other was the day the circus came to town. The circus came while it was yet dark in the summer morning, unloaded the animals, unpacked the snakes and freaks, and built its house from the ground up. Very swiftly the great tents were slung, and deftly the swinging trapezes were dropped. Ropes uncoiled into patterns. The three rings came full circle. Seats rose tier on tier. Then the same invisible will created a mile long parade down Main Street, gave two performances of two hours each, and packed up the circus, which disappeared down the road before the Presbyterian church bell rang midnight.

A man once said to me of a world famous general: "He is a great executive. He could run a circus on moving day." It was the perfect tribute. So I can give no clearer picture of what Pétain and his five fingers – the generals of his staff – are accomplishing than to say they are running one thousand circuses, and every day is moving day.

Our little car was like a carriage dog in the skill with which it kept out of the way of traffic while traveling in the center of the road. Three-ton trucks pounded down upon it and the small cuss breezed round and came out the other side. The boys told me that one of our jitneys once pushed a huge camion down over a ravine, and went on innocent and unconcerned, and never discovered its work as a wrecker till next day.

But soon we passed out of the zone of transports and into the shell-sprinkled area. We went through a deserted village that is shelled once or twice a day. There is nothing so dead as a place, lately inhabited, where killing goes on. There is the smell of tumbled masonry and moldering flesh, the stillness that waits for fresh horror. Just as we left the village, the road narrowed down like the neck of a bottle. It is so narrow that only one stream of traffic can flow through. By the boys of the field service this peculiarly dangerous village of Bethlainville is known as "Bethlehem" – Bethlehem, because no wise men pass that way.

The young man with me had been bending over his steering gear, a few days before, when a shrapnel ball cut through the seat at just the level of his head. If he had been sitting upright the bullet would have killed him. And another bullet went past the face of the boy with him. The American Field Service has had nothing but luck.

"But don't publish my name," said my friend. "It might worry the folk at home."

We rode on till we had gone eighteen miles.

"Here is our station."

I didn't know we were there. Our Poste de Secours was simply one more hole in the ground, an open mouth into an invisible interior – one more mole hole in honeycombed ground.

We entered the cave, and something hit my face. It was the flap of sacking which hung there to prevent any light being seen. We walked a few steps, hand extended, till 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 suffering people. It prevents waste and overlapping and duplication. It obtains free transportation across the ocean for all gifts, free entry through the French customs, and free transportation on all the French railways. It forwards the gifts to the particular point, when it is specified. It distributes unmarked supplies to places of need. It receives money and purchases supplies. It has 114 persons giving all their time to its work. It has issued 45,000 personally signed letters telling of the work. It employs ten auto trucks in handling goods. It has concentrated time, effort and gifts. It has obtained and spread information of the needs of the Allies. It has been efficient in creating relationship between the donor in America and the recipient in France, and in increasing good will between the nations. I do not write of the Clearing House from the outside, but from a long experience. For many months my wife has given all her time to making known the work of Miss Fyfe who manages the work of relief for civilians, their transportation, and conducts a refugee house, and a Maternity Hospital in the little strip of Belgium which is still unenslaved. Little local committees, such as Miss Rider's in Norwalk, in Cedar Rapids, in Montclair, and in Douglaston, L. I., have been formed, and 36 boxes of material, and over $1,500 in money, have been given. Those supplies the Clearing House has brought from New York to La Panne, Belgium, free of charge, promptly, with no damage and no losses. What the Clearing House has done for this humble effort, it has done for 60,000 other consignments, and for more than a million dollars of money. It has distributed supplies to 2,500 hospitals and 200 relief organizations in France. It has sent goods to Belgium, Salonica, to the sick French prisoners in Switzerland. It dispatched the ship Menhir for the relief of Serbian refugees. It has installed a complete hospital, with 200 beds and a radiograph outfit. The cases which it transports contain gauze, cotton, bandages, hospital clothing, surgical instruments, garments, underwear, boots, socks. The names of the men who have administered this excellent organization in Paris are H. O. Beatty, Charles R. Scott, Randolph Mordecai, James R. Barbour, and Walter Abbott.

