IVAT THE FRONT

THIS time we have a different run. It is from Montzéville to Hill 239, and the wounded are brought in through the communication trench which leads to Mort Homme—the well-named Dead Man’s Hill. The road was once lined for a distance of perhaps a mile with towering poplars, evinced by the size of the stumps, but now not one of them is left higher than three or four feet. The road runs the entire distance across open meadows, and as whatcamouflagethere was has been shot away by the Boche in his search for two 220 batteries, which have long since moved on, the enemysaucissescan regulate the traffic quite simply. The place has been shot up so much recently that there has been no time to repair the roads fully, and now there are long stretches temporarily patched with rough, broken stone, which makes bad going. Riding forward, one sees large German shells breaking on the road ahead like sudden black clouds, which disappear slowly and convey to the mind uncomfortable premonitions.

Mort Homme comes suddenly and bleakly into view about two kilometres on our left,—a hill, not exceedingly high, commanding a great plain, it is imposing only in the memory of the rivers of blood that have flowed down its sides. Once—and looking at it one can scarcely believe it—this was covered with trees and vegetation like many another less famous hill. Now it is reduced to a mere sandpile, pitted with the scars of a million shells. After standing the continuous bombardment of both combatants for over a year, there is left not a stick of vegetation, nor an inch of ground that has not been turned over by shells many times. Crowned by the pink of the sunset, it stands there on the plain a great monument to the glorious death of thousands.

The French lost many thousands of lives in their attempts to capture Mort Homme, and were very bitter, consequently, against its defenders. There was a large tunnel running through the hill, and when three sides had been captured and both ends of the tunnel were held, it was discovered that they had trapped there three thousand Germans. I talked with a man who walked through the tunnel the day after the massacre and he told me that it was literally inches deep in blood.

Arrived at theposte, which is nothing more than a hole in the ground, we stand around while thebrancardiersload the car and exchange lies with any one who happens to be there. The Boche sends a dozen or more shells whining over our heads to break on the road or beside it, and near enough for every one to gravitate slowly towards theabriin preparation for a wild dive should the next shell fall much nearer. One man asked me why they put stairs leading into anabri, as nobody ever thought of using them. When I asked him how else one would get out, he said he had never thought of that.

There is nothing quite so uncomfortable to hear as the near whistle of a shell. The more one hears the sound the more it affects him. There is something in the sharp whine which seems to create despair and induce subconscious melancholy. There is a feeling of helplessness and powerlessness that is most depressing. The thunder of the guns or the crash of the bursting shells cannot be compared with the sound of this approaching menace. It is as if some demon from the depths of Hades were hurtling towards you, its weird laughter crying out, calling to you and chilling your blood. For the second of its passage a hush falls on the conversation, and the best jokes die in dry throats. But it is only for that second, and instantly laughter rings out again at some jest. Speculations or comments are made on the probable or observed place where it exploded, and all is the same except for that subconscious tenseness which, for the most part unrealized, grips every man while he goes about his work here.

The first ordeal by fire is the easiest. It is then but a new and interesting sensation and experience. Later, after one has seen the effect and had some close calls, it is more of a nervous strain. The whine of a shell is very high-pitched, and after a time the sound wears distinctly on the nerves. It is a curious fact that, in spite of the philosophy developed, the longer a man has been under shell-fire the harder it is for him to stand it. By no means would he think of showing it, but he would not deny the fact. It is only the philosophy and callousness developed which keep the men from breaking down, and in many cases the strain on the nerves becomes so great that men do collapse under it. This is one of the forms of so-called “shell-shock.”

The car loaded withblessés, we start back, driving more slowly this time, as precious lives are in our care and jolts must be avoided wherever possible. We find the road still more “out of repair” than when we went over it before, with a number of new shell-holes varying from two to ten feet in diameter, and much wood, dirt, and torncamouflagestrewn about, and often a horse lying where it was hit, its blood coloring the mud in the gutter.

Approaching the town of Montzéville one sees at first a wood—ci-devant—now a few blackened tree-trunks of spectre-like appearance against the grey of the evening sky. Behind these appears the town, a mass of jagged ruins, at that distance seeming to be absolutely deserted. In fact it is, except for the dozen odd men who live in two or three scatteredabrisfor some obscure purpose. An air of desolation and despair broods over the place, and God knows it has seen enough to haunt it.

From Montzéville we ride on to Dombasle and Jouy, the hospital, and after handing over our more or less helpless charges to the tender mercies of thebrancardiers, we return to the relay station at Montzéville to wait for our next roll, and to wonder what possible good thosepoiluscan be doing who sit all day so peacefully at the door of theabriopposite ours, sippingPinardand smoking their cigarettes.

