The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me Part 3

A road roller always was in sight. No road ever got b.u.mpy and at given distances along the road were repair stations for the government automobiles. Nothing was allowed to stop the machinery of war. At night along these country roads, thirty kilos back from the line we travelled with lights; so that night out of Rheims, we hurried through the night, pa.s.sed village after village swarming with soldiers, black and yellow and white; for the colour line does not irritate the French; and we saw how gay and happy they were, crowding into picture shows, listening to the regimental band, sitting on the sidewalks before the cafes, or dancing with the girls in the parks.

Then a time came when the village streets were lonely and dark and we knew that the bugle had sounded taps. And so in due course we came to the end of the day's journey, at the end of a spur of the railroad, near one sector of the Verdun front. There we found a field hospital of four thousand beds. And when there is to be renewed French activity on the Verdun sector, the first thing that happens is the general evacuation of all the patients in the hospital. It takes a great many railroad trains to clear out a hospital wherein six thousand wounded men are jammed. We saw one hospital train loading. This hospital had handled twenty-six hundred cases in one day the week before we arrived. The big guns that we had heard booming away for three days as we went up and down the line had been grinding their awful grist. We walked through the hospital, which covered acres of ground. It is a board structure, some of the walls are not even papered, but show the two-by-fours nakedly and the rafters above. Stoves heat most of the wards, and hospital linoleum covers the runways between the rows of beds. Of course, the operating rooms are painted white and kept spotless.

The French are marvellous surgeons, and their results in turning men back to the line, both in per cent of men and time are up to the normal average of the war; but they are not so finical about flies and fresh air and unimportant dirt as the English or the Americans. They probably feel that there are more essential things to consider than flies and their trysting places! In this hospital we saw our first wounded German prisoners. We saw boys fifteen years old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. We saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic type, wearing gla.s.ses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubby looking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust and the sc.u.m of the earth."

And we saw also some well-set-up Germans, and in a bull-pen near the railroad station waiting for the trains to take them to the interior of France were six thousand German prisoners--for the most part well-made men. Here and there was a scrub--a boy, a defective, or an old man; showing that the Germans are working these cla.s.ses through the army; but indicating, so far as one batch of prisoners from one part of the battle line may indicate, that the Germans still have a splendid fighting army. But the old German army that came raging through Belgium and northern France in 1914 is gone.

Germany is well past the peak in man power, as shown in the soldiers of the line. It is also likely that the morale of the German line has its best days behind it. The American ambulance men in the Verdun sector told us of a company of German soldiers who had come across a few nights before to surrender, after killing their officers.

They appeared at about ten o'clock at night, and told the French to cease firing at exactly that time the next night for ten minutes and another troop of Germans would come across. The French ceased at the agreed hour and thirty more came over and brought the mail to their comrades! That, of course, is not a usual occurrence. But similar instances are found. The best one can say of the German morale in the army is that it is spotted. In civilian life the nearer one gets to Germany the surer one is that the civilian morale seems to be sound. These things we found in the air up near the front line trenches, where German prisoners talk, and where one sees the war "close up."

But we were going still nearer to the German lines, and the next day we set out for Recicourt and arrived there about noon. It is a little bombed village where a few thousand soldiers are quartered, and a few score villagers huddle in cellars and caves by night and go forth to their farms by day. The village lies in a ravine. The railway runs in front of the town, and the week we were there a big naval gun was booming away on the railroad throwing death into the German lines eight or ten miles away. At the back of the town, across a bridge over a brook the white wagon road runs, and that day the road was black with trucks going up to the front line with supplies. We could hear the big guns plainly over in the woods a few miles away. But we had no thought of danger as we tumbled out of our car. We should have known that bombed villages don't just grow that way! Something causes the gaping holes in roofs, the shattered walls, the blear-eyed windows and battered out-buildings!

