Our Part in the Great War. Gleason Arthur
it is cut out of the solid rock, just wide enough for one of our cars to pass. You can imagine the joys of this drive on a dark night when you have to extinguish all lights, and when the speed of the car cannot be reduced for fear of not making the grades. The first aid post, called Silberloch, is but 200 or 300 yards from the famous crest which has been the scene of many fierce combats. The bursting of shells has taken every bit of foliage from the wooded crest, carried pines to the ground, so that only a few splintered stumps stick up here and there. At the post no one dares show himself in the open. All life is subterranean in bomb-proofs covered by five feet of timber. The road is concealed everywhere by screens, and the sound of a motor may bring a hail of shells down on your head. The stretcher bearers are so used to meeting death in its worst forms—by burning oil, by shell fragments, by suffocating shells—that they have grown to look at it smilingly."
It is a St. Paul's School car that operates there.
"Another time the run was up to an artillery post in the mountains. The road was extremely steep near the top, and covered with gravel. It was only by hard effort that a dozen men could push the car up. We ran to the communicating trench, where they had the man waiting. He was wounded in the abdomen, and in great pain. We started down over the terrible road; at every pebble he would groan. When we reached the worst place of all, where the road had recently been mended with unbroken stones, his groans began to grow fainter. They ceased, and, stopping, we found that he was dead. But there had been a chance of saving his life. A larger car could not have gone up. A wagon or a mule would have caused his death almost immediately.
"On one of our hills in winter a team of six Red Cross men was kept on duty waiting for our ambulance to come along. The cars would go as far as possible up the incline, and before they lost speed would be practically carried to the crest on the shoulders of the pushers—mules, with their drivers hanging on the beasts' tails to make the ascent easier. Strapped on these animals are barbed wire and hand-grenades, red wine and sections of the army portable houses."
Such is winter in Alsace.
"Luke Doyle had driven his car to the entrance of the Hartmanns trenches and our last post, when a heavy bombardment forced every one to make for the bomb-proof. Several men were wounded and he came out to crank his car and carry them off when he was ordered back to safety. A few moments later a shell landed close to the 'abri.' It struck a man and killed him. A flying piece reached Doyle and entered his elbow. Another of our section, Douglas, arrived, and was knocked flat by a bursting shell. He rose, put Doyle in his car and drove him up the road to safety."
Another time, Jack Clark writes:
"Car 161 still lives up to her reputation. Yesterday, in a blizzard, she was blown off the road between two trees, over three piles of rock, through a fence and into a ditch. Three men and a horse removed her from the pasture, and she went on as ever."
Car 163 had 13 cases of tire trouble in two weeks. The whole success of the adventure depends on the condition of the cars. So through all the narrative of shell-fire and suffering men recurs the theme of roads and tires, axle-trouble and hill-grades. The adventure of the car itself is as real as that of the man. The car becomes a personality to the man at the wheel, just as the locomotive is to the engineer. It isn't any old car. It is the little Ford, Number 121, given by Mrs. Richard Trowbridge of Roxbury, Mass. In that particular car you have carried 500 wounded men, you have gone into the ditch, stuck in the mud, and scurried under shell-fire, shrapnel has torn the cover, and there is the mark of a rifle-bullet on the wheel-spoke. You have slept at the wheel and in the chassis, after hours of work. You have eaten luncheons for two months on the front seat. The reader must not get very far away from the ambulance-car in making his mental picture of the experience of the boys in North France, and he must not object if all through this chapter he gets the smell of grease and petrol, and if the explosions are tires as often as shells. Because that is the way it is at the front. These boys never take their eyes from the road and the car. So why should we who read of them?
There is a certain Detroit manufacturer who has a large and legitimate advertisement coming to him. If he will collect the hundred fervid and humorous comments written into the records of the field service he will have a publicity pamphlet which will outlive "A Message to Garcia." For this job of the jitneys is more than carrying orders; it is bringing wounded men over impossible routes, where four wheels and a motor were never supposed to go. Mr. Ford with his ship accomplished nothing, but Mr. Ford with his cars has done much in getting the boys out of the trenches. They would have lain there wounded for an hour, two hours, in the Alsace district for twelve hours longer, if his nimble jitneys had not chugged up to the boyau and dressing station.
"We expected to be kept rolling all night." To "keep rolling" is their phrase for driving the car.
"The next sixty hours were not divided into days for us. We ran steadily, not stopping for meals or sleep except during the brief pauses in the stream of wounded. Except for one memorable and enormous breakfast at the end of the first 24 hours, I ate while driving, steering with one hand, holding bread and cheese in the other. The first lull I slept an hour and a half, the second night there was no lull and I drove until I went to sleep several times at the wheel. Then I took three hours' rest and went on. Gasoline, oil and carbide ran low; we used all our spare tires. One of our men ran into a ditch with three seriously wounded soldiers, and upset. Another man broke his rear axle. During the two and one-half days of the attack, over 250 wounded were moved by our 15 cars a distance of 40 kilometers."
Ambulance work depends on the supply of gasoline, oil, carbide and spare parts, solid rations and sleep. Success rests in patching tires, scraping carbon and changing springs. Any idea of ambulance work is off the mark that thinks it a succession of San Juan charges. It is hard, unpicturesque work, with an occasional fifteen minutes of tension.
"A stretcher makes a serviceable bed, and, warmly wrapped in blankets, one can sleep very comfortably in an ambulance."
"A climb of 800 meters in less than 10 kilometers involves mechanical stress."
"The unique spring suspension and light body construction make our cars the most comfortable for the wounded of all the types in service."
A mechanical detail—but it is in these bits of ingenious mechanical adaptation to human needs that the American contribution has been made. It isn't half enough in a machine-made war to be dashing and picturesque. You must fight destructive machinery with still cleverer engines of relief. The inventive brain must operate as well as the kind heart and the spirit of fearlessness. It is in the combination of courage and mechanical versatility that the best of the American quality has been revealed.
Flashes of the soldier life are given by the boys. Canned beef is called by the poilu "singe," or monkey meat.
"All that is impossible is explained by a simple 'c'est la guerre.' Why else blindly scrape one's way past a creaking truck of shells, testing 20 horses, two abreast, steaming in their own cloud of sweaty vapor? Why else descend slopes with every brake afire, with three human bodies as cargo, where a broken drive shaft leaves but one instantaneous twist of the wheel for salvation, a thrust straight into the bank, smashing the car but saving its load? 'C'est la guerre.'"
"'Chasseurs Alpines': a short, dark-blue jacket, gray trousers, spiral puttees, and the jaunty soft hat 'bérets.' These are the famous 'blue devils.'"
"I, who came for four months and have been working eight, can assure any one who is considering joining the American Ambulance that he will go home with a feeling of great satisfaction at having been able to help out a little a nation that appreciates it, and that is bearing the brunt of the fighting on the Western Front."
"Among the wounded that our cars carried, was the General of the Division—General Serret"—brought down from the height he had held to be amputated and to die.
Another section of twenty-four cars started in at Esternay at the time of the spring freshets, when life was chilly and wet. Eleven received individually the Croix de Guerre. This section served two divisions of the second French Army and had a battle front of from seven to ten miles—the St. Mihiel sector, a region subject to artillery fire. It has been commanded by Oliver Hazard Perry, a descendant