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OLD GLORY AND 
 VERDUN 
 
OLD GLORY AND 
 VERDUN 
 
 And Other Stories 
 
 BY 
 
 ELIZABETH FRAZER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DUFFIELD & COMPANY 
 
 1918 
 
^'t 
 
 Copsrright, 1918, Curtis Publishing Company 
 Copyright, 1918. Duffield & Company 
 
 DEC i?!9l8 
 
 ©GI.A5086tJl 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Ward Eighty-Three ........ 3 
 
 With the French Wounded 39 
 
 Miss Greenhorn Goes A-Nursing . . . . 77 
 
 The Children of the War Zone 107 
 
 A Canteener in France 143 
 
 Old Glory and Verdun 186 
 
 Behind Chateau-Thierry 223 
 
 The Spite Attack ...... . . . 269 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 What Kemained of a French Field Hospital After 
 
 a German Incendiary Shell Hit It . Frontispiece 
 
 Facing Page 
 Eefugees from the Gassed Districts .... 110 
 
 The Commanding Officer of the Citadel of Verdun 188 
 
 Tent-Ward Showing Damage by German Bombs . 270 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 
 
 It was my first morning at the hospital The 
 clock in the vestiaire stood at five minutes to eight. 
 At eight I was to begin work, "Report for duty" 
 was the way the formal summons ran. I was to 
 report to Ward Eighty-three, the biggest, the heav- 
 iest and the most interesting ward in the hospital. 
 Mrs. Monroe, who had charge of the untrained and 
 unpaid volunteer nurses — or auxiliaires, as they are 
 termed — ^had told me to await her in the vestiaire. 
 Accordingly I waited, feeling awkward and strange 
 and timid, like a Freshman on his first day at 
 college. 
 
 To say that I was nervous would be considerably 
 understating the case. Ever since entering the stone 
 portal of the big American war hospital that morn- 
 ing, I had been smitten with a deadly ague of fear — 
 fear lest in my abysmal ignorance I should do the 
 wrong thing at the wrong time, or fail to do the right 
 thing at the right time, and a man should die as the 
 
 3 
 
4 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 consequence — a man; a real, live, breathing man — • 
 one of those gay, muscular, bright-eyed little boy 
 soldiers of France, with cigarettes perched rakishly 
 behind their ears, that I had seen crowding the streets 
 of Paris on their brief permissions from the Front ! 
 
 Suddenly it came to me that fastening a handker- 
 chief round the eyes of a blinking but obliging friend 
 was a vastly different affair from fastening a firm, 
 nonslippable bandage across the sockets of a man 
 whose eyes have been torn out by a ball. And how 
 did one stop a hemorrhage? You tied something 
 somewhere. That was the extent of my knowledge on 
 that point. In the confusion of my mind, I had even 
 forgotten how to rescue a drowning man, a formula 
 which has always fascinated me and which I have 
 memorized at intervals ever since the age of ten, 
 thinking that some day in such a fashion I might 
 rescue my future husband. In short, all the carefully 
 acquired artificial knowledge I had been able to ab- 
 sorb in a three-months' First Aid Course in New 
 York, all the data, the neat lists of questions and 
 answers, had faded clean out of me, like a cheap 
 dye, now that I was faced up with the immediate 
 and grim reality. 
 
 That course, and the light-Heartedness with which 
 I had pursued it, seemed all at once to me very re- 
 mote, irrelevant to the present situation, and some- 
 how like a joke in bad taste. I perceived, or I be- 
 lieved I perceived, that I was in a false situation. I 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 5 
 
 had no business in that vestiaire, in that white uni- 
 form and coif. If at that moment there had been a 
 train waiting outside the vestiaire door bound for the 
 Grand Central Station, I should have taken it with- 
 out a second's hesitation. There being none, I con- 
 soled myself with the reflection that, after all, I had 
 not asked to come ; that, on the contrary, I had been 
 sent for and urged to begin without delay, as the 
 hospital was undermanned at this summer-vacation 
 season, and the wounded were pouring in, a great 
 steady stream, from the base hospitals. 
 
 Moreover, I should not be alone, like a sentinel on 
 his post. Over me, the auxiliaire, was the trained 
 nurse; over the trained nurse was the head nurse; 
 over the head nurse was the doctor of the ward ; over 
 the doctor was the assistant surgeon ; over the assist- 
 ant surgeon was the chief surgeon, or medicin chef; 
 and over all of us, interlocking us together, was the 
 French military system and the invisible but potent 
 Papa Joffre. So that if I, alone, could not stop a 
 hemorrhage, I could call my trained nurse; if she 
 could not stop it, she could call the head nurse; if 
 the two of them could not stop it, they could call the 
 ward doctor ; and if he could not stop it — but at this 
 point I felt myself on safe ground. The affair was 
 out of my hands! 
 
 "Have you ever Had to stop a hemorrhage?" I 
 voiced my secret fear to a young Englishwoman be- 
 side me, who was rapidly changing from her civilian 
 
6 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 costume into the crisp white linen infirmiere^s blouse 
 of the wards. 
 
 "Mon DieUy no!" She laughed as she pinned on 
 her coif. "Not a chance, with so many nurses round. 
 You'll have plenty of chance, though, to wash their 
 feet — those that still have feet," she added soberly. 
 "Is this your first day?" 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 "And did you have any training — I mean any real 
 training — before you entered?" I asked. 
 
 "No," she said. "I took an examination in Lon- 
 don; but the examiner was so weary by the time he 
 got to me that he merely said, 'Have you had the 
 usual course?' And when I replied *Yes,' he simply 
 passed me through. But it doesn't matter. You 
 soon pick things up. What's your ward?" 
 
 "Eighty-three." 
 
 She raised her brows af that an3 glanced a^ my 
 feet. 
 
 "I hope you have comfortable shoes ! Tha? ward 
 is the hardest in the hospital — nothing but big pri- 
 mary cases; every single hlesse in bed. You'll have 
 no chance to go to sleep at the switch," she added 
 with a smile. "If your feet hurt to-night, rub them 
 with cold cream, then alcohol; and lie with them up 
 on the footboard of your bed. It takes the swelling 
 out. Have you read the rules ?" She waved her hand 
 toward a printed sheet tacked upon the wall, nodded 
 and hurried off. 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 1 
 
 I faced round, feeling more than ever like a Fresh- 
 man on his first day, and read the following : 
 
 "AMERICAN AMBULANCE 
 
 "conditions for auxiliary service 
 
 "The auxiliaires work under the trained nurses. 
 They do not, as a rule, attend at operations ; nor 
 do they do the dressings, although they might be 
 called upon to do a minor dressing, should the nurse 
 consider them sufficiently experienced. The hours 
 are from eight a. m. to six p. m. daily, with one whole 
 day free one week, and one afternoon free the follow- 
 ing week. Auxiliaires are asked to stay three months 
 at least; six months if possible. The service is en- 
 tirely voluntary, and auxiliaires must meet all their 
 own expenses. Luncheon is provided at the Ambu- 
 lance at a cost of 1.50 francs a meal " 
 
 At this juncture the vestiaire door opened again. 
 I wheeled — I had been wheeling every time it opened 
 for the last ten minutes! — and Mrs. Monroe's brisk 
 voice said: 
 
 "Ah, there you are ! Sorry to have kept you wait- 
 ing. I'll just take you to Miss Brooks, the head 
 nurse of Salle Eighty-three, and she'll tell you where 
 to begin.'" 
 Five minutes later introductions had been effected. 
 
8 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Miss Brooks, who, together with the doctor, two other 
 nurses and an orderly, was bending over a bed from 
 which proceeded loud screams of "0^, la la! Oh, 
 la lat! Oh, la la!! I Bon Dieu! Doucement! Oh, la 
 la!'* turned to the nurse beside her and said 
 briefly : 
 
 "Here's your auxiliary. Miss Ransome. Is there 
 anything she can start on?" 
 
 Miss Ransome did not even glance up. She was 
 holding, firmly grasped in both hands, a man's leg, 
 stiffly extended, while the doctor lifted pieces of 
 gauze from what appeared to be a deep bloody and 
 suppurating crater in the thigh. 
 
 "One moment, please," she murmured. 
 
 The dressing of the wound continued. The man 
 renewed his high agonized cries : "Oh, la la! Oh, Nom 
 d'un Nom! Doucement! — Gently there!" 
 
 I stood aside and drew a deep breath. The quality 
 of anguish in those tones had already turned me 
 pale. Later I was to learn to discriminate between 
 sounds of pain. There is the loud outcry of the man 
 who is not in extreme pain, but whose nerves have 
 been so battered by shock, exposure and continued 
 strain that he is no longer master of himself. Sec- 
 ond, there is the scream of the man, also suffering 
 from shock and abnormally sensitive, who howls at 
 the mere approach of the doctor. 
 
 And finally, there is the cry of the plucky soul, 
 strong to endure, but whose agony has passed the 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 9 
 
 limit of human endurance. Such a cry, bursting out 
 across the ward, simply stampedes the nerves ; heard 
 suddenly in the middle of the night it would fetch 
 one out of bed in a single leap, panic-stricken with 
 horror; and even in a big hospital, where innumer- 
 able sounds of pain blunt the ear, it still takes the 
 right of way, momentarily stilling the air. As the 
 days went on I was to learn these fine discriminations ; 
 but at present all screams were alike to me. I gave 
 each one full value, one hundred per cent of an- 
 guish. 
 
 While the dressing proceeded I looked about me. 
 Salle Eighty-three was a spacious airy room, lofty- 
 ceiled, with tessellated stone floors, and long French 
 windows on two sides. One set of windows gave 
 upon the rear of the building, and the other side 
 opened on a charming French garden round which 
 the huge structure is built, one room deep, in the 
 shape of a hollow square. Inside the salle the beds 
 were ranged round the four sides and came halfway 
 down the center, forming thus two passages that 
 were none too wide for the busy morning traffic. 
 
 Everyone, I perceived, was already working under 
 a full head of steam. Two doctors were in the ward, 
 one on each side, and the dressings were progressing 
 steadily from bed to bed. A nurse preceded the doc- 
 tors, cutting down the bandages. The air was thick 
 with cries and groans, the cry of "Doucement! Easy 
 there!" prevailing high above all others like a mo- 
 
10 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 notonous refrain. French military orderlies were 
 hurrying about, their arms piled high with stained 
 linen; two blowzy-cheeked little femmes de chambre 
 were down on their knees scrubbing the stone floor, 
 their tongues and their sabots clattering together. 
 Ahead of them a bent old woman, with a great red 
 hooked nose and a wide toothless smile, hideous as 
 one of Shakespere's witches, was passing from bed 
 to bed, gathering up the cigarette butts, chaffing the 
 men and exchanging with them jests as broad as they 
 were good-natured. 
 
 It was evident she was a prime favorite, for it was 
 ^' Grand* merer* "Grand'merer* straight down the 
 line, and chuckles followed in the wake of her sallies 
 like bubbles on a stream. Here and there patients 
 able to sit up in bed had removed their chemises and 
 were soaping their chests with gusto. These Grande- 
 mere favored with take-offs on their manly beauty. 
 Bursts of laughter punctuated her hits. 
 
 "Here are your men," said Miss Ransome, joining 
 me — "these twelve. You're not responsible for the 
 others. Suppose you begin with Claudius there. 
 Wash him. Rub his back with alcohol. Then make 
 his bed. Watch out for his broken leg!" she cau- 
 tioned. 
 
 And she nodded toward that unfortunate member, 
 which, swathed as stiff as that of a mummy and 
 dotted with numerous little rubber tubes that 
 sprouted up through the bandages like unnatural 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 11 
 
 flowers, was swung out upon an extension and held 
 taut by a jungle of pulleys and bags and weights. 
 
 "He's had a hard time," she continued in a lowered 
 voice. "What with losing his eye and getting his 
 leg infected — you see, he lay wounded four days and 
 four nights on the battlefield, without water, before 
 he was finally rescued — he's had a tough pull. For 
 weeks we thought he would die. But he fooled us all — 
 didn't you, Claudius ?" 
 
 As she spoke English, the boy did not understand. 
 He lay regarding her with a bright dark eye, all the 
 brighter for the black patch which covered its com- 
 panion ; and finally he asked in tones of weary polite- 
 ness: 
 
 "You said, mees.?" 
 
 "Change all his linen," she pursued unheeding. 
 "He can raise himself an inch or two. When he's 
 finished, go straight down the line and do the same 
 to the others. I can't help you much this morning." 
 
 And she hurried away, leaving me with my first 
 task — to wash the back and change the entire bed 
 linen of a man who could not stir more than an inch 
 or two without exquisite pain ! 
 
 "Bonjour," I said by way of commencement. 
 "Comment ga va? — How goes it?" 
 
 "Bad. Very bad. That imbecile pig of a leg! 
 Not a moment's rest did it give me last night. 
 Cramp, cramp, cramp !" He clenched and unclenched 
 his fist with nervous irritability to indicate the nature 
 
12 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 of the pain, while the flare of crimson in his thin 
 cheeks testified to a heightened temperature. "I 
 wish you'd cut it off to-night," he growled, "and 
 stand it over in the corner." 
 
 "I will — with my scissors," I promised. "And to- 
 morrow, if it's been good, we'll fasten it back on with 
 safety pins." 
 
 "You needn't bother," he grinned. 
 
 With many gaspings and painful grimaces he got 
 hold of an overhead hand grip, dug his head deep into 
 the pillow and managed to raise himself until his back 
 described a parabola perhaps two inches above the 
 bed. "Quick! Quick!" he commanded breathlessly. 
 I washed him as best I could. Afterward I glanced 
 up at the chart hanging behind his bed and read 
 there: "Simondon, Claudius. Age, 21. Wounded 
 May 25, 1916. Admitted June 7, 1916." Claudius, 
 aged twenty-one, had already white hairs in his head, 
 and his slight figure was shrunken and yellow and 
 dry, like that of a little old man. At the same time 
 there was about him something unquenchably boyish 
 and debonair, which made one wish to weep. 
 
 "Have you ever been in a charge?" I asked, to 
 divert his attention. 
 
 "Yes; ten of them. Not interesting! Not inter- 
 esting at all ! You stand there in a trench, water up 
 to your knees, holding your gun and waiting for the 
 order. You are cold, and still you perspire. You 
 tremble with agitation. Maybe you stand thus for 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 13 
 
 hours. Or you climb over the parapet and run. If 
 the Bodies retreat, yes, then it is interesting. If 
 they come on, no, not interesting. Not interesting at 
 all !" And he looked up at me with his sardonic grin. 
 "War," he added, "is the stupidest game that a fellow 
 with wits can play at." 
 
 A minute later he confided to me that he was to 
 receive a decoration. He was to receive the Croix de 
 Guerre. 
 
 "But that is fine !" I exclaimed. 
 
 "Ah, you think so?" jeered Claudius. "It's very 
 fine, without doubt; but as for me, I'd rather have 
 my eye than that pretty little medal hung on my 
 chest. Can I see the world with that little medal? 
 Zutf I prefer my eye — thanks." 
 
 For the moment his nonchalance completely de- 
 ceived me. It was not until several days later when 
 I came upon him unobserved, poring over the official 
 notice of his decoration, and caught the look of 
 pride, of emotion in the young face, that I really got 
 the matter straight. Twenty-one is twenty-one the 
 world over, and always hides its loves. 
 
 After washing Claudius and rubbing his back with 
 alcohol, I made his bed. In France the bed is a sacred 
 institution and the making of one is not a proper 
 subject for jest. But I am not jesting when I say 
 that the ordinary, casually made American bed, with 
 its opportunities for ventilation and its light loose 
 covers which one may kick joyously down to the foot 
 
14 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 in the morning, would fill the average Frenchwoman 
 with amazement and scorn. 
 
 A French bed is something in the nature of a 
 cocoon, with a hole in the upper right-hand corner, 
 into which one artfully insinuates oneself at night, 
 and from which one artfully disengages oneself in the 
 morning. All apertures, save the small one at the 
 top, are hermetically sealed — so tightly are the sheets 
 drawn under the mattress, so smoothly are the covers 
 laid on, so exquisitely are the corners mitered. One 
 is all but sewed into bed. 
 
 To make such a bed is to produce a work of art, 
 a creation. Thus, Jean and Marie made my bed 
 every morning at the hotel, folding on each layer as 
 close as the successive skins of an onion, while I 
 watched them with respectful admiration. Once, feel- 
 ing too warm in the middle of the night, I tried to 
 remove a blanket. I struggled until four o'clock the 
 next morning. Next time I am going to send for 
 professional wreckers. 
 
 But the making of such a bed is, after all, a com- 
 paratively simple affair — for I am not in it ! Let us 
 denominate it Class C in order of difficulty. Class B 
 is the making of such a bed with an occupant, but 
 an occupant who can help himself — stir about. 
 Class A is the making of such a bed with an immov- 
 able man in it ; a man, moreover, attached to a net- 
 work of apparatus — cords, pulleys, overhead weights 
 and drains, all in such delicate adjustment that to 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 15 
 
 jar any of them will wrench a cry of torture from the 
 occupant. 
 
 To this last class belonged the bed of Claudius. 
 When, after three-quarters of an hour's labor, punc- 
 tuated by many exclamations of "Doucement! 
 Doucementr I straightened myself, Claudius was 
 rather white and I was perspiring freely. Still, that 
 bed was made — it really should be written Made ! — 
 and I surveyed it proudly. The lower sheet in par- 
 ticular had been difficult to dispose properly. To 
 me it appeared at least twice too long for the mat- 
 tress, and in the end I had simply wadded up the 
 extra yards of length and tucked them under the 
 pillows. 
 
 It was during this latter operation when Justin, 
 the orderly, came upon me. Justin is a squat, gro- 
 tesque little old man, with the head of a gargoyle set 
 on powerful Atlas-like shoulders. Being an orderly 
 is his metier. He has been one in a French military 
 hospital for twenty years, which is to say that Justin 
 is a very wise man. I believe he could give points 
 to Solomon, for Solomon was not a Frenchman. He 
 regarded my bungling efforts for a moment in silence, 
 and then said in tones of grave reproach : 
 
 "Ah, mademoiselle, it is not thus we make a bed 
 in France ! Permit me." 
 
 Saying which, he stripped the bed bare to the 
 mattress and made it afresh, with the subtle perfec- 
 tion of Jean and Marie. My crumpled undersheet 
 
16 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 was drawn taut as a drumhead. Followed in swift 
 succession the drawsheet, the top sheet and the 
 blankets, smooth as rose petals and as firmly fixed. 
 
 Where, meantime, was Claudius, with his weak 
 back, his smashed leg and his jungle of apparatus? 
 Not a single cry had escaped him. A glance showed 
 his thin dark face alight with amusement as he 
 watched old Justin teach the strange "mees" how to 
 make a bed with a live Frenchman in it. 
 
 "Via!" said Justin, straightening himself. "That's 
 the way we make a bed in France !" And he padded 
 noiselessly off in his battered blue list slippers ; it had 
 taken him exactly six minutes by the ward clock. 
 
 The next bed, when I turned down the covers, re- 
 vealed a patient whose linen was saturated and stiff 
 with blood. Another undersheet to manipulate ! 
 
 "Don't touch me ! Don't touch me !" came a faint 
 moan from the pillows. 
 
 "Where are you wounded?" I inquired, for this is 
 the first fact a maker of beds must determine. 
 
 "Both legs broken below the knees," was the feeble 
 reply. 
 
 "Don't stop to do him now," said Miss Ran- 
 some, approaching the bed. "He's just been 
 brought in and is going up for operation. You can 
 make his bed while he is away. Look at those feet !" 
 she exclaimed, pointing. 
 
 I looked. Beneath the caked and dried blood from 
 his wounds the mud of the Somme was ground into 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 17 
 
 his skin until it was blackened as if from powder. 
 
 "Some of them are worse than that!" said she. 
 "Last week there came in to us a little poiluy straight 
 from the first-line trenches of Verdun. How long 
 he had been without a wash even he himself did not 
 know. The doctor gave one long-range sniff and 
 said hastily: 'Send him to the baths!' It seemed, 
 however, that he was not acquainted with baths — at 
 least not in the *all-together' and in an American 
 bath-tub; for the attendants said that he fought 
 like a wild cat — and when he came back he was cry- 
 ing! He had faced the cannon at Verdun; he had 
 been smashed to pieces by a shell, and had his leg 
 cut off up to his thigh with only a local anaesthetic 
 without flinching; but he wept with fear at sight of 
 an American bath and demanded to be sent back to 
 the trenches !" 
 
 The bedmaking went on, somewhat raggedly to be 
 sure, for on those first days I was obsessed by an 
 absurd and fantastic fear that sometime when I 
 pulled away the drawsheet I should pull away also a 
 mangled leg upon it. There was one bed, however, 
 which I grew to enjoy making, and that was the bed 
 of Grandpere — fat, dirty, profane, cross-grained, 
 whimsical old Grandpere. He was notorious in the 
 ward as a grouch. Claudius declared that he had 
 been jilted in love and had had the "black butter- 
 flies" ever since. He was what is known as an end- 
 less-chain smoker. He lighted one cigarette from the 
 
18 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 end of another and kept going the entire day through, 
 with the result that his chemise front was always full 
 of little burnt holes and powdered thick with ashes. 
 
