The section that was "shot up" at Verdun-American Ambulance Field Service, Section Three. Ralph Blumenthal, the Princeton All-America football centre, standing at the right. Next him, Waldo Pierce, the artist.
Philibert, Eighth Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, Fifth Prince of the name, Forty-fifth Count of the name, stooping at the left to repair a bad tire. He was chauffeur of the car that carried us to Verdun.
IV
Table of Contents THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN
The French have been massed at Verdun in the decisive battle of the war. So were the Americans. Our little group of ambulance drivers were called from the other points of the 350-mile line, and five sections of the American Ambulance Field Service and the Harjes and the Norton Corps work from ten up to twenty hours of the day bringing in their comrades, the French wounded. One hundred and twenty of our cars and 120 of our boys in the field service were in the sector, under constant shell-fire. Several were grievously wounded. Others were touched. A dozen of the cars were shot up with shrapnel and slivers of explosive shell.
Will Irwin and I went up with Piatt Andrew, head of the field service, to see the young Americans at work. We left Paris on July 1 in a motor car. Our chauffeur was Philibert, Eighth Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, Fifth Prince of the name, Tenth Marquess of Cruzy and Vauvillars, Forty-fifth Count of the name, Sixteenth Viscount of Tallart, Twenty-first Baron of Clermont en Viennois, Ancien Pair de France, descendant of the Seigneur of Saint Geoire. For nine centuries his family has been famous. The Duke is a kindly, middle-aged aristocrat, who is very helpful to the American Field Service. He takes the boys on visits to some one of his collection of châteaus. He drives Piatt Andrew on his tours of inspection. He is a gifted and furious driver, and on our dash from Paris to Verdun he burned up a couple of tires. It was a genial thing to see him, caked with dust on face and clothing, tinkering the wheel. To be served by one of the oldest families in Europe was a novel experience for Irwin and me, though actually what the Duke was doing in his democratic way is being done almost universally by the "high-born" of France. Up through thousands of transports, thousands of horses and tens of thousands of men, we steered our course to Lovering Hill's section of the American Field Service.
There on the hillside, to the west of Verdun, were the boys and their cars. It was daytime, so they were resting. All work is night work. They were muddy, unshaved, weary. A couple of base-ball gloves were lying around. One of the boys was repairing a car that had collided with a tree. There was mud on all the cars, and blood on the inner side of one car. For ten nights they have been making one of the hottest ambulance runs of the war.
It was on that run that William Notley Barber, of Toledo, Ohio, was shot through the back. The shell fragment tore a long, jagged rent in his khaki army coat, with a circle of blood around the rip, entered the back and lay against the lung and stomach. The car was shattered. The next man found him. The wrecked car still stood on the road with a dead man in it, the wounded soldier whom he was bringing back. We saw Barber at the field hospital. He had been operated on for the second time. He showed us the quarter inch of metal which the surgeon had just taken out, the second piece to be removed. He has won the Medaille Militaire.
This section needed no initiation. They had long served at Hartmannsweilerkopf in the Alsace fighting, and of their number Hall was killed. This experience at Verdun is a continuation of the dangerous, brilliant work they have carried on for sixteen months. These men are veterans in service, though youngsters in years. By their shredded cars and the blood they have spilled they have earned the right to be ranked next to soldiers of the line.
They gave me the impression of having been through one of the great experiences of life. There was a tired but victorious sense they carried, of men that had done honest service.
As we sat on the grass and looked out on a sky full of observation balloons and aeroplanes, a very good-looking young man walked up. Only one thing about his make-up was marred, and that was his nose-a streak of red ran across the bridge.
"Shrapnel," he said, as he saw me looking. "And it seems a pity, too. I spent $600 on that nose, just before I came over here. They burned it, cauterized it, wired it, knifed it, and pronounced it a thorough job. And as soon as it was cleaned up, it came over here into powder and dust and got messed up by shrapnel. Now the big $600 job will have to be done over again."