Generally it is German sh.e.l.ls, but we had been seeing bombed towns for days, and we forgot that sooner or later we must meet the bombs that did the miserable work. As we stood by the automobiles at Recicourt, kicking the wrinkles out of our cotton khaki riding breeches--and mine, alas, had to be kicked carefully to preserve that pie-slice cut from my s.h.i.+rt tail that expanded the waistband from 36 to 44 inches--little did it seem to Henry and me that we should first meet a German sh.e.l.l face to face in a place like Recicourt. The name did not sound historic. But we had scarcely shaken hands around the group of American Ambulance men who gathered to greet us before we heard a B-A-N-G!--an awful sound! It was as if someone suddenly had picked up the whole Haynes Hardware store--at Emporia--tinware, farm implements, stoves, nails and shelf-goods, and had switched it with an awful whizz through the air and landed it upon the sheet-iron roof of Wichita's Civic Forum, which seats six thousand! We looked at each other in surprise, but each realized that he must be casual to support the other; so we said nothing to the Ambulance boys, and they, being used to such things, let it pa.s.s also. We went on talking; so did Major Murphy, being a soldier.

So did Mr. Richard Norton, being head of the American Ambulance Service. In a minute there was a fearful whistle--long, piercing, and savage, and then they had taken the Peters Hardware stock in Emporia and dumped it on the Wichita Union Station. This time we saw a great cone-shaped cloud of dirt rise not 400 feet away--over by the wagon road, across the brook from us. Still no one mentioned the matter. It seemed to Henry and me to be anything but a secret, but if the others had that notion of it, far be it from us to blab!

An ambulance driver came lazying around the corner and began to start his car.

"Any one hurt, Singer?" asked a handsome youth named Hughes, of the Corps.

"Man hit by the first sh.e.l.l up here by the railroad. I'm going after him."

"Hurt badly?" asked another boy.

"Oh, arm or shoulder or something blown off. I'll be back for lunch."

The details interested us; we could see that the secret was being uncovered. Again came an awful roar and another terrific bang--this time the dust cloud rose nearer to us than before--perhaps 300 feet away. Every one ducked. In five seconds they had taught me to duck.

It's curious how quickly the adult mind acquires useful information.

But Henry for some reason got a bad start, and his duck needed correction. To duck, you scrooch down, and shrink in, to get as much as possible of your body under the eaves of your steel helmet.

Somewhere between the second and third bang, they got a helmet on me. No one knows where it came from, nor how it got there. But there it was, while they were correcting Henry's duck. In spite of them, when he ducked, Henry would lean forward, thus multiplying his exposure by ten. But it really does a fat man little good to duck anyway; the eaves of his helmet hardly cover his collar. It was while they were trying to telescope Henry that some one grabbed me by the arm and said: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!" Abri was a brand new word to me, but it seemed to be some place to go and that was enough for me.

"Where" (read this line with feeling and emphasis) "is the abri?"

The ambulance boy took me by the arm and led me on a trot to a dugout covered with railroad iron, and logs and sand bags, and we went in there and found it full of French officers. They have some sense. The abri would not turn a direct explosion of a sh.e.l.l; but it would s.h.i.+eld one against a glancing blow and against the shrapnel which sprays itself out from the point where the sh.e.l.l hits like a molten iron fountain. After the ninth bomb had come over we left the abri. The Germans had been allowancing Recicourt to nine a day. But that day they gave us three more prunes for dessert. They came very close and fairly fast together. As they came Henry was sitting in the barn where the ambulance boys had their meals. Lunch was on the table and Henry was writing. The sh.e.l.ls sounded just outside the barn. "What are you writing, Mr. Allen?" asked Major Murphy. "I'm sketching," stuttered the Wichita statesman, "a sort of a draft of the American terms of peace!"