 Nor was his bed much better. One swept out of 
 it each morning aluminum filings, chunks of bread, 
 apple parings, handkerchiefs, books, nutshells, let- 
 ters, as well as innumerable little pillows and pads 
 with which Grandpere combated the hated "currents 
 of air" from the open windows. The fact was, he 
 got no peace day or night from a badly infected leg, 
 and sometimes he was hard driven for diversion. 
 
 Between him and a certain substitute nurse in the 
 ward there existed a violent and mutual antipathy. 
 She was an excellent nurse professionally, but hard, 
 brusque in manner, and without a single word of 
 French to build a bridge of sympathy between herself 
 and her patients, among whom she was known as the 
 old mitrailleuse. Between her and Grandpere was 
 waged a fierce battle each morning over the making 
 of his bed. She lectured him roundly in English for 
 his untidiness, and Grandpere retorted volubly in 
 French, with a vocabulary that would have enchanted 
 a cow-puncher. She was displeased with the state of 
 his chemises, and Grandpere was highly displeased 
 with her displeasure. 
 
 "What is she saying, the old mitrailleuse?" he 
 would whisper to me, his little gray eyes gleaming 
 with mischievous humor. "Why has she always the 
 great anger?" 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 19 
 
 **She says you smoke too much — that your bed is 
 full of trash." 
 
 "But, mon Dieu, that is my sole distraction ! And 
 what else?" 
 
 "She says you burn holes in your chemise and that 
 it is always covered with ashes." 
 
 "But — my word ! — does she know nothing, then, of 
 the laws of Nature — the old Anglaise! — that ashes 
 always tumble downward, not upward; and that fire 
 always burns ? Can I make the ashes go upward into 
 the air ? I am not God. I am only a Frenchman." 
 
 An hour later he would beckon me secretly over 
 to his side, point to a fresh perforation of his chemise, 
 a fresh sprinkling of ashes, and whisper gleefully : 
 
 "Tell the old mitrailleuse to come and sweep me 
 out again !" 
 
 He enjoyed the encounters ! And as they were, 
 indeed, his sole distraction through weary days, I 
 sometimes humored him. 
 
 The dressings, meantime, continued, with their un- 
 ceasing accompaniment of groans and cries of 
 "Doucementr* A young surgeon told me that douce- 
 ment was the first French word he acquired; and 
 undeniably it is the word oftenest heard during the 
 dressings period. This does not signify that the pa- 
 tients are, as a rule, given to outcry. On the con- 
 trary, these young Frenchmen endure the intensest 
 pain with a kind of smiling white fortitude that brings 
 a furtive tear to the eye. 
 
20 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Let me take, for example, the demeanors of the 
 three whose beds are on a little sleeping porch on the 
 terrace — Claudius, Fran9ois, Emile. Their being on 
 the terrace carries its own significant hint of special 
 weakness. Of these three, Claudius, when under eX' 
 treme stress, shuts tightly his one eye, thrusts his 
 knuckles into his mouth and bites them until they 
 bleed. If the pain has shaken him unendurably, when 
 the doctor and the nurses depart he puts a pillow 
 over his face and weeps into it silently. 
 
 Fran9ois, on the other hand, an idyllically hand- 
 some aristocratic youth of twenty-one, with a 
 smashed arm and leg, takes an opposite course. He 
 looks his pain squarely in the face as if it were an 
 adversary, with an assumption of nonchalant scorn. 
 Under a particularly painful dressing or probe his 
 eyes grow steel;]^ and narrow, while his lips under 
 the little golden brown mustache begin to smile 
 sternly. As the pain increases, that smile becomes 
 more distinct, more contemptuous and challenging. 
 I have a notion that secretly Fran9ois loves pain 
 for the opportunity it affords him to test the fine 
 unblunted steel of his young courage. 
 
 Emile, a Breton lad of twenty-two, with a ball 
 through his lungs, has a different reaction. He 
 hoists himself painfully up in bed, stares out upon 
 the garden with his mystical blue eyes, coughs, 
 winces; and at the end he lays himself down again, 
 gasping, and says gently, "Sank you, mees !" That 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 21 
 
 is all, a soft "Sank you, mees!" spoken m English 
 to please me ! Of those three reactions Emile's is the 
 hardest to bear. 
 
 In lively contrast to these is the conduct of Grand- 
 pere. Grandpere no longer has any romantic illu- 
 sions to sustain, no youthful reticences. The first 
 article in his creed is that if you suffer pain you 
 should yell. If it makes you feel better, begin to 
 yell beforehand. And curse ! Use all the powers of 
 protest the good God has given you. Accordingly 
 from the first to the last moment of a dressing he lets 
 himself out, so to speak, and the entire ward chuckles 
 over his choice list of epithets. 
 
 But, despite the amount of concentrated pain that 
 it holds, the big airy ward is much more a place of 
 laughter than of depression and gloom. Wlien the 
 dressings are finished, and the aftermath of painful 
 throbbing has died down, the natural life and vivacity 
 of fifty Frenchmen reassert themselves. They banter 
 and chaff each other and discuss every discussible or 
 undiscussible subject under the sun. Naturally the 
 present struggle comes in for the lion's share of de- 
 bate; nor is the feeling concerning it by any means 
 unanimous. In that small bedfast community are 
 ardent imperialists, conservatives, radicals, syndical- 
 ists and philosophic anarchists ; and each one of them 
 takes a hack at the great conflict from his own angle 
 of vision. Nor have they within them the hate for 
 the German that seems to animate some of the spec- 
 
22 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 tators on the side lines. At any rate he is not a 
 monster ; in fact, one was forced to believe from their 
 many stories of good will that the average German 
 was really almost human ! 
 
 "What do you think of the Germans?" a young 
 soldier asked me suddenly one day as I was taking his 
 temperature. 
 
 "Their methods, you mean? I thought there were 
 no two opinions on that." 
 
 "Very well!" he retorted. "Then you take the 
 French side and I'll take the German side, and we'll 
 discuss the subject. Begin, if you please." 
 
 "No; you begin!" I said, rather curious to hear 
 what a wounded Frenchman would have to say in 
 defense of his foe. 
 
 He talked for ten minutes, brilliantly, earnestly, 
 caustically, holding the thermometer like a cigarette 
 in one corner of his mouth ; and at the end of that 
 time he had proved not indeed that the Germans were 
 right, but that war itself was so intrinsically de- 
 grading and hellish — despite what romanticists might 
 say to the contrary of its elevating spiritual effect on 
 the soul — that it exerted a debasing influence on 
 whoever engaged in it, be he German, French, Eng- 
 lish, Russian or American. 
 
 "War is a rotten business for the individual," he 
 wound up soberly. "And don't let them sidetrack 
 you by saying it's the Germans. They're not mon- 
 sters. It's war itself that's the monster. It's a bad 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 23 
 
 microbe. A mean little soul it poisons, and a big 
 soul it poisons also. The physical wounds — like 
 this," he touched his bandaged shoulder — "you can 
 see. The wounds on the soul are invisible. But, be- 
 lieve me, they exist just the same, and are even more 
 ghastly. I know!" And he handed back the ther- 
 mometer with a smile. 
 
 The real word-battles, however, take place between 
 themselves. Sometimes an argument lasts for weeks, 
 and they have a go at it every fine afternoon, wres- 
 tling with each other like the conversational experts 
 they are. Sometimes it is only a brief but hot dis- 
 pute. It was one of the latter that took place about 
 a month after my arrival, between Fran9ois and 
 Claudius. That particular afternoon a concert was 
 impending. It was to be given in the garden by a 
 crack Belgian military band, and programs had just 
 been handed round. 
 
 Claudius looked over his card and I saw his ex- 
 pressive face darken. 
 
 "The Marseillaise isn't down !" he exclaimed. "If 
 they haven't the courtesy to play the French national 
 air to wounded French soldiers in a French military 
 hospital, I, for one, shall not listen to their old con- 
 cert. I shall sleep !" 
 
 Saying which, he scornfully tossed the program 
 over into the garden and composed himself for 
 slumber. But Fran9ois, who was feeling gay that 
 day, could not permit such a remark to pass. 
 
24 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "I don't think so highly of that Marseillaise !" he 
 remarked languidly, but with the light of battle in 
 his eyes. "It's not a good song. On the contrary, 
 it's a very bad song." 
 
 Claudius' one eye popped wide open. He fairly 
 leaped into the combat. 
 
 "What !" he exclaimed, flushing with anger. "You 
 say the Marseillaise is not a good song? You say 
 this is not good ?" And, propping himself up on one 
 elbow, his eye still blazing, he chanted the immortal 
 battle cry : 
 
 ** 'Aua: armeSf citoyens! 
 Formez vos bataillons! 
 Marchons! Marchons! 
 Qu'un sang impur, 
 Ahreuve nos sillons* 
 
 "Voilar* cried Claudius, his voice shaky with emo- 
 tion. "You dare to say that is not a good song?" 
 
 "Ah, the music's all right," admitted Fran9ois 
 loftily. "It's the words." 
 
 "And what's the matter with the words? Why 
 aren't they good?" 
 
 "Why?" said Fran9ois coolly. "Because they in- 
 cite to carnage! 'Formez vos bataillons T But what 
 for? To kill somebody ! No, no ; such words are not 
 good." 
 
 The irrefutable logic of this, Claudius chose to 
 ignore. 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 25 
 
 ''You are not a true Frenchman," He declared 
 scornfully. 
 
 Fran9ois began to smile — the cold distinct smile of 
 the dressing hour. He glanced round for a weapon. 
 A cup of wine stood on his bedside table. His fingers 
 closed round it. 
 
 "Say that again !" he remarked pleasantly. 
 
 Claudius' hand had likewise gripped his wineglass. 
 Of the two he was much more passionate. He glared 
 hardily and began: 
 
 "You're not a " 
 
 The head nurse appeared opportunely on tHe 
 threshold. 
 
 "Fran9ois," she said severely, "you know you 
 mustn't drink that wine when you're going up for 
 operation !" 
 
 Fran9ois looked at the nurse, at me, at the wine 
 in his cup, and from thence to Claudius, who by now 
 was grinning broadly. 
 
 "I wasn't going to drink it," he observed mildly. 
 "I was going to give it to the camarade, there !" 
 
 And he proflf ered it gravely to Claudius, who drank 
 it down with equal politeness ; then suddenly both of 
 them tumbled back on their pillows and went off into 
 boyish little yips of laughter under the startled eyes 
 of the nurse. And, to finish off the episode, the Bel- 
 gian band really played the Marseillaise after all. 
 
 The first few weeks I was in the ward we were 
 enlivened each morning by the performance of 
 
26 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Clarice. Clarice was a hen ; and every day, at pre- 
 cisely ten o'clock, she laid an egg. It happened in 
 this way : There was a young one-armed soldier, an 
 opera singer before the war, who, for the amusement 
 of his companions, would lie upon his bed and with 
 his voice conjure all the animals of the farmyard into 
 lively existence. The deep growl of the watchdog, 
 the grunting of a pig, the whickering of horses down 
 in the meadow, the lordly crow of the cock, the busy 
 cackling of the hen — he reproduced them all with 
 startling realism. The hen, in particular, he loved to 
 delineate. 
 
 The sound would start suddenly under one of the 
 hospital beds — the low Tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck ! of a 
 hen talking softly to herself as she scratched in the 
 hay. 
 
 "Sh! It's Clarice! She's going to lay an egg\^^ 
 somebody would cry ; and all the ward held its breath 
 during the operation. 
 
 After a period of soft clucking — Tuck-tuck, tuck- 
 tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck ! — which Clarice required 
 to dispose herself suitably and discreetly upon her 
 nest, a profound silence ensued. Clarice was laying 
 her egg\ The men lay perfectly still, smiling ex- 
 pectantly, glancing now and again at the clock. The 
 hush was absolute. It was Clarice's moment. 
 
 Presently a loud, triumphant cackle issued forth: 
 Tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck ! The 
 egg was an accomplished fact. And Clarice, her 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 27 
 
 proud duty done, flew straight to her lord and master, 
 who added his crow of patronizing approbation. The 
 illusion of the performance was perfect, and little 
 Clarice was a source of great delight to the men, 
 who built round her all sorts of romances. 
 
 "That's our little Clarice !" Emile explained to me 
 the first time I heard her. "But she is admirable, 
 that Clarice ! She lays an egg each morning ; and we 
 give it to a sick camarade for his dejeuner!'* 
 
 By the time the beds are made, clean bandages 
 adjusted, vacant beds disinfected, the individual 
 tables scrubbed and hot drinks fetched from the diet 
 kitchen, the day is well under way. The dressings, 
 meantime, proceed steadily down the ward. Some- 
 times, after a new offensive, when the big war hos- 
 pital has received a fresh influx of the wounded, every 
 bed contains a battered wreck, these dressings fill the 
 entire morning and continue straight through the 
 afternoon. 
 
 Those are trying days for heart and head and feet. 
 Through all the hours the busy stream of traffic flows 
 constantly through this, the heaviest ward. There 
 are men going up to operations on stretchers; men 
 coming down from operations, unconscious, on 
 stretchers ; men being discharged, with their meager 
 little sack of possessions, also on stretchers. Good- 
 bys are shouted — "Bon voyager "All aboard!" 
 *'En voitureT Or the orderly enters with a batch of 
 letters — letters from home. 
 
28 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "Simondon !" he bawls cheerily. 
 
 "Present !" 
 
 "Girod!" 
 
 "Present!" 
 
 "Coussin!" 
 
 "Discharged !" a voice volunteers. 
 
 "Morel! . . . Morel! . . . Morel?" 
 
 "Give me that letter," says the head nurse quietly, 
 for Morel cannot receive it ; Morel is dead. 
 
 At about half past ten, when the ward is in fair 
 order, and the blesses under their fresh linen look like 
 rows of good children in bed, the medicin chefy or 
 chief surgeon, makes his rounds. As he approaches 
 a bed its occupant salutes, and then listens with in- 
 tense concentration to the strange English jargon of 
 the ward doctor, who is making his daily report. 
 Perhaps he catches the word "operation" — which 
 every soldier knows. After the surgeon has passed 
 he beckons and whispers eagerly: 
 
 "What did he say? What did the medicin chef 
 say ? Operation ?" 
 
 I nod. "Only a little one. But no lunch to-day. 
 No good pinardF' 
 
 Pinard is the trench slang for wine, corresponding 
 to the English "booze." That word, upon my lips, 
 will nearly always bring a laugh from a poilu. But 
 no laugh greets me this time. He sinks back upon 
 his pillow, a little white and very quiet. The day has 
 suddenly lost its color for him. 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 29 
 
 After the great medicin chef — or God, as he is 
 irreverently termed in the ward — ^has departed, with 
 his halo of dread, dejeuner is the next important fea- 
 ture of the day. Serving a community of fifty a 
 three-course meal — soup, meat and vegetables, and 
 dessert — is a man-size proposition. Serving it on bed 
 tables, often cutting up the food and feeding the 
 armless patients, further complicates the task. The 
 first day I completely lost my head. My clamorous 
 young brood, nine of whom were under twenty-two, 
 reminded me of nothing so much as a nestful of yawp- 
 ing baby robins waiting to be fed. 
 
 It was: "Look out for my leg, mees!" *'More 
 bread, mees!" "My serviette, mees!" "Have you 
 forgotten me, mees?" "My God, my soup's tipped 
 into my bed ! I'm afloat, mees !" And all in a rapid 
 bubble of French that made my head spin. At last, 
 in sheer desperation, I addressed them in the Ameri- 
 can language: "You darned kids — shut up!" As 
 was usual in those first days, it was old Justin who 
 came to my aid and disentangled me. 
 
 The patients' dejeuner over, the auxiliaires have 
 three-quarters of an hour off for their own, which 
 they may get at the hospital or at some of the neigh- 
 boring patisseries. As for me, that first day I choked 
 down a few mouthfuls and then retired to the vestiaire 
 to rest my feet. 
 
 The afternoon was cut off the same piece of clothi 
 as the morning — more beds, more dressings, more 
 
30 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 bandages, more high shrill cries, more gayety and 
 laughter. But about four o'clock in the afternoon 
 something began to happen. It began to happen in 
 bed Number Ten. Its occupant, a handsome dark lad 
 of eighteen, had a gangrenous arm, the sight of which, 
 with its deep gashes to let out the poison, turned 
 one faint with horror. All the morning, at intervals, 
 I had held a basin while he retched, or fetched hot- 
 water bottles. 
 
 About four o'clock he began to babble of his 
 mother, his brothers and sisters, and his home in the 
 country. He laughed, chatted, cried out "Mamanr 
 repeatedly, and tried to rise to go to her. Presently 
 it was found necessary to strap his supple, strong 
 young body to the mattress. At the time I had not 
 the faintest notion that he was already in the ante- 
 chamber of death, so alive he was, so palpitant with 
 restless energy. 
 
 Suddenly he lay still. I had turned to get another 
 hot-water bottle. "Never mind !" said the nurse, and 
 at some quality in her voice I paused, startled, and 
 looked again. He was gone. His passing had been 
 as light and unpretentious as a breath of air through 
 the open window. 
 
 After he was carried out I disinfected his bed and 
 made it afresh, in a strange convulsion of soul. Thus 
 I had my first glimpse of that vast, interminable pro- 
 cession which must haunt the dreams of ambitious 
 kings. 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 31 
 
 As yet, I have been to no battlefronts. I have 
 letters, to be sure, which if presented in the proper 
 quarters, I am told, would result in personally con- 
 ducted trips to lines not engaged in an actual offen- 
 sive. But those letters still lie, unsent, in my trunk. 
 I may use them some day. But at present there is 
 within me a reluctance to visiting ruins and battle- 
 fields. Perhaps it is because I have seen so many 
 ruins who have returned from those battlefields. 
 
 Moreover, I have already been to the Front and I 
 have made a charge. It was a hand-grenade charge, 
 under the leadership of one Sergeant Girod, who since 
 then has been awarded the Croix de Guerre. The 
 announcement of the award reads, "For conspicuous 
 bravery in leading a brilliant hand-grenade attack 
 against the enemy while under fire from our own 
 mitrailleuses.'* I know it was a brilliant attack, for 
 I made it with him. It happened in this way: 
 
 It was six o'clock in the evening, and the big salle, 
 with its forest of overhead apparatus, was wrapped 
 in warm darkness, through which the bright, glow- 
 ing ends of cigarettes bloomed like tiny stars. The 
 electricity was out of order and the sole lights — two 
 tall candles on the head nurse's desk in the middle 
 of the room, with their straight still flames — lent an 
 air of enchantment to the place. The men, their 
 suppers over, lay smoking tranquilly, or chatted in 
 undertones. To me it was the pleasantest hour of the 
 day. I had lingered to make up another bed, the 
 
82 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 occupant for which, a fresh arrival, had not yet come 
 down from the operating room. 
 
 "Can you stay a few minutes?" called the head 
 nurse as she hurried past me. "I am called away; 
 the nurses are down at first supper, and someone 
 should be here when your man arrives." 
 
 I promised to remain. A few minutes later the 
 big double doors were flung open and a dark jumbled 
 mass appeared. The same instant a loud shout shat- 
 tered the quiet gloom : 
 
 **En avantf mes enfants! Vive la France! En 
 avant! Toujours en avant! lis approchent! Les 
 Boches! Les infidels! Les brigands! lis appro- 
 chent a gauche! Regardez a gauche! A gauche! — 
 They're approaching on the left! Look out on the 
 left — En avant, mes enfants! Toujours en avant!'' 
 
 It was a shout that would send a thrill along a 
 dead man's spine. A ripple of laughter went round 
 the room. Raised heads peered eagerly. The bran- 
 cardiers came forward, two wheeling the stretcher 
 and two more holding down the occupant, who was 
 struggling convulsively to raise himself and shouting 
 hoarse commands in a voice that could be heard a 
 block away. 
 
 "Where does he go, mees.''" came Justin's steady 
 tones. 
 
 "Here—Bed Eight.'' 
 
 "En avant! En avant, mes enfants! Regardez h 
 gauche! A gauche! lis approchent a gauche! Les 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 33 
 
 Boches, Us approchentr* The hoarse shouts did not 
 cease for an instant. 
 
 "He's leading a charge," said Justin, grimly 
 pleased, as they paused beside me. "Hand grenades ! 
 He's a terrible fellow. He killed ten Boches coming 
 down the stairs !" 
 
 Then, all together, with a "Uriy deux, trois — 
 AllezF* the four lifted him from the stretcher into 
 bed. 
 
 He was a powerfully built man, fair, with blue 
 eyes and a blond mustache, and his chemise, torn 
 away in the struggle, revealed a torso that gleamed 
 like ivory. Suddenly he looked up and gripped me 
 with a hand of iron. 
 
 "Criez avec moi: 'Vive la France!* " 
 
 "Vive la France!" I repeated in a low voice, to 
 soothe him. 
 
 "Louder! Shout louder: "Vive la France!** 
 
 "Vive la France!** I said more loudly. "Lie still 
 now. It's over. The attack is finished." 
 
 "And the Boches.'"' he queried eagerly. "They are 
 gone ?" 
 
 "All gone." 
 
 "No, no!" he cried violently, trying to rise. 
 "They're not gone! They're still coming on! My 
 God, see them ! Wave on wave ! Regardez a gauche, 
 mes enfants! Les Boches! Les brigands! Ah, my 
 poor comrades !" he murmured. "See them fall !" He 
 turned to me, whom evidently he took for one of his 
 
34 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 grenadiers: "Citronne went down just then. Did 
 you see him? Was he killed?" 
 