After the claims of immediate dramatic suffering, comes the great mute community of the French people, whose life and work have been blighted. And for one section of that community the Association of "Les Amis des Artistes" has been formed. "To preserve French art from the deadly effects of the war, which creates conditions so unfavorable to the production of masterpieces of painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, engraving," is the object of this society. The members see that other forms of activity will swiftly revive after the war. "The invaded districts will be rebuilt, business will flourish. But art will have a hard and prolonged struggle." The society purchases from its funds the works of men of talent whom the war has robbed of means of support. These paintings, statuary, engravings, so acquired, are annually divided among the members. The purchase is made by a committee composed of distinguished artists, critics and connoisseurs, representing the three great French salons and the various art tendencies of the modern movement. The Honorary Committee includes Bakst, Hanotaux, Maeterlinck, Rodin and Raemaekers. Americans who are aiding are Mrs. Mark Baldwin, Mrs. Paul Gans, Walter Gay, Laurence V. Benét, and Percy Peixotto.

The new American fund of the "Guthrie Committee" for the relief of the orphans of war has been recently announced. It is planned to raise many millions of dollars for this object.

Children, artists, invalid soldiers, refugees – there is a various and immense suffering in France at this moment, and no American can afford to be neutral in the presence of that need. The sense of the sharp individual disturbance and of the mass of misery came to me one day when I visited the Maison Blanche. We entered the open air corridor, where a group of thirty men rose to salute our party. My eye picked up a young man, whose face carried an expression of gentleness.

"Go and bring the War Minister your work," said the Major who was conducting us.

A little chattering sound came from the lips of the boy. It sounded like the note of a bird, a faint twittering, making the sound of "Wheet-Wheet" – twice repeated each half minute. Then began the strangest walk I have ever seen. His legs thrust out in unexpected directions, his arms bobbed, his whole body trembled. Sometimes he sank partly to the ground. His progress was slow, because he was spilling his vitality in these motions. And all the time, the low chirrup came from his lips. More laborious and cruel than the price paid by the victims of vice was this walk of one who had served his country.

And yet nothing in the indignity that had been done to his body could rob him of that sweetness of expression.

"A shell exploded directly in front of him," explained the doctor, "the sudden shock broke his nervous system, and gave him what is practically a case of locomotor ataxia. He trembles continuously in every part. It forces out the little cry. The effect of that shock is distributed through his entire body. That is what gives hope for his recovery. If the thing had centered in any one function, he would be a hopeless case. But it is all diffused. When the war ends many of these men who are nerve-shattered, will recover, we believe. As long as the war lasts, they live it, they carry a sense of responsibility, with the horror that goes with it. But when they know the shelling is over for ever they will grow better."

In a few minutes the young soldier returned carrying two baskets. The one thing that is saving that man from going crazy is his basket making. Very patiently and skillfully his shaking hands weave close-knit little baskets. Some of them were open trays for household knick-knacks. Others were worked out into true art shapes of vase. I shan't forget him as he stood there trembling, the little reed baskets rocking in his hands, but those baskets themselves revealing not a trace of his infirmity. Only his nervous system was broken. But his will to work, his sweet enduring spirit, were the will and the heart of France.

The War Minister, in whose hands rests the health of four million soldiers, is as painstaking, as tender as a nurse. Fifteen minutes he gave that man – fifteen minutes of encouragement. The rest of France waited, while this one little twitching representative of his race received what was due from the head of the nation to the humblest sufferer. Do I need to say that the soldier was bought out? Professor Mark Baldwin and Bernard Shoninger held an extempore auction against each other. But one basket they could not buy and that was the tray the man had woven for his wife. He was proud to show it, but money could not get it. And he was a thrifty man at that. For, as soon as he had received his handful of five-franc notes, he went to his room, where he sleeps alone so that his twittering will not disturb the other men, and hid the money in his kit. Something more for his wife to go with the basket.