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."