 "No ; only wounded. Be quiet now. It's done." 
 
 "But not well done," he retorted impatiently. 
 "We hadn't enough balls. To-night we attack again. 
 Listen well !" 
 
 And then he gave me my orders. It appeared that 
 on each side of us were Moroccan troops who were 
 to follow our attack with a charge. For a few 
 minutes Girod was silent. Suddenly he broke out: 
 
 "Boom! Soisante-quinzer* — the French seventy- 
 fives. "Boom! Les canonsT He appeared to be 
 listening to the bombardment. Presently he sighed. 
 "Ah, my poor wife ! My poor Cecilie ! You know, I 
 have a wife and three children — two boys and a girl." 
 
 It was evident to me that the sergeant had a 
 presentiment that he was going to fall in the attack. 
 After a long silence his voice came to me abruptly 
 out of the dark : 
 
 "What time is it?" 
 
 I named the hour. 
 
 "Well, then, my friend, we have still ten minutes. 
 Let us smoke a cigarette before we part." A second 
 later he was shouting at the top of his powerful 
 voice : 
 
 ^'En avant, mes enfants! lis approchent! Les 
 Bodies! Regardez a gauche! A gauche!" 
 
 Over and over he issued his commands to his grena- 
 diers ; over and over he shouted his warning cry, call- 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 35 
 
 ing frantically for bombs that were not forthcoming ; 
 and always he was driven back, despairing, by the 
 tide of Germans on his left. His brain, like a talk- 
 ing-machine record, had recorded faithfully every 
 detail of that last wild, brilliant attack, terminating 
 so disastrously because of the shortage of balls ; and 
 in his delirium he played that one record ceaselessly, 
 with no thought, action or sensation omitted. But 
 as the hours went by the record played slowly and 
 more slowly, with gaps of silence in between. Finally 
 he slept. 
 
 There is another chapter to add to this episode 
 concerning Girod. It happened some three weeks 
 later. And as this is not fiction, but a plain report- 
 ing of facts, I hasten to add that Girod did not die. 
 
 Passing his bed, however, one afternoon, I laid my 
 hand casually on the iron bed-frame. It was trem- 
 bling. The entire bed was vibrating steadily, gently, 
 as if to the oscillation of some remote earthquake. 
 Astonished, I looked at Girod. And Girod was trem- 
 bling too. It was he who caused the tremor of the 
 bed. Beneath the white coverlet his big body shook 
 with a ceaseless, mysterious agitation. 
 
 "What is the matter?" I cried. "Why are you 
 trembling like that?" 
 
 He gave a faint, apologetic smile, 
 
 "I'm afraid !" he said simply. "I'm afraid of tHat 
 operation this afternoon." 
 
 "But it's nothing," I assured him — "really nothing 
 
36 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 at all. Only a slight incision in the shoulder.'* 
 
 "I know. But — I'm afraid! You see " He 
 
 broke off, knitting his brows. "It was not always 
 thus. Once I did not know what fear was — ^be- 
 fore That's why they made me leader of the 
 
 bombing squad. I was reckless. But now — ^I'm 
 afraid. I'm afraid of that little operation 1" 
 
 "You've been under a strain," I said. 
 
 I recalled Girod's history. He had narrated it to 
 me one rainy afternoon. From his wife, Cecilie, and 
 his three children, he had not heard a word since the 
 war opened, as they lived in the invaded territory. 
 For the last six weeks before he was wounded he 
 and his comrades had been in the first-line trenches, 
 unrelieved, without food save for their reserve stores ; 
 and without water, unless one crawled on one's belly 
 at night to a spring in the dangerous strip of 
 No Man's Land between them and the enemy's 
 trenches. 
 
 Each night he crawled to the spring, filled his 
 canteen and crawled back to his wounded companions. 
 And then came one night when the spring failed. 
 
 "I crawled out there, as usual," Girod related, 
 "and found it full of cadavers !" 
 
 "And after that ?" I persisted. 
 
 But Girod made no reply. 
 
 "It's the strain, the heavy strain," I said again. 
 
 A nurse — the one known as the mifrailleuse — at 
 that instant passed his bed. 
 
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 37 
 
 "What's the matter with him?" she demanded 
 brusquely. "What's he shaking for?" 
 
 "The operation," I said. "He fears it. It's the 
 strain he's been under so long " 
 
 "Pooh!" she broke out impatiently. "Some of 
 these men can't stand pain any better than a baby !" 
 
 As the days and the weeks go by the ward changes. 
 Men recover or die, or are discharged to convalescent 
 hospitals; and fresh wrecks appear in their places, 
 sleep in their beds, and smile up to one from the pil- 
 low. The big salle is an antechamber, with exits 
 leading both ways — out into the great adventure of 
 life and out into the still greater adventure of death. 
 At the end of three months scarcely a single familiar 
 face remains. But the exit leading back into life is 
 always open. The recovered men return. 
 
 An aviator, whose leg had been amputated at the 
 hospital, comes to announce that he is to have the 
 honor of returning to the Front. He is the last of 
 his class of eight — and he must fly with a wooden 
 leg. 
 
 Even Claudius has been discharged. He has gone 
 home to his mother and sister, of whom he is the sole 
 support. A letter from him lies before me. 
 
 "My leg is no good," he writes, "and I never shall 
 be able to use it to work. What shall I do? I shall 
 have to ride that leg all day in a carriage! But 
 where ajn I to get the carriage? I shall go to 
 America! Do you think some rich — and pretty — 
 
38 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 young American mees would marry me and let me 
 ride in her carriage?" 
 
 That, indeed, would be a solution for Claudius ! 
 And I am making his modest wants known, with the 
 hopes that some pretty — and rich — young American 
 "mees" may wish to take a flyer on a young French- 
 man, considerably smashed but with his sense of 
 humor intact. If she should, and can guarantee the 
 carriage, I will send her Claudius' address. 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 
 
 Every hour wounds; 
 The last one kills. 
 
 Old French Couplet on the Clock Tower of the American 
 Ambulance, at Neuilly. 
 
 When, one morning in Paris, I received orders to 
 report without delay to the big American war hos- 
 pital in Neuilly, and begin work there as a volunteer 
 nurse's aid, I suddenly found myself reluctant, even 
 rebellious; though it was precisely for that reason, 
 and no other, that I had come to France. But I 
 had just arrived in Paris and already that city of 
 enchantments had cast its spell on me. I did not 
 want to work — I never want to work. I wanted, I 
 scarcely knew what : to taste Paris again ; to breathe 
 her air, which affects one like a mild champagne; 
 to stroll about and enjoy her noble proportions and 
 beautiful distances. I did not wish to be swallowed 
 up immediately by another piece of work, no matter 
 how fine or inspiring. 
 
 There were a few specials little, no-account per- 
 sonal things I wished to do first ; I wanted to revisit 
 
 39 
 
40 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 the tomb of Napoleon and ask the little old gentle- 
 man reposing down there below what he thought of 
 the present situation; I wanted to renew acquaint- 
 ance with Rodin's statue, The Thinker, in front of 
 the Pantheon, to see whether it cast as big a shadow 
 as ever ; I wanted to wander through the leafy alleys 
 of the Luxembourg Garden, decorated with marble 
 gods and goddesses and given over to the naive de- 
 lights of student lovers ; I wanted to stroll once more 
 up the Champs-Elysees in the twilight and see the 
 Arc de Triomphe, gravely beautiful, looming solidly 
 against the sky; I wanted to view again the statue 
 of Jeanne d'Arc; I wanted to taste once more some 
 Vouvray and see whether the world would turn into 
 an enchanted bubble again; I wanted to discover 
 whether the same immemorial fishermen were still fish- 
 ing on the banks of the Seine — for dead cats, Mark 
 Twain declared. These are but seven samples of the 
 things I wanted to do. In brief, I wanted to loaf. 
 
 "But you can't!" said the crisp English nurse 
 executive at the hospital, to whom I confided these 
 noble ambitions. "In the first place, we need you. In 
 the second place, we've got to have you. And in the 
 third place, Paris just now is no place for loafers. 
 With this present offensive on and so many of our 
 staff completely worn out — do you know there are 
 women working here who have not had a day off in 
 twenty months? — we need every pair of hands that 
 are available. Now, when can you come ? Monday ?" 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 41 
 
 This was Wednesday, and there was a nurse's out- 
 fit to buy, matriculation papers to procure at the 
 Prefecture, and other odds and ends of official red 
 tape to tie, which would take every hour of my time. 
 But I was conquered. I acquiesced. My hopes of a 
 holiday went a-glimmering. Hereafter, what I see of 
 Paris in wartime will be hasty glimpses, caught on 
 the fly ; for it will be dark when I rise, at six-thirty, 
 button myself into my infirmiere's blouse, swallow my 
 morning draft of chicory au lait, whose sole virtue 
 is that it is so hot it scalds me all the way down; 
 and it is dark again when in the evening, at six- 
 thirty, the day's work done, I bundle into the Red 
 Cross omnibus, which takes the auxiliary workers 
 back to the Subway. 
 
 During the first week in the hospital the sheer 
 physical strain was terrific. It seemed as if I were 
 in a strange, mad, nightmare world, where everything 
 was reversed; instead of health — disease, and man- 
 gled and torn bodies and suppurating wounds, some 
 of them hideously green and yellow, like decayed 
 meat; and smashed wrecks of men, with arms and 
 legs swung up on apparatus that resembled noth- 
 ing so much as the old torture racks of the Inquisi- 
 tion; as if shrieks and cries and groans and smells 
 were the natural and normal order of things. For 
 days I was nauseated. The sight of raw mangled 
 flesh, the blood-saturated linen, the stench of gan- 
 grenous wounds, the nervous strain of bandaging 
 
42 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 freshly amputated stumps, and the screams of the 
 dressing hour simply bombarded the unaccustomed 
 senses and hit the newcomer fairly in the pit of the 
 stomach. When I confessed this to the ward surgeon 
 he laughed. 
 
 "That's nothing — the rebellion of healthy nature 
 against disease. When I was at the Front, at the 
 commencement of the war, at one of the base hos- 
 pitals, I used to retire and gag at regular intervals. 
 It was awful, for we had nothing to work with. But 
 mobilize your emotions. Don't let them mobilize you. 
 Imitate the sang-froid of the poilu. Yesterday I 
 stopped by the bed of a youngster who's had a leg 
 off and is dying of gangrene. ^Well, how goes it?' I 
 asked him. *C« va, Ca va mieux.^ — It goes. It goes 
 better, he replied simply. And he was dead up to his 
 waist already ! He was a dead man he knew it, and 
 he knew that I knew that he knew it; and still he 
 looked me straight in the eye and said 'It goes. It 
 goes better!' There's mobilization of spirit for 
 you!" 
 
 Nevertheless, when the dressings were over I 
 breathed relief. Never did I learn to control my 
 nerves completely; to listen without a tremor to the 
 cries of pain, the high, piercing screams, "O/i, Za, la!" 
 *^Ah, Nom de DieuF* "Ah, doucement, docteur! 
 Easy there!" ''Oh, hon Dieu, how I suffer!" The 
 quality of pure agony in those broken cries was too 
 much for me. 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 43 
 
 It was on trying occasions like these that Justin, 
 the old French orderly, came to my aid, showing me 
 exactly how to hold a broken leg; how to wind a 
 difficult bandage with comfort and security ; how to 
 lift a heavy patient without injury to myself or to 
 him. 
 
 Justin deserves a separate paragraph all to him- 
 self, a separate little niche in heaven. Kipling's 
 celebrated Gunga Din had nothing on him — for 
 Gunga Din had no sense, only goodness ; while Justin 
 is a Frenchman, with all a Frenchman's natural in- 
 telligence and sardonic humor. He had been an or- 
 derly in a French military hospital for twenty years ; 
 and what he did not know about sick humanity — 
 their weakness and irritability, their heroisms and 
 long, long patience — was not worth knowing. From 
 morning to night he went trotting noiselessly about 
 the ward in his old blue list slippers ; dirty aproned ; 
 squat, ugly and strong as a gorilla; vulgar, gay, 
 resolute and as tender-fingered as a woman. And 
 the men leaned on him as on an elder brother. 
 
 All day long it was : "Justin, a basin — quick !" 
 "Justin, lift me up!" "Justin, this plaster cast is 
 killing me !" "Ah, Justin, how I suffer !'* 
 
 And Justin's steady, cheerful voice would reply: 
 "I come, mon enfant.''^ "There, mon petitT* "That 
 goes better, mon petit brave, eh?" 
 
 Once only did I see him in a passion. Some negli- 
 gent person had bound a damp bandage too tightly 
 
44 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 about a fractured leg ; drying, it contracted still fur- 
 ther ; the result was acute torture. The soldier, a 
 modest, shy lad, had appealed once or twice to a 
 passing nurse; but the first big morning rush of 
 dressings was on and no one heeded him. Minutes 
 passed. The pain increased. Silently he began to 
 weep. It was old Justin trotting past with a pail of 
 soiled dressings who first noted the writhing young 
 figure and caught a faint groan. He paused long 
 enough to inquire: "What's the matter, petit?*' . 
 
 The soldier indicated his leg. The orderly's face 
 darkened as he looked. He set down the pail, undid 
 the bandage and rewound it properly, muttering an- 
 grily between his teeth the while. Presently a nurse 
 bore down upon them. She was the one whom the 
 men had nicknamed the old mitrailleuse — for reasons 
 obvious. Competent enough technically, she had 
 neither tenderness nor humanity nor gay spirits to 
 commend her services to the men. She was like a 
 soured, fibrous old schoolmistress, and the soldiers de- 
 tested her cordially and, after the fashion of mis- 
 chievous school-children, amused themselves by devis- 
 ing fresh nicknames for her each day. 
 
 Frenchmen love charm in a woman, and hate the 
 reverse like a deformity. Accordingly, when she 
 paused belligerently at the bedside, both Justin and 
 the lad instinctively stiffened themselves. 
 
 "What are you doing, Justin?" she cried sharply. 
 "Let that bandage alone !" 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 45 
 
 For an orderly to dare to rewrap a certificated 
 nurse's bandage is, of course, a breach of etiquette. 
 It is a situation that requires taet ; but Justin at 
 that moment was far too angry for tact. Stolidly he 
 continued his task. When the last safety pin was 
 refastened he straightened himself and faced the 
 nurse squarely. 
 
 "Some imbecile, some cocJion of an infirmiere,'' he 
 began, mentioning no names, "put a wet bandage on 
 the leg of that poor child !" And then he continued 
 suavely, in French — of which the nurse understood 
 nothing beyond a few scattering words: "Ancient 
 female camel! Daughter of the union of a cannon 
 ball and a hippopotamus : Do you conceive that I, a 
 Frenchman and a soldier, shall not do what is good 
 for these, my little children? Nom de Dieu! Nom 
 de Dieu!" And with a shrug of contempt he gath- 
 ered up his slops and trotted away. 
 
 It was not long after this late one afternoon, when 
 Justin beckoned me with a stealthy finger. By this 
 time we had become firm allies. At noon I saved him 
 a cup of wine from the men's lunch and let him rest 
 his aching feet and smoke a cigarette undisturbed 
 behind a screen. And in return Justin taught me all 
 the fine subtleties of his art. 
 
 "You are very amiable, mees," he began now in a 
 carefully lowered voice. "Will you help me ?" 
 
 "What is it?" I asked; for by his conspirator air 
 and his secrecy I knew he intended to achieve some- 
 
46 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 thing, by his own initiative, which was against the 
 rules. 
 
 "It's Simondon, out on the terrasse,'' he mur- 
 mured, still in guarded tones. "His new cast hurts 
 him. Last night he did not sleep for pain, and to-day 
 the pauvre petit has a temperature of thirty-nine. 
 I'm going to take off that plaster and rewad it !" 
 
 "But why don't you ask the nurse? It's her job, 
 really. You and I have no right to touch that cast 
 without permission." 
 
 "Simondon won't let her come near. He's crazy 
 with the pain. They've decided to wait for the doc- 
 tor. But the doctor is up in the operating room, 
 and the Sacred Virgin alone knows when he will re- 
 turn." He led the way to the terrace, a sleeping 
 porch which gave on the garden. 
 
 I knew this Simondon. He had lost an eye and had 
 a badly infected leg, due to four days and four nights 
 spent on the field of battle, without food or water, 
 before help came. As a consequence, of the five 
 months spent in the hospital each separate hour had 
 been a desperately fought struggle, a superb resist- 
 ance of the spirit. 
 
 Small wonder that, after all these long months, 
 the cool nerve that rarely deserts a Frenchman had 
 worn down to rather a fine thread! 
 
 Upon the terrace we found him, a dark, painfully 
 emaciated lad of twenty-one, his black hair already 
 plentifully sprinkled with white from the hardships 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 47 
 
 he had undergone. His cheeks were scarlet with 
 fever, and in his torture he had bitten his lips until 
 they were covered with a thin, bloody froth. 
 
 "No, no ! You shan't touch it !" he began fiercely 
 as we came up. 
 
 "Courage, mon petit braveT soothed Justin. 
 "Ten minutes, and it'll all be over and we'll have 
 you up in the wheel chair. Say, old embusque! Will 
 you have a small glass of cognac first?" 
 
 "Don't you touch it !" breathed Simondon passion- 
 ately between his teeth. "Get out of here !" 
 
 "Hold up his leg, mees!" commanded Justin 
 calmly. "Thus !" 
 
 Obediently I held the leg, incased from thigh to 
 heel in an open plaster cast, at the desired angle. 
 Simondon let out a piercing yell. 
 
 "Oh, bon Dieu! Oh, la, la! Wait!" Tears of 
 agony streamed down his wasted cheeks. Wildly he 
 tried to seize my hands. "Can't you hear me?" he 
 sobbed. "Imbeciles ! Stop !" 
 
 "Maybe we'd better," I murmured. 
 But, with swift and sure precision, Justin had 
 already begun to strip the bandages. 
 "Higher !" he ordered briefly. 
 
 Again Simondon made a furious swing at my 
 wrists. Again he screamed madly. 
 "Let's wait for the doctor," I urged. 
 Justin never looked up. 
 "Don't heed him, mees," he said simply. " 'Tis 
 
48 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 only his sickness speaking." Wise old Justin ! "Rest 
 tranquil, petit" he added; and he nodded to the 
 young sufferer, who, suddenly docile beneath the firm, 
 ministering hands, returned him a quivering smile 
 of obedience. "It's almost finished," murmured 
 Justin. 
 
 And indeed, in less time than it takes to tell, the 
 cruelly binding plaster incasement was shed, extra 
 layers of soft padding inserted, the cast readjusted 
 and rebound; and Simondon, the tears still wet on 
 his cheeks, was smiling happily and sipping a tiny 
 glass of cognac. A half hour later, his fever abated 
 and his red tasseled cap cocked rakishly over his one 
 good eye, he was up in the wheel chair — for the first 
 time in five months — and Justin was trundling him 
 off for a brief promenade. 
 
 By the sheer authority of his spirit, the squat, 
 grotesque, vulgar little old man had achieved in a 
 few minutes what two nurses had labored vainly over 
 for an hour. Shortly after he was on his rounds 
 again, at his perpetual dog-trot, carrying a basin 
 and making, as he passed me, his invariable joke — 
 that he was taking a small gift to the Kaiser! 
 
 The first month in the big ward I was worked to 
 death. But so was everybody else. Some of the 
 nurses were ill, some of the auxiliaries were away, 
 and an offensive was at its height. Consequently the 
 rest of us worked under a terrific pressure. Ward 
 Eighty-three, at that time the heaviest in the hos- 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 49 
 
 pital, had over fifty beds, each one filled with a grand 
 blesse. Fifty backs to wash; fifty beds to make; 
 fifty dressings to cut down, change and rebandage ; 
 fifty bedside tables to scrub ; fifty meals to serve on 
 individual tables; fifty temperatures and pulses to 
 take—to say nothing of a thousand and one odd 
 jobs, such as hot compresses every hour, hot drinks, 
 medicines, diets, wounds to irrigate, beds to disinfect, 
 which kept nurses and aids racing dizzily straight 
 through the day. And even then we were always 
 behind our schedule ! The work was never done. 
 
 If anyone is suffering from a broken heart or a 
 general stagnation of life — what O. Henry called 
 "slow pulse" — a big hospital ward during the rush of 
 an offensive is a good place to lose it. But there are 
 compensations; for a sick warrior is nothing after 
 all but a sick child, docile, naive, craving for sym- 
 pathy. He wants to be consoled for his suffering; 
 he wants to be cured. He demands everything and 
 gives everything. And at night as I passed, dog 
 tired, down the ward, heads were raised, hands out- 
 stretched; and the shower of cries of ^'Bonsoir, 
 Mees !" — "a demaiuy Mees Californie !" — were sweeter 
 than bouquets of roses thrown across the footlights 
 to a reigning star. 
 
 There were twelve soldiers for whose welfare I was 
 specifically responsible, and who had the right to 
 call me to their bedsides and demand whatsoever 
 they pleased, from an extra piece of cotton batting 
 
50 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 over their toes to the reasons why there are so many 
 divorces in my country. Of these twelve, nine were 
 under twenty- three and two looked not a day over 
 sixteen, rosy cheeked and downy. After the first 
 mists of strangeness had cleared away, and I began 
 to view things more normally, that was the first thing 
 that struck me — the amazing youth of the man. De- 
 spite their wounds and the stress of trench life in a 
 brutal wintry climate, they fairly shouted life and 
 vivid vitality. Their eyes were as clear as those of 
 children, their laughter as fresh, their joy as spon- 
 taneous. 
 
