An orderly appeared shortly, to inform me that I must make ready to take out a few wounded. My load consisted of one poor fellow on a stretcher, still and invisible under his swathing of blankets, and two very lively chaps,—each with a leg smashed, but able to sit up and talk at a great rate. We offered them stretchers, but they were refused with gay contempt. They hopped forward to their seats, smiling and nodding good-bye to the stretcher-bearers. Despite my efforts one of them bumped his wounded leg and a little involuntary gasp escaped him. "Ça pique, mon vieux," he explained apologetically; "mais ça ne fait rien—allez!"
At the hospital, several miles back, there was the usual wait for papers, and as I handed cigarettes to my two plucky passengers, I explained that hospital book-keeping was tiresome but necessary. Suddenly the blood-stained blankets on the stretcher moved and a pale, but calm and quizzical face looked up into mine: "Oh, là là! C'est une guerre de papier; donnez-moi une cigarette!" You can't down men of this caliber.
Just before bedtime another call came from a dressing-station at the extreme front. It was a thick night, snowing heavily, and black as ink, and I had to drive three kilometres, without light of any kind, over a narrow winding road crowded with traffic of every description. How one does it I can scarcely say. War seems to consist in doing the impossible by a series of apparent miracles. Ears and eyes must be connected in some way. Driving in pitchy blackness, straining every sense and calling every nerve to aid one's eyes, it seems that vision is impaired if ears are covered.
At the posts, just behind the lines, where one waits for wounded to come in from the trenches, I spend idle hours, chatting or playing dominoes. Our little circle comprises a remarkable variety of types: one hears French of every patois, from the half-Spanish drawl of the Mediterranean to the clipped negatives and throaty r of Paris.
As inventors of racy slang we Americans are miles behind the French. Your pipe is "Mélanie" (also your sweetheart, for some unknown reason). One's mess is "la popote," a shrapnel helmet is a "casserole," a machine-gun is a "moulin à café." Bed is ironically called "plumard"; and when a bursting shell sends out its spray of buzzing steel, the cry is "Attention aux mouches!" [Look out for the flies!] Government tobacco is known, aptly, as "foin" [hay]. If one wants a cigarette, and has a paper but no tobacco, one extends the paper toward a better-provided friend saying, "Kindly sign this." And so on.
February 18
I had an interesting day yesterday. The commandant asked for a car—he is the head medical officer—to visit some posts, and I was lucky enough to land the job. He is a charming, cultivated man, and made it very pleasant for his chauffeur. We visited a number of posts, inspecting new dugout emergency hospitals, and vaccinating the stretcher-bearers against typhoid—a most amusing process, as these middle-aged fellows have the same horror of a doctor that a child has of a dentist. Reluctant was scarcely the word.
Finally we left the car (at the invitation of the artillery officer) and walked a couple of miles through the woods to see a new observation post. The last few hundred yards we made at a sneaking walk, talking only in whispers, till we came to a ladder that led up into the thick green of a pine tree. One after another the officers went up, and at length the gunner beckoned me to climb. Hidden away like a bird's nest among the fragrant pine-needles, I found a tiny platform, where the officer handed me his binoculars and pointed to a four-inch hole in the leafy screen. There right below us were two inconspicuous lines of trenches, zigzagging across a quiet field, bounded by leafless pollard willows. It was incredible to think that hundreds of men stood in those ditches, ever on the alert. At a first glance the countryside looked strangely peaceful and unhampered—farm-houses here and there, neatly hedged fields, and, farther back, a village with a white church. Look closer, though, and you see that the houses are mere shells, with crumbling walls and shattered windows; the fields are scarred and pitted with shell-holes, the village is ruined and lifeless, and the belfry of the church has collapsed. Above all, there is not an animal, not a sign of life in the fields or on the roads. Not a sound, except the distant hornet buzzing of an aeroplane.
On clear days there is a good deal of aeroplane activity in our section, and one never tires of watching the planes. The German machines do not bomb us in this district, for some reason unknown to me, but they try to reconnoiter and observe for artillery fire. It is perfectly obvious, however, that the French have the mastery of the air, by virtue of their skillful and courageous pilots and superb fighting machines, and their superior skill in anti-aircraft fire. To watch a plane at an altitude of, say, nine thousand feet under shrapnel fire, one would think the pilot was playing with death; but in reality his occupation is not so tremendously risky.
Consider these factors: he is a mile and a half to two miles from the battery shooting at him, he presents a tiny mark, and his speed is from eighty to one hundred and twenty-five miles per hour. Above all, he can twist and turn or change his altitude at will. The gunner must calculate his altitude and rate of speed, and after the lanyard is pulled, considerable time elapses before the shell reaches its mark. Meanwhile, the aviator has probably come down or risen or changed his course. It is like trying to shoot a twisting snipe with very slow-burning powder—the odds are all in favor of the snipe.