The submarines run on the surface to save electricity.
"Perhaps you are wondering why we didn't submerge. We simply couldn't use up our electricity. It takes oil and running on the surface to create the electric power, and we had a long, long journey ahead. Then ice began to form on the superstructure, and we had to get out a crew to chop it off. It was somethingof a job; there wasn't much to hang on to, and the waves were still breaking over us. But we freed her of the danger, and she went on—
"We used to wonder where the other boys were, in the midst of all the racket. One ship was drifting toward the New England coast, her compass smashed to flinders; others had run for Bermuda, others were still at sea.
Good weather at last.
"Then we had three days of good easterly wind. By jingo, but the good weather was great! Were we glad to have it?—oh, boy! We had just got things shipshape again when we had another blow, but this second one was by no means as bad as the first. And after that we had another spell of decent weather. The crew used to start the phonograph and keep it going all day.
Reaching a friendly coast.
"The weather was so good that I decided to keep right on to the harbor which was to be our base over here. I had enough oil, plenty of water; the only possible danger was a shortage of provisions. So I put us all on a ration, arranging to have the last grand meal on Christmas day. Can you imagine Christmas on a little storm-bumped submarine some hundred miles off the coast? A day or two more and we ran calmly into—shall we say, 'deleted' harbor?
The men rejoice at food and baths.
"Hungry, dirty; oh, so dirty! We hadn't had any sort of bath or wash for about three weeks; we all were green-looking from having been cooped up so long, and our unshaven grease-streaked faces would have upset a dinosaur. The authorities were wonderfully kind, and looked after us and our men in the very best style. I thought we could never stop eating, and a real sleep—oh, boy!"
"Did you fly the flag as you came in?" I asked.
"You bet we did!" answered the captain, his keen, handsome face lighting at the memory."You see," he continued in a practical spirit, "they would probably have pumped us full of holes if we hadn't."
And that is the way the American submarines crossed the Atlantic to do their share for the Great Cause.
A guest on the mother-ship.
I got to the port of the submarines just as an uncertain and rainy afternoon had finally decided to turn into a wild and disagreeable night. Short, drenching showers of rain fell, one after the other, like the strokes of a lash; a wind came up out of the sea, and one could hear the thunder of surf on the headlands. The mother-ship lay moored in a wild, desolate, and indescribably romantic bay; she floated in a sheltered pool, a very oasis of modernity, a marvelous creature of another world and another time. There was just light enough for me to see that her lines were those of a giant yacht. Then a curtain of rain beat hissing down on the sea, and the ship and the vague darkening landscape disappeared—disappeared as if they had melted away in the shower. Presently the bulk of the vessel appeared again. At once we drew alongside, and from that moment on, I was the guest of the vessel, recipient of a hospitality and courtesy for which I here make grateful acknowledgment to my friends and hosts.
The ship is most skillfully handled.
The mother-ship of the submarines was a combination of flagship, supply-station, repair-shop, and hotel. The officers of the submarines had rooms aboard her, which they occupied when off patrol, and the crews off duty slung their hammocks 'tween decks. The boat was pretty well crowded, having more submarines to look after than she had been built to care for; but thanks to the skill of her officers, everything was going as smoothly as could be. The vessel had, so to speak, a submarine atmosphere. Everybody aboard lived, worked, andwould have died for the submarine. They believed in the submarine, believed in it with an enthusiasm which rested on pillars of practical fact.
The heroism of the men who tried the first submarine.
The chief of staff was the youngest captain in our navy; a man of hard energy and keen insight; one to whom our submarine service owes a very genuine debt. His officers were specialists: the surgeon of the vessel had been for years engaged in studying the hygiene of submarines, and was constantly working to free the atmosphere of the vessels from deleterious gases and to improve the living conditions of the crews. I remember listening one night to a history of the submarine, told by one of the officers of the staff; and for the first time in my life I came to appreciate at its full value the heroism of the men who risked their lives in the first cranky, clumsy, uncertain little vessels, and the imagination and the faith of the men who believed in the type. Ten years ago, a descent in a sub was an adventure to be prefaced by tears and making of wills; to-day submarines are chasing submarines hundreds of miles at sea, are crossing the ocean, and have grown from a tube of steel not much larger than a lifeboat, to underwater cruisers which carry six-inch guns.
Said an officer to me, "The future of the submarine? Why, sir, the submarine is the only war vessel that's going to have a future!"