After three extra bombs had come in the Germans turned their guns from the town, and we had our lunch at our ease. And such a lunch! A melon to begin with; a yellow melon that looks like the old-fas.h.i.+oned American muskmelon and tastes like a nectar of the G.o.ds, followed by onion soup. Then followed an entree, a large thin slice of cold sausage which they afterward told us was made of horse meat, a pate of some kind, then roast veal sliced thin and slightly underdone with browned potatoes; then new beans served as a separate course; then fruit and cheese and coffee and cigars!

And that in a barn!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!"]

We had to go up to a first aid station after lunch so we piled into an ambulance, were b.u.t.toned in from the back by the driver, and went sailing up the hill and into the woods. They told us that we were in the Avecourt Woods in the Forest of Hess. We remembered that but a few weeks before when we were in our newspaper offices, that the Avecourt Woods had been the scene of some fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y fighting. And as we rode up the hill we heard the French cannon roaring all about us. We were told that four thousand cannon were planted in the Avecourt Woods, but only about a thousand of them were active that day. Yet we could see none, so completely were they hidden by camouflage. The woods were barren of leaves or branches though they should have been in foliage. We gazed through the windows of the ambulance into the stark forest with its top off, and then rather gradually it occurred to me that the white objects carefully corded against the tree trunks were not sticks of cord wood at all, as they seemed, and as they should have been if the wood had been under the ax instead of under fire. They were French seventy-five sh.e.l.ls--deadly bra.s.s cartridges two feet long, all nicely and peacefully corded against the trunks of the big trees! We rode through them for several miles. Beside the road always were the little heaps of road metal, little heaps of stone, and always the engineers stood ready to refill the holes that might be made by the incoming sh.e.l.ls. And occasionally they were coming in; though they seemed to be landing in a distant part of the forest. The ear becomes curiously quick at telling the difference between what are known as arrives and departs. The departs were going out that day at the ratio of 32 to one arrive. For the Germans had wasted enough ammunition on the Verdun sector and were trying to economize!

Still the arrives were landing in the Avecourt wood every minute or so, and they were disquieting. Only the chirping of our own broad-mouthed Canaries there in the roofless forest gave us cheer.

For some way the sound of the sh.e.l.ls of our own guns shrieking over us is a deep comfort; it is something like the consolation of a great faith.

At last, seven or eight miles in the forest, we came upon the first aid post, a quarter of a mile from the opposite edge of the wood and but half a mile from the front line trenches of Verdun The first aid post there was a cellar, half excavated, and half covered with earth, and roofed with iron rails, logs and sandbags. The usual French doctors, stretcher bearers and American Ambulance men were there. And there was the little cemetery, always found at a first aid post where those are buried who die on the stretchers or in the dugout. It was lovingly adorned by the French with the tri-colour of France, with bronze wreaths, with woodland flowers, and was altogether bright and beautiful in the bare woods. They showed us a sh.e.l.l by the cave--a gas sh.e.l.l that had come over during the morning and had hit on the oblique and had not exploded. It was gently leaking chlorine gas, which we sniffed--but gingerly. Other sh.e.l.ls were popping into the place and fairly near us with some regularity and enthusiasm, and it seemed to Henry and me that we had no desire to stare grim war's wrinkled front out of countenance, and we hoped that the Major and Mr. Norton were nearly ready to go back. But we heard this:

From the Major: "How far forward can we go toward Hill 304; we would like to see it, but have no desire to go further than you care to have us."

And from the French lieutenant in charge: "Go to Berlin if you want to!"

It occurred to Henry and me, considering our feelings, that the Major's nonchalant use of that "we" was without the consent of the governed. But when he started forward we followed. Our moral cowardice overwhelmed our physical cowardice, and our legs tracked ahead while our hearts tracked back. The Major swung along the road at a fast clip; Mr. Norton went with him. For short-geared men we followed as fast as we could, but it was at a respectful distance.

