MARY HELEN FEE

Thousands of automobile trucks.

When the first offensive began to the north of us, we, who were stationed in the American Canteen at E——, not more than fifteen miles from Rheims, were thrilled by the sight of the thousands of automobile trucks, which like a mighty river flowed ceaselessly by our canteen carrying French troops up to the English front; and we grew sad when we beheld ambulance convoys hurrying in the same direction.

We could not be oblivious to certain signs which pointed to renewed activity in our sector. The American ambulance boys predicted with the emphasis and at the same time with the vagueness born of surmise instead of exact knowledge, that we should "see something doing" in a few weeks.

Few German airplanes.

What chiefly excited our curiosity, however, was the scarcity of German airplanes. Although the days were clear and fine for observing, only occasionally did the barking of guns call us outside to behold a little white, shimmering object skipping defiantly through extremest blue while tufts of woolly cloud broke far below it, serving only to aid us in detecting the almost invisible plane. One came over one night just about sunset, and called us and our dinner guests from the beginning of a meal. Another paid us an early morning call. Then for nearly three weeks we enjoyed undisturbed rest at night. Not once did the "alerte" send us shivering to damp cellars; not once did we hear the deep "boom" followed by a savage jar and rattle which differentiates the falling bomb or torpedo from the cannon. We said, fatuously, that we believed all the airplanes were engaged up on the English front, and that at last our mastery of the air must be firmly established.

News of the second offensive.

The permissionaires return in good humor.

It was on a Monday that the news of the second offensive reached us. Trains from Paris were delayed and the Paris papers did not arrive, but the ambulance men told us there was a German offensive from Rheims to Soissons. Next day the canteen was crowded with permissionaires hastily recalled from leave and hurrying to join their regiments at the front. Most of them had passed through, ten to two days before, in the subdued good humor with which the poilu hails his bath, disinfecting, clean clothes, and relative security of body while on a ten days' leave. They were going back to face death, mutilation, and an experience which drives many men mad. There was no undue hilarity about them, but a quiet determination which has been reflected in the stand made by the armies. Here and there a weakling had tried to escape thought in drink, but the percentage of that sort was very small.

Three weeks' respite of raids.

On Tuesday more news drifted in, and that night I did not fully undress on going to bed. So strongly can the sense of optimism be grown from little habit that a respite of three weeks from bombing attacks had almost (though not quite) convinced me there would never be any more. I may explain that I was serving as canteen accountant, and occupied a tiny three-room apartment across the street from the canteen, between it and the railway station, and I took my meals at one of the two Red Cross houses maintained in E——.

Objective of a bomb attack.

When a town is bombed, the Germans have various objectives, principally the railway stations, troop barracks, canteens, munition dumps, food stores, and hospitals. As a rule, when private homes are destroyed, it is because they happen to be close to these points of attack. Torpedoes are too expensive to be wasted in chance destruction.

Lights are extinguished in the war zone.

In towns in the war zone, great precaution is taken to prevent even a thin line or dot of light from showing at night. Only the railroad shows its signal lights, and these are put out at the first alarm, while all moving trains come to a standstill and extinguish what lights they carry. The lamps in passenger coaches are always put out when the train enters the war zone. So the bombing aviator has a rather difficult task in getting his bombs exactly where he wants them. The bomb must be released about a thousand feet in advance of the object aimed at, and the plane must pass over and reverse its course before a second bomb can be thrown at the same target. The course of a plane can be followed by tracing its bombs.

My position during a bombing raid was most unenviable. A torpedo cast at the railway station and going a bit too far was likely to land on the two-story brick house in which I was lodged. One cast at the canteen, and falling short, was likely to do the same.

Anticipating air raids.

It is fashionable among the workers in France to affect great indifference to danger. I am free to confess that I am not a particularly courageous woman. My imagination is active, and on nights when we expect a bombing raid I always go through a period of misery before going to bed. I would not for anything leave the war zone, but I have always a lively vision of coming out of slumber to the accompaniment of fearful noise and the crashing of the building atop, and then my coward imagination paints pictures of lying torn and anguished under settling weights of being burned alive while disabled and unable to extricate myself. Oddly enough, all my terrors vanish with the falling of the first bomb. I cannot remember being in what the English call a "blue funk" while a raid is going on, though many a time I have been in one beforehand.

Premonition of danger.

Tuesday night some subtle instinct warned that trouble might come. In accordance with a natural forethought I slipped into a suit of underwear and woollen stockings under my nightdress. I must have been asleep in three minutes after my head touched the pillow, for I was dead tired.

A bomb lands close by.

The sky blazes with shells.