The submarines are moved alongside.
On the night of my arrival, once dinner was over, I went on deck and looked down through the rain at the submarines moored alongside. They lay close by, one beside the other, in a pool of radiance cast by a number of electric lights hanging over each open hatchway. Beyond this pool lay the rain and the dark; within it, their sides awash in the clear green water of the bay, their gray bridges and rust-stained superstructures shining in the rain,lay the strange, bulging, crocodilian shapes of steel. There was something unearthly, something not of this world or time, in the picture; I might have been looking at invaders of the sleeping earth. The wind swept past in great booming salvoes; rain fell in sloping, liquid rods through the brilliancy of electric lamps burning with a steadiness that had something in it strange, incomprehensible, and out of place in the motion of the storm.
And then a hand appeared on the topmost rung of the nearer ladder, and a bulky sailor, a very human sailor in very human dungarees, poked his head out of the aperture, surveyed the inhospitable night, and disappeared.
Submarines are going out to-night.
"He's on Branch's boat. They're going out to-night," said the officer who was guiding me about.
"To-night? How on earth will he ever find his way to the open sea?"
"Knows the bay like a book. However, if the weather gets any worse, I doubt if the captain will let him go. Branch will be wild if they don't let him out. Somebody has just reported wreckage off the coast, so there must be a Hun round."
"But aren't our subs sometimes mistaken for Germans?"
"Oh, yes," was the calm answer.
The boats may never come back.
I thought of that ominous phrase I had noted in the British records,—"failed to report,"—and I remembered the stolid British captain who had said to me, speaking of submarines, "Sometimes nobody knows just what happened. Out there in the deep water, whatever happens, happens in a hurry."
My guide and I went below to the officers' corridor. Now and then, through the quiet, a mandolin or guitar could be heard far off twanging some sentimental island ditty; andbeneath these sweeter sounds lay a monotonous mechanical humming.
"What's that sound?" I asked.
"That's the Filipino mess-boys having a little festino in their quarters. The humming? Oh, that's the mother-ship's dynamos charging the batteries of Branch's boat. Saves running on the surface."
The captain of the patrol cheerful.
My guide knocked at a door. Within his tidy little room, the captain who was to go out on patrol was packing the personal belongings he needed on the trip.
"Hello!" he cried cheerily when he saw us; "come on in. I'm only doing a little packing up. What's it like outside?"
"Raining same as ever, but I don't think it's blowing up any harder."
Reading matter is in demand.
"Hooray!" cried the young captain with heartfelt sincerity; "then I'll get out to-night. You know the captain told me that if it got any worse, he'd hold me till to-morrow morning. I told him I'd rather go out to-night. Perfect cinch once you get to the mouth of the bay; all you have to do is submerge and take it easy. What do you think of the news? Smithie thinks he saw a Hun yesterday. Got anything good to read? Somebody's pinched that magazine I was reading. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—that ought to be enough handkerchiefs. Hello, there goes the juice!"
The humming of the dynamo was dying away slowly, fading with an effect of lengthening distance. The guitar orchestra, as if to celebrate its deliverance, burst into a triumphant rendering of Sousa's "Stars and Stripes."
My guide and I waited till after midnight to watch the going of Branch'sZ-5. Branch and his second, stuffed into black oilskins down whose gleaming surface ran beaded drops of rain, stood on the bridge; a number of sailors were busy doing various things along the deck.The electric lights shone in all their calm unearthly brilliance. Then slowly, very slowly, theZ-5began to gather headway, the clear water seemed to flow past her green sides, and she rode out of the pool of light into the darkness waiting close at hand.
"Good-bye! Good luck!" we cried.
A vagrant shower came roaring down into the shining pool.
"Good-bye!" cried voices through the night.
The submarines disappear in the dark.
Three minutes later all trace of theZ-5had disappeared in the dark.
Night and day are the same on a submarine.
Captain Bill of theZ-3was out on patrol. His vessel was running submerged. The air within—they had but recently dived—was new and sweet; and that raw cold which eats into submerged submarines had not begun to take the joy out of life. It was the third day out; the time, five o'clock in the afternoon. The outer world, however, did not penetrate into the submarine. Night or day, on the surface or submerged, only one time, a kind of motionless electric high noon, existed within those concave walls of gleaming cream-white enamel.