Nearer and nearer we came to the open field, and by the same token, quicker and nearer and hotter came the German sh.e.l.ls. We were continually on the duck. Our progress had an accordion rhythm that made distance come slow. We came to a dead mule in the road. He had been bombed recently, and was not ready for visitors. Now a mule is not nature's masterpiece at his best; but in the transition state between a mule and hamburger, a mule leaves much to be desired. As we pa.s.sed the forward reaches of the mule, Henry began his kidding. He always begins to guy a situation under emotion.

"Bill," he cried, "if we die we'll at least save our nice new hundred dollar uniforms down there in Paris!" And from me he got this: "And say, Henry--if we die we won't have to face our wives and tell 'em we paid that much for a two-piece suit! There's that comfort in sudden death!"

It seemed to Henry and me that we had seen all there was to be seen of the war. Hill 304 would be there after the treaty of peace was signed and the Major and Norton then could come to see it. But they were bound for Berlin; so we slowly edged by that poor mule; he seemed to be the longest mule we had ever--well, he seemed to be a sort of trans-continental mule, but we finally got past him and came to the edge of the woods. It took about three ducks to twenty yards, and pa.s.sing the mule we had four downs and no gain.

That gave the Germans the ball. So when we got to the edge of the wood and were standing looking into the French trenches and at Hill 304 off at our right, after the Major had handed Norton the field gla.s.ses and Norton had considerately handed them to Henry, who pa.s.sed them to me for such fleeting glance as politeness might require, the Germans came back with that ball. It came right out of Berlin, too. One could hear it howl as it crossed the Thiergarten and went over Wilhelm Stra.s.se and scream as it whizzed over Bavaria. There never was another such sh.e.l.l. And we ducked--all of us. Henry said he never saw me make such a duck--it was the duck of a life-time.

And then that sh.e.l.l landed. It was a wholesale hardware store that hit--no retail affair. The sound was awful. And then something inside of me or outside tore with an awful rip. We had been reading Dr. Crile's book on the anesthesia of fear, and suddenly it occurred to me that the sh.e.l.l had hit me and torn a hole in me and that fear had deadened the pain. Slowly and in terror my right hand groped back to the place of the wound, expecting every moment to encounter blood and ragged flesh. We were still crouched over, waiting for the fountain of junk to cease spraying. Nearer and nearer came the shrinking fingers to the wound. They felt no blood, but something more terrible! There, dangling by its apex, hung that pie-shaped slice of s.h.i.+rt from those cotton khaki trousers--ripped clear out!

And Paris fifty miles away!

Slowly we unfolded ourselves from the duck. And as we came up--sping!

went a sharp metallic click on Norton's helmet. A bit of shrapnel had hit it. Under a hat he would have been killed! So we went back to the first aid post--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer force of will, and both hands!

So long as Norton and the Major had led the way from the dugout, it simultaneously flashed over Henry and me that we should lead the way back, and not leave all the exertion to our companions. So we set the pace back.

At the first aid post we stopped for breath. The French welcomed us back, and we rested a moment under their hospitality. Our own French guns were carolling away; the arrives were coming in. It seemed to Henry and me that we were not so badly frightened as we knew we were. For we kept a running fire going of airy persiflage--which was like the noise of boys whistling through a graveyard. Henry said: "That German gunner is playing by ear! His time is bad, or else it's syncopated." Then to Major Murphy: "Nice sightly location that Hill 304; but I noticed real estate going up a good deal in the neighbourhood!" And to the a.s.sembled company in the dugout he remarked as he pulled out his pipe, a short Hiram Johnson, bulldog model that he had bought on the Rue de Rivoli, "If you gentlemen will get out your gas masks now I'll light my dreadnaught!" Which he did and calmed his iron nerves. So in a few moments we came out of the post and went to our ambulance which would take us back to Recicourt. Clouds had blown across the sky and as we pa.s.sed the gay little cemetery by the dugout, we were shocked to see the body of a French lieutenant laid ready for burial. He had met death while we played the fool in our twenty minutes' walk.

