Generals, of course, stand for the "larger issues" of the war; it is their decisions that figure in to-morrow's communiqués. But at the front, doctors represent destiny in a much more picturesque way: it is no use putting these blessés in an ambulance; death will close over them quite as gently here as twenty kilometres farther to the rear. This man's rheumatism demands that he be sent to Lyons or Marseilles; that one has five days in a base hospital and is in the trenches for the next death revel. A business-like surgeon pronounces his judgments in a ghastly poste de secours,—it is nothing compared with "strategical necessities,"—it will have no place beside announcements of yards of trenches taken and yards of trenches lost,—and yet, it is life or death for some brave soldier and all in the world that counts for some family circle.
These mountain-tops are often for weeks on end bathed in a heavy mist varied by rainstorms. At such times when there is no work to do,—and very frequently there are no wounded to carry for twenty-four hours or more,—the surgeon, ourselves, the brancardiers, and the mule-drivers, close in around the stove. One of these brancardiers, or stretcher-carriers, was transferred after being wounded at the battle of the Marne from the front-line troops to the Service Sanitaire, and before the war he had served five years in the Foreign Legion in Africa. His stories of this period are endless and interesting, and, after listening to them for a week, we all go back to our base calling soldiers nothing but poilus; coffee, jus; wine, pinard; canned beef, singe; army organization, système D. There is also a good deal of reading done by many of the Section on the rainy days of no work. It is part of the daily relieving man's unofficial but well-understood duties to bring along any magazines and newspapers that he can get hold of, and generally, too, books gradually accumulate and grow to be considered as a sort of library that must not be taken away. Indeed, at one poste de secours our library consists at present of two or three French novels and plays, "The Newcomes," a two-volume "Life of Ruskin," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," and "Les Misérables."
When a group of men are on duty at an isolated poste de secours like this, they take turns in carrying the wounded who may arrive, the man who has made the last trip going to the bottom of the list. And there is something comfortable about feeling that you are the last to "roll" on a stormy night when every plank in the little hut rattles and groans, when the wind shrieks in the desolate outside, when the sinister glare of the trench rockets gleams through the heavy blackness like a flash of lightning, and the wet mule-drivers who borrow a little of your fire shake their heads and pointing towards the road say, "Un mauvais chemin" And then, as you settle a little deeper in your blankets and blow out your lantern and assure yourself for the last time as to where your matches are and how much gasoline you have in your tank, you are pretty apt to think, before you go to sleep, of the men a little way off in the rain-soaked trenches.
They are certainly not very far away. Only over there on the next ridge where the shells are exploding. They have been there, you know, without relief for ten days. You remember when they marched up the mountain to take their turn. How cheery and soldierlike they were! Not one of them, like you, is sleeping in blankets. They won't, like you, go back to-morrow to a pleasant dinner, with pleasant friends, in a pleasant hotel, and out of sound, too, of those awful guns. Some will come back and you will carry them in your ambulance. And some will never come back at all. Well....
"Did I leave that spark-plug wrench under the car? God knows I can never find it on a night like this and I change a plug every trip!"
"Wake up! Don't talk in your sleep!"
"What, is it my turn to roll? Wounded?"
"No, Steve is en panne halfway down the mountain."
And you begin to take things in with one of the Section's sous-chefs leaning over your cot with the news that the first man on the list has a load of wounded and has met with an accident. The others are waked up too. Some are left to take care of such other wounded as may arrive and the rest form a rescue party. Two ride in the rescue ambulance; two more probably walk. The wounded are moved from the broken-down car to the other ambulance, and then daylight finds three or four of us rain-drenched and mud-smeared, changing a brake-band or digging into a carburetor.