Those of the crew not on watch were taking it easy. Like unto their officers, submarine sailors are an unusual lot. They arerealsailors, or machinist sailors—boys for whose quality the navy has a flattering, picturesque, and quite unprintable adjective. A submarine man, mind you, works harder than perhaps any other man of his grade in the navy, because the vessel in which he lives is nothing but a tremendously intricate machine.
Life on board.
In one of the compartments the phonograph, the eternal, ubiquitous phonograph of the navy, was bawling its raucous rags and mechano-nasal songs, and in the pauses between records, one could just hear the low hum of the distant dynamos. A little group in blue dungarees held a conversation in a corner; a petty officer,blue cap tilted back on his head, was at work on a letter; the cook, whose genial art was customarily under an interdict while the vessel was running submerged, was reading an ancient paper from his own home town.
News of a German submarine.
Captain Bill sat in a retired nook, if a submarine can possibly be said to have a retired nook, with a chart spread open on his knees. The night before, he had picked up a wireless message saying that a German had been seen at sundown in a certain spot on the edge of his patrol. So Captain Bill had planned to run submerged to the spot in question, and then pop up suddenly in the hope of potting the Hun. Some fifteen minutes before sundown, therefore, theZ-3arrived at the place where the Fritz had been observed.
"I wish I knew just where the bird was," said an intent voice; "I'd drop a can right on his neck."
The sentiments of the captain of a destroyer.
These sentiments were not those of anybody aboard theZ-3. An American destroyer had also come to the spot looking for the German, and the gentle thought recorded above was that of her captain. It was just sundown; a level train of splendor burned on the ruffled waters to the west; a light, cheerful breeze was blowing. The destroyer, ready for anything, was hurrying along at a smart clip.
"This is the place all right, all right," said the navigator of the destroyer. "Come to think of it, that chap's been reported from here twice."
Keen eyes swept the shining uneasy plain.
How a submarine crew takes orders.
Meanwhile, some seventy feet below, theZ-3manœuvred, killing time. The phonograph had been hushed, and every man was ready at his post. The prospect of a go with the enemy had brought with it a keen thrill of anticipation. Now, a submarine crew is a well-trained machine. There are no shouted orders. If a submarine captain wants to send his boat underquickly, he simply touches the button of a Klaxon; the horn gives a demoniac yell throughout the ship, and each man does what he ought to do at once. Such a performance is called a "crash dive."
"I'd like to see him come up so near that we could ram him," said the captain, gazing almost directly into the sun. "Find out what she's making."
Getting up speed.
The engineer lieutenant stooped to a voice-tube that almost swallowed up his face, and yelled a question to the engine-room. An answer came, quite unheard by the others.
"Twenty-four, sir," said the engineer lieutenant.
"Get her up to twenty-six."
The engineer cried again through the voice-tube. The wake of the vessel roared like a mill-race, the white foam tumbling rosily in the setting sun.
Seventy feet below the surface.
Seventy feet below, Captain Bill was arranging the last little details with the second in command.
The plan of attack.
"In about five minutes we'll come up and take a look-see [stick up the periscope], and if we see the bird, and we're in a good position to send him a fish [torpedo], we'll let him have one. If there is something there, and we're not in a good position, we'll manœuvre till we get into one, and then let him have it. If there isn't anything to be seen, we'll go under again and take another look-see in half an hour. Reilly has his instructions." (Reilly was chief of the torpedo-room.)
Wreckage all about.
"Something round here must have got it in the neck recently," said the destroyer captain, breaking a silence which had hung over the bridge. "Didn't you think that wreckage a couple of miles back looked pretty fresh? Wonder if the boy we're after had anything to do with it. Keep an eye on that sun-streak."
A crash dive to avoid a destroyer.
An order was given in theZ-3. It was followed instantly by a kind of commotion—sailors opened valves, compressed air ran down pipes, the ratchets of the wheel clattered noisily. On the moon-faced depth-gauge, with its shining brazen rim, the recording arrow fled swiftly, counter clockwise, from seventy to twenty, to fifteen feet. Captain Bill stood crouching at the periscope, and when it broke the surface, a greenish light poured down it and focused in his eyes. He gazed keenly for a few seconds, and then reached for the horizontal wheel which turns the periscope round the horizon. He turned—gazed, jumped back, and pushed the button for a crash dive.
"She was almost on top of me," he explained afterwards, "coming like hell! I had to choose between being rammed or depth-bombed."