We rode to Recicourt greatly sobered, and it was hours before we could get back our spirit. Of course, eventually, kind hands pinned up the rent in the corsage of those khaki trousers. They used a dozen big steel safety pins as large as railway spikes. And that night as we were preparing for bed in a shack near a hospital, Henry gazed curiously at the job as it glittered before him in our corner, when, his friend's tunic being removed, the wealth of metal was uncovered. Henry was impressed. "Bill," he said gently, as he gazed admiringly at his friend's armour, "I don't know as I ever saw a man before with so much open plumbing on him as you're wearing these days!"

For a long time we lay awake and talked about the day's experience, and particularly our half day under fire. We agreed that really it was not so bad. We were scared--badly scared; but we could laugh at it, even at the hottest of it, and it was never so exceedingly hot. Yet we might have been killed. Thousands who died, went out in just such mild places as we had been through, and probably went out laughing as we might have gone, by a jiggle of a quarter of an inch one way or another of the German's gun. Our Wichita and Emporia soldiers, we said, would doubtless live days and weeks under what we had seen and would grow fat on it. Then Henry mused: "I wonder if that young French lieutenant there in the woods went out smiling!" And then for a long time no one spoke, and at last we slept.

[Ill.u.s.tration: So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer force of will and both hands!]

CHAPTER IV

WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"

This chapter will contain the story of our visit to General Pers.h.i.+ng and the American troops. But before we came to that part of France which holds our men we pa.s.sed through divers warlike and sentimental enterprises which lay across our path, and while we relate the story of these adventures, the reader must wait a few moments before we disclose the American flag. But the promise of its coming may buoy him up while the preliminary episodes clog the narrative.

One afternoon we were chugging along in our Red Cross ambulance coming down from the first aid posts where we had been talking to some American Ambulance boys on the French Front, when we noticed the arrives were landing regularly so we knew that the Germans were after something in the neighbourhood--perhaps a big gun, perhaps an ammunition dump. We were speculating upon the nature of the target when we whirled around a corner and saw it. It was a cross-road.

Four roads forked there; the Germans, of course, had it marked. It was getting its afternoon pour parler; for they believed that the ammunition trains would be pa.s.sing that cross-road at that time.

And as we looked out of the windows of the ambulance our hearts jumped--at least Henry's and mine jumped--as we saw that between us and the forks of the road a great French camion had skidded and stalled, with two wheels over the embankment that raised the road from the swamp about us, effectually blocking our way. "This,"

said Major Murphy, taking in the situation quickly, "is a mighty dangerous place." As the word "place" escaped him he was on the ground. He had slid through a window of the ambulance. The ambulance drivers--Singer and Hughes--neglecting to unlock the ambulance doors, ran up the road and began working with the drivers of the camion to get the great van on the road again. The other occupants of the ambulance also hurried to the camion--through the windows of the ambulance; no one was left to unb.u.t.ton the thing for Henry and me. Henry insists that he was there alone; that he was afraid to follow me through the window for fear of sticking in it. He had not been avoiding fats, sugars and starches for a year and had no girlish lines in his figure. And the arrives were certainly bouncing in rather brashly. The rest of us were out in the open where we could duck and perhaps avoid the spray of shrapnel. But an ambulance was no more protection against fifty pounds of German junk than an umbrella. And there sat Henry in the ambulance wistfully looking through the window of the vehicle and realizing that his exposure was less in a dignified sitting posture in the ambulance than it would be horizontally half in and half out of the thing, held fast in the vain endeavour to get away. So he waited for the next "arrive" to come with commendable fort.i.tude. And then it came. It sounded like the old grand-daddy of all sh.e.l.ls. We fancied we could sense its direction; possibly that was imagination. But anyway we looked toward the German lines and realized Henry's grave danger.

And then it struck--whanged with an awful roar about seventy-five feet from us, against the bare trunk of a sh.e.l.l-stripped tree.

