We turned our machine to the south with a feeling of the greatest awe at the thought of what two hundred thousand casualties must mean. We were silent for some minutes as the machine sped along, and then Captain Parker remarked: “At Gettysburg or at Waterloo the total forces engaged amounted to only about one hundred and sixty thousand!”
We ran toward the slope of the plateau, passing slowly an endless, unbroken line of transports. Beyond Bergères-Les-Vertus an infantry brigade was resting beside the road and the tired men were cooking and eating.
We tried to comprehend the battle as a whole by studying a great many fields, any one of which would a few years ago have been considered an entire battle in itself. The dead were scattered far and wide; and in the fields and among the grain-stacks the wounded cried out their piteous faint appeals. Little groups of German stragglers were hiding in the forests, and squads of alert French soldiers hunted them down, beating through the cover as eager setter dogs search for grouse. In one field of about six acres lay nine hundred German dead and wounded; across another, where a close-action fight had raged, two hundred French and Germans lay mixed together, all mashed and ripped. Here was the curious sight of a German and Frenchman lying face to face, both dead, and each one transfixed by the other’s bayonet.
The very birds of the air and the beasts of the field lay dead and rotting amid the general destruction. We saw feathers and bits of chickens and halves of cows. On one occasion Hall maintained that “it” had been a cow, while I thought “it” was a horse, and no piece large enough for a certain identification could be found. Of some of the villages which had been peaceful and beautiful a week ago, there remained now only chimneys, ashes, and bits of walls rising from smouldering gray débris. A French village wrecked by battle looks very much wrecked indeed, in contrast with its habitual orderly and toy-like appearance.
I was not so horrified in viewing these ghastly sights as I had expected, because I could not put from me a sense of their unreality. The human mind is incapable of comprehending to the full such terrible happenings. One kept endlessly saying to oneself: “Can all this which we are seeing really have taken place in this once quiet French countryside, almost within the suburbs of Paris? It seems impossible—unbelievable!”
In the little upland village of Clamanges was a field hospital which had been established by the Germans when they first occupied the place on the night of September 7th. They had held it until their retreat on the 10th, when their retirement was so precipitate that they had been unable to take with them their wounded.
In this war it is the custom to convert the village churches into hospitals. The chairs and benches are thrown out into the graveyard and the floor is covered with straw upon which the wounded are laid in long rows extending the length of the nave. The altar is converted into the pharmacist’s headquarters and bottles and medicaments are piled thereon, while bandages, for want of room, are sometimes hung upon the statue of the Virgin, who has, in this unique service, an air of sublime and compassionate contentment. An operating room is usually established in the vestry or in the Parish House and a Red Cross flag is hung from the steeple. Any shell holes in the roofs and walls are stopped with sections of tenting. As we approached Clamanges, we detected a sickening, subtle, sweetish odor which crept stealthily to us through the air and filled us with an insinuating disgust. The Colonel said simply, “That is gangrene.”