There was another swift commotion, another opening and closing of valves, and the arrow on the depth-gauge leaped forward. Captain Bill was sending her down as far as he could, as fast as he dared. Fifty feet, seventy feet—ninety feet. Hoping to throw the destroyer off, theZ-3doubled on her track. A hundred feet.
Crash! Depth-charge number one.
Depth bombs explode near by.
The submarine's peril.
According to Captain Bill, who is good at similes, it was as if a giant, wading along through the sea, had given the boat a vast and violent kick, and then, leaning down, had shaken her as a terrier shakes a rat. TheZ-3rocked, lay on her side, and fell through the water. A number of lights went out. Men picked themselves out of corners, one with the blood streaming down his face from a bad gash over his eye. Many of them told later of "seeing stars" when the vibration of the depth-charge traveled through the hull and their own bodies; some averred that "white light" seemed to shoot out of theZ-3'swalls. Each man stood at his post waiting for the next charge.
Crash! A second depth-charge. To everyone's relief, it was less violent than the first. A few more lights went out. Meanwhile theZ-3continued to sink and was rapidly nearing the danger-point. Having escaped the first two depth-charges, Captain Bill hastened to bring the boat up to a higher level. Then, to make things cheerful, it was discovered that theZ-3showed absolutely no inclination to obey her controls.
Anxious moments before the submarine rises again.
"At first," said Captain Bill, "I thought that the first depth-bomb must have jammed all the external machinery; then I decided that our measures to rise had not yet overcome the impetus of our forced descent. Meanwhile the old hooker was heading for the bottom of the Irish Sea, though I'd blown out every bit of water in her tanks. Had to—fifty feet more, and she would have crushed in like an egg-shell under the wheel of a touring-car. But she kept on going down. The distance of the third, fourth, and fifth depth-bombs, however, put cheer in our hearts. Then, presently, she began to rise; the old girl came up like an elevator in a New York business block. I knew that the minute I came to the surface those destroyer brutes would try to fill me full of holes, so I had a man with a flag ready to jump on deck the minute we emerged. He was pretty damn spry about it, too. I took another look through the periscope, and saw that the destroyer lay about two miles away, and as I looked she came for meagain. Meanwhile, my signal-man was hauling himself out of the hatchway as if his legs were in boiling water."
The Stars and Stripes signal to the destroyer.
"We've got her!" cried somebody aboard the destroyer, in a deep American voice full of the exultation of battle. The lean rifles swung, lowered. "Point one, lower." They were about to hear "Fire!" when the Stars and Stripes andsundry other signals burst from the deck of the misusedZ-3.
"Well, what do you think of that!" said the gunner. "If it ain't one of our own gang. Say, we must have given it to 'em hard."
"We'll go over and see who it is," said the captain of the destroyer. "The signals are O.K., but it may be a dodge of the Huns. Ask 'em who they are."
In obedience to the order, a sailor on the destroyer's bridge wigwagged the message.
"Z-3," answered one of the dungaree-clad figures on the submarine's deck.
No resentment of the adventure.
Captain Bill came up himself, as the destroyer drew alongside, to see his would-be assassin. There was no resentment in his heart. The adventure was only part of the day's work. The destroyer neared; her bow overlooked them. The two captains looked at each other. The dialogue was laconic.
"Hello, Bill," said the destroyer captain. "All right?"
"Sure," answered Captain Bill, to one who had been his friend and classmate.
"Ta-ta, then," said he of the destroyer; and the lean vessel swept away in the twilight.
The cook's opinion of the destroyers.
Captain Bill decided to stay on the surface for a while. Then he went below to look over things. The cook, standing over some unlovely slop which marked the end of a half a dozen eggs broken by the concussion, was giving his opinion on destroyers. The cook was a child of Brooklyn, and could talk. The opinion was not a nice opinion.
"Give it to 'em, cooko," said one of the crew, patting the orator affectionately on the shoulder. "We're with you."
And Captain Bill laughed to himself.
The breakfast-hour was drawing to its end, and the very last straggler sat alone at the ward-room table. Presently an officer of themother-ship, passing through, called to the lingering group of submarine officers.
The first of the flotilla to return.
"TheX-4is coming up the bay, and theX-12has been reported from signal station."
The news was received with a little hum of friendly interest. "Wonder what Ned will have to say for himself this time." "Must have struck pretty good weather." "Bet you John has been looking for another chance at that Hun of his."
