Stories of French Courage
By Edwin L. Shuman
[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]
There has just appeared in Paris a book called "La Guerre Vue d'Une Ambulance," which brings the war closer to the eye and heart than anything else I have read. It is written by Abbé Felix Klein, Chaplain of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, and has the added merit of describing the noble work which American money and American Red Cross nurses are doing there for the French wounded. The abbé, by the way, has twice visited the United States in recent years, has many warm friends here, and has written several enthusiastic books about the "Land of the Strenuous Life."
When the war broke out this large-hearted priest and busy author dropped all his literary and other plans to minister to the wounded soldiers brought to the war hospital established by Americans in the fine new building of the Lycée Pasteur, which was to have received its first medical students a few weeks later. There were 250 beds at first, and later 500, with more than a hundred American automobiles carrying the wounded to it, often direct from the front.
Through all these months Abbé Klein has labored day and night among these sufferers, cheering some to recovery, easing the dying moments of others with spiritual solace, and, hardest of all, breaking the news of bereavement to parents.
From day to day, through those terrible weeks of fighting on the Aisne and the Marne, with Paris itself in danger, the good abbé wrote brief records of his hopes and fears regarding his wounded friends, and set down in living words the more heroic or touching phases of their simple stories. Let me translate a few of them for the reader.
Take, for instance, the case of Charles Marée, a blue-eyed, red-bearded hero of thirty years, an only son who had taken the place of his invalid father at the head of their factory, and who had responded to the first call to arms. During his months of suffering his parents were held in territory occupied by the enemy and could not be reached. The abbé goes on to tell his story:
Let us not be deceived by the calm smile on his face. For six weeks Charles Marée has been undergoing an almost continual martyrdom, his pelvis fractured, with all the consequences one divines, weakened by hemorrhage, his back broken, capable only of moving his head and arms.... He is one of our most fervent Christians: I bring him the communion twice a week, and he never complains of suffering. He is also one of our bravest soldiers; he has received the military medal, and when I asked him how it came about he told me the following in a firm tone and with his hand in mine, for we are great friends:
"It was given to me the 8th of October. I had to fulfill a mission that was a little difficult. It was at Mazingarbe, between Béthune and Lens, and 9 o'clock in the evening. Two of the enemy's armored auto-machine guns had just been discovered approaching our lines. I was ordered to go and meet them with a Pugeot of twenty-five or thirty horse power—I was automobilist in the Thirtieth Dragoons.
"I left by the little road from Vermelles on which the two hostile machines were reported to be approaching. After twenty minutes I stopped, put out my lights, and waited. A quarter of an hour of profound silence followed, and then I caught the sound of the first mitrailleuse. With one spin of the wheel I threw my machine across the middle of the road. That of the enemy struck us squarely in the centre. The moment the shock was past I rose from my seat with my revolver and killed the chauffeur and the mechanician.
"But almost immediately the second machine gun arrived. The two men on it comprehended what had happened. While one of them stopped the machine, the other aimed at me under his seat and fired a revolver ball that pierced both thighs; then they turned their machine and retreated. My companion, happily, was not hurt, so he could take me to Vermelles, where the ambulance service was. The same evening they gave me the military medal, for which I had already been proposed three times."
After three months of suffering, borne without complaint, this man died without having been able to get a word to his parents. The abbé had become deeply attached to him, and the whole hospital corps felt the loss of his courageous presence.
Some of the horror of war is in these pages, as where the author says:
The doctors worked till 3 o'clock this morning. They had to amputate arms and legs affected with gangrene. The operating room was a sea of blood.
Some of the pathos of war is here, and even a little of its humor, but most of all its courage. Both of the latter are mingled in the case of an English soldier who was brought in wounded from the field of Soissons.
"I fought until such a day, when I was wounded."
"And since then?"
"Since then I have traveled."
An English infantry officer, a six-footer, brought to the hospital with his head bandaged in red rather than white, showed the abbé his cap and the bullet hole in it.
"A narrow escape," said the abbé in English, and then learned that the escape was narrower than the wounded forehead indicated. Another bullet, without touching the officer, had pierced the sole of his shoe under his foot, and a third had perforated his coat between the body and the arm without breaking the skin.
The author's attitude toward the Germans, always free from bitterness, is sufficiently indicated in such a paragraph as this:
This afternoon I gave absolution and extreme unction to an Irishman, who has not regained consciousness since he was brought here. He had in his portfolio a letter addressed to his mother. The nurse is going to add a word to say that he received the last sacraments. A Christian hope will soften the frightful news. Emperors of Austria and Germany, if you were present when the death is announced in that poor Irish home, and in thousands, hundreds of thousands of others, in England, in France, in Russia, in Servia, in Belgium, in your own countries, in all Europe, and even in Africa and Asia!... May God enlighten your consciences!
