Steam-rollers are then sent up to finish the work, but find themselves persona non grata when left over night in the middle of a narrow and muddy road, with no lights showing. We ambulanciers are not fond of the species at any time, as they seem to have a great affinity for six-inch shells. When disintegrated, any one of the numerous parts blocks our way. We are perfectly content to have the task left to the simple roadbuilder, who proves less of an obstruction after meeting a one-fifty.
MANY undeveloped instincts lie dormant in the subconscious mind of man. In this war, where man has turned back the pages of civilization to live and act for a period of time as a glorified cave-dweller, a number of these unknown faculties have been discovered and developed.
Many animals have the power of seeing in the dark, and all species can sense an unknown danger. These senses have been denied to civilized man, but the primitive life at the front has developed them and other instincts in those who live there so that it seems as if man might again become possessed of all his latent powers.
A man going along a road has a conviction that if he continues he will be killed. He makes a wide detour to avoid the road, and a shell strikes where he would have been. Then again, men have premonitions that they will be killed in the next attack or battle. All this is coupled with absolute fatalism. They feel either that they are going to be killed or will live through everything, and whichever it is, they merely shrug their shoulders, remark, “C’est la guerre,” and permit nothing to alter their belief. Many say that the shell with their name on it has not yet been made, or if it has—“Why worry? We cannot escape it.” I carried one man, while doing evacuation work, who had served three years without a scratch, and when en repos had fallen from an apple tree and broken his leg. He thought it a great joke.
The ambulancier has developed two of these instincts to quite a degree. The first is that he can always locate an abri, his or some one else’s, and disappear in it with astounding rapidity. The second is that he can keep the road with no lights. This has to be done almost entirely by instinct on many nights, and we find it usually safer to make a turn where the “inner voice” directs us rather than where we remember it should be. It is not remarkable, of course, that an occasional car falls into a ditch or a shell-hole, but astonishing rather how seldom this happens. While our Fords never attained any great speed in night driving, I rode once with a friend from another section in a Fiat, when he drove in pitch darkness faster than fifty miles an hour, taking every turn accurately and safely by instinct and luck.
THE mud plays havoc with calculations, and we long to set our foot once again on dry land. All the water in France seems to have gone into mud. Water has never been a popular beverage here, and now it is even less so. One horrified poilu, who had observed me drinking a glass of water, asked if it did not give me indigestion. At the front there is good reason for this. With so many men buried in the ground and so many animals uninterred on it, all the springs are contaminated, and the germs of every disease lurk in the water.
The French army provides a light red wine to take its place. This wine is little stronger than grape juice and is the Pinard of the poilus. The government also provides tobacco which, to quote one ambulancier, cannot be smoked without a gas mask.
The water in the streams is little better, and a bath in one of them gives more moral than physical satisfaction. One French artilleryman told me with great glee of seeing from his observation post a company of German soldiers marched down to a river for a bath. As soon as they were in the water he signalled the range to his battery, and they put a barrage between the bathers and their clothes.