The appearance of the crew.
The talk drifted away into other channels. A little time passed. Then suddenly a door opened, and, one after the other, entered the three officers of the first home-coming submarine. They were clad in various ancient uniforms which might have been worn by an apprentice lad in a garage: old gray flannel shirts, and stout grease-stained shoes; several days had passed since their faces had felt a razor, and all were a little pale from their cruise. But the liveliest of keen eyes burned in each resolute young face, eyes smiling and glad.
A friendly hullabaloo broke forth. Chairs scraped, one fell with a crash.
"Hello, boys!"
"Hi, Ned!"
"For the love of Pete, Joe, shave off those whiskers of yours; they make you look like Trotzky."
"See any Germans?"
"What's the news?"
"What's doing?"
"Hi, Manuelo"—this to a Filipino mess-boy who stood looking on with impassive curiosity—"serve three more breakfasts."
"Anything go for you?"
"Well, if here isn't our old Bump!"
Captain Ned begins his story.
The crowd gathered round Captain Ned, who had established contact (this is a military term quite out of place in a work on the navy) with the eagerly sought, horribly elusive German.
"Go on, Ned, give us an earful. What time did you say it was?"
An enemy submarine that escaped.
"About 5 a.m." answered the captain. He stood leaning against a door, and the fine head, the pallor, the touch of fatigue, all made a very striking and appealing picture. "Say about eight minutes after five. I'd just come up to take a look-see, and saw him just about two miles away, on the surface, and moving right along. So I went under to get into a good position, came up again, and let him have one. Well, he saw it just as it was almost on him, swung her round, and dived like a ton of lead."
The audience listened in silent sympathy. One could see the disappointment on the captain's face.
"Where was he?"
"About so-and-so."
"That's the jinx that got after the convoy sure as you live."
Two blind ships that tried to find each other under water.
The speaker had had his own adventures with the Germans. A month or so before, he had shoved up his periscope and spotted a Fritz on the surface in full noonday. The watchful Fritz, however, had been lucky enough to see the enemy almost at once, and had dived. The American followed suit. The eyeless submarine manœuvred about, some eighty feet under, the German evidently "making his getaway," the American hoping to be lucky enough to pick up Fritz's trail, and get a shot at him when he rose again to the top. And while the two blind ships manœuvred there in the dark of the abyss, the keel of the fleeing German had actually, by a curious chance, scraped along the top of the American vessel and carried away the wireless aerials!
All were silent for a few seconds, thinking over the affair. It was not difficult to read the thought in every mind, the thought ofgetting atthe Germans. The characteristicaggressivenessof the American mind, heritage of a people compelled to subdue a vast, wild continent, is a wonderful military attribute. The idea of our navy is, "Get after 'em, keep after 'em, stay after 'em, don't give 'em an instant of security or rest." And none have this fighting spirit deeper in their hearts than our gallant boys of the submarine patrol.
"That's all," said Captain Ned. "I'm going to have a wash-up." He lifted a grease-stained hand to his cheek, rubbed his unshaven beard, and grinned. "Any letters?"
"Whole bag of stuff. Smithie put it on your desk."
"Trotzky" and "Rasputin."
Captain Ned wandered off. Presently, the door opened again, and three more veterans of the patrol cruised in, also in ancient uniforms. There were more cheers; more friendly cries. It was unanimously decided that the "Trotzky" of the first lot had better take a back seat, since the second in command of the newcomers was "a perfect ringer for Rasputin."
"See anything?"
A British patrol hunts a lost torpedo.
"Nothing much. There's a bit of wreckage just off shore. Saw a British patrol boat early Tuesday morning. I was on the surface, lying between her and the sunrise; she was hidden by a low-lying swirl of fog; she saw us first. When we saw her, I made signals, and over she came. Guess what the old bird wanted—wanted to know if I'd seen a torpedo he'd fired at me!An old scout with white whiskers; one of those retired captains, I suppose, who has gone back on the job. He admitted he had received the Admiralty notes about us, but thought we acted suspicious. Did you ever hear of such nerve?"
Courage of the submarine patrol.
When the war was young, I served on land withmessieurs les poilus. I have seen the contests of aviators, also trench-raids and thefighting for Verdun. Since then I have seen the war at sea. To my mind, if there is one service of this war which more than any other requires those qualities of endurance, skill, and courage whose blend the fighting men call—Elizabethanly, but oh, so truly—"guts," it is the submarine patrol.