THE soldiers at the front are always looking for the bright side of life, and after a little one gets to see humor in many more things than he would have believed possible at home. As an example, there seems to be little humor connected with a funeral, yet one of the times I saw thepoilusmost amused was one day at P 4, our relay station, on such an occasion.

There had been an intermittent bombardment, and we were sitting or standing inside theabriwaiting for it to let up. Theabriwas located in the corner of a graveyard, and there was always the unpleasant feeling that the next rain might wash a few bones in on us. Theabriwas small, very crowded, and, as it was several feet underground, none too well ventilated. Every one spent long stretches here, and brought his food with him. What was too poor to eat soon mixed with the mud on the floor, lending an unsavory odor to the atmosphere. Presently one of the Frenchmen went out to see if the bombardment had stopped. This is discovered by the same method one ascertains whether or not it is raining—if he gets wet the storm is not over. The bombardment was not over, and we waited. At last it seemed to have let up, only an occasional shell crashing into the woods across the road, and we went out to stretch and get a breath of air.

Thepoilusgathered our inquisitive friend from the surrounding shrubbery and trees and put him into several empty sandbags which they laid on a stretcher, carefully placing the head, which appeared to have been solid enough to withstand the shock, at the upper end. Another man carried a freshly-made pine-wood coffin. In high spirits, the assembled soldiers formed a procession and marched into the graveyard, singing alternately a funeral dirge and “Madelon,” the French “Tipperary.” This graveyard, not being on the firing-line itself, was rather a formal affair. The graves were laid out in neat rows, and each man had one all to himself with a wooden cross and his name on it. Of course occasionally the shells did a little mixing, but that was a jest of the Fates which disturbed no one, least of all those who were mixed.

Arrived at the grave, thepoilusrolled in the fragments of our late friend and covered them with dirt.

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note.”

Then they came back, roaring with laughter and tossing the coffin in the air. The hero had expected the coffin and they had fooled him. Now they could use it again.

The usual method of burial on the French front, where there is little time to attend to such matters, is to dig a ditch six feet wide, ten feet deep, and twenty feet long approximately. As each man is killed, time and circumstances permitting, he is divested of his coat and shoes, and his pockets are emptied. He is then thrown into the ditch and covered with a few shovelfuls of dirt. This system is all very well until new divisions relieve those in the trenches, and start digging ditches for their own men. As there are no marks to show the location of the old ones, they sometimes uncover rather unpleasant sights.

The reputation we have gained at home of being cold-blooded and lacking in the finer senses is undeserved. While one is in it he cannot permit himself to realize or dwell on the horrors or they would overwhelm him and drive him insane. What is more natural than for the reaction to turn the matter into jest and joke, to permit it to glance from the surface without inflicting a wound?—“C’est la guerre.”

PLUNGED suddenly from the commonplaces of peace into the seething cauldron of war, France has had to adjust herself. Every one without exception has lost many who were dear to him and much that he had considered essential. The homes and hopes of thousands have been blasted. Destruction, following in the wake of the invaders, has laid waste much of the land, in many cases irreparably.

Entering the war a man is possessed of the greatest seriousness. He thinks of its causes, the results both immediate and future, and of the effect of each on him. He is stunned by what he believes himself to be bearing up under. Then, as he moves up into the zone, into service and action, and sees how others are affected, how much suffering and misfortune come to them, he merges his troubles with theirs, realizing the pettiness and insignificance of his own in thetout ensemble. He laughs, and from this laugh springs the philosophy,—“C’est la guerre.”

If a fly falls in his soup, if his best friend is blown to bits before him, if his home and village are destroyed, he calmly shrugs his shoulders, and remarks, “C’est la guerre.”

THE roads at the front are cared for by a class of unsung heroes, the roadbuilders. Back of the lines German prisoners are often used for this work, but it is a rule of warfare that prisoners must not be worked under fire, and the Allies observe this as the other rules of civilized warfare. The roads are the arteries of the front, and during an attack the enemy does his best to cripple them. If he succeeds, the troops in the trenches, cut off from food, ammunition, and other supplies, are at his mercy. During one attack through which I worked, the Boche, whose hobby is getting ranges down to the inch and applying them as all other things in a definite system, put a 150 every ten yards down the more important roads.