We knew without looking that the sh.e.l.l had hit the tree. Then our consciousness recorded the fact that a French soldier had been standing by that tree. And slowly and in terror we turned our eyes tree-ward. The tree was a ma.s.s of splinters. It looked like a special sale of toothpicks in a show window. Then we turned our eyes toward the place where we had last seen the French soldier.

We hardly dared to look. But instead of seeing a splatter of blood and flesh upon the earth by the tree stump, we saw the soldier rise from the buck-brush where he had been ducking, and light a cigarette. The sh.e.l.l had hit not a dozen feet above him, but had sprayed its fountain from him, instead of toward him. He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a second at his inconvenience. But so far as we could see, the fact that death had reached for him and missed him by inches had left no impression upon his mind. Three years in war had wrought some deep change in him. Was it entirely in his nerves or was it deeper than nerves, a certain calmness of soul--or was it merely a dramatic expression of a soldierly att.i.tude? We did not know. But to Henry and me, who had been rescued from death by that tree that stopped the sh.e.l.l headed straight for us, it seemed that we should come back after the war was over and nail a medal of honour and a war cross on the stump, and put up a statue there with an all-day program! We had no desire to hide our fright! It relieved us to chatter about the tablet on that tree stump!

The French soldier strolled over to us; helped to straighten out the camion, and when we learned that he was going down the hill we gave him a lift. He was a hairy, dirty, forsaken looking poilu who, washed and shaved and cla.s.sified, turned out to be an exchange professer from the Sorbonne, who had spent a year at Harvard, and it was he who told us of the bombing of the hospital at Landrecourt; we'll call it Landrecourt to fool the censor, who thinks there is no hospital there. At the mention of the hospital the Major turned to us and said: "That's where we sent that pretty red-headed nurse who came over with you on the boat. And," added the Major, "that is the hospital equipped by Mrs. Chesman, of New York!" whose name is also changed to fool the censor. It was a better known name!

"Say," exclaimed Henry, "the Aunt of the Gilded Youth!"

"You mean our ambulance boy who came over on the boat with you--the multimillionaire?" asked the head of the American Ambulance service.

"The same," answered Henry, who turned to me and said in his oratorical voice: "The plot thickens." Then the Frenchman told us the story of the raid: How the airmen had come at midnight, dropped their bombs, killing nurses and doctors, and how the discipline of the hospital did not even flutter. He said that the head nurse summoned all her nurses, marched them to the abri at the rear of the hospital, and stood at the door of the abri, while the girls filed in, and just as the last nurse was going into the dugout with the head nurse standing outside, the airmen dropped a bomb upon her and erased her! None of the nurses inside was hurt. Two doctors were killed and a number of patients. Landrecourt was on our way and we hurried to it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a second at his inconvenience]

Was there ever a martial adventure without a love story in it?

Little did it seem to Henry and me as we left our humble homes in Wichita and Emporia to make the world safe for democracy, that we two thick-set, sedentary, new world replicas of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza should be the chaperons and custodians of a love affair. We were not equipped for it. We were travelling light, and our wives were three or four thousand miles away. No middle-aged married man gets on well with a love affair who is out of daily reach of his wife. For when he gets into the barbed wire tangle of a love affair, he needs the wise counsel of a middle-aged woman. But here we were, two fat old babes in the woods and here came the Gilded Youth, the Eager Soul and the Young Doctor--sping! like a German sh.e.l.l--right into our midst, as it were.

There at Landrecourt we found the Eager Soul, a badly scared young person--but tremendously plucky! And mad--say, that girl was doing a strafing job that would have made the kaiser blus.h.!.+ And the fine part of it was, that its expression was entirely in repression.

There was no laugh in her face, no joy in her heart, and we scarcely knew the sombre, effective, business-like young person who greeted us. And then across the court we saw something else that interested us. For there, walking with his patrician aunt, we saw the Gilded Youth. Evidently he had heard of the raid, had run over from Valaincourt on some sort of military permission.