Copyright, Atlantic Monthly, October, 1918.
France took tender care of her wounded heroes, and the following narrative gives a number of touching incidents observed by one who visited several of the French hospitals and received stories and experiences from the wounded soldiers.
The descriptions which are to follow belong to history already ancient; to the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918. So rapid is the march of events with us now!
The enthusiasm of a wounded soldier in 1914.
The soldier wounded during the first months of the War came to us overflowing with enthusiasm, eager to express himself. His mind was full of picturesque and varied impressions and he asked for nothing better than to tell about them. Willingly he described the emotions and spirit of the moment of departure; his curiosity in the presence of the unknown, the shock of the first contact with the enemy, the dizzy joy of initial successes. He confessed the amazement and pain of the first checks and the headlong retreat which followed them. He spoke of the famous Joffre's "ordre du jour" when, in the battle of the Marne, the men were told to take the offensive. They stopped the enemy. They pursued him. They experienced the intoxication of a victory that gave back to France her old prestige and felt with certainty, although at first confusedly, that their battle was a decisive event in human history.
The wounded of 1918 reflect the long tragedy.
They have faced terrible new weapons.
To this brilliant and epic beginning succeeded a long and sombre tragedy, to thisIliadworthy of a Homer anInfernoworthy of a Dante. So we cannot wonder that the wounded of 1918 differed from those of 1914, and that their faces, like the face of the Florentine poet returning from hell, reflected the terrible things through which they had passed. The sufferingof years, the eternal waiting for a decision of arms that did not come, the increasing horror of confronting weapons unknown in the early months—heavy artillery, gas, liquid fire, aëroplane attacks—left their mark upon our soldiers.
Dante imagines the terrible things he recounts. Our soldiers have seen them face to face. New Year after New Year has come and gone, and found them living underground, in constant danger of unseen and unavoidable forms of death, huddled together in damp, dark holes, exposed to rain and snow and shell fire. Rarely was there fighting—as we used to understand the term—but daily death took its toll, and ill and wounded were evacuated to the rear.
Modern battle has become a scientific operation.
Ardor they certainly retained for the assault, and heroism for confronting sheets of fire, or clouds of asphyxiating gas; but in the scientific operation which the modern battle has become, most things that are purely personal are more to be dreaded than desired, a fiery temper counts for much less than coolness, discipline, mastery of self, the spirit of abnegation and self-sacrifice. And when the battle was won, that is to say, when they had taken, not a town with a resounding name, but the ruins of a village, a treeless forest, a dismantled fort, a hill thirty metres high, the survivors still had a task before them which had lost none of its roughness or austerity. They had to organize the new position in haste, dig other shelters, undergo bombardments and reject counter-attacks, all the more violent because the enemy, supported in the rear by positions prepared in advance, was more furious than ever after defeat. Thus it continued—until now, even now, when under the irresistible pressure of the French, the English and the Americans, the German wall is crumbling. At last it willbe broken, and the victorious flood of the armies of democracy will pass through. Then our invaded provinces and the sacred soil of Belgium will be freed; then the conditions of just and honorable peace among all the nations of the earth may be dictated on the banks of the Rhine—or farther, if necessary.
Patience and tenacity are necessary.
But to support, while we waited, the monotonous trench-life to accomplish the rapid nocturnal raids or the formidable exploits of the great days and weeks of offensive, required more than that brilliant quality of our fathers, thefuria francesethat was the synonym of overwhelming courage and the ardor which commands victory. Patience to wait, resignation to accept, tenacity to prolong efforts, deliberate and indomitable will to overcome trials, within and without and to press on to the distant goal of final victory were above all things necessary.
"To the end!"
These qualities, summed up in one expression: "To the end!" so profoundly different from those which hitherto have passed as characteristic of our race, were the ones most noticeable in our combatant of the fourth year of the War. Youthful enthusiasm was no more; each man numbered the dangers run, each man took clear account of those to come.
Patriotism becomes a passion.
Only austere love of duty can sustain a man at such a height. A schoolmaster-sergeant of Lyon, Philippe Gonnard, voices it to a friend inclined to pity him: he was ill enough to get his freedom, but wished, nevertheless, to keep at his post until he was killed: "I intend to stay at the front.... Patriotism for me is a passion. Does that mean that I am happy here far from all I love? You do not think that and I have often said I am not, in prose and verse. But from now until peace, no man of heart can be happy. If I came back, I should be still less happy, because instead ofbeing dissatisfied with my lot, I should be dissatisfied with myself."