 One morning I was washing the back of a young 
 Breton lad whose torso, with its clean, flowing lines, 
 would have delighted a sculptor. 
 
 "Claude," I laughed, "you have a back almost as 
 nice as Apollo's." 
 
 "Yes, mees? Truly?" he cried, blushing and 
 deeply pleased. 
 
 I was puzzled by his delight, for Claude was a 
 young coal miner who could not even sign his own 
 name, and I knew he did not know Apollo from Moses. 
 The next morning, as I was rubbing him down with 
 alcohol, he twisted about to ask shyly : 
 
 **Mees Californie, is my back still as nice as 
 Apollo's?" 
 
 As I stared at him blankly he repeated the query 
 in slightly different form ; and then the truth dawned 
 upon me: he thought Apollo was some other boy in 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 51 
 
 the ward whose back didn't have any bedsores! 
 
 It would be a great mistake to conclude that the 
 ward of a military hospital, simply because it is the 
 container of so much concentrated pain, is, therefore, 
 the natural abode of sadness and gloom. In the first 
 place, the soldiers, taken as a whole, are not sick: 
 they are only wounded — a vast difference. Save for 
 their injuries, the majority of them are practically 
 well men. In the second place, they are young, and, 
 speaking again, in the large, magnificently healthy. 
 
 Consequently the large airy ward, with its com- 
 munity of bedfast inhabitants, resembles a menagerie 
 of fifty playful cubs — each chained to his own post, 
 to be sure, but capable, nevertheless, of considerable 
 mischief — rather than the classic conception of a sick 
 room, with lowered lights and voices. 
 
 Pain there is, certainly, up to the limits of human 
 endurance; but this is borne with a spirit, an ironic 
 fortitude, which is a Frenchman's most natural pos- 
 session. A soldier suffering the refined tortures of 
 hell during the dressing of an infected wound is yet 
 capable of making a jest with, twitching lips that will 
 send his comrades off into spasms of laughter. 
 
 Nor is this humor an affectation. It is his in- 
 stinctive reaction to pain. And, as a reverse side of 
 the same shield, he is also capable at such times of 
 the finest flower of courtesy, such as saying simply, 
 "Thank you, doctor !" to the man who has just cut 
 off his leg without ether. 
 
52 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 But if he can and does endure intense pain su- 
 perbly, it is no sign, as the school-boys say, that he 
 intends to endure lesser, or what he considers un- 
 necessary ones, with like dignity. As a matter of 
 fact, a pain in the great toe, a crease in the draw- 
 sheet, or, above all, that thing most dreaded by every 
 Frenchman, a courant d*air from an open window, 
 will produce loud lamentation, which will set the 
 entire ward in an uproar. For these are the small 
 ills that can be righted, and therefore must be — and 
 instantaneously, if you please. 
 
 An incident in point took place recently in the 
 ward. The chief surgeon, when making his morning 
 rounds, decided that a superficial incision of perhaps 
 an inch should be made in a certain wound in order to 
 permit the free passage of the Carrel-Dakin solution, 
 the famous antiseptic irrigation which keeps down 
 bacterial poisoning. It was not considered suffi- 
 ciently important to remove the patient to the oper- 
 ating room, or even to administer ether. Three or 
 four snips by the ward doctor and the thing would 
 be done. But Georges, the party of the first part in 
 the operation, had decided he wanted an anaesthetic. 
 He did not intend to be hurt. He had understood 
 that in this grand hospital de luxe the Americans had 
 the latest methods; that they did not chop a poor 
 soldier up without first "putting him to sleep," Vain 
 were my efforts to soothe him. 
 
 The other men, delighted by this fantastic griev- 
 
WITH.THE FRENCH WOUNDED 53 
 
 ance — for most of them detest the anaesthetizing 
 process — egged him on with a gayety that soon be- 
 came riotous. They exchanged bets on the possible 
 chances of recovery from such a grave operation. 
 They promised to write to his mother and to his 
 fiancee in the event of his death. One soldier, an 
 erstwhile opera singer, consented to chant his mass. 
 Another offered to confess him, and adjured him to 
 make a clean breast of all his sins. At lunch, with 
 their wine, they drank to him a solemn morituri te 
 salutamus! 
 
 The day became a Fete of Death dedicated to 
 Georges and his inch-long cut. And when at length 
 the crucial hour arrived, and the doctor and nurse 
 entered with a tray of glittering instruments, every 
 man of them was up on his elbow in bed, and the 
 opera singer began softly to chant the mass. But 
 Georges was nowise abashed by all this jest and 
 blague. As the doctor approached his bedside he 
 began to writhe, and gasped : 
 
 "Mon Dieu, how I suffer ! Oh ! Ah ! Doucetnent! 
 —Gently !" 
 
 *'Un!'' murmured the opera singer at his side. 
 
 The nurse pulled down the covers and elicited an- 
 other loud groan. 
 
 "O/i, la, la! Doucement! Doucementr' 
 
 *'Deuxl Trois!" counted his neighbor. 
 
 The ward meantime was one gurgle of suppressed 
 laughter. The nurse started to undo the bandage. 
 
54 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "Doucementr* sang out Georges lustily. 
 
 "Quatrer 
 
 The doctor picked up an instrument from the tray 
 and touched the wound-opening tentatively. 
 
 "Oh, Nom de Dieu! Oh, docteur! Doucement! 
 DoucementI Doucement!" 
 
 "Cinq! Six! Sept!'' 
 
 "What's biting you, old man?" laughed the doctor 
 in English. "You know this doesn't hurt." 
 
 "Doucement!'' roared Georges in reply. 
 
 "Huit!" 
 
 "I don't understand this," said the nurse, glancing 
 at the chart. "He has no temperature." 
 
 "Doucement! Doucement!" moaned Georges. 
 
 "Neuf! Dix!" registered the opera singer. 
 
 The doctor snipped off an infinitesimal flake of 
 (dead cuticle. 
 
 "Oh, hon Dieu! Doucement! Doucement! Douce- 
 ment! Doucement! Oh, cher docteur! Doucement!" 
 
 "Onze! Douze! Treize! Quatorze! Quinze!" 
 
 By this time the men were in a broad ripple of 
 laughter — all save Georges, who continued to howl 
 with every move the doctor made. But finally the 
 operation was over. Doctor and nurse disappeared. 
 
 "How many?" I inquired. 
 
 "Twenty-eight !" grinned the opera singer. 
 
 Georges had screeched Doucement! eight-and- 
 twenty times inside of five minutes, at a practically 
 painless operation ! And now the opera singer began 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 55 
 
 to mock him by singing Doucement! in every conceiv- 
 able accent up and down the scale. 
 
 "Son of generations of monkeys !" grunted Georges 
 contemptuously. He turned to me: "A drop of 
 cognac, mees ! Regard how my hand trembles." 
 
 And he lifted that member and waggled it before 
 my eyes without the faintest glimmer of a smile. 
 Needless to say, he got his cognac; he had earned 
 it. The men had expected amusement and Georges 
 had done his best not to disappoint them. Such 
 a mirth provoker in a ward is worth any amount of 
 drugs. Moreover, it is only justice to Georges to 
 add that, in a subsequent operation, he had his leg 
 taken off above the knee with a coolness, a gay devil- 
 may-caredom that touched even his pain-hardened 
 comrades. Upon that occasion never a single Douce- 
 ment fell from his lips. He was far more concerned 
 over the noon meal he was forced to miss, and cursed 
 like a pirate because he must lose both his lunch and 
 his leg at the same fell clip ! 
 
 But even Georges, with all his impudence and 
 nerve, had his black moments, his fits of melancholy, 
 of piercing nostalgia, of deadly ennui of the soul. 
 Cafard the soldiers call these seasons of gloom. "Blue 
 devils" is our equivalent term. While the Russian 
 muzhik says simply : "My soul suffers !" 
 
 The men dread this cafard more than an operation. 
 To fight off its approach they reread old letters, 
 finger over beloved relics in their small sacks of per- 
 
56 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 sonal belongings, smoke miles of cigarettes, read end- 
 less romances, or write up their simple histories — 
 poor, meager, ill-spelled and laboriously penciled nar- 
 ratives of the individual roles they played in the 
 present mighty conflict. 
 
 But sooner or later the cafard, lying in wait, gets 
 them. That Georges, however, witty, jeering, pun- 
 gent as Javelle water, should fall a victim filled me 
 with surprise. But one morning I came upon him 
 with his head smothered under a pillow. And when 
 I lifted it off, fancying him asleep, his young face 
 startled me with its look of utter and naked misery, 
 which he was too proud to show his little world. 
 
 "Why, what is the matter?" I cried. 
 
 He looked at me silently with brooding, gloom- 
 filled eyes. 
 
 "I have the cafard,^^ he said simply at last. 
 
 Despite himself, his mouth quivered. Every one 
 of those arid and sterile hours of his sickness had 
 piled its heavy weight upon his soul. 
 
 "Ah, when will it all be finished?" he breathed. 
 "When shall I see my mother, my little sister, again ?" 
 
 For this I had no reply. Georges' chances of re- 
 covery at that time were about fifty-fifty. 
 
 "Do you see that verse?" He pointed to the high 
 clock tower of the hospital, which bore, in old French 
 script, the following couplet: 
 
 Every hour wounds; 
 The last one hills. 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 57 
 
 Georges repeated it slowly, with intense bitterness. 
 
 "The other day I counted how many hours I had 
 lain couched here. Three thousand three hundred 
 and twenty hours !" He held up to the light a yellow, 
 emaciated hand. "Pretty, isn't it? Every hour 
 wounds, and the last one kills, eh? Well, I'll take my 
 killing all at once, thanks. I'm tired, you know. I'll 
 dispatch myself some day !" 
 
 A tender word on my part at that instant and 
 Georges would have wept outright — and never for- 
 given me for disgracing him! I tried a joke — ^his 
 own favorite weapon. 
 
 "Well," I said, smiling, "if you want to die right 
 away, this very minute, here's a method." 
 
 And I picked up from his bedside table a broken 
 and rusted knife. It was his trench knife, a battered 
 old wreck of an affair, the big blade of which was 
 still crusted with dried blood — Georges' own blood, 
 spilt there when he got his wound, and carefully pre- 
 served by him as a souvenir. As a lethal instrument 
 that knife was a joke, and I trusted he would see the 
 point. But I underestimated the depth of blackness 
 in his soul. For a long moment he stared at me, 
 silent. Then suddenly, with a swift and violent move- 
 ment, he tore open his chemise at the throat. 
 
 *^Voila! There you are!" he exclaimed. I laid the 
 knife out of reach in a hurry. 
 
 "Peu!'^ he said contemptuously, and turned his 
 back on me. 
 
68 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 It later appeared that the cafard in this particular 
 case had its origin in a girl. Following hard upon 
 his operation, as soon as he could grasp a pen, 
 Georges had written to his fiancee, telling her that he 
 was now a cripple and releasing her from her engage- 
 ment. And it seemed that the girl had taken him 
 at his word. Not a single line had he received from 
 her ! And added bitterness lay in the fact that, deep 
 down in the unplumbed depths of him, Georges had a 
 fine upstanding confidence in himself, and believed 
 that, cripple or no cripple, he was a pretty fine match 
 for any girl. 
 
 As the days filed by without news he began to 
 bleed inwardly. But one afternoon, shortly after- 
 ward, as I passed down the ward I beheld by Georges' 
 bedside her hand tightly locked in his, a small, pale- 
 browed but radiant young person, in a heavy veil of 
 black crepe. Georges, exultant and gay, beckoned 
 me over. 
 
 "C^est ma fianceeT' he introduced proudly. 
 
 Upon receipt of his letter she had waited only to 
 bury a relative, and then hastened up from 
 their native village to give him her reply in per- 
 son. 
 
 In the hospital there were innumerable love affairs 
 that came under my eye as the busy, monotonously 
 diverse days flowed by; and the soldiers, one by one, 
 made me their confidante while I wrapped their band- 
 ages, made their beds, or scrubbed the ingrained 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 59 
 
 mud of the Somme from their feet with liquid soap 
 and a flesh brush. But there is one that lingers in 
 my mind because it became a game, half playful, half 
 serious, between me and the soldier lover. 
 
 On visitors' day the spacious salle was always 
 crowded by a throng of wives, mothers, sweethearts 
 and friends. Before the big double doors were 
 thrown open each soldier had his tiny pocket mirror 
 out, combing his mustache and grooming himself for 
 the occasion. Among these, I came to observe 
 Coussin, a jeweler by trade, who, with his wife and 
 small son of three, lived in Montmartre before the 
 war. 
 
 Coussin was a quiet young man with an under- 
 standing eye and an unfailing sunny smile. I always 
 hated to hurt him in dressing his wound, because it 
 hurt him so to hurt me. As the hands of the clock 
 approached two he would shift on his pillow so that 
 his glance could reach the door without obstruction. 
 He was one of those rare Frenchmen who do not 
 smoke ; and he would lie thus, motionless, a little pale 
 from emotion, his eyes glued to that distant door. 
 They never left it save to consult his watch. And 
 when finally, on the stroke of two, his wife, Fabienne, 
 appeared, a pretty, dark young woman, trimly veiled, 
 pushing her son ahead of her, Coussin would lift him- 
 self abruptly out of bed — despite stern orders to the 
 contrary, for there was still danger of hemorrhage — 
 and wave his uninjured arm. 
 
60 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 And Fabienne would lift her wee son for a salute 
 to Papa! After which she would start down the long, 
 crowded aisle. Smiling, her eyes still clinging to 
 those of Coussin, she moved sedately, controlling her 
 eagerness ; but at the end she always ran. The kiss 
 that followed was — well, indescribable. You will have 
 to imagine it. And the look which they exchanged 
 afterward was even more than a kiss, more passion- 
 ate, tender, revealing. 
 
 As the afternoon drew on to a close the bell rang, 
 warning the visitors that it was time to begin to get 
 ready to think of departure. It was at this juncture 
 that the comedy with Coussin began. Earlier in the 
 day he had secretly set his watch half an hour back. 
 If he could have got hold of a stick long enough to 
 reach from his bed I am convinced he would have un- 
 blushingly turned back the hands of the ward clock 
 to match, without a single compunction. As it was, 
 he and Fabienne blandly ignored the first bell, as none 
 of their private concerns. But when it rang again, 
 and the orderlies began shooing the dilatory ones out 
 into the corridor, Coussin would glance guilelessly 
 at his watch, start, compare it hastily with the ward 
 clock, and then exclaim with an air of surprise, min- 
 gled with indignation: 
 
 "Again too fast ! But it is no good — that big old 
 clock. This admirable little watch of mine has not 
 been out a minute in five years !" 
 
 And Fabienne would regard lovingly the admirable 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 61 
 
 little watch of her admirable little husband. In the 
 end, of course, he won his extra half hour, and after 
 the departure of his wife his timepiece and that of 
 the ward would somehow mysteriously synchronize. 
 But this was not quite all of the comedy. When 
 the visitors had gone basins were passed round and 
 the men bathed themselves before supper. But on the 
 day of his wife's visit Coussin always refused to 
 bathe. 
 
 "I don't wish to!" he would say with gentle ob- 
 stinacy, 
 
 "But you must. It's the rule. It's good for you." 
 
 "Not to-night. To-morrow." 
 
 "But to-night it's very necessary. Many visitors 
 — many microbes." 
 
 "I don't wish to — to-night." He would shake his 
 head with smiling decision. 
 
 "But why don't you want to wash to-night?" I 
 asked him on the first occasion. 
 
 He gave me a single full look, and the truth 
 dawned upon me : He did not wish to wash away the 
 kisses of his wife and little son ! 
 
 "To-morrow night I will wash twice!" he added 
 magnanimously ; and upon that we compromised. 
 
 There are certain French words — one can hardly 
 call them slang — which have come into popular usage 
 since the war, and which one hears constantly on the 
 lips of the soldier. One of these is pinard, the trench 
 word for wine, corresponding loosely to our term 
 
62 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "booze." Another is copain. A copain is a pal, a 
 chum, a trench comrade; one with whom a soldier 
 shares his bed and his blanket and whiles away the 
 long dull hours of inactivity. Not to have such a 
 friend at the Front — or la-has — Out There — as the 
 soldiers call it — is a severe deprivation ; for it means 
 spiritual isolation; one puny soul bearing alone the 
 terrific impact of the war. To illustrate this tender 
 feeling toward a copain: 
 
 One day I was given the task of taking down the 
 histories of the men in my ward; and I discovered, 
 somewhat to my surprise, that a postman, a quiet, 
 drab, nondescript little man with a bald spot, had 
 won both the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Mili- 
 taire. To me, his tale was astounding in its valor, 
 for this timid, oldish little person seemed the sort to 
 flee for his life, like a frightened rabbit, at the first 
 big thunder of the guns. 
 
 It appeared that one night he had volunteered to 
 go out upon the battlefield, still under French and 
 German fire, to rescue a fallen soldier. While car- 
 rying his charge a shell exploded near at hand, in- 
 juring both his legs and wounding his companion 
 afresh. At this point he might have saved himself 
 by deserting his comrade. Instead of which, he re- 
 mained all night beside him ; made his dressings ; fed 
 him the dew that collected on the adjacent leaves, 
 drop by drop; remained beside him throughout the 
 following day, under constant bombardment ; and at 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 63 
 
 nightfall got him, like a sack of meal, up on his shoul- 
 ders, and, crawling on his hands and knees, dragging 
 his injured legs — "Grace a Dieu it was not my arms," 
 he said, "or I never could have made it !" — ^he event- 
 ually reached a dressing station, five kilometers away. 
 But he had paid the toll of that long wait upon the 
 infected field of glory. Gangrene set in and it was 
 found necessary to amputate both feet. Never again 
 could he be a postman. 
 
 "That was very splendid of you !" I said at the end 
 of his recital. 
 
 "But no ! But no !" he denied swiftly. "You see, 
 'twas my copainT^ 
 
 There is still another word the war has brought 
 into being ; an epithet that, falling in anger from the 
 lips of a soldier, is the supreme and ultimate insult. 
 It is the word that has been coined to cover the case 
 of the man who evades military service. Embusque 
 is the French term. Literally it means one who hides 
 in ambush. But practically it has come to embrace 
 all who, through graft or influence, hide in easy ad- 
 ministrative jobs, soft snaps, sinecures, saving their 
 pusillanimous skins instead of taking their chances 
 with their fellows in the trenches. The contempt 
 for this particular brand of coward is great, and 
 insults are extremely likely to be the portion of any 
 civilian who walks the streets of Paris these days in 
 mufti. 
 
 An American ambulance driver on the field service 
 
64 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 at Verdun told me that, on a recent permission in 
 Paris, he had taken all his uniforms to the tailor to 
 be cleaned. 
 
 "It seemed bully," he said, "to have a real Ameri- 
 can all-over bath and get into real American clothes 
 again — that is, it semed bully until I ventured out 
 upon the boulevards en civile. But presently I began 
 to hear 'Emhusque!^ ^Emhusquel' all round me in the 
 air. Sometimes it was hurled in my face in passing ; 
 sometimes it was hissed close to my ear. And finally 
 there approached four poilus abreast, mutile every 
 one, taking the entire width of the pavement, stump- 
 ing along on their wooden pegs, gay as larks, and 
 chattering seventeen to the dozen. Convalescents, I 
 figured them, out on their promenade. When they 
 came alongside, naturally I gave them the road. But 
 they halted, confronted me contemptuously, and 
 cried: ^Embusque! Embusque vousT Well, it was 
 too much for me. I beat it back to the tailor and 
 got into respectable clothes." 
 
 Like many opprobrious epithets, however, embus- 
 que, among friends, has a different slant; used thus, 
 it becomes a term of endearment, a sort of rough ca- 
 ress. A soldier, fresh Out There, muddy-booted, un- 
 shaved, bristling with the accouterments of war, will 
 clump awkwardly into the hospital, bend over his 
 wounded comrade, salute him on both cheeks, and ex- 
 claim jovially: "Well, old embusque, how goes it?" 
 And on the morning following my weekly afternoon 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 65 
 
 off the men never failed to greet me : "Aha, Mees Em- 
 husque! You deserted us yesterday. Embusque 
 vousT* 
 
 Used so, it was a term of affection. Nevertheless, 
 it is a word to be handled with discretion. Returning 
 from the hospital late one night to my quiet hotel, I 
 found the place in a tumult. The police had invaded 
 the kitchen; and the Dutch chef, a stout, pompous 
 white-capped tyrant, before whom the entire estab- 
 lishment walked in terror, lay on the floor with his 
 head smashed in, weltering in his own gore. Over 
 him stood the head waiter, a tiny sprite of a French- 
 man, hands clenched, eyes blazing, and looking ready 
 to jump on the chef's fat stomach if that prostrate 
 gentleman so much as batted an eyelid. 
 
 "What's the matter ?" I inquired. 
 
 "He — he called me embusque! Me !" exploded the 
 head waiter, stammering in his rage. "I knocked the 
 fat swine down and his head hit the stove." 
 