I wakened with the sense that I had heard a gun, and, with one stockinged foot thrust out of bed, wondered sleepily whether it was the first, second or third of the alerte, or whether indeed I had not wakened from a dream of a gun. Probably it was the last gun of the alerte, for the next sound was the thunderous roar of a bomb which clearly had landed close by (it got a railway shed and a freight car on the tracks behind me). The terrific noise and the shock to our building, which rattled as if it were coming down, considerably accelerated my movements. I snapped on the electric torch which always lay, together with my cap and slippers, beside the bed, slipped a skirt over my nightdress and my great-coat atop, and got into the cap and slippers in record time. But by the time I had crossed the flagged passage and wrestled with the lock of the "grande porte" there was no getting out of the house. The canteen, directly across the street, lay in utter darkness, lights out, doors locked. There was no hope of using it as a short cut to the abris, or shelter, on the other side, while to try to go around it was almost certain death. The sky was ablaze with breaking shells from our seventy-fives; shrapnel was falling like hail in the streets, while the steady "pup-pup" of machine-guns—both our own and the bombing planes'—advised all who could to remain under shelter. The noise of our guns and of the bombs was like a small inferno.

Waiting through the raid alone.

I stayed it out—about twenty minutes—alone in that dark flagged hallway, and it was lonesome. When the shrapnel and machine-gun fire let up sufficiently to make it safe, I crept along under the shelter of the eaves to the door of a courtyard next door where I knew one of our cooks lived. She had invited me a few days before, to refuge there instead of trying to get over the abris, because, she said, the whole upper lofts were full of hay, and it had been demonstrated that bombs will not penetrate to any depth in hay. But the door was locked, and though I beat upon it with my electric torch, nobody heard me. I finally took advantage of a lull in the firing, when the Germans went back to their own lines for more ammunition, to get over the abris.

There one of the women on night duty at the canteen told me that the directrice and everybody else not on night duty, had gone up to the evacuation hospital about ten o'clock, in response to a call for aid from the French authorities.

Many wounded in the hospitals.

In E—— there were half a dozen large hospitals. The wounded, chiefly English, were coming in faster than the hospital corps could handle them. They needed our help, not only in registering the men—very few of whom understood any French—but in feeding and giving water.

I got to the hospital the next day and worked steadily till eight thirty. Then an ambulance driver gave me a lift as far as the canteen, and I managed to get a cold supper at our mess.

Dispensing hospitality to worn-out officers.

I was hardly in my office before I heard a knock at the door, which, as I was alone in the house, I always locked at night as soon as I entered. In response to my "Who's there?" a voice, guided by my English, replied, "I am an English officer." I threw open the door without a second's hesitation. A young officer, weary, white-faced, stood there, beginning to apologize as he saw my uniform and white veil. He was simply "done," he said—and he looked it. He had found every hotel was full, and, seeing a few gleams of light behind the shutters, he had knocked in the hope of finding shelter for the night. I knew that the woman at the canteen who would go off duty at midnight was scheduled to go immediately to the hospital to work until seven in the morning and that I could occupy her bed after I came back from the hospital, and I offered my apartment to the officer for the night. He was most grateful, and I rushed over to the canteen to get him a pitcher of hot water and a cup of chocolate. But there I found a group of French officers, who said they had neither sleep nor rest for three days and nights, pleading for some place to lie down. As there was a comfortable leather couch in my office, besides a wide soft couch over which I had laid my steamer rug, and, in addition, an exceedingly soft double bed in my room which I thought the tired Englishman ought to be willing to share with an equally tired man, I proffered my hospitality, which was gratefully accepted. I piloted them across to the office, and returned to the canteen, hoping to find an American ambulance boy who would run me over to the hospital.

A new raid begins.

Directing men to shelter.

Help from American boys.

I sighted a group of the familiar uniforms, and was heading for it when, bang! went a falling bomb, without any warning alerte. The next instant all lights were out, and the French soldiers were swarming through the door. As all the other women in the canteen had set duties to perform—putting out fires, locking up money and food—and I, not being on duty, had none, I stationed myself at the door, calling out to the soldiers where they would find shelter. Being transients, they did not know where to find refuge. But long before the canteen was empty, the machine-gun bullets were sweeping the street and the shrapnel was raining down. Two American boys came up in the darkness, and one said in the quietest tone of authority, "Get between us, lady!" They backed me up against the side of the canteen, close under the shelter of the eaves, and stood one on each side of me. I had no trench-helmet, so one of them took his sheepskin driving coat, folded it, and put it over his head and mine. As soon as a lull in the firing permitted, we ran across the street to the abris. The Germans went back several times for more ammunition and continued the bombing for nearly two hours.

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.

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.

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, anticipating 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 passing 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.

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.

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 passed 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.

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 passing. 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.

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 cockney 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.

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 grass 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.

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.

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 gassed, asked me hoarsely 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 pass 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.

The French bills come in.

Friday was a long, tense day. The French merchants and all the people with whom we had dealings, anticipating our withdrawal, swarmed in with accounts. When the G.A.N. (Grand Armée Nationale) sent in its request for a check (previously, I had been obliged fairly to windlass 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——.

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. Shells 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.

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 shelled 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.

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 passenger 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 assisted in extricating the pilot. That morning, our guns got three German planes.

A German shell 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 shell passed over the house, killing, as they said, twenty-seven persons.

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 shells 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.

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.