The French wounded in the hospital at Neuilly—during the period when the German right wing was being beaten back from Paris—frequently accused the German regulars of wanton cruelty, but testified to the humanity of the reservists. The author relates several episodes illustrating both points. Here are two:
"The regulars are no good," said a brave peasant reservist. "They struck me with the butts of their rifles on my wound. They broke and threw away all that I had. The reserves arrive, and it is different; they take care of me. My comrade, wounded in the breast, was dying of thirst; he actually died of it a little while afterward. I dragged myself up to go and seek water for him; the young fellows aimed their guns at me. I was obliged to make a half-turn and lie down again."
Another, who also begins by praising the German field officers, saw soldiers of the active army stripping perfectly nude one of our men who had a perforated lung, and whom they had made prisoner after his wound:
"When they saw that they would have to abandon him, they took away everything from him, even his shirt, and it was done in pure wickedness, since they carried nothing away."
One of the most amazing escapes is that of a soldier from Bordeaux, told partly in his own racy idiom, and fully vouched for by the author. After relating how he left the railway at Nanteuil and traversed a hamlet pillaged by the Germans he continues:
We form ourselves into a skirmish line. The shells come. The dirt flies: holes to bury an ox? One can see them coming: zzz—boom! There is time to get out of the way.
Arrived at the edge of the woods, we separate as scouts. We are ordered to advance. But, mind you, they already have our range. The artillery makes things hum. My bugler, near me, is killed instantly; he has not said a word, poor boy! I am wounded in the leg. It is about two o'clock. As I cannot drag myself further, a comrade, before leaving, hides me under three sheaves of straw with my head under my knapsack. The shells have peppered it full of holes, that poor sack. Without it—ten yards away a comrade, who had his leg broken and a piece of shell in his arm, received seven or eight more wounds.
I stayed there all day. In the evening the soldiers of the 101st took me into the woods, where there were several French wounded and a German Captain, wounded the evening before. He was suffering too, poor wretch. About midnight the French soldiers came to seek those who were transportable. They left only my comrade, myself and the German Captain. There were other wounded further along, and we heard their cries. It was dreary.
These wounded men passed two whole days there without help. On the third day the Germans arrived and the narrator gave himself up for lost. But the German Captain, with whom the Frenchmen had divided their food and drink, begged that they be cared for. Ultimately they were taken to the German camp and their wounds attended to. But in a few minutes the camp became the centre of a violent attack, and again it looked as if the last day of the wounded prisoners had come.
Suddenly the Germans ran away and left everything. An hour later, when the firing ceased, they returned, carried away the wounded of both nationalities on stretchers, crowded about twenty-five of them into one wagon (the narrator's broken leg was not stretched out, and he suffered,) and all the way the wagon gave forth the odor of death. All day they rode without a bite to eat. At 1 o'clock at night they reached the village of Cuvergnon, where their wounds were well attended to. The following day the Germans departed without saying a word, but the villagers cared for the wounded, both friends and enemies, and in time the American automobiles carried them to Neuilly.
It is a paradise [added the wounded man.] Now we are saved. But what things I have seen! I have seen an officer with his brain hanging here, over his eye. And black corpses, and bloated horses! The saddest time is the night. One hears cries: "Help!" There are some who call their mothers. No one answers.
All these recitals of soldiers are stamped with the red badge of courage. A priest serving as an Adjutant was superintending the digging of trenches close to the firing line on the Aisne. He had to expose himself for a space of three feet in going from one trench to another. In that instant a Mauser bullet struck him under the left eye, traversed the nostril, the top of the palate, the cheek bone and came out under the right ear. He felt the bullet only where it came out, but soon he fell, covered with blood and believed he was wounded to death. Then his courage returned, and he crawled into the trench. Comrades carried him to the ambulance at Ambleny, with bullets and "saucepans" raining about them from every direction. In time he was transferred to the American Hospital at Neuilly. "I'm only a little disfigured and condemned to liquids," he told his friend the abbé. "In a few weeks I shall be cured and will return to the front."
Abbé Klein tells the curious story of a Zouave and his faithful dog. In one of the zigzag corridors connecting the trenches near Arras the man was terribly wounded by a shell that killed all his companions and left him three-quarters buried in the earth. With only the dead around him, he "felt himself going to discouragement," to use the author's mild phrase, when his dog, which had never left him since the beginning of the war, arrived and began showing every sign of distress and affection. The wounded man told the author:
It is not true that he dug me out, but he roused my courage. I commenced to free my arms, my head, the rest of my body. Seeing this, he began scratching-with all his might around me, and then caressed me, licking my wounds. The lower part of my right leg was torn off, the left wounded in the calf, a piece of shell in the back, two fingers cut off, and the right arm burned. I dragged myself bleeding to the trench, where I waited an hour for the litter carriers. They brought me to the ambulance post at Roclincourt, where my foot was taken off, shoe and all; it hung only by a tendon. From there I was carried on a stretcher to Anzin, then in a carriage to another ambulance post, where they carved me some more.... My dog was present at the first operation. An hour after my departure he escaped and came to me at Anzin.