 The police, upon hearing the provocation, vindi- 
 cated the servant completely, and the Dutchman 
 went to the hospital to mend his head and his man- 
 ners. It was another version of Owen Wister's fam- 
 ous Western tale : "When you call me that — smile !" 
 
 At the end of three months I was transferred to 
 another ward with only twelve beds — a small, tran- 
 quil family, it seemed to me, after the continual rush 
 and hurry of the big receiving ward. But still there 
 was plenty to do. No time to sit like a lady, with 
 
66 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 folded lilylike hands. And the first three days, in 
 addition to the regular routine, I had a dying man 
 in charge. For three days and three nights he lay 
 dying from general gas infection, a poor wreck, too 
 ghastly to look upon with composure. His face, 
 under the process of decay, had turned a horrible 
 greenish yellow ; beneath one eye yawned a deep un- 
 healed bayonet gash ; his mouth was filled with pois- 
 onous ulcers ; and his tongue was so swollen that he 
 could scarce articulate. 
 
 One leg had been amputated at the thigH in a vain 
 effort to arrest the gangrene ; but the infection had 
 immediatel}^ showed in the other leg. The stench 
 of this moribund organism was such that, with every 
 window flung wide open, the odor was still almost 
 overpowering. And the danger of infection was no 
 imaginary fear. A nurse, with her hands tender from 
 being constantly in water, is always crocking off bits 
 of superficial skin. 
 
 Conceive the daily dressing and bandaging of this 
 poor wretch; the daily changing of linen, soaked 
 through and through with deadly suppurations, 
 down to the very mattress ! In touching him the 
 doctor, the nurse and the orderlies wore gloves; so, 
 also, did I whenever that was possible. But at this 
 time there was a temporary shortage of nurses and I 
 had the ward to myself, save when the head nurse 
 looked in for a minute to ask if all went well. And 
 perhaps I would be busy when the cry would come: 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 67 
 
 "Mees ! Mees ! Number Two ! A drink ! Quick !" 
 
 Upon which I would drop everything in a panic 
 and fly to his bedside, barely in time to prevent him 
 from swallowing the contents of the spittoon ; for he 
 had long, lean, powerful arms, this Number Two, 
 which were always wandering, always in motion. 
 With these he would pull into his bed whatever of the 
 adjacent landscape he could lay hands on; for this 
 reason we were forced to discard the bedside screens 
 that usually inclose the dying. Once this blind, wan- 
 dering hand discovered a thermometer on the bed- 
 side table of a neighbor. Instantly it was in his 
 mouth and was broken in two between his teeth. 
 Nothing for it but to thrust in my bare hand and pull 
 the pieces out. No time for rubber gloves ! He might 
 die of gas gangrene ; but I was not going to have him 
 die of a thermometer. 
 
 Happily he did not suffer and at times he was con- 
 scious. Once, as I held up his head — this time with 
 gloves — to give him water, he looked into my eyes 
 and said, quite matter-of-f actly : 
 
 "C*est la ftuy n*est-ce'pas?'' — It's the end, isn't 
 it.? 
 
 As he lingered and still lingered on, there came a 
 subtle change over the attitude of the ward with 
 regard to this long-spun-out dying. At first, when, 
 after what seemed to them a proper and suitable 
 length of time. Number Two still stubbornly held on, 
 complaints began to be heard. No Frenchman loves 
 
68 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 an open window. Were they all to die of colds in the 
 head because of one inconsiderate fellow? Frankly, 
 they had had enough of him. It was not courteous 
 to linger thus ! 
 
 ''Bon Dieu, not yet? Will he go to-night, think 
 you ?" they would impatiently inquire. 
 
 But as the feeble flame still burned mysteriously 
 on, unquenched, this feeling gradually altered; it 
 merged into a wondering awe and respect. The gal- 
 lant fight of Number Two, his gaspings, his wrest- 
 lings with the invisible foe, commanded their admi- 
 ration. 
 
 "How strong he is !" they would murmur respect- 
 fully, "What force!" 
 
 " 'Tis the force of youth," commented another. 
 
 " 'Tis sad to die like that, so young, so brave — 
 n^est-ce-pas, mees?" 
 
 And when the final spells of periodic shuddering 
 began, showing the last phase was at hand, they 
 watched him with undisguised interest. 
 
 "He's passing!" announced one. 
 
 "Not yet," retorted another, almost with pride. 
 "See him drink! Pauvre brave! 'Tis a good war- 
 rior." 
 
 "He'll go to-night— that's sure!'* 
 
 They began to argue about it. 
 
 But he did not go that night, nor yet the next 
 morning; and the afternoon found him still battling 
 feebly for breath. Late in the afternoon of the 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 69 
 
 third day his wife arrived, a shabby, terrified little 
 peasant woman, infinitely pathetic in her rusty black 
 crepe and her gnarled toil-worn hands. Accompany- 
 ing her was the soldier's father, a gaunt Breton, in 
 smock and wooden shoes, with a small, round berib- 
 boned hat like that of a priest, and beneath it deep- 
 set, intelligent eyes. 
 
 Upon me devolved the unpleasant task of breaking 
 the news. I led them out into the corridor and, for 
 a space, I could find no words. What is the polite 
 formula in such a case, anyhow? Perhaps the wife 
 read the trouble in my face, for her eyes upon me 
 were like those of a dog, piteous, begging not to be 
 beaten. She grasped me by both elbows. 
 
 "How goes it?" she breathed. "He is better? 
 Say that my husband is better !" 
 The situation was intolerable. 
 "He is dying," I blurted out brutally. 
 With a loud cry she flung herself into my arms. 
 The father gazed stonily out the window. Soon, how- 
 ever, she had composed herself, and I asked whether 
 they wished a priest. Was her husband a Catholic? 
 Briefly they conferred apart, and then the woman 
 turned, with a timid query. Would it cost anything? 
 And with that the whole bleak truth came out. They 
 were poor, very poor, it appeared; so poor, indeed, 
 that they had sold their cow to enable them to come 
 to Paris. 
 
 They had counted the expenses down to the last 
 
TO OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 sou; but they had not counted the expense of a 
 priest. 
 
 I assured them we had an abbe in the hospital and 
 that his services were free. Upon which they decided 
 to have him. An hour later he celebrated Holy Com- 
 munion, the soldiers looking on with simple, un- 
 affected interest. Only one blemish marred the se- 
 renity of the sacred event: At the crucial moment 
 Number Two absolutely refused to receive the Host. 
 Twice the murmuring abbe bent over him and inserted 
 the holy wafer, and twice it was rejected by the swol- 
 len lips. 
 
 "Let's try it with water," I suggested. 
 
 The dying man drank thirstily as ever, but again 
 refused the symbol. I was nonplused, for plainly 
 those black eyes staring up into mine were conscious. 
 After the departure of the abbe a soldier beckoned 
 me to his side.^ 
 
 "He's not a Catholic," he explained softly. 
 
 As daylight waned there came a brief respite in the 
 struggle ; Number Two breathed more easily ; he lay 
 quiet, relaxed; his invisible antagonist seemed to 
 have removed a short way off. The men meantime 
 chatted cheerfully. Some sang. 
 
 Presently a knock sounded at the door. It was 
 the X-ray man from upstairs, who had come to take 
 a photograph of a certain plaster cast, an extraor- 
 dinarily fine specimen, made at the Front. 
 
 "Who's the new hlesse with the leg cast?" he called 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 71 
 
 out jovially. He consulted a card. "Peletier's the 
 name." 
 
 "Present !" came a voice from the corner. 
 
 "But jou can't take a picture now !" I protested, 
 scandalized. "A man^s dying in here. Wait until 
 he's dead." 
 
 "Can't! The cast comes off to-morrow morning. 
 Got to take the picture right away. Here's the 
 order." 
 
 Perforce I let him come in. And now a lively bustle 
 ensued. The bed containing the soldier adorned 
 with the desired cast was wheeled into the center of 
 the room, the leg exposed to the best advantage, ban- 
 dages unwrapped, the bedcovers composed neatly,' 
 the tripod set up, the lights arranged. 
 
 Then the photographer's head disappeared be- 
 neath the black camera cloth. It would be vain to 
 deny that the men enjoyed it hugely. They watched 
 with eagerness as the photographer's head emerged 
 from the dark folds. He altered slightly the position 
 of the cast, looked again, and made a second change. 
 "Good !" he exclaimed at length briskly ; and he held 
 up a warning hand. "Now! Ready, old manf Tell 
 your leg to smile ! Tell it to regard the little bird." 
 At this threadbare joke a veritable shout of laugh- 
 ter went up from the ward. Even the dying man 
 smiled ! 
 
 ''Regardez! He smiles !" cries a soldier, pointing. 
 *^Bon gargon!" 
 
72 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 The mirth renewed itself. It was the strangest 
 death scene I had ever viewed. 
 
 Number Two lingered through the night and 
 slipped away the next morning so quietly that none 
 of us knew the exact moment ; and his strength and 
 his smile at the photographer's jest became a legend 
 in the ward. 
 
 There is much talk nowadays of the great number 
 of desertions, and one's fancy is fed by all kinds of 
 wild and fantastic tales. Most of them are pure in- 
 ventions, or have grown, like snowballs rolling down 
 hill, from the merest innocent fact. The French are 
 not deserters by temperament. One does not hear 
 of whole companies of Frenchmen, bereft of their 
 officers, falling on their knees, lifting up their hands, 
 and crying: "Kamerad! Spare me; for I am a 
 father !" Simply, that is not the French note. To 
 drag in his papahood at such a moment would ap- 
 pear to a Frenchman as grotesquely humorous and 
 absurd. 
 
 And yet it would be idle to assert that there have 
 been no French desertions. But most of them are 
 pathological cases. The human brain can experience 
 just so much bloodshed, so much killing, without 
 going a little mad. And the more sensitive, finely 
 tempered and humanitarian the person, the heavier 
 the spiritual strain. 
 
 The following story is a case in point. It was told 
 me by the would-be deserter himself, a young play- 
 
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 73 
 
 Wright of twenty-four, called, let us say, Vernier, 
 who had been invalided back to Paris. He related 
 it with a certain mordant humor, as being something 
 of a joke on himself. The background of the story, 
 his repeated wounds and illnesses, his hatred of kill- 
 ing, which grew with the months into a morbid soul 
 sickness, were supplied by his mother and a friend: 
 
 Vernier, nervous, high-strung, idealistic, had been 
 in the war since the days of mobilization. Repeatedly 
 wounded, but never gravely, constantly ill from ex- 
 posure, he gravitated back and forth between the 
 trenches and the hospitals, not remaining very long 
 at a time in either. He took part in a number of 
 attacks and killed a number of Germans. He didn't 
 like it. About Christmas he wrote to his mother: 
 "To be a really successful trench warrior one should 
 be made of pig iron clean through : no head, no heart, 
 no nerves !" And he added : "Frankly I am sick, sick, 
 sick to death of it all." 
 
 Shortly after this he was wounded again and went 
 to the hospital; a month later he was back in the 
 lines. Threatened with a relapse, he was sent to a 
 shelter behind the trenches. And here the break- 
 down came. Fortunately his mother was with him. 
 To her Vernier declared he had killed his last man in 
 battle. He swore a solemn oath never to take another 
 human life. He was through ! He was going to clear 
 out, escape to Canada, become a farmer and start 
 life anew. 
 
74 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 He spoke wildly, passionately, in tones that car- 
 ried far beyond the small room. His mother listened, 
 gray with terror. She implored him not to be fool- 
 ish, to hush, to speak lower; to consider himself, his 
 mother, France. Vernier, however, remained firm. 
 "But they'll shoot you, my son, as a deserter !" 
 And to this Vernier vehemently replied : 
 "Mother, can't you conceive that it's more honor- 
 able to stand up against a wall and die publicly for 
 your faith than to die like a dog in a hole in the 
 ground for something you don't believe? No; I've 
 killed my last man, I tell you ! If they want to kill 
 me for that let them kill." 
 
 Frenzied, the mother flung herself upon him, try- 
 ing to stifle with her hand that dangerous young 
 mouth ; but the damage was already done. His loud 
 speech had been overheard. Within the hour he was 
 summoned before the commandant and asked whether 
 the charge were true. Far from denying. Vernier ad- 
 mitted everything up to the hilt ; he even went far- 
 ther and embroidered his point of view. The com- 
 mandant listened attentively; and at the end he 
 spoke. 
 
 "He told me," related Vernier in excellent English, 
 "that in ordinary circumstances I should be shot the 
 next morning as a deserter — and thus achieve what 
 was so evidently my desire. But there was somebody 
 else to be considered — namely, my mother. For, in 
 overhearing me, they had overheard her entreaties 
 
.WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 75 
 
 as well. The son of such a mother must be worth 
 saving; and, therefore, he was returning my life, 
 plainly forfeit, to this brave mother of France. But 
 he named a condition. And after that," continued 
 Vernier with a reminiscent grin, "he simply cut loose 
 and lit into me. Asked ironically whether I supposed 
 I was the only man in France who was opposed to the 
 shedding of blood! I was a socialist, eh? Well, he 
 was a philosophic anarchist ! Went me one stronger, 
 you see." 
 
 And this was the commandant's condition: He 
 asked Vernier to remember that this bloody war was 
 a trial, not to him alone but to all Frenchmen with 
 a spiritual nature ; and, as they were strong for the 
 common good, he asked Vernier to be strong also — 
 and hold his tongue. Simply that — to be strong and 
 hold his tongue ! And to this Vernier consented. He 
 had to, he said, after the commandant's courtesy to 
 his mother. And, also, he was not going to be out- 
 done in delicacy. When last heard of. Vernier was 
 still holding his tongue Out There. 
 
 There was one question the soldiers asked con- 
 stantly. They began the first day I entered the hos- 
 pital ; and I had no reply. On the last day they were 
 still asking it ; and still I had no reply. That ques- 
 tion was : When will the United States enter the war.? 
 
 Observe the form of that question. They did not 
 say If, but When? For to most of them it seemed 
 inevitable that, sooner or later, we, the big sister re- 
 
76 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 public, with kindred form of government and ideals, 
 should come to see what France, with her fine lucidity, 
 had seen for so long: that she is battling not alone 
 for her own right to exist as a free, unenslaved na- 
 tion — though assuredly she is doing that — but for 
 America also, and for the doctrine of democracy, as 
 opposed to the doctrines of force and the gauntleted 
 fist, all over the world. 
 
 But also, quite aside from this, the French soldiers 
 want us to come in because they like us personally. 
 They like us and they want us to fight upon their 
 side. 
 
 Not long ago Georges expressed these sentiments 
 in a nutshell. He had been lying staring up at the 
 Stars and Stripes, which, with the Tricolor, was 
 tacked above the ward door. 
 
 "It's pretty," he remarked pensively, "that starry 
 flag. It's not bad at all, truly! And it goes well 
 with ours. It would be pleasant to see them both 
 flying at large over Verdun — n^est-ce-pas, mees?" 
 
 As I write this, that wish of a wounded French sol- 
 dier boy has come true. 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 
 
 "Watch that man!" said the nurse to her volun- 
 teer aid, nodding toward a bed that had been tilted 
 at an angle by means of wooden blocks inserted under 
 the legs, so that its occupant, a wounded Frenchman, 
 lay downhill, his feet higher than his head. He looked 
 as if he were past the need of watching and were 
 dead already, that rigid, immobile, white-draped fig- 
 ure. His face was a livid mask, with heavy shadows 
 beneath the closed lids, pinched nostrils, deep carved 
 lines of pain round the bluish mouth, and a black 
 unkempt bristle of beard that showed up startlingly 
 against the white of the pillows. Not a movement, 
 not a stir or visible breath or touch of warm living 
 color. He was a fresh arrival, thirty-six hours from 
 Verdun, and in the morning — if he lasted that long ! 
 — he was going up for operation. Both of his legs 
 were broken above the knees. 
 
 "Watch that man !" warned the nurse again from 
 the door. "I'm going off duty for two hours. Lord, 
 I'm tired!" 
 
 "Oh, I'll watch him all right," promised the young 
 
 77 
 
rS OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 aid confidently. "That's what I'm here for," sHe 
 added with dreamy sweetness. 
 
 The nurse walked over to the bed, bent down and 
 took the soldier's pulse. 
 
 "He seems all right," she murmured dubiously. 
 "Pretty weak. Well, keep an eye on him." She 
 sighed a sigh of pure fatigue and departed. 
 
 Left to herself, the auxiliary fussed about the ward 
 for a few minutes, after which she, too, crossed to 
 the bedside of the man on whom she had been com- 
 manded to keep an eye. For a space she stood star- 
 ing down watchfully upon him. That was what she 
 had been told to do, and she did it conscientiously. 
 
 Then, her duty performed, she returned to her seat 
 at the table and commenced a letter to a girl friend. 
 And while she is thus engaged, and the stage is set 
 for action — and probably tragic action — let me give 
 a brief thumbnail sketch of her. 
 
 It was a big war hospital in France, and the vol- 
 unteer aid was a girl from the Middle West who, in 
 a fine white flame of enthusiasm for the Allied cause, 
 had come all the way from her native town as fast as 
 train and ship could bear her in order to nurse the 
 fine, brave, glorious and magnificent French soldiers. 
 For it was with such glov/ing adjectives that she 
 described them, and she could not even think of them 
 without springing tears. The dear, rugged, war-torn 
 heroes, flat upon beds of pain, with romantic white 
 bandages bound about their brows, gazing up at her 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 79 
 
 with unutterable gratitude in their dying eyes. For 
 it was thus, movie-wise, she pictured them; and she 
 pictured herself as a nurse, a sort of ministering- 
 angel-of-mercy ingenue cast, divinely compassionate, 
 dressed for the part in pure spotless white garments, 
 on her head that very becoming French coif — it had 
 looked so attractive in the pictures ; she really must 
 have one of them — bending over a dying poilu, sooth- 
 ing his fevered brow with cool white fingers, murmur- 
 ing gentle words of hope, promising to write to his 
 mother, and finally kissing him good-by into Heaven. 
 She had read of nurses doing that, of soldiers whis- 
 pering faintly, "Kiss me good-by for my mother!" 
 And she knew — she had a sure instinct — that she 
 would be good in that part. For, as she told her girl 
 friend, she had so much sympathy and tenderness in 
 her nature ! 
 
 So great had been her zeal to help along the above 
 lines that she had not tarried to take any tiresome, 
 humdrum courses in nursing. For the war might be 
 over any time, she argued, and she couldn't bear to 
 lose a single precious instant. And so she had come 
 right on. She had come right on, and with fool's 
 luck she had arrived in Paris at an opportune mo- 
 ment — for her. A mighty drive was on on the West- 
 ern Front, and the backwash of French wounded was 
 pouring in — a vast, unending, sanguinary tide. It 
 was the tail end of summer, a terrific, heart-breaking 
 summer, on top of a terrific heart-breaking spring, 
 
80 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 and no let-up in sight. Doctors and nurses and aids 
 were exhausted, pegged out, at the end of their 
 tethers. Some of the workers had collapsed under 
 the abnormal tension, and the rest toiled on, showing 
 their fatigue by curt crisp orders, by quick bursts of 
 irritation or sudden explosions of savage temper. It 
 was into this dynamic atmosphere that romantic little 
 Miss Greenhorn walked one day, utterly incompetent 
 technically and spiritually, but self-confident, un- 
 abashed, full of her dream of those fine, splendid 
 French soldiers — poor, wounded darlings! — and 
 strong in the belief of her own divine function to 
 succor and save — in that very attractive coif: And 
 they gave her a place. Such was the stern necessity 
 of the hour. Here was another pair of hands, an- 
 other pair of feet ; certainly they could scrub tables, 
 carry slops, run errands, and thus divert fatigue from 
 the more important trained members of the corps. 
 And so Miss Greenhorn donned her coif — her 
 premonition concerning it was right; it was, in- 
 deed, very fetching — and prepared blithely to ma- 
 terialize her Florence-Nightingale-Mary-Pickford 
 dream. 
 
 They assigned her to a small ward of ten. The 
 orderly had not arrived, which is a salient character- 
 istic of orderlies, and the nurse bade her take a pail 
 of slops to the lavabo. It was a heavy pail, too 
 heavy for her slight shoulders. After that she car- 
 ried piles of blood-stained linen to the same destina- 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A--NURSING 81 
 
 tion, and following hard upon that several morning 
 bedpans. It was not distinguished work, and dainty 
 little Miss Greenhorn performed these lowly duties 
 with a disdainful nose in air. 'Twas not for this she 
 had traveled all the way to France ! The ward doc- 
 tor, noting the contemptuous, gingerly fashion in 
 which she held her burdens at arm's length from her 
 immaculate linen costume, murmured ironically to 
 the nurse: 
 
 "We've got a queen in disguise among us. Look 
 out!" 
 
 Presently she was set to make a bed. Now in the 
 course of all her fair young life Miss Greenhorn had 
 not made half a dozen beds, and, moreover, she did 
 not deem it a matter of grave importance. Still she 
 was willing to oblige. 
 
 "Poor man !" she breathed, hanging above him ten- 
 derly. "How grateful he must feel toward me!" 
 And, smiling her Florence-Nightingale-Mary-Pick- 
 ford smile, she began pulling away a sheet at ran- 
 dom. The soldier let out a yell of fury : 
 
 "Imbecile! Are you trying to kill me.? OH, mon 
 Dieu! Get out!" 
 
