Le Général Joffre,
Généralissime des Armées de la République
a déjeuné dans cette maison.
Le 15ème Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins occupant cette région.
Délivrée par lui le 7 Août 1914.
Alsace has been for forty years German territory. For forty years young Alsatians have been forced to learn German in the schools, to serve in the German army, to be links in the civil and military chains which bound them to the Kaiser's empire. A few days ago I took the photograph of an Alsatian girl standing in the doorway of her home, which she said she was going to send through Switzerland to her brother in the German army "somewhere in Russia." But French hearts doubtless beat under many a German uniform, and those of us who have lived in Alsace are confident that re-annexation by France will not be a slow or a difficult process. Alsace has been tied to France by something which forty busy years have not found a way to change. The armies of the Republic have been received with an open hand and an open heart. I know of a fine field hospital organized and staffed entirely by Alsatian ladies happy to be nursing wounded French soldiers. I know of Alsatian boys, at the outbreak of the war not yet old enough to have commenced their German military training, who are to-day volunteer, and only volunteer, French soldiers.
We have drawn our impressions of Alsace chiefly from five or six towns in a commercial valley. They are subject to long-range shelling and bombs dropped from aeroplanes. Indeed, my first day in Alsace was spent in the yard of a hospital contrived out of a schoolhouse. Our cars were parked beneath the windows of one of its wings, and all day long one heard the pitiful moans of a mother and her two little daughters who had been wounded the night before when the Germans had dropped half a dozen shells into the town where they lived.
But these towns seem to be, on the whole, cheerful, prosperous places. Soldiers resting from the trenches flirt the time away with bilingual Alsatian girls. Horns, claxons, and the hum of motors make in the little mountain-smothered streets the noises of Broadway or Piccadilly. The cafés and stores are full from morning until eight o'clock, when all lights must be put out.
Nothing is taken by the soldiery without being paid for, a fact that was brought sharply home to me on one occasion. We needed wood for the kitchen-fire of a little dressing-station hidden on a tree-covered mountain-top. I picked up an axe and started to get some exercise and the wood for the fire at the same time; but the cook excitedly told me that not even in that out-of-the-way place, unless he had the proper military authorization, would he dare cut down a tree, because the commune must be paid for, every twig of it.
But, interesting as these towns are, it is beyond them that we do our most useful work. I am writing, as it happens, at a dressing-station between the artillery and the infantry lines where two of our cars are always on duty. The driver of the other car, eight months ago, was in charge of a cattle ranch in the Argentine, and last May, a passenger on the ill-fated Lusitania, was rescued after four hours in the water. He is on his back tightening bolts underneath his car, and a hole in the left sole of his projecting shoes tells of hours with the low speed jammed on, for this is the way we have to drive down as well as up hill.
We are at one end of a valley which, opening gradually, runs into the basin of the Rhine. Our two ambulances are backed up against a hay-loft dressing-station among a little group of houses frequently mentioned in the communiqués. At this minute the place is as peaceful as any Florida glade; it does not seem possible that war can be so near, so completely hushed. There is little military in the appearance of a few stretcher-bearers, dressed in the discarded clothes of peace, throwing stones into an apple tree; there is not a gun to be seen; there is not a sound to be heard unless you listen to catch the splash of a mountain stream or the tinkle of the bells tied around the necks of the cows grazing high up on a green but ladder-steep mountain-side. Coming down the road towards me is a little barefooted boy driving a half-dozen cows to where some girls are waiting in a pen to milk them. A little later, when my companion and I sit down to dinner with the young médecin auxiliaire in charge of the post, there will be some of this milk on the table.
But long before dinner-time the whole surrounding aspect may change as if by black magic. Tree-hidden batteries, some only a hundred yards away and some on the tops of neighboring and surrounding mountains, may speak together with their "brutal lungs" until the echoes, rolling and accumulating, make a grand, persistent roar. Even trench-weary soldiers will unconsciously duck their heads and stand ready to run to the bomb-proofs if the answering German shells begin to fall close to them. After dark the wounded will arrive, carried on stretchers, rested on men's shoulders, or pushed in wheelbarrows, to the hay-loft where a doctor, working almost entirely without anæsthetics, treats such cases as the doctors in the trench dressing-stations passed without attention.
By this time also, on a night when many wounded are arriving, six or eight more American ambulances will be summoned by telephone. There will be no headlights used; only a great swinging of lanterns and much shouting back and forth in French and English. Although the firing after dark will not be so general, one or two batteries will continue to break out sharply every few minutes. One of our squad leaders will be on hand as driver in charge of the situation. "Are you ready to roll?" he will call to somebody as the doctor comes up and speaks to him. A dark figure standing by a car will lean over and spin a crank, an engine will sputter and pour forth smoke, for we must use a double supply of oil on these grades. Then an ambulance will back up to the door of the barn and the driver, leaving his engine throttled down, will help in lifting the stretchers.