Passed by the censor

by Wythe Williams

I resigned my ambulance job and took the next train. But I kept my brassard with the red cross upon it. I wanted it as a proof of those hard days and sometimes harder nights, when my profession was blotted from my mind—and copy didn't matter—I wanted it because it was my badge when I was an ambulance orderly carrying wounded men, when I came to feel that I was contributing something after all, although a neutral, toward the great sacrifice of the country that sheltered me. I shall keep it always for many things that I saw and heard; but I cherish it most for my recollection of Trevelyan—the Rue Jeanne d'Arc and those from a locality called Quesnoy-sur-Somme.

(A) Trevelyan

The orderly on the first bus was sitting at attention, with arms folded, waiting for orders. It was just dawn, but the interior of his bus was clean and ready. He always fixed it up at night, when the rest of us, dog tired, crept into the dank straw, saying we could get up extra early and do it.

So now we were up "extra early," chauffeurs tinkered with engines, and orderlies fumigated interiors; and the First Orderly, sitting at the head of the column, where he heard things, and saw things, got acquainted with Trevelyan.

The seven American motor ambulances were drawn up with a detachment of the British Red Cross in a small village near B——, the railhead where the base hospital was located, way up near the Belgian frontier. The weather was cold. We had changed the brown paint on our busses to gray, making them less visible against the snow. Even the hoods and wheels were gray. All that could be seen at a distance were the two big red crosses blinking like a pair of eyes on the back canvas flaps. The American cars were light and fast and could scurry back out of shell range quicker than big lumbering ambulances—of which there was a plenty. Therefore we were in demand. The morning that the First Orderly met Trevelyan our squad commander was in conference with the fat major of the Royal Army Medical Corps concerning the strenuous business of the day.

Both the First Orderly and Trevelyan were Somebodys. It was apparent. It was their caste that attracted them to each other. The First Orderly was a prominent figure in the Paris American colony; he knew the best people on both sides of the Atlantic. Now he was an orderly on an ambulance because he wanted to see some of the war. He wanted to do something in the war. There were many like him—neutrals in the ranks of the Croix Rouge.

The detachment of the Royal Army Medical Corps to which Trevelyan belonged arrived late one night and were billeted in a barn. The American corps were in the school house, sleeping in straw on the wood floor. A small evacuation hospital was near where the wounded from the field hospitals were patched up a little before we took them for a long ambulance haul.

Trevelyan was only an orderly. The American corps found this "quaint," as Trevelyan himself would have said. For the orderly of the medical corps corresponds to the "ranker" of the army. In this war, at a time when officers were the crying demand, the gentlemen rankers had almost disappeared. Among the American volunteers, being the squad commander was somewhat a matter of choice and of mechanical knowledge of our cars. We all stood on an equal footing. But Trevelyan was simply classed as a "Tommy," so far as his medical officers were concerned.

So he showed a disposition to chum with us. He gravitated more particularly to the First Orderly, who reported to the chauffeur of the second bus that Trevelyan had a most comprehensive understanding of the war; that he had also a keen knowledge of medicine and surgery, with which the First Orderly had himself tinkered.

They discussed the value of the war in several branches of surgery. The chauffeur of the second bus heard Trevelyan expounding to the First Orderly on the precious knowledge derived by the great hospital surgeons in Paris and London from the great numbers of thigh fractures coming in—how amputations were becoming always fewer—the men walked again, though one leg might be shorter.