The streets of the village were muddy and littered, and there were innumerable ominous flies everywhere. The town was crammed with German wounded. In the church long rows of them, touching feet to head and arm to arm, so that the attendants had to step gingerly between as they made their slow way about. The neighboring peasant houses were packed full with the overflow. In the halls lay the bodies of men who had died of gangrene, and as no one had time to attend to the dead, the piles of them grew and increased. We were told that there were thirteen hundred wounded in the village, among whom labored sixty attendants. They were all severely wounded, since the Germans had dragged with them all their slightly wounded, these being good assets.
What had once been a little rose garden was piled high with a gigantic heap of bloody accoutrements which had been taken from wounded men as they were brought in. Under a tree in a corner of the churchyard a surgeon had set up a big kitchen table which he used for operations; the ground underneath was black and caked. In a near by corner of the church walls was a great pile of boots and stained clothes which had been cut from shattered limbs, and I expect one might have discovered even more ghastly objects had one ventured to turn over the rags. The attendants were nearly all French, although two German doctors and several German orderlies had stayed behind with their wounded. All worked heroically to cope with their great task.
In the rush of battle it had been impossible to obtain food for the wounded, so that for days these men had gone hungry, and one heard the agonizing sound of dying men crying piteously for bread. The French attendants themselves went hungry in order to give their charges such small pittances of food as were obtainable. We watched an orderly who entered the church with a single loaf of bread which had just been secured and which was to be divided among several hundred wounded. He used a great knife as if he hoped to make up for the smallness of the supply by the largeness of the implement. Slowly and with sober care he cut slice after slice, each one so thin that the light shone through it. Every head was turned toward him and each burning pair of eyes was fixed upon the precious bread with an expression of animal dumbness, which reminded one of the intent eyes of a hungry dog as it watches a hoped-for morsel. As he advanced step by step, the wounded stretched up shriveled hands, or propped themselves on one elbow to make more appealing gestures, their faces all contorted by the pains the movement caused them. They made no sound, for their attention was too intently fixed upon that bread. One, however, who had been overlooked, burst into screams and wailings until the mistake had been properly remedied. We Americans held a Council of War and unanimously decided to contribute our jealously hoarded supply of provisions; we thereby became as angels in the eyes of those poor creatures. A French attendant remarked as he handed a sliver of our only loaf of bread to a shattered man: “Il va mourir tout à l’heure, mais cela lui fera grand plaisir en mourant!”
The dying are frightful sights, and parts of them are often already mortified, as they lie in the straw, entirely occupied with breathing. They breathe eternally little short breaths, a hundred or a hundred and ten to the minute, like some sort of pump. They wish passionately not to die, and yet they know with desperate certainty that they are going to die. They lie down there in a tiny, little black hell of their own and fight with all their might and main, feeling that they will die instantly if they skip one little short breath. (I was going to say they fight with all their soul and body, but they no longer really possess either of these). They have no time to speak, or listen, or move, or be helped, as every particle of energy must be used for the next respiration. A jumbled heap lies in the straw covered with a blanket to keep off the flies. An attendant looks at its side in search of the fluttering little pulsation of breath. If it is there, “he” is living; if all is still, “it” is dead, and they carry it out and dump it in the hall with the other bodies.
The little village of Ecury-le-Repos had been deserted by every one but its Mayor, who mistook us for Germans, and as such faced us bravely and with dignity. He very correctly refused to believe that we were not of the enemy until he had examined our papers. His village was not a pleasant sight. He said that it had been taken and retaken many times and that there had been fighting in its streets as recently as yesterday; its houses were battered and rent by shells and many had burned down and still smouldered; no earthquake could have ruined them more thoroughly. The narrow village streets were littered ankle deep with a muddy, rotting pot-pourri in which one detected broken glass, bits of brick, cartridges, roof slates, broken bottles, shreds of clothing, shells, fragments, shrapnel cases, and kepis. Dead men lay in the gutters, covered with filth to such an extent that one almost failed to recognize what they were.
In their last retreat the Germans had dragged their desperately wounded into halls and doorways in order that they might be out from under foot, and there they still lay. Half of them were mercifully already dead. We looked into one hallway only. Here amidst a stifling stench, five Germans were propped up; three were dead and the other two barely alive; all were covered black with flies and the living and the dead were eaten by white, weaving masses of maggots.
Ecury-le-Repos is situated in a little circular hollow, with elevated table-lands all around. Here where the table-lands begin to dip down, the Germans had defended themselves against the advancing French. As they faced southward toward the oncoming enemy, they had the village in its cup-like hollow at their backs. At one point German infantry to the number of about two hundred had been placed on the crest facing across the bare level plateau, while in front of them some two hundred and fifty paces distant was a pine wood through which the French were advancing. The Germans had evidently had no time to entrench but had quickly lain down in skirmish order in the outer edge of a potato field; each soldier had then pushed up in front of him, as protection, a little heap of potatoes and loose earth. A hundred paces to the right of this German skirmish line, two mitrailleuses had been skillfully thrust forward some fifty yards in advance, and concealed in small trenches hurriedly dug. They could thus fire across the front of their own infantry and take in the flank any French who advanced. This action was one of a series which had taken place along this line of hills. The German flanks were not unprotected, but owing to the fact that the country was much broken and obscured by woods, such a force would be partly hidden from its neighbors to the right and left, and largely independent in repelling any attack made against it.
A body of French infantry three to four hundred strong had advanced to the edge of the woods, facing the Germans, and had there taken up a skirmish position. The opposing bodies had then fired at each other a collective total of about twenty-five thousand rounds across a perfectly flat field. We were able to estimate the number of men engaged on either side from the impressions which their feet, elbows, and bodies had made in the soft earth, and we could judge how many rounds per man had been fired by counting the little piles of empty cartridges which had accumulated beside each rifleman. When we arrived upon the scene the wounded had nearly all been removed, but the dead were still untouched, and we were able to see that, as a result of this fusillade of twenty-five thousand rounds, only three Germans and six Frenchmen had been killed outright.
After this rifle contest, the French had made a bayonet charge across the open. The Germans had fired until the French had advanced about half way and had hit a score, after which they temporarily ceased firing and the French then promptly “charged home.” The two German mitrailleuses were unperceived by the advancing French, and as the French passed them in flank, the mitrailleuses opened fire; at the same moment the Germans suddenly fired a scattering rifle volley. Attacked in front and on the flank, every Frenchman but one was hit, and sixty dead still lay in a row across the field as if cut down by a mowing machine. The sole survivor of the fatal cross-fire was a boy with a tiny black moustache. Undaunted, he had charged alone in among the Germans and had received many bayonets in his heroic body. He lay on his back among the German cartridges fifty yards ahead of the row of his dead comrades.