I have left the American train standing at the platform all this time, but it rests there till the afternoon, for it takes three hours to clean it for its trip back to the front. Only three hours—one more swift job by our contingent. It is the best ambulance train in France. The huge luggage vans of the trans-continental expresses were requisitioned. Two American surgeons and one French Medecin Chef travel with the wounded men. It carries 240 stretchers and 24 sitting cases in its eight cars for "Les blessés." The five other cars are devoted to an operating room, a kitchen for bouillon, a dining car, a sleeping car for the surgeons, and the other details of administration. Safety, speed and comfort are its slogan. The stretchers rest on firm wooden supports riding on an iron spring. The entire train is clean, sweet smelling, and travels easily. J. E. Rochfort, who has charge of it, went around to the men on stretchers as they lay on the platform.
"You rode easily?" he asked.
"Très bien: très confortable."
If an emergency case develops during the long ride, the train stops while the operation is performed. It is also held up at times by the necessities of war. For the wounded must be side-tracked for more important items of military demand—shells, food, fresh troops.
Village and town along its route turn out and throng the station to see the "Train Americain." The exterior of the cars carries a French flag at one end, and, at the other, the American flag. I like to think of our flag, painted on the brown panel of every car of the great train, and brightly scoured each day, riding through France from Verdun to Paris, from Biarritz to Revigny, and the thousands of simple people watching its progress, knowing its precious freight of wounded, saying, "Le train Americain," as they sight the painted emblem. It is where it belongs—side by side with the Tricolor. There isn't a great question loose on the planet to-day, where the best of us isn't in accord with the best of France.
That is the biggest thing we are doing over there, carrying a message of good-will from the Yser to Belfort, up and down and clear across France, and "every town and every hamlet has heard" not our "trumpet blast," but the whirr of our rescue motors and the sweetly running wheels of our express. It is one with the work of the Ambulance Hospital, where, after the bitter weeks of healing, the young soldier of France receives his discharge from hospital. Looking on the photograph and plaster cast of what shell-fire had made of him, and seeing himself restored to the old manner of man, he has a feeling of friendliness for the Americans who saved him from the horror that might have been. The man whose bed lay next walks out on his own two legs instead of hobbling crippled for the rest of his life, and he remembers those curious devices of swinging splints, which eased the pain and saved the leg. He, too, holds a kindly feeling for the nation that has made him not only a well man, but a whole man. And America has two more friends in France, in some little village of the province.
This work of the hospital, the train, the motor ambulance, is doing away with the shock and hurt of our aloofness. These young Americans, stretcher-bearers and orderlies, surgeons and nurses, drivers and doctors, are unconscious statesmen. They are building for us a better foreign policy. It is a long distance for friendly voices of America to carry across the Atlantic. But these helpers are on the spot, moving among the common people and creating an international relationship which not even the severe strain of a dreary aloofness can undo. Our true foreign policy is being worked out at Neuilly and through the war-cursed villages. This is our answer to indifference: the gliding of the immense train through France, carrying men in agony to a sure relief; the swift, tender handling of those wounded in their progress from the trench to the ward; the making over of these shattered soldiers into efficient citizens.
The quarrel none of ours?
The suffering is very much ours.
Too proud to fight?