 The nurse dropped her work and came running. 
 It appeared that, instead of the bed sheet proper, 
 the novice had got hold of another which, quadruple- 
 folded, formed part of the padding of a wooden frac- 
 ture-box that held the soldier's broken leg; and with 
 the first tug she had all but capsized the entire ap- 
 
82 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 paratus and spilled fracture-box, leg and soldier out 
 upon the floor. 
 
 Miss Greenhorn bacl^ed off from the scene, deeply 
 mortified. Her sensitive feelings were hurt. The 
 man had called her an imbecile ! The very first words 
 a French soldier had addressed to her — to her who 
 had traveled five thousand miles to nurse him — had 
 been not "You are heavenly kind, miss !" or "Kiss me, 
 for I am dying !" but a brutal "Imbecile ! Get out !" 
 It was a rude jolt to her rosy dream. In addition, 
 the nurse reprimanded her sharply, and for the next 
 two back-breaking hours she made beds under a 
 dragon eye of supervision, made and remade them. 
 
 Everything she did was wrong, clumsy, maladroit, 
 and had to be altered twice, thrice, while the men 
 turned pale under the prolonged strain and sweated 
 or muttered nervously "Let be, mees ! Enough ! Oh, 
 good God !" After her first mishap they were deadly 
 afraid of her. And so sensitive spots went unbathed, 
 uneased ; temperatures shot up, and infected wounds 
 began to throb, while little Miss Greenhorn took her 
 first lesson in nursing. It was hard upon her, for 
 everyone within the circle of her inexpert activities 
 became irritated and vented their irritation freely; 
 but it was even harder on her victims, the soldiers of 
 France she had come so far to serve. 
 
 After two hours of constant stooping, kneeling and 
 lifting heavy and helpless men, little red lightnings 
 of pain began to play up and down her spine, her 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 83 
 
 shoulder muscles ached cruelly, and there was a dull 
 roaring in her ears. Her feet, too, already swollen 
 in their fashionable white buckskin pumps, began to 
 hurt atrociously and to show a congested purple be- 
 neath the transparent white-silken hose. Above all 
 things on earth, she desired to sit down five minutes 
 and rest. Instead of this the nurse bade her disinfect 
 a bed. Another unwieldy mattress to tug and haul 
 about ! 
 
 "Do I have to put this strong stuff into the 
 water ?" she demanded plaintively, holding up the dis- 
 infecting fluid. "It'll spoil my hands !" 
 
 She was proud of those hands. They were delicate 
 and cool and white. And, besides, they were part of 
 the stage property of her movie dream. 
 
 "If you intend to disinfect the bed, do so," re- 
 turned the nurse dryly. "The case in that bed died 
 of gas gangrene, and I shouldn't care to expose an- 
 other patient to the microbes, even at the risk of 
 spoiling your hands." 
 
 "May I have a pair of rubber gloves then.^" 
 
 "We're short of rubber gloves just now. What 
 we have are needed in the operating room." 
 
 Miss Greenhorn bent to her task in silence. Her 
 cheeks were burning and her eyes were blurred with 
 tears of rage and fatigue. As she stooped, dabbing 
 futilely here and there with her cloth, the blunt voice 
 of the nurse came to her: 
 
 "Don't shirk your work that way. That isn't half 
 
84 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 disinfected. Here, give me the rag." And, squat- 
 ting comfortably, she proceeded to give a thorough 
 demonstration. "Don't be afraid to use a little elbow 
 grease," she concluded ironically. 
 
 Miss Greenhorn bit back an angry retort. She 
 had not come over to France to do low, menial, 
 scrubby, grubby work and then be treated like a ser- 
 vant. At home she gave orders instead of receiving 
 them. But aloud she only said "Thank you !" so low 
 that the nurse glanced at her keenly and added: 
 "Never mind. You'll learn some day. Now suppose 
 you wash all the bedside tables. Remove everything 
 from them first. And after that, if there's time, 
 scrub the big table. Then the men's dejeuner will 
 be coming along. Have you got the hot drinks from 
 the diet kitchen.'* Ah, but I told you to do that al- 
 ways before eleven o'clock! The kitchen's closed 
 now and the poor chaps have lost their nourishment 
 for the morning. Try not to fail on that again. 
 Oh, before you begin on the tables, please make me 
 a hot compress for Number Two. You don't know 
 how-f* Very well!" And with a smothered exclama- 
 tion of impatience she hurried off to make it herself. 
 
 Somewhat subdued. Miss Greenhorn began on her 
 tables. A few minutes later a peculiar sound from 
 the adjacent bed caused her to look up and then cry 
 hastily : 
 
 "Oh, nurse! That poor man — Number Six — he's 
 vomiting." 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 85 
 
 But the nurse, with the hot compress and a pa- 
 tient's broken arm in her hands, could not disengage 
 herself instantly. Moreover, her patience for the 
 moment had gone into complete eclipse. 
 
 "When a man vomits, don't call me!" sKe barked 
 savagely. "Hold something!" 
 
 But unfortunately little Miss Greenhorn could find 
 nothing to hold. Terribly disconcerted, she flew 
 round wildly in a circle, like a kitten chasing its tail, 
 seeking a suitable vessel. But nothing seemed to pre- 
 sent itself to her distracted gaze. The pail? Ob- 
 viously too large! The bedside wine cup? Ob- 
 viously too small ! Oh, where But by this time 
 
 the nurse had caught up a basin and was supporting 
 the sick man's head. 
 
 "He's gone through everything," she said wearily. 
 "We'll have to change the entire bed. Fetch some 
 linen. And next time use a little horse sense, if you've 
 such a thing concealed about your person." 
 
 During the change the patient groaned horribly. 
 The sweat of exhaustion poured from his face. His 
 flesh was clammy. 
 
 "Get some hot-water bottles," the nurse ordered 
 tersely. "No, never mind, I'll do it. You'd prob- 
 ably scald him !" 
 
 Miss Greenhorn returned to her tables, the corners 
 of her mouth dipping like those of a baby whose hands 
 have been slapped. And during the rest of the morn- 
 ing Number Six's white face reproached her mutely. 
 
86 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 In the afternoon she left another wide swath of 
 errors behind her. The men thanked her politely, 
 but declined her kind offers to shake up their pil- 
 lows. When she took the temperatures she broke 
 three thermometers hand-running, and French ther- 
 mometers were rare commodities. 
 
 "I think they must have been cracked," she apolo- 
 gized. "They snapped so easily." 
 
 Later, marking up the temperature charts, she 
 made atrocious blunders. Normal patients suddenly 
 exhibited fever peaks high as the Himalayas. The 
 astounded ward doctor, discovering such a one and 
 its source, swore fervently and voted her a pest, with 
 a double-barreled profane adjective attached. That 
 night her feet ached so that she cried when she re- 
 moved her shoes. And for that night and many 
 nights thereafter she had her dinner in bed and fell 
 to sleep immediately from sheer exhaustion. 
 
 And now, the resume complete, let us skip a week 
 and return to Miss Greenhorn as she sat writing a 
 letter to her friend. Every few minutes, true to her 
 orders, she had risen for a look at the patient she 
 had been set to watch. She watched him dutifully, 
 ignorantly. She was still Miss Greenhorn, with one 
 short week of experience. Not once did it occur to 
 her to query: What am I to watch this man for? 
 What is likely to happen? What shall I do if it 
 does ? And yet she was not a particularly stupid girl. 
 She was rather above the average in intelligence and 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 87 
 
 eagerness ; but so firmly had she riveted her gaze upon 
 the romantic, the false, the pseudo-aesthetic aspects 
 of her job, that she was temporarily blinded to its 
 actual features. But that the unriveting process had 
 already begun and was somewhat painful was evi- 
 denced by her letter to her friend. And as the man 
 she was set to watch seems quiet, ominously quiet, let 
 us peep a moment over her shoulder : 
 
 "Dearest Amelia: This is the very first time I 
 have had a chance to sit down since I entered the 
 hospital a week ago to-day. And oh, Amelia, before 
 I say another word, I want to tell you: Don't come 
 over ! Don't, Amelia, don't ! With your delicate 
 health you never would be able to stand it. The 
 work is simply terrible — ^hard, brutal, back-breaking, 
 menial. You should see my poor hands! And my 
 feet! And never a single word of thanks from any- 
 body. They just seem to take you and your sacrifices 
 for granted, and they expect you to know how to 
 do things letter-perfect, right off the reel. Of course 
 I don't know anything. 
 
 "The other day a soldier called me an imbecile, and 
 that's exactly what I am, Amelia, a proud, presump- 
 tuous, ignorant little fool ! But I never dreamed how 
 dangerous it is to be so ignorant. The nurse gives 
 you some mean, insignificant little job that does not 
 seem to amount to a hill of beans, and in the end it 
 turns out to be something horribly important, 
 
88 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 fraught with terrible consequences. For example: 
 The other day a man had a relapse and all but died 
 simply because I couldn't find something quickly for 
 him to vomit into. The first consequence was that 
 we had to change his bed. The second consequence 
 was that the extra effort fatigued him so he couldn't 
 eat any lunch. The third consequence was that, 
 having eaten nothing, in the afternoon he had a 
 relapse. For a while I thought he was going to die. 
 Those were dark hours for me, Amelia ! That night 
 I offered to sit up with him — to make it up, you see. 
 But the ward doctor said, *No, let's give the poor 
 devil a fighting chance !' That was horrid, wasn't it ? 
 He's atrocious, that young ward doctor, and he never 
 loses a chance to intimate what he thinks of my pre- 
 sumption in offering my untrained services. He 
 says my nerve, if he could get an X-ray of it, would 
 make the celebrated Colossus of Rhodes look like a 
 pygmy. He asked me seriously if I wasn't ashamed 
 when I woke up in the middle of the night 'to be so 
 dumb — not damn, but dumb — ignorant !' And I am, 
 Amelia. But I really think I'm beginning slowly 
 to learn. There's a sick soldier they've set me to 
 watch right now. So horribly pale! So still! 
 
 One " 
 
 At this point Miss Greenhorn's pen trailed off and 
 she sat bolt upright, staring before her into space. A 
 sudden thought had smitten her, almost with the 
 force of a blow. Why was he so pale ? Why was he 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 89 
 
 still? Why, in short, had she been set to watch him? 
 She rose rather hurriedly and went to his bedside. 
 She would ask him what was the matter. Really it 
 was an inspiration! 
 
 "How are you ?" she questioned gently. 
 
 ^^J^ai froidy" came the faint murmur from rigid 
 lips. 
 
 "Ah ! Cold, are you ? Then I'll get you some hot- 
 water bottles and they'll make you warm. Nice and 
 warm !" And Miss Greenhorn sped away on her mis- 
 sion, delighted to be of service. ^^VoilaT* she cooed 
 soothingly a few minutes later, slipping the heated 
 bags into the foot of the bed. "Now you'll soon be 
 warm ! Nice and warm and cozy !" And she leaned 
 above him solicitously, still vaguely troubled. Cer- 
 tainly he was ghastly pale ! 
 
 It was at this juncture that the ward doctor, a 
 busy, brusque, discerning young gentleman, blew into 
 the room with a — 
 
 "Hullo, Miss How's that fellow " A 
 
 single glance at the fellow in question stopped the 
 words as if a sudden hand had been clapped over his 
 mouth. He sprang forward and threw down the 
 covers. The soldier lay in a pool of blood. "My 
 God! Hemorrhaging! Why didn't you call me?" 
 
 He wheeled on her savagely. But Miss Greenhorn's 
 face had blanched almost as white as the counter- 
 pane. Her hand went up to her trembling lips. 
 
 "I — I — I didn't know !" she whispered. "He com- 
 
90 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 plained of feeling cold, and so I— I gave him hot- 
 water bottles." 
 
 "Yah ! In case of hemorrhage, when a man's bleed- 
 ing to death, for first-aid apply hot-water bottles! 
 Fine! Where's that tourniquet? I tied it onto the 
 foot of the bed myself." 
 
 "The — what?" stammered Miss Greenhorn, im- 
 measurably terrified. She quailed before the look in 
 his eye. 
 
 "Tourniquet ! That piece of rubber tubing." 
 
 "0-o-oh! That terra-cotta rubber thing, you 
 mean! It made the bed look untidy and so I undid 
 it. Let me see. Where " 
 
 But the door had already slammed upon the doc- 
 tor, who returned immediately with a tourniquet from 
 the adjacent ward. Fortunately it was not an arte- 
 rial, but a slow, oozing hemorrhage, and so the man 
 did not die ; but that was not Miss Greenhorn's fault. 
 And the doctor did not spare her : 
 
 "Why did you suppose his bed was tilted up so 
 that his feet were higher than his head? Don't 
 you know that in itself is a sign of hemorrhage? 
 Why did you suppose that tourniquet was tied to the 
 foot of this particular bed? Do you see it on any of 
 the other beds ? That's another sign ! And what did 
 you suppose you were set to watch him for anyhow? 
 Zeppelins? You've been here a week now. Tell me, 
 are you solid ivory from the neck up?" 
 
 I am not going to repeat the remainder of Jus 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 91 
 
 scathing remarks, for he was angry and his nerves 
 were none of the best. In justice to Miss Greenhorn 
 it must be said that she took her whaling like a gen- 
 tleman. She did not once glance at the doctor, but 
 kept her eyes fixed on the French soldier whose life 
 she had jeopardized by her criminal ignorance. And 
 in that moment she jettisoned the last fragments of 
 her ministering-angel dream. Cool hands, fevered 
 brows, the kiss-me-for-I-am-dying business — all the 
 false, sentimental rubbish with which she had stuffed 
 her romantic young head she let go by the board 
 forever. 
 
 And that, for us, is the end of Miss Greenhorn, 
 save to mention that she is a real person. She told 
 me the tale herself six months later, with tears only 
 half of laughter in her eyes. And then she affixed 
 the moral, which in brief is this: That not all of 
 France's enemies are behind the German guns. 
 
 From this solitary episode one may deduce most 
 of the qualifications, both natural and acquired, that 
 a volunteer nurse's aid should possess before ever she 
 sets foot inside a war hospital. First of all she must 
 have health. She must have the kind of health that 
 does not break or crack or crock or show signs of 
 wear in bad weather ; the kind of health that can pile 
 one hard day on top of another hard day, and one 
 hard week on top of another hard week, and one hard 
 month on top of another hard month, and keep right 
 on without flagging or asking the captain to stop the 
 
92 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 ship so she can get off and walk. Every auxiliary 
 signs on for a period of at least three months, prefer- 
 ably six months ; and in some hospitals abroad they 
 sign on for the remainder of the war. The work is 
 too severe for a delicate constitution; it has been 
 known to put a crimp in a tough one ; and it is unfair 
 both to the soldier and to the hospital plant to have 
 human machinery that is apt to break down any 
 minute. This implies youth, resiliency, reservoirs of 
 stored strength, the unspent increment of physical 
 endurance; and, therefore, anyone outside the ages 
 from twenty to forty should ponder deeply before 
 entering this most exacting branch of the service. 
 
 Aside from good general health, the volunteer aid 
 should possess what physicians term a high threshold 
 to disease. She should not catch things readily. 
 Microbes should be unable to obtain a foothold. In 
 this respect even healthy people vary widely. One 
 person will take the mumps if there is a case in the 
 next county ; another may sleep in the same bed with 
 the victim and go unscathed. There was a youug 
 woman in our ward who caught everything. Every 
 little pirate microbe that sailed the invisible seas of 
 air with his jolly skull-and-crossbones flag knew her 
 for a friendly island, had her marked down in his log 
 book, and put in for food and repairs, sure of safe 
 harborage. 
 
 Tonsillitis, grippe, infected finger, swollen glands, 
 infected eye, tonsillitis again — ^she had them one after 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 93 
 
 another as fast as she could, and she finally came 
 home with the jaundice ! 
 
 But let us suppose that the candidate has passed 
 her physical examination with flying colors ; that her 
 back is strong; that her feet have not the slightest 
 tendency to fallen arch ; that she can eat stewed horse 
 without a regretful pang; that she sleeps like the 
 traditional top at night, and rises from her slumbers 
 fresh as the traditional daisy. There are still other 
 natural qualifications to reckon with: She must be 
 able to subordinate herself to the will of others, to 
 take orders, to take hard, disagreeable, and often 
 what she may consider unjust orders from her supe- 
 riors without opening her mouth to complain. 
 
 In the first year of the war the hospitals were 
 nearly swamped by the sudden rush into them of 
 grand ladies who were naught but little Miss Green- 
 horns in more arrogant guise. These women had not 
 the faintest notion of subordination, or of the mental 
 and spiritual discipline involved in nursing. Their 
 conception, in a word, was the unreal conception of 
 Miss Greenhorn. They, too, were devotees of the 
 Florence-Nightingale-Mary-Pickford canned brand 
 of dream. They had not left their beautifully ap- 
 pointed homes to carry slops, et cetera, but to nurse 
 the gallant British and French lads ! And for a time 
 doctors and nurses were driven almost to insanity 
 under the double pressure of caring for the wounded, 
 and training — or quietly assassinating and smug- 
 
94 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 gling down a well some dark night ! — these ignorant 
 ladies who descended on the hospitals like an Egyp- 
 tian plague. Nor were all of the untrained, emo- 
 tional incompetents of English origin. America sent 
 her quota — women who from infancy had never 
 obeyed anything outside of their own vagrant fancies, 
 who were congenitally incapable of sinking their own 
 personalities and becoming privates for the good of 
 the cause. They wanted to be colonels at the very 
 least or they wouldn't play, and a field-marshal's 
 baton was even more to their taste. Boss was the 
 middle name of every one of them. They had ele- 
 phantiasis of the mind. Such a person in the minor 
 position of nurse's aid can disrupt the entire ward 
 of a hospital, which, more than any other branch of 
 service, resembles the army in its authorities, its 
 hierarchies and gradations of rank, and the severe 
 monotony of the daily routine. 
 
 For a time there was such a Great Person in our 
 ward at the American Ambulance, the sort who "my- 
 good-man's" the soldiers. As for the rest, she blandly 
 did what she pleased, and set the nerves of all of us 
 on edge in consequence. For what she didn't please 
 to do, we had to, you see ! 
 
 One afternoon the head nurse said to her: 
 
 "Mrs. X, will you disinfect that bed ?" And it was 
 none the less a command even though it was issued 
 mildly in the interrogative form. 
 
 Mrs. X responded in her best drawing-room drawl: 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 95 
 
 "Oh, my deah Miss C, I am so sorry! But it is 
 my tea time ! And besides, really that is not my bed, 
 you know !" With which piece of insolence she drifted 
 languidly oif to tea. 
 
 "What am I to do with her?" exclaimed the head 
 nurse despairingly to the ward doctor, who had wit- 
 nessed the insubordination. 
 
 "Shoot her at sunrise," He suggested jovially. 
 "This is a military organization. Shoot her at sun- 
 rise, and put over her grave: 'Here lies a deserter. 
 Shot for refusing to obey a superior officer in 
 action.' "' ^ 
 
 Of course he was right. That is precisely what 
 should have been done to her. And I would have 
 joined the firing squad with pleasure — for I had to 
 disinfect that bed ! 
 
 To be strong, healthy, adaptable, able to sink 
 one's identity and to take orders — these are some of 
 the natural qualifications of a successful volunteer 
 aid. In addition she must be prepared for disagree- 
 able tasks. The sight of blood, of poor fellows 
 smashed to pieces, the hideous stench of gangrenous 
 wounds, the screams of the dressing hour — these are 
 the inevitable concomitants of a surgical ward in 
 war-mangled Europe to-day, and are sufliciently dis- 
 agreeable. But these are not what I mean. I mean 
 the monotonous, prosaic, inglorious tasks that every- 
 body loathes but somebody has to perform. And 
 that somebody, eleven cases out of ten, is the nurse's 
 
96 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 volunteer aid. For you have not read thus far with- 
 out discovering that the position of an auxiliary re- 
 sembles closely that of a printer's devil. Not his the 
 high responsibility of getting out the paper or de- 
 ciding the politics of the editorial page; his not to 
 reason why, his but to be on the living, red-hot jump 
 every second of the time or get sacked by his irate 
 boss. In one respect, however, the printer's devil has 
 the haul over the nurse's assistant, for he receives a 
 weekly envelope, while she labors for love. 
 
 As a specimen of these monotonous tasks, an Eng- 
 lish volunteer aid confessed to me that for two months 
 in an English base hospital, three miles behind the 
 lines, she did nothing all day save carry heavily 
 loaded trays of food from the diet kitchen to a cer- 
 tain table in the corridor. Day after day, from 
 eight in the morning until seven at night, back and 
 forth, back and forth, remote, solitary, with aching 
 shoulders, this plucky young private drudged. Never 
 a wounded soldier did she see. At times the hospital 
 shook under German bombardment; but so far as 
 romance and illusion were concerned, she might as 
 well have been a slavey in a twilight basement restau- 
 rant beneath the dull roar of the Sixth- Avenue ele- 
 vated trains. Another young woman told me that 
 for six weeks she carried nothing but bedpans. And 
 at the American Ambulance, the auxiliaire who 
 roomed next to me had a job of which I did not envy 
 her the possession. Every evening she used to offer 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 97 
 
 to trade it in even barter for mine. And every eve- 
 ning I refused to take a cowardly advantage of her 
 generosity. The position which my friend was so 
 generous with was up in the operating room. And 
 it was her particular duty to carry off the amputated 
 members in a basket. 
 
