The American Corps keeps ambulances at the Aubervilliers station day and night in relays, so that at any moment not less than two cars are there to receive wounded. Today I was assigned as orderly to an ambulance on the afternoon shift which begins at one o’clock and ends at nine. The receiving station for wounded is a huge express shed about three hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. A railway siding enters through a big door and within runs longitudinally along one wall. A large storage platform occupies the rest of the interior, on which are arranged four parallel benches running nearly the whole length of the shed. Each bench is about seven feet wide and has a slight slope for “drainage.” When we arrived all the benches were crowded with wounded, who were packed side by side in four long ghastly rows. They were wrapped up in their clothes—the same old clothes in which they had fought. The French are, apparently, not sure that the Germans may not yet take Paris, for as a rule they do not permit wounded to be sent to that city. Only those who are slightly wounded in the hand or arm and able to walk, or, on the other hand, those too desperately wounded to survive being moved farther, are allowed to remain in Paris. All the others, although they have already taken two or three days to arrive from the front, are allowed only twelve hours “repose” before they are sent on to the south of France. This “repose” is taken on the benches described above or in similar situations. If the shed is already full and additional trains of wounded arrive, the late comers are left in their cars. Why anyone should consider a train which is standing still more reposeful than one which is moving I cannot imagine. In Paris the wounded at least get something to eat, usually coarse bread with meat and cheese. They arrive in those silly little freight cars marked “eight horses,” each of which carries about eighteen wounded, twelve on stretchers in two tiers in each end and some six more standing or sitting in the aisle, which extends from door to door between the stretchers.
On arriving at the Aubervilliers station we were on duty all the afternoon, and as no trains happened to arrive this meant standing in the rain and doing nothing at all. After dark, however, three train loads of wounded, each of some fifty cars, came in at intervals of about an hour. The wounded are so many that one counts them by trains and the trains come so often that one loses count even of them. No one who has not seen them can possibly comprehend the human misery contained in one such unit. The first train arrived at five o’clock and brought five hundred cases. They had been two days on the way and had had nothing at all to eat for the last nineteen hours.
Seventy-five of their number were unwounded, but had reached such a state of nervous collapse that they could not endure life in the trenches a minute longer, and had therefore, perforce, been sent to the rear. I could not ascertain just how such cases were handled at the front for the French were reluctant to discuss the matter. Certain it is that the instances must have been numerous, for the punishment usually prescribed in war for such delinquency in the face of the enemy is death before a firing squad. The cases must have been so numerous and the ordeal withstood at the front so terrible that punishment became impracticable. In extenuation it may be pointed out that the French army, like any conscript army, contains every able-bodied man of the nation, a certain proportion of whom are inevitably mentally below par and have been sent to war against their will or inclination. The British are the only ones who have fought night and day from the beginning without relays and seem to thrive on it, a fact chiefly due to their being picked volunteers all of whom are soldiers by choice.
After the first train arrived a number of very desperate cases were immediately sorted out and given to our ambulances. The ambulance upon which I served was the last to leave. We departed at seven o’clock, carrying a lieutenant of Chasseurs Alpins who had had his hand shot off and who showed symptoms of lockjaw, and a little private of infantry, a boy with a delicate refined face, who had a bad gangrenous shell wound in the right thigh. His leg was rotting away in a most frightful manner. He was delirious and as weak as a kitten. He imagined he was a little child again and that his mother was causing him all the pain he suffered. He moaned to her reproachfully. We picked our way as slowly and carefully as possible, never making more than four miles an hour and actually avoiding every projecting stone and cobble. In spite of our efforts, our charges suffered frightfully and the delirious boy made this evident in a way which cast a silent spell upon the streets through which we passed. We went up over Montmartre and along the Boulevard Clichy, famous “wicked” street of Paris, because the road surfaces happened to be somewhat smoother. As we went we left behind us a trail of the intangible, all-permeating, sickly-sweetish odor of gangrene.
It is very curious to see how virtually all fatally wounded men know that they are going to die and how they grasp it with a certainty which exceeds the certainty of anything else in life. They often realize it sooner than the surgeons. It is most uncanny. Perhaps it is because their nervous system senses that its foundation has suddenly crumbled. It is very impressive to see the quiet, optimistic calm with which they face the end, and the bigness of it. It makes one feel confident that there is an after-life, or that it is at least right to die for an ideal.
Monday, November 2d. Francis Colby, who drove me when I went to get the children of the Countess X., has recently enlisted in the American Ambulance. He is at present organizing one of the new trains of ambulances of which he will probably have charge when it is complete. These new trains are to be made up of large cars, each carrying six sitting or four lying cases. They will be able to travel five hundred kilometers without taking on gasoline, oil, or other supplies and are to carry repair outfits and food supplies. Every man in service with these trains, no matter what his position, must have a French chauffeur’s license, thus providing not only greater elasticity in action but enabling the men to drive in relays. The amount of detail connected with the preparation of such units is immense.
Saturday, November 7th. Two ambulances are being shipped from England to Boulogne, and Colby and myself with two other men are to be sent out to get them. The necessary permits from the General Staff have been applied for.