AT A VALLEY "POSTE" (MITTLACH)
Around the railway station is a group of temporary tents, where the wounded are given by the ladies of the Croix Rouge a cup of coffee or a glass of citron and water before being packed into the train sanitaire to begin their long journey to the centre or south of France. The ambulances evacuating the hospitals draw up among these tents under the orders of the sergeant in charge. Four or five French ambulances arrive and are unloaded. Then a smaller car takes its place in the line. It has a long, low, gray body with two big red crosses painted on either side. Beneath the red crosses are the words "American Ambulance," and a name-plate nailed to the front seat bears the words "Wellesley College."
The driver, after clearly doing his best to make a smooth stop, gets down and helps in lifting out the stretchers. One of the wounded, as his stretcher is slid along the floor of the car and lowered to the ground, groans pitifully. He had groaned this way and sometimes even screamed at the rough places on the road. So the driver's conscience hurt him as he pulled some tacks out of his tires and waited for the sergeant's signal to start. It was his first day's work as an ambulancier. He could still see every rock and every rut in the last mile of the road he had just driven over and he wondered if he really had been as careful as possible.
But he was saved from reproaching himself very long. An infirmier tapped him on the shoulder and, telling him that a blessé wished to speak to him, led him to one of the tents. It was the man about whom he had been unhappy, now more comfortable, although evidently still suffering.
"You are very kind, sir," he said in English that might have been in other circumstances quite good, and disclosing a lieutenant's galons as he gave his right hand to the driver. "You drive carefully. I know, for I have a car. I don't like to cry—but I have two broken legs—anything hurts me—but it is really decent of you fellows to come way over here—it really is trop gentil...." And the driver went back to his car marvelling for the first of many times at the sense of sympathy which had made that pain-stricken officer think of him at all.
One wet night not long ago, the writer was stopped en route by a single middle-aged soldier trudging his way along a steep road running from a cantonment behind the lines to the trenches. Embarrassed a little at first and pulling at his cap, this man said that he had heard in the trenches of the American Ambulance; that a friend had written back that he had been carried in one of them; that this was the first time that he had had an opportunity of shaking hands with one of the volontaires américains. Then, as I leaned over to say good-bye, he shook both my hands, offered me a cigarette, shook both my hands again, saying, "une jolie voiture," and, pointing towards where in the black distance came the rumble of guns, "Perhaps you will bring me back to-morrow."
If that man, by the way, had asked me for a lift, as is usually the case when you are stopped like that on the road, my orders would have been to have refused him, to have said, "C'est défendu" and to have driven on. The Hague Conventions forbid carrying any soldiers in ambulances except those who are wounded and those in the service sanitaire. It is, putting it mildly, unpleasant to have to refuse a man a ride when he is wearily facing a long walk and you are spinning by in an empty ambulance. It is doubly unpleasant when you feel that this man would do anything for you from pushing your car out of a ditch to sharing a canteen. And yet, whenever we have to perform this disagreeable duty, the conversation usually ends with a "Merci quand même."
Indeed, discipline in a French soldier seems to be able to maintain itself remarkably from within. Officers and men mingle probably more unrestrainedly than in any army in the world. A soldier when talking to an officer does not stand at attention after the first salute. Privates and officers are frequently seen in the same room of a hotel or café, and sometimes even have their meals in messes that are scarcely separated at all. But these encroachments upon military formalism seem to go no deeper than the frills of efficiency. Orders are obeyed without "reasoning why," and, as in all conscript armies, the machinery of punishment is evolved to uphold authority at all cost. Officers have wide and immediate powers of punishment, and the decisions of courts martial judging the graver offences are swift, severe, and highly dreaded.