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All work in the zone is done by three classes of workers, excluding the necessary military operations carried on by the troops in action. First, there are the German prisoners who do every kind of work out of the zone of fire. Then there are the French prisoners in the army, who have committed some military crime, from sneezing in ranks to shooting a colonel. Instead of serving time in a guardhouse, these are put in the front-line trenches and kept there unarmed to build up the parapet, attend to the drains, stop Boche bullets, and perform other functions. If, for instance, a French soldier sends a letter through the civil instead of the military mails, where the censorship is more strict, he receives a thirty days’ sentence. If these prisoners make a suspicious move they are shot by their own men. Second timers are rare, but many serve life sentences.

Then there is the third class, a regular branch of the army, a subdivision of the engineers, termedpionniers. The engineers do the nastiest work in the army, and thepionniersdo the nastiest work in the engineers. It is their duty to see that the wire is properly cut before a charge, that the parapet is in repair and does not lack sandbags,—and it is in this class that the roadbuilders come.

All along the roads lie piles of broken stone, which are continually replaced by loads from the rear. At intervals are placedabrisfilled with roadbuilders who watch until a shell hits the road in their sector. Then, almost before the dirt settles, they rush out armed with shovels, and pile this rough stone into the hole and rush back again to shelter, to wait for the next shell, which is not long in coming. This rough patching is consolidated later when the sector quiets down, but does admirably for the time-being, as the mud and traffic push it rapidly into shape.

Steam-rollers are then sent up to finish the work, but find themselvespersona non gratawhen left over night in the middle of a narrow and muddy road, with no lights showing. Weambulanciersare not fond of the species at any time, as they seem to have a great affinity for six-inch shells. When disintegrated, any one of the numerous parts blocks our way. We are perfectly content to have the task left to the simple roadbuilder, who proves less of an obstruction after meeting a one-fifty.

MANY undeveloped instincts lie dormant in the subconscious mind of man. In this war, where man has turned back the pages of civilization to live and act for a period of time as a glorified cave-dweller, a number of these unknown faculties have been discovered and developed.

Many animals have the power of seeing in the dark, and all species can sense an unknown danger. These senses have been denied to civilized man, but the primitive life at the front has developed them and other instincts in those who live there so that it seems as if man might again become possessed of all his latent powers.

A man going along a road has a conviction that if he continues he will be killed. He makes a wide detour to avoid the road, and a shell strikes where he would have been. Then again, men have premonitions that they will be killed in the next attack or battle. All this is coupled with absolute fatalism. They feel either that they are going to be killed or will live through everything, and whichever it is, they merely shrug their shoulders, remark, “C’est la guerre,” and permit nothing to alter their belief. Many say that the shell with their name on it has not yet been made, or if it has—“Why worry? We cannot escape it.” I carried one man, while doing evacuation work, who had served three years without a scratch, and whenen reposhad fallen from an apple tree and broken his leg. He thought it a great joke.

Theambulancierhas developed two of these instincts to quite a degree. The first is that he can always locate anabri, his or some one else’s, and disappear in it with astounding rapidity. The second is that he can keep the road with no lights. This has to be done almost entirely by instinct on many nights, and we find it usually safer to make a turn where the “inner voice” directs us rather than where we remember it should be. It is not remarkable, of course, that an occasional car falls into a ditch or a shell-hole, but astonishing rather how seldom this happens. While our Fords never attained any great speed in night driving, I rode once with a friend from another section in a Fiat, when he drove in pitch darkness faster than fifty miles an hour, taking every turn accurately and safely by instinct and luck.

THE mud plays havoc with calculations, and we long to set our foot once again on dry land. All the water in France seems to have gone into mud. Water has never been a popular beverage here, and now it is even less so. One horrifiedpoilu, who had observed me drinking a glass of water, asked if it did not give me indigestion. At the front there is good reason for this. With so many men buried in the ground and so many animals uninterred on it, all the springs are contaminated, and the germs of every disease lurk in the water.

The French army provides a light red wine to take its place. This wine is little stronger than grape juice and is thePinardof thepoilus. The government also provides tobacco which, to quote oneambulancier, cannot be smoked without a gas mask.

The water in the streams is little better, and a bath in one of them gives more moral than physical satisfaction. One French artilleryman told me with great glee of seeing from his observation post a company of German soldiers marched down to a river for a bath. As soon as they were in the water he signalled the range to his battery, and they put a barrage between the bathers and their clothes.

VERDUN is more than a name now—it is a symbol. France’s glorious fight here with her back to the wall has gone down in history as a golden page. The foe thundered at the gates and the gates held,—held for months while the fate of France hung in the balance, and then opening, the hosts of France poured out and drove the foe back mile by mile, bitter miles.