Strong will and nobility of soul.
More or less consciously, this was the rock bottom of the character of the soldier of France after three and a half years of war: "Will always on the stretch, anguish conquered, melancholy transformed into nobility of soul—as long as literature does not portray these essential traits of the soldier," says one of our best author-combatants, "all it creates will only be artificial and bear no relation to reality."
"No matter, it is for France."
"No matter, it is for France!" says the wounded soldier to the comrades bending over him, and if it is during an attack he tells them not to stop, not to carry him away "because it is no longer worth while," but to continue without him the noble work for which he is offering his life. Let a chaplain bring him divine help in time and he will die more than resigned, joyous and radiant in the faith of his childhood, bewailing his sins and kissing the crucifix like the French of the Middle Ages. How many times, in the horrible frame of modern war, have words been uttered, scenes enacted, agonies suffered which echoed the most sublime passages of theChanson de Roland!
Most of the wounded recover.
Many times wounded.
But, thank God, among those who fall without being killed outright, the minority are mortally wounded. Most of them are destined to get well or at least to survive: they know it, and are glad. As soon as they regain consciousness after the shock, the first idea is: "Am I really not dead?" To be wounded does not disconcert them at all. "We are here for that!" said, the other day, one of my young friends of the class 1915, who by exception has been preserved until now. The alternative, in this present War, is not to come out of it wounded, or unwounded, but wounded or dead:to escape death is all that one can reasonably ask. Men who have only been wounded once, are more and more scarce, some have returned to the front four or five times. We had at the hospital a year ago an American sergeant of the Foreign Legion, engaged at Orleans in August, 1914, who having fought in Champagne, on the Somme and in Alsace, had received three wounds, the last at the end of 1915, at Belloy-en-Santerre, when a German bomb had badly damaged his left thigh: "the last" up to that time, for he had to go back under fire and will in all probability receive a fourth wound.
The slightly wounded are lucky.
The most unfortunate.
Those slightly wounded have not much merit, it must be confessed, in being resigned or even joyful. After a rapid dressing at the first station they will rest several days at the hospital at the front, and then get leave of convalescence which they will pass with their families. A wound for them, who can bear a little suffering, means an unexpected holiday and supplementary permission. They are only sorry if they are hit stupidly, out of action or at the beginning of a well-prepared attack, and prevented from going on with it. Let us leave them to their good luck, and stay longer with the severely wounded, those, for instance, who have a leg or arm broken, a fractured jaw, vertebra or ribs bruised, or are deprived of one of their senses—blind, deaf, paralyzed. We unhesitatingly acknowledge that these three last categories of wounded feel their misery profoundly, and need time to get used to it. Those, happily much more numerous, who have only temporarily or permanently lost the use of one of their limbs, generally consider themselves very fortunate. "I have the good wound!" they affect to say, meaning that the War is over for them. So at least they express themselves, not at all wishing to be admired, and trying as it were, to minimize their courage in bearing their trial.
Self-sacrifice of the wounded.
"Arise, ye dead!"
But aside from this paradoxical attitude, they frequently speak and act in the most simple, touching way! It is common to hear one say to the stretcher-bearer who comes to fetch him: "Take my comrade here first; he is much more wounded than I; I can wait...." And that when it means lying on the ground under the bombardment, thirsty, feverish, feeling his strength ebb with his blood. Before any one comes back to get him, often he will try again, if he has a sound arm left, to fire his rifle or his machine-gun once more. Glory surrounds the epic incident of the trench where the only unwounded soldier, seeing the enemy arrive, cried out as if in delirium: "Arise, ye dead!" and the dying really rose, and succeeded, some of them, in firing once more before they fell again, and the assailants fled. A more recent and simpler deed is also worth recording.
A dead observer protects his pilot.
Returning from a bombardment of the enemy's factories in broad daylight, a French machine conducted by two men was attacked by several aviators. The observer, hit by a ball in the chest, dropped down into thecarlingue. The pilot seeing this prepared to turn back. But hearing his machine-gun firing again, he concluded that the observer was not seriously hurt. As soon as he landed in France: "Well, what about that wound?" he asked. No answer. He bent down and saw that his companion was dead. Even in his agony he had continued to protect his comrade.
