CHAPTER II
To the Front
THAT swift ride through France in the new Red Cross ambulance was quite devoid of any startling incidents. There were the usual bits of well traveled and rutty roads and long stretches of fine highway, the occasional detours by reason of road mending; here old men and boys labored to keep up the important lanes of traffic for the oncoming hosts of Americans and the transportation of overseas supplies. The lads overtook heavily laden lorries, or camions as the French call them; they passed columns of marching men and those billeted in villages or encamped in the wayside fields. They noted the slow moving forward of heavy field pieces and here and there they came to drill grounds where lately arrived Americans were going through mock trench fighting or were bayonet stabbing straw-stuffed bags supposed to be Huns.
Everywhere the boys observed also that there were more people in the towns and villages than the sizes of these places seemed to warrant, and in the fields and woods, in uncultivated or otherwise barren spots little settlements of tents and rude shelters had been established as evidence of the wide exodus from the battle-scarred areas far to the east and north. Hundreds of thousands of people, driven from their ruined or threatened homes, had thus overrun the none too sparsely inhabited sections beyond the war-torn region.
“Non, non, non, non!” That was the common refrain directed by Herbert and Donald to the solicitations of the French, for the purchase of sundry articles, mostly of edible character, whenever the car was forced to stop.
“If you want to get rid of your money very quickly,” Herbert explained to the three Red Cross nurses riding with them in the rear of the ambulance, “you can sure do it if you patronize these sharpers. Their goods are all right generally, but the prices—phew! They must think every American is a millionaire.”
“And yet one must pity many of them; they have suffered and are suffering so much,” said the eldest nurse, a sweet-faced woman whose gray hairs denoted that she was past middle age.
“They seem to be very patient and really very cheerful,” remarked the somewhat younger woman whose slightly affected drawl and rather superior bearing indicated that she belonged to the higher social circles somewhere back in the U. S. And then up spoke the third, a mere slip of a girl, who had been quite silent until now.
“I have wondered and wondered what it would all be like, what the people would be like; and now I’m glad I’ve come. Perhaps when the war is over we can do something for these——”
“We will every one of us be glad to get home again,” said the gray-haired lady. “You, my dear, will prove no exception, however noble your reconstructive impulses are. But these people, no matter what they have gone through, will be well able to take care of themselves.”