 The points thus far in the natural qualifications 
 of a nurse's aid are health, resiliency, ability to take 
 orders and to stick at mean, disagreeable jobs. Let 
 us add a final one that is really the keystone of the 
 entire arch. For without it the others are as sound- 
 ing brass and tinkling cymbals. Nor is it acquirable : 
 it is a grace, a gift. Some successful doctors and 
 nurses possess it to a high degree ; others, lacking it, 
 turn into dried-up turnips. There was a certain 
 young surgeon in the hospital who undoubtedly pos- 
 sessed this qualification. Whether he was an expert 
 technician I do not know, for he left the hospital 
 before I arrived and it was only the soldiers' memory 
 of him, the reflected echo of his personality, that I 
 received. But that was sufficient. They loved him. 
 "Ah, mees," they would exclaim, "do you know Doc- 
 teur James d'Amerique? Non?** And they made me 
 feel that not to have known him was a profound per- 
 sonal loss. "Ah, how he was kind! How he was 
 good!" they would murmur fondly, and they would 
 drag forth a tiny snapshot of him for me to look at, 
 and laugh with delight at beholding his face. "See, 
 mees ! Here he is ! Aha ! Bon jour, Docteur James !" 
 
98 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Thej wished me to share with them the fragrance of 
 that memory. One could not ask for a better epitaph 
 than the tribute paid by these poilus to the unknown 
 Docteur James d'Amerique ! Another did not possess 
 this gift. Brusque, impatient of address, he would 
 pull away the gauze sticking to an infected wound 
 with an abruptness that invariably raised a howl; 
 and exclamations of "BrutalT' "Imbecile!" "Sale 
 cochon!" followed his ministrations down the ward. 
 "Oh, shut up ! Shut up ! Shut up !" the doctor would 
 retort in English. Now the soldiers did not know 
 exactly what "Shut up" signified; without doubt in 
 their minds it was some extremely naughty English 
 profanity. But they had their revenge. They nick- 
 named him "Docteur Shut Up." That was his 
 epitaph. 
 
 A nurse who failed in this one respect they dubbed 
 the old mitrailleuse, I have seen them sham sleep 
 when she approached their bedsides for a chat. There 
 was one, however, whom they loved. She was a slim, 
 gold-haired Scotch miss, not much higher than the 
 bedposts, but a grenadier for all that, and the quality 
 I am speaking about rayed out from her in an almost 
 visible aura. Not that she was "soft" or easy with 
 the men. On the contrary, she cracked a whip over 
 them and made them walk a chalk line of discipline, 
 which they did with an open, unabashed delight in 
 her. They would feign all sorts of ailments to lure 
 her to their bed for a chat and massage. 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 99 
 
 "I suffer bad here, mees !" they would begin. "No, 
 not there — higher up. No, chere mees, not there. 
 No — yes! Voila! Parfaitement! A-ah! Mais, 
 continuez, continuezr And not a thing the matter 
 with the frauds ! But they sunned themselves in her 
 presence and all but fought for her smiles. That 
 little Scotch miss had a way with her. Moreover, 
 she loved her job. She loved It from the ground up, 
 over and under and beyond and through. She loved 
 it in all of its aspects and ramifications ; she loved it 
 in all the hours. She had the faculty, the gift I have 
 been attempting to describe. ' She had a vocation. 
 And unless one possesses In some degree this natural 
 delight in humanity, in sick, diseased and often dirty 
 humanity, the hour soon strikes when nursing begins 
 to pall. 
 
 Thus far I have dealt only with the natural quali- 
 fications that a young woman should possess if she 
 desires to do volunteer nursing In this war. All those 
 who, after searching their inmost hearts with sincer- 
 ity, cannot pass on the above-mentioned points with 
 an all-round grade of at least seventy-five per cent, 
 need waste no further time on this article. They 
 may get out of the procession right now and go 
 round next door and sign in for canteen cooking, or 
 join the hoe brigade. Step lively, please! 
 
 At the present moment there does not exist in the 
 Red Cross organization any course of instruction 
 that has for its direct and primary object the train- 
 
100 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 ing of volunteer nurses' aids for work in surgical hos- 
 pitals here or abroad. There does not exist in the 
 Red Cross curriculum, as it is now constituted, any 
 course that is adequate for the present crisis. The 
 teaching manuals are the same that were in use before 
 the war, unrevised, unchanged. They were not writ- 
 ten with war in mind. Their purpose and goal is not 
 our purpose and goal. And, as the textbooks have 
 remained unaltered, it is inevitable that the various 
 courses of instruction based upon them should be 
 more or less beside the point, congested with material 
 that is useless or irrelevant, and barren of certain 
 fundamental facts which every volunteer aid should 
 know. Sometimes when these lessons are given by 
 nurses or doctors who have seen actual war service 
 they are of more value, but these are exceptional, 
 random cases ; and in general the courses, instead of 
 hitting the bull's-eye of to-day's grim necessity, are 
 faced off in another direction and shooting at an 
 imaginary mark. 
 
 There are four courses of instruction in the Red 
 Cross curriculum that have a bearing, more or less 
 indirect, on the subject of volunteer nursing in sur- 
 gical hospitals during the present war. Let us glance 
 at each in turn. 
 
 Most popular of all is the course in First Aid. 
 This is the course that nearly every woman in the 
 land flew at and swallowed down whole at the outset 
 of the European conflict, and, it is safe to say, with 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 101 
 
 very slight benefit. This is not surprising, for First 
 Aid was not the proper choice. To teach nursing is 
 not its object. The punishment, so to speak, does 
 not fit the crime. Almost purely educational in 
 character, it is designed for the accidents and emer- 
 gencies of our ante-bellum, peaceful past rather than 
 for the precise, up-to-the-minute scientific require- 
 ments of our belligerent present. 
 
 And from the point of view of the nurse's assistant 
 there are entire chapters that should be ruthlessly 
 scrapped. Methods of resuscitating a drowning 
 man ; cures for snake bite ; the way to tell an intoxi- 
 cated gentleman from one who has merely fallen down 
 in the street in a fit — these matters are interesting 
 and valuable in their place ; but their place is not in 
 a manual used to instruct in the art of nursing under 
 present conditions. It would seem advisable that the 
 First-Aid manual be taken in hand by some eminent 
 surgeon who has seen war-hospital service during the 
 present year — for example. Dr. George W. Crile, 
 head of the Cleveland Hospital Unit, that was re- 
 cently ordered to France — and blue-penciled unspar- 
 ingly with actual conditions in mind. The residue, 
 plus a chapter on the recent discoveries and im- 
 proved methods in caring for wounds, such as the 
 treatment of burns from liquid gas, and the Carrel- 
 Dakin system of antiseptic irrigation of infected 
 wounds, to mention but two examples, would form an 
 invaluable nucleus of instruction. 
 
102 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 The second course in the Red Cross curriculum is 
 that known as Elementary Hygiene and 'Home Gare 
 of the Sick. "The primary object of this course," 
 according to the pamphlet, "is to teach women per- 
 sonal and household hygiene in order that they may 
 acquire habits of right living which will aid in the 
 prevention of sickness and the upbuilding of a strong 
 and vigorous people, and to give them simple instruc- 
 tion in the care of the sick of their own homes which 
 will fit them to render intelligently such service as 
 may be safely entrusted to them." Admirable three 
 years ago in peace times, but not at all what we are 
 after now. Here again, so far as the purpose of 
 the volunteer nurse is concerned, the emphasis, as in 
 First Aid, is on the wrong foot from the start-off. 
 There are entire chapters that might be omitted with 
 profit, such as the house, the care of the house and 
 the laundry, the household medicine closet, the hy- 
 giene of infancy and childhood. They should be 
 dropped, and a more thorough, intensive and leisurely 
 training be given in actual conditions prevailing in 
 war hospitals of to-day. 
 
 In addition to these courses there are two others 
 of minor importance. One in Home Dietetics is en- 
 tirely too elaborate for the simple requirements of the 
 nurse's aid, who needs to know only the general food 
 values and the compounding of invalids' drinks. 
 Three or four lessons in connection with the nursing 
 course should amply cover this field. The fourth 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 103 
 
 course, the Surgical Dressings, is practical but 
 limited. 
 
 These are the popular courses given under the 
 auspices of the Red Cross to-day. Each, taken by 
 itself, has grave defects ; and even when all four are 
 combined there is such a ponderous dead weight of 
 irrelevant material, pre-war nursing and medical 
 junk, that for practical purposes it would seem bet- 
 ter to throw them all out of the window and devise 
 another course, a course compounded of the valu- 
 able elements of all four, but thorough, scientific, 
 modern, and above all specifically adapted to the 
 actual conditions of the present fight. 
 
 It may be argued that the necessary eliminations 
 will be made by each individual. But to let the imma- 
 ture, embryo nurse decide what she will and what she 
 won't eliminate is a dangerous business in practice. 
 It would be all right in peacetime, when she does not 
 have to try it out on the dog. But she might elect 
 to eliminate the wrong detail, and then find herself in 
 the quandary of Miss Greenhorn, with a human life 
 hanging in the scales. For though in theory an 
 auxiliary has no authority and no responsibility, in 
 actual practice that is far from being the truth. 
 There are hours, even days, in the absence of the 
 nurse, when the entire care of the ward falls on the 
 shoulders of the assistant, with the head nurse look- 
 ing in at rare intervals. In textbooks untrained per- 
 sons are not supposed to be in positions of responsi- 
 
104 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 bility. In this or that emergency "Call the doctor !" 
 or "Call the nurse !" they say. But suppose the doc- 
 tor is up in the operating room, blocks away. Sup- 
 pose the nurse is off duty. Suppose also that the 
 nurses in the adj acent wards are down at lunch. For 
 such precisely was the stage setting of a mishap that 
 occurred in the jaw ward of the American Ambu- 
 lance. The auxiliary was alone in the room. Sud- 
 denly, without warning, one of the jaw cases began 
 to hemorrhage from the mouth and nostrils. Bright 
 arterial blood spurted high as the ceiling and stained 
 adjoining beds. In less than ten minutes the man 
 was dead. What should the auxiliary have done? 
 The event proved that in that particular case not a 
 whole regiment of doctors could have saved the pa- 
 tient ; but the responsibility was there. And it is for 
 just such tight corners of actuality that a volunteer 
 nurse should be prepared. And for such prepared- 
 ness the teaching manuals and the lectures based 
 upon them should deal, not with the diffuse and gen- 
 eral matters of health, but exclusively and incisively 
 with the realities of the present crisis. In addition, 
 it should be noted that the Red Cross, in connection 
 with its nursing course, "hopes that a limited number 
 of hours of practical experience will be provided by 
 the base hospitals" ; but such practical experience is 
 not deemed essential to a certificate. 
 
 Aside from these courses, three is a course given 
 by the Young Women's Christian Association of New 
 
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 105 
 
 York City, which for practical purposes covers the 
 requirements of the present situation in an almost 
 ideal fashion. It is, in fact, the most admirable 
 course of instruction on the market — scientific, mod- 
 ern, intensive, complete. It is called the Trained 
 Attendant Course, and is given by Johns Hopkins 
 nurses of the highest standards of excellence, who 
 are trained teachers as well. The course covers 
 eleven weeks of daily instruction and practice, with 
 an obligatory companion course in invalid cookery. 
 
 With the natural and technical qualifications of the 
 volunteer nurse's aid thus disposed of, one may look 
 about and query where suitable material is to be 
 found. The answer is at hand : In the colleges. Col- 
 lege women of the two upper classes form a compact 
 body, already listed, easy to mobilize. Young, sup- 
 ple, adaptable, mentally and physically fit, with a 
 background of discipline behind them, they are excel- 
 lent instruments for the purpose. Sharpen them to 
 a point by an adequate course of instruction, and 
 three months should produce a corps of workers suf- 
 ficient for a year. These might then be registered 
 and called upon at need. 
 
 It is a feature of the present disaster that no one 
 can gauge the future. One man's guess is as good as 
 another's. It is safe to say that two years ago no 
 one foresaw that to-day the United States would be 
 in the arena as the protagonist of democracy. Nor 
 can anyone predict with assurance what the next two 
 
106 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 years will hold : Whether we shall have a big expedi- 
 tionary force in France; whether by that time we 
 may not be fighting on our own soil; or whether the 
 whole infernal business may not burst like a bubble 
 before the month is out. But this much seems cer- 
 tain — American surgery and American hospitals are 
 counted the best in the world both in the preventive 
 and in the follow-up field. And since our entry into 
 the war the governments of the United States, Great 
 Britain and France have had under consideration a 
 proposition for placing the entire French ambulance 
 service, and later on the entire British ambulance 
 service, under the United States army medical corps. 
 So there you are, dear procession, right up against 
 your job! I hope you like its dimensions. As the 
 darky says, "You done chawed off a mouthful !" And 
 that is all for this time, except — God bless you, girls ! 
 Go to it! And remember, it's our own men this 
 time! 
 
THE CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 
 
 "GuAED well the little ones to-day, Marthe. Don't 
 let them out of sight or play too far from home. 
 You know Emile hates to wear his gas mask. He 
 tears it off and hides it, the naughty rogue, soon as 
 the back is turned. There! Listen! It has com- 
 menced again — the bombardment !" 
 
 Marthe's mother, a short, stocky French peasant 
 with a heavy, weather-roughened face and deep-blue 
 eyes, held up her hand for attention ; and Marthe, a 
 slim gypsy child of seven, dirty and unkempt, with 
 great gleaming black eyes and an uncombed mat of 
 curly black hair, cocked an indifferent ear to listen ; 
 in fact, she was somewhat scornful of her mother's 
 continued terror of that distant muffled roar. Heard 
 thus, ten kilometers or more away, it was not unlike 
 the shock of a heavy surf breaking on a rocky coast. 
 For three years now Marthe had heard that sound. 
 She had heard it near at hand when a big shell had 
 exploded bang! right on top of her own house and 
 knocked all one side out open to the sky — after which 
 they had dragged the furniture downstairs and lived 
 
 107 
 
108 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 in the cellar ; she had heard it farther off when bing \ 
 bang ! the spire of the old mossy stone church across 
 the way had crashed down into the street and all of 
 the saints save only Mother Mary and her little Son 
 had tumbled, face down, from their niches; she had 
 heard it the last thing at night when she went to sleep, 
 and she had risen to its sound in the morning. 
 
 And familiarity had bred contempt. It was part 
 of the everyday tissue of her life, common as the 
 Boches' avions, which went sailing high overhead in 
 the sky, tiny as minute dragon flies, and disappeared 
 into fleecy clouds. For Marthe and her mother lived 
 in a little village in the war zone, just in front of a 
 line of concealed French batteries which the enemy 
 had long been striving to demolish. 
 
 And when the Boches became enraged at their fail- 
 ure in locating the French batteries which roared 
 nightly defiance they would deliberately turn their 
 guns upon the defenseless civilian villages in between, 
 abandoned by all save a few old people and poor 
 families who had nowhere else to go ; and perhaps 
 they would kill an old woman or mangle a child play- 
 ing in the deserted streets ; after which sport, encour- 
 aged and refreshed, they would go after the French 
 batteries again. Jean, a village boy, had explained 
 all this to Marthe. His entire family had been killed 
 in an explosion, and since then he had turned into a 
 wild, moody character, following the army or roaming 
 the countryside. 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 109 
 
 Marthe listened to the distant struggle of artillery 
 and then she shrugged her shoulders and said calmly : 
 "It is not near. To-day it is not as near as yester- 
 day. I do not think they will bother us any more. 
 For yesterday Jean and I went through the village 
 and counted, and every single house had been hit. 
 They have finished with us, maman! If the guns do 
 not come after us this afternoon may I take Emile 
 and gather flowers for the shrines ?" 
 
 Her mother shook her head. The frugal breakfast 
 of soup over she was fastening on her apron of coarse 
 ticking to go to work in her field. It was for the 
 sake of that precious plot of five hectares of wheat 
 that she had stayed on in the village, taking fearsome 
 chances, after the enemy had started to gas the en- 
 tire district and the French orders of evacuation had 
 come. 
 
 "You would let little Emile be gassed," she mur- 
 mured reproachfully, "while you run off to gather 
 flowers !" 
 
 "Zut! They have not gassed us for ten days. And 
 it is cold down here, maman. Even in the mid- 
 dle of the day it is cold — and dark. Emile 
 sneezes all the time. And he is getting as white as 
 plaster." 
 
 Ker mother sighed. "Very well," she consented 
 grudgingly, "you may go. But for an hour only. 
 I do not like it, though. Tie Emile's mask behind his 
 back where he cannot find it." 
 
110 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "Yes, maman. But they are not going to gas us 
 any more. Jean said so." 
 
 "That Jean!" cried her mother angrily. "What 
 does he know about it? Even the good God Himself 
 does not know any more what they will do ! And I 
 will not have you playing with that scamp, that 
 jeune sauvage. He is not respectable. Chasing all 
 over the country! Following the soldiers! Helas! 
 What is our poor country coming to ? A fine crop of 
 young vagabonds we shall have after the war !" 
 
 She thrust into her pocket a hunk of dark sour 
 bread and a fragment of cheese, kissed Emile and 
 Marthe, caught up from the mattress a pallid, som- 
 ber-eyed girl baby, and went out to the field. 
 
 Left to herself, Marthe took Emile, climbed the 
 few steps leading up from her cave home and sat 
 watching the German aeroplanes. They passed, 
 singly or in groups, frequently. . The thin drone of 
 their motors coming from the north could be heard 
 long before even Marthe's keen eyes could pick out 
 the black speck far up in the pale-blue ether. The 
 thunder of artillery had grown fainter and died away. 
 Certainly Jean was right. What was the fun of 
 shooting at houses that were already knocked down? 
 
 That afternoon, with Emile clinging to her fingers 
 and every now and then looking up with a delighted 
 smile into her eyes, Marthe led the way to the ruined 
 church. From the leather belt which secured the 
 boy's diminutive black cotton apron dangled the gas 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 111 
 
 mask. According to orders Marthe had tied it be- 
 hind his back, and at every step it bobbed up and 
 down like an absurd little antiquated bustle. The 
 sun shone brilliantly. It was an ideal day in which 
 to be out of the cellar. Arrived at the church, with 
 its small inclosed garden of silent inhabitants, Marthe 
 ensconced Emile, always obedient, smiling and ten- 
 der, upon a grave close under the wall of the old 
 stone chapel, and then rambled off to gather bouquets 
 for the shrines. 
 
 How long she remained away, how far she wan- 
 dered, she did not know ; but when she returned little 
 Emile had mysteriously vanished. In her absence 
 the old stone church had altered also. One entire 
 side had fallen out and lay prone, a chaos of tumbled 
 broken granite, upon the mossy ground. And now 
 Marthe recalled having heard an explosion, but so 
 accustomed were her ears to the sound that at the 
 time she had but vaguely marked it. That accounted 
 for the church certainly. 
 
 But Emile — where was Emile, obedient, tender lit- 
 tle Emile? She ran about, peering behind grave- 
 stones, calling shrilly, and at length, smitten by a 
 nameless anguish of horror, scared in every atom of 
 her small being without knowing why, she fled, sob- 
 bing wildly, to her mother and poured out her story. 
 
 That night there was a hurried exodus. Marthe's 
 mother, broken by the death of her small son — for 
 if his disappearance was a mystery to the girl it was 
 
112 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 not to her mother after one glance at the high-piled 
 broken granite — decided to give up her field; but it 
 was like wrenching her heart out of her body. Jean, 
 chancing by that way at dusk, offered his company 
 as far as the next village, for Marthe's mother, a true 
 peasant, had never in her life traveled more than a 
 dozen kilometers from her own doorstep, and knew 
 less of the outside world than she knew of heaven. So 
 Jean had taken charge. And now he walked beside 
 the refugees, carrying a huge blanketful of their pos- 
 sessions strapped across his shoulders and holding by 
 the hand Marthe, who still wept bitterly at the 
 thought of abandoning her little Emile to the cold 
 and the dark of the deserted churchyard. She pic- 
 tured him sobbing and stumbling among the mossy 
 stones, and calling in sweet, plaintive tones for his 
 sister. That the fall of the church wall had any- 
 thing to do with the vanishing of Emile did not once 
 enter her head. The two were separate catastrophes 
 — the one, familiar, ordinary ; the other, mystifying, 
 terrible. She, too, bore a sack of household goods 
 upon her back, and from her free hand dangled a 
 small, battered bird cage. 
 
 Behind them trudged Marthe's mother, harnessed 
 to the shafts of a dump cart piled high with mat- 
 tresses and bedding, and bearing on top the small 
 slumbering Georgette, cozy and warm, nested deep in 
 pillows. Since viewing the fallen wreck of the church 
 not one sound had the mother uttered. If she had 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 113 
 
 marked Jean's opportune appearance on the scene 
 she did not betray any sign of his presence. And now 
 she plodded forward, shoulders bent, gripping the 
 shafts, dry-eyed, stolid, mute. What were her 
 thoughts upon that twilight road? 
 
