But aside from this paradoxical attitude, they frequently speak and act in the most simple, touching way! It is common to hear one say to the stretcher-bearer who comes to fetch him: "Take my comrade here first; he is much more wounded than I; I can wait...." And that when it means lying on the ground under the bombardment, thirsty, feverish, feeling his strength ebb with his blood. Before any one comes back to get him, often he will try again, if he has a sound arm left, to fire his rifle or his machine-gun once more. Glory surrounds the epic incident of the trench where the only unwounded soldier, seeing the enemy arrive, cried out as if in delirium: "Arise, ye dead!" and the dying really rose, and succeeded, some of them, in firing once more before they fell again, and the assailants fled. A more recent and simpler deed is also worth recording.
A dead observer protects his pilot.
Returning from a bombardment of the enemy's factories in broad daylight, a French machine conducted by two men was attacked by several aviators. The observer, hit by a ball in the chest, dropped down into the carlingue. The pilot seeing this prepared to turn back. But hearing his machine-gun firing again, he concluded that the observer was not seriously hurt. As soon as he landed in France: "Well, what about that wound?" he asked. No answer. He bent down and saw that his companion was dead. Even in his agony he had continued to protect his comrade.
In the beginning of the War the wounded stayed a long, a very long time without being rescued, at the place where they fell, or in the shelter to which they had been able to crawl. Our stretcher-bearers of the American Ambulance found, after the battle of the Marne, many who had lain for days and nights in shell holes, at the foot of trees, in ruined barns or churches! One may guess what the mortality might be! Today, happily, it is no longer so. The field of action is more restricted and the aid is better organized.
Transportation is painful and dangerous.
Relief at the first dressing station.
The nurses devoted and the sufferers resigned.
If transportation, however, is less retarded than three years ago, it is still painful and rather dangerous. Even when a special passage has been dug before the attack for the evacuation of the wounded, all jolts are not avoided in this dark and narrow way; but in going through the ordinary passage-ways, dangerous and unseen obstacles are often encountered—crumbling earth, perhaps, or convoys going in the opposite direction. If they heeded the wounded soldier, the stretcher-bearers would go on open ground. This he frequently does, if he is at all able to get on without aid; once hit he thinks himself invulnerable—a singular illusion which has brought about many catastrophes. At the first dressing-station and at the front hospital, relief begins. In ordinary times, this will be quite complete, and the wounded will not be carried to the rear until they are really able to stand the journey. But while the battle is on, they must go in the greatest haste: the worst cases are thoroughly cared for; the badly hurt who can be moved receive the attention which enables them to depart speedily; the slight cases have to be content with summary consideration. Here one sees the devotion of the nurses and the resignation of the sufferers, and better than resignation: the noble effort not to moan, the murmured prayer, the forgetfulness of self, eagerness to ask news of the fight. Among the falsities of a book a thousand times too vaunted (falsities due not so much to the lie direct as to the constant dwelling on odious details, and the suppression of admirable facts), nothing is farther from the truth than the picture of a hospital at the front where one hears and sees only blaspheming and rebellious men. With most of the wounded who have spoken to me about it in our hospital, and who certainly had the right to bear witness, we proclaim loudly that if the French army had been such as the work in question paints it in this passage and in many others, the War would have ended long ago, and history would never have known the names of the Marne, nor the Yser, nor Verdun, nor the Chemin-des-Dames.
A true picture of our Ambulance at the front.
A true picture of an Ambulance at the front, overflowing with wounded the evening of a battle, I find in these lines by an eyewitness: "Some moderate complaints among the crowded stretchers: one asks for a drink, one wants relief for pain, a bed, a dressing, to be quickly attended. But let some story be told in the group, some incident come out like a trumpet-call, all faces brighten, the men lift themselves a little, the mirage of glory gives them heart again. I commemorate with piety the anonymous example of a little Zouave, doubled over on himself, holding his bullet-pierced abdomen in both hands, whom I heard gently asked: 'Well, little one, how goes it?' Oh, very well, mon Lieutenant, our company has passed the road from B—— to the south; we had gotten there when I was knocked out. It's all right; we are smashing them!"