The city does not boast an unscarred building, but these wounds do not bleed in vain. For every one here there shall be two across the frontier when the day of reckoning comes. An awe-inspiring silence broods over the littered streets. There are no civilians here now, but many soldiers, and as one walks an occasional cheer greets him,—“Vive l’Amérique!”

The enemy has been driven back so far by this time that not more than half a dozen vengeful shells a day are directed towards the violated cathedral, its subterranean vaults blown open and exposed, its walls struck, its windows shattered, and its roof fallen. A walk through this city, divided by the peaceful Meuse, would convince one, if nothing had before, that this war is not in vain, and that no force should be spared, no rest taken until the nation which has perpetrated these million crimes be crushed, that it may never strike like this again.

ABATTLE is made up of a number of attacks, and a push consists of a number of battles. Consequently, each attack is most important as it is one of the single stones out of which the wall of the push is constructed. The taking of A—— was a small attack in itself, but it was a part of the foundation on which was built the great August push at Verdun.

Our section rolled into a town about four miles from A—— three days before the attack proper was scheduled to begin. We established our headquarters there, and our relay station andposte de secoursin the Hesse Forest, the latter just behind the third-line trenches.

In the Champagne push the year before the French had not had nearly enough artillery support, and it had cost them many lives. It is something one hears spoken of rarely. To avoid a repetition of this disaster they had massed for this attack in one wood six thousand guns varying in calibre from the famous 75’s to several batteries of 380’s, mounted on a railroad a stone’s throw from our sleeping quarters. However, as we had no time for sleep, it made little difference. The 75 is about a three-inch gun, and the 380, a sixteen approximately.

Starting in three days before the attack, these guns began firing as steadily as they could without overheating. Very often in our frontabriit was impossible to write because of the vibration. One day, when we stopped in the woods to change a punctured tire, the car was knocked off the jack by the shocks several times before we could remove the tire, and at last we had to run in on the rim.

Finally, just before the men were to go over the top, the barrage was set down in front of the trenches and the men climbed over the parapet, and started walking towards the enemy. It is always possible to tell thetir de barrageby the sound of the guns. There is a certain regularity which is lacking when each gun is firing at independent targets, and the steady thunder gives one the feeling of a tremendous hammer smashing, smashing, irresistibly, each blow falling true and hard, and following one another with the regularity of the machines in a giant factory.

A perfect barrage is impenetrable, with the shells falling so near together and with such short intervals of time between that nothing can survive it. The only possibility is the inaccuracy of some one or more guns which will put a number of shells out of the line and leave a break or opening.

Before the attack the officers all have their watches carefully synchronized, as a mistake of one minute may cost many lives. Walking ahead of their men, keeping them the right distance behind the solid wall of flame and steel, they wait until a certain minute when the barrage is lifted a number of yards and then advance to that distance. In the orders, the minute the barrage is to be lifted and the distance are given out beforehand; for to advance the soldiers too quickly would be to put them under fire from their own guns.

In this attack the first wave passed over the destroyed wire, and on reaching the enemy’s front-line trenches could not distinguish them from the rest of the ground, and found no living thing there. The second-line trenches were little better, and they got their fighting at the third-line trenches. So perfect had the preparation and execution of this attack been that the Bois d’A—— was cleared of the enemy in thirteen minutes from the time the French left their trenches.

The first wave is followed by the “butchers” (the English “moppers-up”), who kill all the wounded and the odd prisoners, it being impractical for a charging line to attempt to hold a few captives. Also another factor which makes this treatment of prisoners necessary, and which the Allies have learned by experience, is that unguarded men, once the first wave has passed over them, will take out a machine gun and catch the advancing troops between two fires. This happened a number of times before the simple expedient was adopted of requesting the prisoners to go down into anabriwhere they would be “safer,” and then tossing in two or three grenades which kill and bury them at the same time.

Of course the Boche was not idle in the meanwhile, and kept up a hail of fire from behind A—— Wood and Dead Man’s Hill, which did not fall until two days later, and we had the benefit of this back on the roads as we tore from the relay station to theposte, to the hospital, and back again, trying to take care of as many as we could of the countless wounded from the attack who were being brought in. French soldiers who had been in the war since 1914 said that they had never seen such fire.

This run and the work through this attack were the most interesting of the experiences I had in the zone. We worked day and night, sleeping and eating at odd moments and with long intervals between, ceasing only when twelve of our cars had goneen panne, and half that number of drivers were in the hospital suffering from the new mustard gas which was showered on us in gas shells. We were tired indeed when relieved for a short perioden repos.

TAKING A LOAD FROM THE ABRICOPYRIGHT—INTERNATIONAL FILM SERVICE CO., INC.

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