This young man is Waldo Pierce, the artist. It was he who once started on a trip to Europe with a friend, but didn't like the first meal, so jumped overboard and swam back. He sailed by the next boat, and arrived on the other side to find his friend in trouble for his disappearance.
Through the side of Pierce's coat, just at the pocket, and just over the heart, I saw a bullet hole.
"Pretty stagey, isn't it?" he explained. "If it had been a ragged, irregular hole, somewhere else, say at the elbow, it would have been all right. But this neat little hole just at the vital spot is conventional stuff. It looks like the barn door, and five yards away.
"And this is worse yet," he added, as he took out from the inner breast pocket a brown leather wallet. Through one flap the same shrapnel bullet had penetrated. Together, coat and wallet had saved this young man's life.
"That's the sort of thing that wouldn't go anywhere," Pierce went on. He is a Maine man, and has a pleasant drawl.
Wheeler's car was shot through, the slatting ripped at the driver's place, the sides a mess. A man on his right and a man at his left were killed. The stuff passed over his head as he knelt before a tire. The boys have been playing in luck. A dozen fatalities were due them in the June drive at Verdun. This was the fiercest offensive of the four months, and they stood up to it.
We were looking west, and as we looked an aeroplane burst into flames. As it fell, it left a trail of black smoke, funnel shaped, and always at the point of that funnel the bright spark, and at the heart of that spark a man burning to death. The spark descended rather slowly, with a spiraling movement, and trailing the heavy smoke. It burned brightly all the way to the horizon line, where it seemed to continue for a moment, like a setting sun on the earth's rim. Then it puffed out, and only the smoke in the sky was left. In another moment the light wind had shredded the smoke away.
It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and we had been coming from Paris at full tilt to get to the Etat Major and report ourselves. So, after watering the car and shaking hands all around, we started off, and straightway the rear left tire went flat, and its successor went flat, and for the third time it went flat. So we crawled to a village at midnight, and laid by for repairs.
At 3 a.m. we rose. There was no dressing to be done, as we had rested in our clothes. We ran out past the city of Verdun on the road going east to Fort de Tavannes. Wheat was ripening to the full crop in a hundred fields about us. All the birds were singing. The pleasant stir and fullness of summer were coming down the air.
Then on a sudden the famous Tier de Barrage broke out-the deadly barrier of fire that crumbles a line of trenches as a child pokes in an ant hill: the fire that covers an advance and withers an enemy attack. Here was what I had been waiting for through twenty-one months of war. I had caught snatches of it at a dozen points along the line. I had eaten luncheon by a battery near Dixmude, but they were lazy, throwing a shell or two only for each course. But here, just before the sun came up, 200 feet from us, a battery of twelve 75s fired continuously for twenty minutes. Just over the hill another battery cleared its throat and spoke. In the fields beyond us other batteries played continuously. Some of the men put cotton in their ears.
We ran through a devastated wood. The green forest has been raked by high explosive into dead stumps, and looks like a New Hampshire hillside when the match trust has finished with it. The road is a thing of mounds and pits, blown up and dug out by a four months' rain of heavy shells. The little American cars are like rabbits. They dip into an obus hole, bounce up again and spin on. They turn round on their own tails. They push their pert little noses up a hill, where the road is lined with famous heavy makes, stalled and wrecked. They refuse to stay out of service.
We rode back through the partially destroyed city of Verdun, lying trapped and helpless in its hollow of hills. We drove through its streets, some of them a pile of stones and plaster, others almost untouched, with charming bits of water view and green lawns and immaculate white fronts. The city reminded me of the victim whom a professional hypnotist displays in a shop window, where he leaves him lying motionless in the trance for exhibition purposes.
Verdun lay seemingly dead inside the range of German fire. But once the guns are forced back the city will spring into life.
Then we returned to the ambulance headquarters and in an open tent shared the excellent rations which the field service provides for its workers. We were sitting with the French lieutenant and discussing the values of rhythm in prose when the boys shouted to us from the next field. An aeroplane was dipping over an anchored sausage-shaped observation balloon. The aeroplane had marked its victim, which could not escape, as a bird darts for a worm. The balloon...