In the beginning of the War the wounded stayed a long, a very long time without being rescued, at the place where they fell, or in the shelter to which they had been able to crawl. Our stretcher-bearers of the American Ambulance found, after the battle of the Marne, many who had lain for days and nights in shellholes, at the foot of trees, in ruined barns or churches! One may guess what the mortality might be! Today, happily, it is no longer so. The field of action is more restricted and the aid is better organized.
Transportation is painful and dangerous.
Relief at the first dressing station.
The nurses devoted and the sufferers resigned.
If transportation, however, is less retarded than three years ago, it is still painful and rather dangerous. Even when a special passage has been dug before the attack for the evacuation of the wounded, all jolts are not avoided in this dark and narrow way; but in going through the ordinary passage-ways, dangerous and unseen obstacles are often encountered—crumbling earth, perhaps, or convoys going in the opposite direction. If they heeded the wounded soldier, the stretcher-bearers would go on open ground. This he frequently does, if he is at all able to get on without aid; once hit he thinks himself invulnerable—a singular illusion which has brought about many catastrophes. At the first dressing-station and at the front hospital, relief begins. In ordinary times, this will be quite complete, and the wounded will not be carried to the rear until they are really able to stand the journey. But while the battle is on, they must go in the greatest haste: the worst cases are thoroughly cared for; the badly hurt who can be moved receive the attention which enables them to depart speedily; the slight cases have to be content with summary consideration. Here one sees the devotion of the nurses and the resignation of the sufferers, and better than resignation: the noble effort not to moan, the murmured prayer, the forgetfulness of self, eagerness to ask news of the fight. Among the falsities of a book a thousand times too vaunted (falsities due not so much to the lie direct as to the constant dwelling on odious details, and the suppression of admirable facts), nothing isfarther from the truth than the picture of a hospital at the front where one hears and sees only blaspheming and rebellious men. With most of the wounded who have spoken to me about it in our hospital, and who certainly had the right to bear witness, we proclaim loudly that if the French army had been such as the work in question paints it in this passage and in many others, the War would have ended long ago, and history would never have known the names of the Marne, nor the Yser, nor Verdun, nor the Chemin-des-Dames.
A true picture of our Ambulance at the front.
A true picture of an Ambulance at the front, overflowing with wounded the evening of a battle, I find in these lines by an eyewitness: "Some moderate complaints among the crowded stretchers: one asks for a drink, one wants relief for pain, a bed, a dressing, to be quickly attended. But let some story be told in the group, some incident come out like a trumpet-call, all faces brighten, the men lift themselves a little, the mirage of glory gives them heart again. I commemorate with piety the anonymous example of a little Zouave, doubled over on himself, holding his bullet-pierced abdomen in both hands, whom I heard gently asked: 'Well, little one, how goes it?' Oh, very well,mon Lieutenant, our company has passed the road from B—— to the south; we had gotten there when I was knocked out. It's all right; we are smashing them!"
Their first thought for victory.
I, personally, received such answers from wounded who came to us from the Chemin-des-Dames, or from the fort of Malmaison. When I asked for news, my mind preoccupied with their individual sufferings, their first thought was to tell me of the victory. The ordinary French phrase for "How are you?Comment ça va-t-il?" (literally: How goes it?) may apply to an event or to a person. This being so, it is never of himself that the newly-wounded soldier thinks, but of what is interesting to everybody—the common success. I went to welcome a patient brought in October 26th and asked: "You came tonight?"
"Yes, Father."
"Not too tired by the journey?"
"No, not too much."
"What wound?"
"Jaw pierced by a bullet, arm broken, wound in the thigh."
"How goes it?"
The wounded are delighted with the success of the attack.
"Very well! The wounded who came to the hospital at the front were delighted, we had gotten everything we were trying for!"
"You were in the attack?"
"Unfortunately no, I was wounded the day before."
"In the bombardment?"
"Yes, while we were filling up the trenches to make a way for the tanks toward the fort of Malmaison."
"That must have been pretty constant thundering?"
"Yes, but very soon we did not think of it. In the little bombardments you hear the shells coming and try to get to shelter, but, in those great days, when it is going on all the time, you can no longer distinguish anything, it is a continual noise, a kind of huge snoring. Then you are quite calm."