Our Part in the Great War. Gleason Arthur
only a well man, but a whole man. And America has two more friends in France, in some little village of the province.
This work of the hospital, the train, the motor ambulance, is doing away with the shock and hurt of our aloofness. These young Americans, stretcher-bearers and orderlies, surgeons and nurses, drivers and doctors, are unconscious statesmen. They are building for us a better foreign policy. It is a long distance for friendly voices of America to carry across the Atlantic. But these helpers are on the spot, moving among the common people and creating an international relationship which not even the severe strain of a dreary aloofness can undo. Our true foreign policy is being worked out at Neuilly and through the war-cursed villages. This is our answer to indifference: the gliding of the immense train through France, carrying men in agony to a sure relief; the swift, tender handling of those wounded in their progress from the trench to the ward; the making over of these shattered soldiers into efficient citizens.
The quarrel none of ours?
The suffering is very much ours.
Too proud to fight?
Not too proud to carry bed-pans and wash mud-caked, blood-marked men. Not too proud to be shot at in going where they lie.
Neutrality of word and thought?
We are the friends of these champions of all the values we hold dear.
War profits out of their blood?
Many hundreds have given up their life-work, their career, their homes, to work in lowly ways, with no penny of profit, no hope of glory, "just because she's France."
III
THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS
This is the story of the American Ambulance Field Service in the words of the boys themselves who drove the cars. Fresh to their experience, they jotted down the things that happened to them in this strange new life of war. These notes, sometimes in pencil, sometimes written with the pocket fountain pen, they sent to their chief, Piatt Andrew, and he has placed these unpublished day-by-day records of two hundred men at my disposal. Anybody would be stupid who tried to rewrite their reports. I am simply passing along what they say.
One section of the Field Service with twenty cars was thrown out into Alsace for the campaign on the crest of Hartmannsweilerkopf. Here is some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Hartmannsweilerkopf is the last mountain before the Plain of the Rhine, and commands that valley. The hill crest was taken and retaken. Here, too, is the one sector of the Western Front where the French are fighting in the enemy's country. Alsace has been German territory for forty-three years. The district known as Haute Alsace is a range of mountains, running roughly north and south; to the east lies German Alsace, to the west the level country of French Alsace. On the crest of the mountains the armies of France and Germany have faced each other. The business of the ambulances has been to bring wounded from those heights to the railway stations in the plain.
John Melcher, Jr., says of this work:
"The mountain service consists in climbing to the top of a mountain, some 4,000 feet high, where the wounded are brought to us. Two cars are always kept in a little village down the mountain on the other side. This little village is a few kilometers behind the trenches, and is sometimes bombarded by the Germans. The roads up the mountain are very steep, particularly on the Alsatian side. They are rough and so narrow that in places vehicles cannot pass. These roads are full of ruts, and at some points are corduroy, the wood practically forming steps. On one side there is always a sheer precipice."
"If you go off the road," writes one of our young drivers, "it is probably to stay, and all the while a grade that in some parts has to be rushed in low speed to be surmounted. Add to this the fact that in the rainy (or usual) weather of the Vosges, the upper half is in the clouds, and seeing becomes nearly impossible, especially at night. Before our advent the wounded were transported in wagons or on mule-backs, two stretchers, one on each side of the mule. Two of us tried this method of travel and were nearly sick in a few minutes. Imagine the wounded—five hours for the trip! That so many survived speaks well for the hardihood of the "Blue Devils." Now with our cars the trip takes 1½ or 2 hours. We get as close to the trenches as any cars go. Our wounded are brought to us on trucks like wheelbarrows, or, at night, on mules, about one-half hour after the wound is received. This is hard service for both cars and drivers, and it is done in turn for five days at a time; then we return to St. Maurice to care for the cars and rest; the ordinary valley service is regarded by us as rest after the spell on the hills.
"Car 170 (the E. J. de Coppet Car) has been doing well on this strenuous work. The two back fenders have been removed, one by a rock in passing an ammunition wagon, and the other by one of the famous "75's" going down the hill.
"The men appreciate it. Often, back in France, we are trailed as the 'voitures' they have seen at Mittlach, or as the car which brought a comrade back. They express curiosity as to our exact military status. The usual thing when we explain that we are volunteers is for them to say "chic." When they learn that the cars are given by men in the United States whose sympathy is with them, they nod approval."
Another man writes of the condition of the service:
"At Cheniménil, the headquarters of the automobile service for this section, we reported to Captain Arboux, and were informed by him of the terms on which he had decided to accept our services. We were to draw our food, wine, tobacco, automobile supplies, such as tires, oil, gasoline, from the Seventh Army, as well as our lodging, and one sou a day as pay. In short, we were to be treated exactly as the French Ambulance sections, and to be subject to the same discipline."
Rations consist of a portion of meat, hard bread—baked some weeks previously—rice, beans, macaroni or potatoes, a lump of grease for cooking, coffee, sugar and a little wine. For soldiers on duty there are field kitchens, fire and boilers running on wheels. But billeted men have their food cooked by some village woman, or a group build wood fires against a wall. Our men made arrangements to mess at a restaurant.
The work was so continuous that some of the men drove for as long as fifty hours without sleep, and no one had time for more than an occasional nap of an hour and a half.
After the battle of Hartmannsweilerkopf the section was decorated as a whole, and twelve men individually were decorated. Lovering Hill of Harvard has been in charge of this section. He has received two citations, two Croix de Guerre, which he doesn't wear, because he knows that the Western Front is full of good men who have not been decorated. The boys formed "The Harvard Club of Alsace Reconquise," and had Harvard Alumni Dinners when the fighting eased up.
"I think that we have saved the wounded many hours of suffering," writes Henry M. Suckley of Harvard, 1910. In that quiet statement lies the spirit of the work done by the American Field Service.
From the head of the Valley of the Fecht, over 10 miles of mountain, 5 up and 5 down, to Krut on the other side—that has been the run.
W. K. H. Emerson, Jr., says:
"Once I went over a bank in an attempt to pass a convoy wagon at night without a headlight, such light being forbidden over part of the Mitlach road. I was lucky enough to lean up against a tree before slipping very far over the bank, and within ten minutes ten soldiers had lifted the machine, and put it back on the road, ready to start. Nothing was wrong but the loss of one sidelight, and the car went better than before. There was great merriment among the men who helped to put it on the road."
After four months the section had its barracks, at the 4,000-foot level, blown down by a gale. So they used a new road. Suckley writes of finding two huge trees across the path.
"I had three wounded men in the car, whom I was hurrying to the hospital. I walked down two miles to get some men at a camp of engineers, the road being too narrow to permit turning. There is a new service to the famous Hartmannsweilerkopf, or, rather, within half a mile of this most southerly mount contested by the Germans.