I would say for him after he took hold that never once did he stumble.
They finally landed me safely, and with fewer jars and jolts than were to have been expected, at a small station where I became a passenger on a curious ambulance. It was made of a stretcher swung between two enormous wheels that one sees on rustic carts. An old fat horse drew this ambulance. The stretcher swung gently between the wheels as he stolidly plodded over rough ground, sometimes muddy, sometimes rocky. It was slow moving, for night had come and all along our course shell-craters, which would capsize the ambulance did it slump into them, had to be guarded against.
My wounds sometimes set viciously to work to give me pain, but again would show mercy. I found a certain soothing effect in the swing of the hammock. And I stared up at the stars that were brilliant and thought how wonderful it was that I was alive at all and reflected whether if I were to be able to fight no more, my country might not make use of me in drilling her other young sons to “carry” on in her tremendous and noble cause.
The good, old fat horse bore me two miles on my way and brought me to a motor ambulance. It had three bunks in it and two were already occupied. When I was placed in this ambulance I began to think that perhaps I had been premature in believing my life saved. For I knew enough of ambulances to know that the bottom bunk is reserved for the carrying of the most dangerously wounded and it was into the bottom bunk they slid me.
I am perfectly willing that Henry Ford should have such advertising as may be from me, for it was an ambulance of his make I rode in, and the fact that it could proceed at all over the roads we had to travel and often enough no roads whatsoever—in and out of gulleys, shell-holes, over sunken fields up pathless hills and finally land me at No. 9 Clearing Station of the Red Cross, certainly earns it honest commendation.
The ambulance drivers told me that the foul-fighting Huns had attacked this big frame hospital only a few days before, and although their shells had not struck, the shocks from the explosions had snapped the slender threads by which three dangerously wounded men were clinging to life.
I was no sooner in the hospital than I was to discover that the Canadians had sent ahead such glowing accounts of my exploit that in this hospital I found myself regarded as a hero and made much of, though you wouldn’t think a “hero” would create much of a sensation in this particular place whose every cot had again and again been occupied by heroes.
One of the first at my bedside was the Rev. Michael Adler, chaplain of the Jews, and through his friendly offices I was enabled to send cards to my friends in England and Australia and other countries telling them I was dangerously wounded but most strongly hoped to pull through. Particular communications were sent to my old commander, Col. A. Gilbey and to Maj. Lionel de Rothschild at London.
Again I passed into the hands of deft nurses. They removed my innumerable wrappings, cleansed me anew and—another transposition from hell to heaven—laid me in a spotless white linen-draped bed! I was weak as a wounded rabbit by this time perhaps, but nevertheless I was able to get a thrill out of this! A bed, all white, clean, sweet and neat!
If only a wounded soldier out of the dirty trenches could turn poet! He could knock the spots off a lot of things other poets have written about love and Springtime and a’ that and a’ that! He could make the song of a thrush sound like a beaten tin pan by his ode to a little white cot and the angels that hover round it!