But when the Zouave was sent to Neuilly the two friends had to separate. At the railway station he begged to take his dog along, and told his story; but the field officer, touched though he was, could not take it upon himself to send a dog on a military train. The distress of both man and beast was so evident that more than one nurse had tears in her eyes as the train pulled out.
They tried to pet the dog, dubbed him Tue-Boches, offered him dog delicacies of all sorts, but in vain. He refused all food and remained for two days "sad to death." Then some one went to the American Hospital, told how the dog had saved the Zouave, and the upshot of it was that the faithful animal, duly combed and passed through the disinfecting room, was admitted to the hospital and recovered his master and his appetite. But at last accounts his master was still very weak, and "in the short visit which the dog is allowed to make each day, he knows perfectly, after a tender and discreet good morning, how to hold himself very wisely at the foot of the bed, his eyes fixed upon his patient."
Thanks to modern science, the cases of tetanus are few in this war, but there are many deaths from gangrene, because, with no truce for the removal of the wounded, so many lie for days before receiving medical aid. Abbé Klein tells of one Breton boy, as gentle a soul as his sister—"my little Breton," he always calls him, affectionately—and comments again and again upon the boy's patient courage amid sufferings that could have but one end. The infection spread in spite of all that science could do, and even amputation could not save him. At last he ceased to live, "like a poor little bird," as his French attendant, herself a mother with three boys in the army, said with tears.
Saddest of all are the bereaved wives and mothers. The reader will find many of them in the good Chaplain's book, and they will bring the war closer than anything else. Sometimes they stand mute under the blow, looking on the dead face without a sound, and then dropping unconscious to the floor. Sometimes they cry wild things to heaven. The Chaplain's work in either case is not easy, and some of his most touching pages depict such scenes.
There was a boy of twenty years, who was slowly but surely dying of gangrene. Let the abbé tell the end of the story:
At 9 o'clock the parents arrive. Frightened at first by the change, they are reassured to see that he is suffering so little, and soon leave him, as they think, to rest. When they return at 10, suddenly called, their child is dead. Their grief is terrible. The father still masters himself, but the mother utters cries. They are led to the chapel, while some one comes to look for me. The poor woman, who was wandering about stamping and wringing her hands, rushes to me and cries, no, it is not possible that her son is dead, a child like that, so healthy, so beautiful, so lovable; she wishes me to reassure her, to say it is as she says. Before my silence and the tears that come to my eyes her groans redouble, and nothing can calm her: "But what will become of us? We had only him."
Nothing quiets her. My words of Christian hope have no more effect than what the father tries to say to her. For a moment she listens to my account of the poor boy's words of faith, of the communion yesterday, of his prayer this morning. But soon she falls back into her distraction, and I suggest to the husband that he try to occupy her mind, to make a diversion of some kind; the more so, I add, as I must leave to attend a burial. She hears this word: "I don't want him to be taken from me. You are not going to bury him at once!" I explain softly that no one is thinking of such a thing; that on the contrary I am going to take her to those who will let her see her boy. We go then to the office, and I hurry away to commence the funeral of another.
I learn on my return that they have seen their son, such as death has made him, and that on hearing the cries of the mother, three other women, already agitated by the visit to their own wounded and by the funeral preparations, have fallen in a faint.
One day last Fall President Poincaré, accompanied by M. Viviani and General Gallieni, was received at the American Hospital by Mr. Herrick, the American Ambassador, and by the members of the Hospital Committee. Abbé Klein has words of praise not only for Mr. Herrick, but also for his predecessor, Mr. Bacon, and for his successor, Mr. Sharp. His admiration for the devoted American women who are serving as nurses in the hospital is expressed frequently in his pages. He says the labors of the American nurses and those of the French nurses complement each other admirably. Of the founding and maintenance of the hospital at Neuilly, he says:
The resources are provided wholly by the charity of Americans. From the beginning of the war the administrative council of their Paris hospital took the initiative in the movement. The American colony in France, almost unaided, gave the half-million francs that was subscribed the first month. New York and other cities of the United States followed their lead, and, in spite of the financial crisis that grips there as elsewhere, one may be sure that the funds will not be wanting. America has its Red Cross, which, justly enough, aids the wounded of all nations; but, among the belligerents, it has chosen to distinguish the compatriots of Lafayette and Rochambeau; our field hospital is the witness of their faithful gratitude. France will not forget.
Later the abbé recorded in his diary that the 500 beds would soon be filled, but added that the generous activity of the Americans would not end there. They would establish branch hospitals. Large sums had been placed at the disposal of the committee to found an "ambulance" in Belgium and another in France as near the front as prudence permitted. Toward the end of January he recorded the gift of $200,000 from Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, and its use by the committee to establish an affiliated hospital at the College of Juilly, in the Department of Seine-et-Marne. He added that still other branches were about to be founded with American funds.
Abbé Klein writes out of a full and sincere heart, whether as a priest, a patriot, or a man who loves his fellowmen; and, without seeking it, he writes as a master of phrase. His new book probably will soon be translated and published in the United States.