There has just appeared in Paris a book called "La Guerre Vue d'Une Ambulance," which brings the war closer to the eye and heart than anything else I have read. It is written by Abbé Felix Klein, Chaplain of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, and has the added merit of describing the noble work which American money and American Red Cross nurses are doing there for the French wounded. The abbé, by the way, has twice visited the United States in recent years, has many warm friends here, and has written several enthusiastic books about the "Land of the Strenuous Life."
When the war broke out this large-hearted priest and busy author dropped all his literary and other plans to minister to the wounded soldiers brought to the war hospital established by Americans in the fine new building of the Lycée Pasteur, which was to have received its first medical students a few weeks later. There were 250 beds at first, and later 500, with more than a hundred American automobiles carrying the wounded to it, often direct from the front.
Through all these months Abbé Klein has labored day and night among these sufferers, cheering some to recovery, easing the dying moments of others with spiritual solace, and, hardest of all, breaking the news of bereavement to parents.
From day to day, through those terrible weeks of fighting on the Aisne and the Marne, with Paris itself in danger, the good abbé wrote brief records of his hopes and fears regarding his wounded friends, and set down in living words the more heroic or touching phases of their simple stories. Let me translate a few of them for the reader.
Take, for instance, the case of Charles Marée, a blue-eyed, red-bearded hero of thirty years, an only son who had taken the place of his invalid father at the head of their factory, and who had responded to the first call to arms. During his months of suffering his parents were held in territory occupied by the enemy and could not be reached. The abbé goes on to tell his story:
Let us not be deceived by the calm smile on his face. For six weeks Charles Marée has been undergoing an almost continual martyrdom, his pelvis fractured, with all the consequences one divines, weakened by hemorrhage, his back broken, capable only of moving his head and arms.... He is one of our most fervent Christians: I bring him the communion twice a week, and he never complains of suffering. He is also one of our bravest soldiers; he has received the military medal, and when I asked him how it came about he told me the following in a firm tone and with his hand in mine, for we are great friends:
"It was given to me the 8th of October. I had to fulfill a mission that was a little difficult. It was at Mazingarbe, between Béthune and Lens, and 9 o'clock in the evening. Two of the enemy's armored auto-machine guns had just been discovered approaching our lines. I was ordered to go and meet them with a Pugeot of twenty-five or thirty horse power—I was automobilist in the Thirtieth Dragoons.
"I left by the little road from Vermelles on which the two hostile machines were reported to be approaching. After twenty minutes I stopped, put out my lights, and waited. A quarter of an hour of profound silence followed, and then I caught the sound of the first mitrailleuse. With one spin of the wheel I threw my machine across the middle of the road. That of the enemy struck us squarely in the centre. The moment the shock was past I rose from my seat with my revolver and killed the chauffeur and the mechanician.
"But almost immediately the second machine gun arrived. The two men on it comprehended what had happened. While one of them stopped the machine, the other aimed at me under his seat and fired a revolver ball that pierced both thighs; then they turned their machine and retreated. My companion, happily, was not hurt, so he could take me to Vermelles, where the ambulance service was. The same evening they gave me the military medal, for which I had already been proposed three times."
After three months of suffering, borne without complaint, this man died without having been able to get a word to his parents. The abbé had become deeply attached to him, and the whole hospital corps felt the loss of his courageous presence.