To go from this place to the sorting-point behind the lines to which the wounded are taken is the worst run we have. It means almost always wondering if your car will make the grades, if you acted properly in letting yourself be persuaded to take three wounded instead of the specified two. It means coming upon comrades en panne and lending a hand or hurrying on with the distress signal, stopping to pour water into your boiling radiator, halting to pass convoys, arguments, decisions, "noms-de-Dieu," backing to a wider place, wheels that nearly go over the edge, pot-bellied munition-wagons that scrape off your side boxes, getting into a ditch and having to be pulled out by mules or pushed out by men.
It is a journey fraught with worry, for there is always the danger of delay when delay may mean death and is sure to mean suffering for the wounded in your car. And sometimes when, with bad cases aboard, you are stuck and can't get out until somebody turns up to help you, it is unbearable to stay near your car and hear their pitiful groans.
But the down part of the journey is full of more acute dangers. You are at the mercy of your brakes. If they fail you, there is only the bank. A quick turn of the steering-wheel and you are all right; that is, there will be only a cruel shaking-up for the men you are carrying and a broken radius rod or perhaps a smashed radiator. But this is better than going over the bank and better than running amuck through a train of mules with their deadly loads of explosives.
Only during the last two months have we been able to use the first ten kilometres of this road at all. Even now for the climbing part of the journey we take none but the more seriously wounded, leaving the rest to be carried in light wagons pulled by mules, until they get to some mountain-top relay-point where our cars are stationed. Most of these relay-points are very close to one or several French batteries. Some of them are established in the midst of thriving cantonments buried in the woods and within sight of the German trenches on a sister mountain-top. Others, farther removed from the enemy lines and higher above the level of destruction, are on summits suitable only for the biggest of the French guns and reached in turn only by the very long-range German guns.
THE HARVARD CLUB OF ALSACE RECONQUISE
Such a place is a mountain-top at which we feel almost as much at home as at our base, for eight of our cars are always on duty at this place, each man serving for a week at a time, and one man being relieved every day. It is one of those plateau-shaped eminences which are mentioned in geographies as distinguishing the Vosges from the Alps and the Pyrenees. It is treeless through exposure to the wind, and its brow slopes gradually towards the French side, with a succession of cuplike hollows tenanted by brush-covered bomb-proofs and dug-outs and horse-sheds. Other than topographical concealments are also employed; gray horses are dyed brown and groups of road-builders when at work in some particularly exposed place carry, like the army that went against Macbeth, umbrellas of branches.
We are housed here in a long, low shack built against the side of the crest. Violent storms sometimes take the roof off this shack with the consequent drenching of the surgeon in charge, ourselves, a half-dozen stretcher-bearers and as many mule-drivers. Bunks are built crosswise against the side of the walls, and over some of these bunks the words "Pour Intransportables" are written. The rest, however, are occupied by people on duty here, for it is merely a relay-point, and the wounded, unless unable to stand a further journey or arriving by mules in numbers greater than we can handle, are merely changed from one mode of conveyance to another and given such attention in passing as they may need.
When one of the beds for intransportables is occupied, it generally means that the man dies in a few days and is buried close by, a corporal of stretcher-bearers, who was before the war a Roman Catholic missionary in Ceylon, borrowing from one of us a camera to take for the dead man's family a photograph of the isolated grave marked with one of those simple wooden crosses from which no mile of northern France is free. Deaths of this sort are peculiarly sad. Anybody who has nursed in the wards of a military hospital will tell you how soldiers, seasoned in trenches that high explosives and mines and hand-grenades have turned into shambles, will grow gloomy when one man in their ward dies. It is the same way with these single deaths and lonely funerals at the front.