 Ahead of her Marthe and Jean held low-voiced 
 conversation as to the probable whereabouts of Emile. 
 The boy, who upon hearing her tale had instantly 
 divined the truth, declared it was his opinion that the 
 sacred Mother Marie, looking out through the win- 
 dow from her shrine in the church, had seen Emile, 
 and noting what a gentle and gay little kid he was 
 had borrowed him for a time to play in the sky with 
 her own small Son, who without doubt must be hor- 
 ribly bored among all those solemn, grown-up saints 
 and angels. And this idea of the jeune sauvage, the 
 vagabond of the fields, comforted Marthe greatly. 
 
 In time they arrived at a village which thus far 
 had escaped shelling. A shelter was found for them. 
 And for a month the peasant mother remained in her 
 new, strange surroundings. But her heart was so 
 heavy that she could not sleep or eat or speak. She 
 suffered as an animal suffers, dumbly. A stranger 
 would have called her sullen — a clod. For hours on 
 end she sat in the same chair, heavy, immobile, and 
 stared out upon a field of grain and poppies and 
 thought of her own plot lying untended in the sun. 
 And finally the tug of the soil became too strong. 
 She returned. 
 
114 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Established once more in the damp cellar of their 
 wrecked home she became herself again, and the first 
 night she chatted volubly with Marthe, to whom she 
 had scarcely addressed a word since their flight ; she 
 even sang as she hushed the small Georgette to sleep. 
 
 "Listen, petite^ she said to Marthe after supper. 
 "I am going down the street a moment to see 
 Madame Barrois. She tends the field next mine. 
 Perhaps also I can get some goat's milk for the 
 &^6^. Ne houge pas! Sois sage — hein?'\ And 
 Marthe had promised soberly not to budge and to be 
 good. She felt lonely the first night, and she wished 
 that Mother Marie would see fit to return Emile. 
 There was such a thing as keeping a borrowed article 
 too long! 
 
 Half an hour later her mother burst into the cel- 
 lar, tears upon her cheek and a strange light in her 
 eye. In her arms she bore a child who bit and wailed 
 and kicked and screamed without cessation : "Maman! 
 Maman! Mamanr* 
 
 "Ca y est! Tais-toi, mon petit gosse!" (Enough ! 
 Enough ! Keep still, my little boy !) murmured Mar- 
 the's mother, pressing the small head close to her 
 bosom. "Thy maman is gone, pauvre enfant !'* 
 
 She placed the sobbing child in Marthe's arms. 
 "Listen to me," she said. ''Emile was taken from 
 us—" 
 
 "I know. The Mother Marie borrowed him to 
 play with the infant Jesus. Jean said so." 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 115 
 
 "Very good. For once that Jean was not so far 
 off. And now the good Mother Marie has given us 
 this poor little one to nourish in Emile's stead." 
 
 To Mar the this exchange seemed only simple jus- 
 tice and she did not trouble her head with the details 
 of the transaction. Nor did her mother explain that 
 on arriving at the dugout of her friend she had 
 knocked repeatedly without receiving a response and 
 was on the point of leaving when from out of the 
 darkness behind the door had sounded a shrill, angry, 
 sobbing little voice : ^^Maman! Maman! J^ai froid! 
 rat froidr 
 
 Hastily Marthe's mother forced the door, made a 
 light, and discovered her friend lying upon the floor, 
 the victim of a shell, and the child beating the still, 
 inanimate figure with his puny fists and crying : "Ma- 
 man! Wake up ! I'm cold !" 
 
 After this Marthe's mother tended her own and 
 her neighbor's field, and Marthe joyfully tended little 
 Emile's substitute. 
 
 One afternoon shortly afterward she took her new 
 acquisition out to wash him in the canal and see what 
 kind of bargain Mother Marie had made with her 
 anyhow. And while she was thus employed, down 
 on her knees scrubbing absorbedly, there drew up 
 quietly behind her a large, military-gray automobile, 
 from which two men descended. It was, in fact. Pre- 
 fect Mirman with an American friend. M. Mirman 
 was prefect of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, 
 
116 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 a portion of the country bordering on Alsace, which 
 included a large area of the battling frontier of 
 France. The prefect himself held a position com- 
 parable in importance to the governorship of New 
 York, and he had in his heart a deep overflowing 
 love for his suffering people which resembled that of 
 Lincoln's. 
 
 But Marthe could not know that. She sprang to 
 her feet, terribly startled, staring behind the men 
 at the big, gray, snorting, quivering, smoking beast 
 — the first she had ever laid eyes on — and instinc- 
 tively threw her new little brother behind her. The 
 prefect, reading her intention of flight, laid a re- 
 straining grasp on her shoulders. Marthe faced 
 him, pale, hostile, her pupils steadily enlarging. 
 
 "Poor unfortunates!" said the American. "Why 
 are they permitted to remain?" 
 
 The prefect smiled slightly. "They are not. They 
 stay without permission. It is impossible for you 
 Americans, who are always traveling about, to con- 
 ceive the love, the passion with which our poor peo- 
 ple cling to the nourishing soil. Transplant them 
 rudely, scientifically as you may say, and they pine, 
 they die. That is the simple truth. Well, what are 
 we to do? For example, take this situation. All 
 throughout this northern-frontier district the civilian 
 population was ordered to evacuate when the enemy 
 started its deliberate bombarding and gassing of de- 
 fenseless open towns. 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 117 
 
 "Some of these little villages lie directly in the 
 line of attack. It is conceivable that, given a tem- 
 porary reverse of our army, they might fall into 
 Prussian hands. And should that unfortunate event 
 occur I do not want left in those villages any women, 
 any young maids, any half-grown lads or any infants ! 
 The majority of the population, of course, get out 
 instantly when the evacuation orders come. But 
 there is always left a residue of those who cannot or 
 will not go, poor people in villages or farmers who 
 have never traveled farther than twenty kilometers 
 in their lives, and whom it is as hard to uproot, even 
 in this time of stress, as it is to uproot a hardy old 
 tree. Simply they prefer to remain here and take 
 their chances. But that must not be! 
 
 *'So for the past two months, since the evacuation 
 orders became effective, I have driven from one end 
 ito another of my department, searching out those 
 *who remain behind. And I explain, I beg, I urge, I 
 entreat. I promise that they shall not go far from 
 home; that their children shall remain with them; 
 that as soon as it is safe they shall return; and if 
 tJiey have crops in the ground they may go certain 
 days to tend them, leaving the children in safety. 
 It has defects, of course, this plan of mine, for often 
 our shelters are bombed, but just at present it is the 
 best I can do." 
 
 And here the prefect, one of the most romantic and 
 truly great figures in France, looked down at the 
 
118 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 reluctant young person he had been holding fast while 
 he discoursed, and said : "Well, little mother ! How- 
 goes it, eh?" 
 
 Silence. Marthe simply stared at him, clutching 
 tightly behind her the substitute Emile, naked save 
 for a pair of diminutive trousers. 
 
 "Where is mamanf'* 
 
 Silence. 
 
 "Who is that you are hiding behind you?" 
 
 "Nobody. There's nobody behind me!" At this 
 mendacious statement the prefect, father of his dis- 
 trict, laughed. "Ha ! 'Tis a little angel then? I'm 
 going to see !" 
 
 He bent over her shoulder. But Marthe, who had 
 been edging out from under the restraining hand, 
 suddenly whirled, caught up the boy, scudded to her 
 cellar across the way, and shut and barricaded the 
 door. She was not going to risk a second disappear- 
 ance! 
 
 The prefect approached, knocked, and addressed 
 gentle, persuasive words to the invisible occupants. 
 There was no response. 
 
 "We shall have to wait," he said, returning to the 
 automobile. "Of course we could use violence — but 
 there's been enough of that !" 
 
 And wait they did for more than two hours, the 
 prefect calm, patient, determined. In the interval 
 he related some of his experiences as prefect in con- 
 nection with the German capture of French towns 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 119 
 
 at the commencement of the war. That the iron had 
 entered the soul of this strong, tender governor of 
 his people was evident, for with all his manifold 
 duties he had taken time to compile a book of officially 
 vouched-for cases of outrages occurring within his 
 own department, for the benefit of those who pooh- 
 poohed the idea of German atrocities. The first sen- 
 tence of that poignant little book reads: "Void un 
 livre d^horreurs; c'est, helas! un livre de verite" 
 (This is a book of horrors; it is, alas, a book of 
 truth!) 
 
 And those Americans who hold that the Germans 
 are really very fine fellows, but simply misled by their 
 overlords, should have a confidential chat with Pre- 
 fect Mirman, the great-hearted governor of that 
 frontier section of France. 
 
 It was deep twilight before Marthe's mother re- 
 turned from her work. With two fields under bom- 
 bardment to tend instead of one, life was no joke. 
 To her the prefect explained the object of his visit. 
 Since the fathers of France were away fighting, he, 
 the prefect, was trying to be father to all the chil- 
 dren in his department, to watch over them, to keep 
 them decent boys and girls, in church and in school, 
 to teach them trades and safeguard them until their 
 parents' return. 
 
 Marthe's mother listened, pondered, put a few 
 practical questions. The place to which he would 
 take them — it was far? No, close at hand ; in effect. 
 
120 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 just behind that hill. And her children, they would 
 be with her? But surely ! And she could return when 
 necessary to care for her fields? The prefect gave 
 her his word. Whereupon Marthe's mother, so spar- 
 ing of emotion, suddenly burst into tears and con- 
 sented. 
 
 Three days later saw the entire family transported 
 to Toul and safely installed in a temporary barracks 
 provided by Prefect Mirman. It was a big, bare, 
 uncomfortable, insanitary affair, and it seemed as if 
 all the young ragamuffins of France had been collected 
 there in one sorry regiment. The story of Marthe 
 might serve as a type for most. But there were 
 some whose histories, written in their small peaked 
 faces and sullen gaze, had a more sinister cast ; some 
 had lost an eye ; some had lost a hand ; some had lost 
 parents; and most of them had lost their childhood 
 gayety. Gathered up from miles along the frontier 
 where the artillery fire was hottest, out of dank, 
 dirty cellars or unspeakably foul dugouts and caves, 
 living without air, baths, change of garments or the 
 simplest sanitary arrangements, they were a dismal, 
 pallid, vermin-infested, scarecrow little crew — and yet 
 they were the budding hope of France, as nobody 
 knew better than the prefect. 
 
 But what to do with them after he had got them 
 together? It was a sore question. For what these 
 small unfortunates needed beyond everything were 
 baths, doctors, nurses, teachers, someone to teach 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 121 
 
 them to smile again — and always more and more 
 baths. Out of the three hundred and fifty, twenty- 
 one were babies under one year; many of them had 
 contagious skin diseases ; a few had tuberculosis ; 
 and all, sick and well, were crowded together without 
 discrimination. 
 
 Food and shelter were all the prefect could be sure 
 of, for these the French Government furnished, but 
 more in the present stress it could not promise, for 
 all the French doctors and nurses were already occu- 
 pied with the war. And the worst of it was that 
 more and more children and mothers would be arriv- 
 ing as the wave of battle swept toward other villages 
 or wholesale gassing set in. It was a thoroughly bad 
 piece of business all round — a kind of vicious circle 
 with no visible outlet. But not for one moment did 
 these difficulties stump the prefect of the department 
 of Meurthe-et-Moselle. He had rescued these chil- 
 dren and got them together — that was his job. Now 
 somebody had to take care of them ; he couldn't, the 
 French Government couldn't. Therefore — somebody 
 else had to ! 
 
 And it is exactly at this point, at that "somebody," 
 that the American Red Cross enters the story. For 
 in the acute and immediate need the prefect tele- 
 graphed for aid to a well-known American woman in 
 Paris. She brought the telegram to Major Murphy, 
 Commissioner for Europe of the American Red Cross, 
 and he at once got into action. Within a few hours 
 
122 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 eight workers were on their way to Toul — a doctor, 
 a nurse, two aids, and women to take charge of the 
 administration. At the same time there started a 
 camionette loaded with clothing and food. 
 
 Thus began the first activity of the American Red 
 Cross for the civil population of France — and it be- 
 gan very appropriately with the children. 
 
 When, one morning several weeks later, I visited 
 this refugee center high up on a sunshiny hill, a gen- 
 eral transformation had taken place. The children, 
 numbering by this time about five hundred, with sixty 
 mothers, had been moved into a newly constructed 
 barracks of brick and cement furnished by the French 
 Government, which also supplied heat, light, rations, 
 cooks, unskilled labor and camion service for trans- 
 portation. This plant, in its bare elements, was then 
 turned over to the American Red Cross to supple- 
 ment and run as it pleased. And when I arrived the 
 American administration was in full swing. To me 
 the children looked surprisingly well and happy — 
 almost too happy, in fact, in view of their grim past ! 
 And I remarked upon this fact to the director. 
 
 "Well," he laughed, "if you are after local color 
 you should have seen them — and smelled them! — 
 when we first took hold. The very first thing we did 
 was to establish louse clinics — 'de-lousing' is the tech- 
 nical term. Don't shudder! They're about clean 
 now, but in the beginning we had some horrible little 
 heads. The soldiers in the winter trenches had noth- 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 123 
 
 ing on those children in the way of vermin and filth. 
 And at the same time we inaugurated the good old 
 American institution of shower baths." 
 
 "And what did the mothers think of these?" 
 
 The doctor chuckled. "Scandalous! Immorall 
 Indelicate ! Designed to murder their poor children 
 outright! Some of these peasant women, you know, 
 have never taken a bath in the altogether in their 
 lives. They still continue the customs handed down 
 to them since the time of Louis XI. They bathe little 
 boys in their trousers — put 'em in the tub with their 
 trousers on ; indelicate to remove 'em, you see ! They 
 bathe little girls with their chemises on. And babies 
 they don't bathe at all. Yes, the shower bath was 
 a novelty. But I may add that it was a novelty which 
 took with the children from the start. Now they 
 fight for a chance at it! 
 
 "Come here, Marthe, and say 'Bonjour^ to the 
 lady." He caught by the hand a passing little girl 
 with great bright dark eyes and dark curls neatly 
 twined. Beside her trotted a small boy, decked in his 
 Sunday best. Thus I had my introduction to Marthe 
 and the substitute brother whom the Mother Marie 
 had sent down to replace the borrowed Emile. 
 
 "She is never without that boy," continued the di- 
 rector. "She seems to be afraid somebody is going 
 to steal him." And then he told me her story, nar- 
 rated above. "Here is her mother," he added as a 
 woman approached along the path. "She has walked 
 
124 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 all the way from her home to spend a few days with 
 her children. These peasant mothers come and go 
 as they will ; they visit with us a few days and then 
 return to their fields. Bon jour, madamey** he said, 
 turning to her. "How goes that crop of wheat ?" 
 
 "Not bad, monsieur. But yesterday — what a mis- 
 fortune ! An obus fell right in the middle of the field 
 where the grain is highest and dug a crater wide as 
 this.'* She extended her two arms. "Sale brute!** 
 (Dirty brute !) "Grace a Dieu! I was off in another 
 corner of the field." 
 
 "You are very courageous," I said, "to work like 
 that for your children in those bombarded fields." 
 
 "But no ! But no ! It is not for the infants. It 
 is that the soldiers of France may have food." 
 
 "There you are!" exclaimed the director in Eng- 
 lish. "That's what they all say — and just as unself- 
 consciously. They don't know what a magnificent 
 piece of work they're pulling off !" 
 
 At this moment Marthe interrupted to show me her 
 sewing and the mother passed on to her baby, the 
 little Georgette. Later I saw this tiny, woeful crea- 
 ture, born in a cellar, under sound of heavy guns. 
 Frail, transparent, pale as a snowdrop, she lay in her 
 mother's arms. Not once in her two years had she 
 been seen to smile. I did not blame her. Such a 
 world was not worth smiling on ! She showed a rare 
 judgment beyond her age. Nevertheless, for five min- 
 utes I held her in my arms, hating the Germans, and 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 125 
 
 trying by all arts to bring a flash of mirth to that 
 solemn, drooping little mouth. Vain enterprise. I 
 might as well have tried to make the Sphinx laugh. 
 
 After that, accompanied by the director, I made 
 a tour of the buildings, built after the usual fashion 
 of military cantonments, in the form of a hollow 
 square. Everything was scrupulously clean, the 
 floors scrubbed, the windows flung wide open, and 
 fresh sunshine flooded the dormitories, where the 
 mothers sat chatting together, their babies at their 
 breasts. 
 
 "This beats caves as a summer resort !" I said. 
 
 The director nodded rather grimly. In company 
 with M. Mirman he had made rescues from some of 
 those caves. 
 
 "And we're going to beat them still more before 
 we're through. Here in this small settlement we are 
 trying to achieve a model community. Already we 
 have a clinic, an infirmary, a hospital of eighty beds, 
 a kindergarten, a church, schools, a store, a recrea- 
 tion teacher — in short, a welfare center for children 
 as scientific and humane as anything to be found in 
 America. But that is not enough. Compared with 
 the need this one single unit is only a drop in the 
 bucket. And so we are planning to make Toul a kind 
 of nucleus from which we shall ray out in all direc- 
 tions. Already we have a traveling dispensary start- 
 ing from this point, with a doctor and nurse, which 
 visits through twenty-five villages, treating the chil- 
 
126 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 dren in their homes and fetching back to the hospital 
 the contagious and tubercular cases. Such a system 
 keeps up the general health par in the areas visited 
 and prevents the sudden spread of epidemics. 
 
 "At Nesle, a town in the devastated district, we 
 have established another unit — a small hospital and 
 another automobile dispensary which carries aid to 
 the outlying districts. In that region, of course, 
 the problem is somewhat different from our own, be- 
 cause the Germans, having retreated, the children do 
 not need to be collected in one place to protect them 
 from gassing or bombing. They remain in their 
 homes — if one can call homes those ruined and burned 
 shells, despoiled of every stick of furniture, every 
 kitchen utensil, and even the orchards cut down and 
 the wells defiled! — and we go to them. We go to 
 them with our traveling clinics in an ambulance con- 
 taining a full outfit of medical stores — and a bath! 
 We carry the makings of that bath right along with 
 us on the floor of the machine — a tub, tubing, a spray 
 and a pumping apparatus. And when we arrive at 
 a home where a child needs a clean-up we heat water 
 in the kitchen, stick the small victim into the tub — 
 without trousers or chemise, you bet ! — and we bathe 
 it after the rules laid down by the Greek nymph Are- 
 thusa, who lived in a fountain and who, according 
 to the Limerick, used to wash, sans mackintosh — 
 b'gosh, sans anything ! 
 
 "It is the simple, serious truth that baths are the 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 127 
 
 greatest hygienic need of these children at the pres- 
 ent time ; and by bringing baths into their homes we 
 are helping to restore the health of the entire dis- 
 trict. So successful have been our efforts at Toul and 
 Nesle that the French authorities have earnestly re- 
 quested us to broaden our scope and establish centers 
 in other needy districts. And this is what we are 
 doing as fast as we can. Eventually we intend to 
 have a chain of centers, linked together by automo- 
 bile dispensaries, strung along that whole northern 
 frontier just behind the battle lines, in order to care 
 for the thousands of children who, no less than the 
 men in the trenches, are giving their lives in this 
 war. 
 
 "As the situation stands to-day France is burn- 
 ing her candle at both ends; she is at one and the 
 same time losing her men and her children. With our 
 American soldiers once in the trenches we are going 
 to check the colossal loss of man power; and in the 
 interval until our fellows arrive, with our hospitals, 
 our clinics, our traveling dispensaries and our schools 
 we are doing our best to check the loss of her child 
 power. This type of scientific social work is the sort 
 of thing America excels in; for the last ten years 
 we've gone in hard for it. I suppose we've got a 
 flair for it, just as the French have for pure science. 
 Anyhow, as a nation we can do that particular job 
 better than anybody else on earth. And for the 
 American Red Cross to throw into the breach our 
 
128 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 finely trained child specialists is to render France 
 in this hour an inestimable benefit." 
 
 This sketches the effort of the Red Cross for the 
 children of the war zone in free France. But not all 
 of France is "free," as the French themselves touch- 
 ingly call it. And that portion of it which still is 
 not free, the immensely rich mining and manufactur- 
 ing district under German rule, has also its child 
 problem. That problem the Germans have dealt with 
 in their characteristic brutal fashion. They are sim- 
 ply sweeping out of the country, as with a gigantic 
 broom, all these small, food-consuming nonproducers. 
 Across the Northern Swiss frontier they are being 
 thrust into France at the rate of nearly five hundred 
 a day — more than ten thousand a month ! Here is a 
 child problem with a vengeance ! Of course it is not 
 the children alone who are being swept out, but all 
 the nonproducing inhabitants. If they can't work — 
 heraus mit 'em ! Dump the refuse out the back door 
 into France. Shift the food burden of all those hun- 
 dreds of thousands of useless inhabitants onto the 
 enemy. From a purely materialistic point of view 
 this wholesale act of dispossession is a fine move — 
 and France is glad to have her people back at any 
 price! Also, she has food to burn! 
 
 Evian-les-Bains is the gate of entry for these exiles 
 — rapatries the French call them — and accordingly 
 to Evian I went. It is a beautiful, quaint little town 
 on Lake Geneva, high, Alp-encircled, and with an air 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 129 
 
 like iced champagne. Formerly a fashionable water- 
 ing place, it has now been transformed into a kind 
 of Ellis Island receiving station for the refugees, who 
 pour in by trainloads, twenty thousand a month. 
 
 Here daily is to be witnessed one of the most tragic 
 processionals that his:tory has ever yet oifered to 
 man — a nation on the march ! But a nation dispos- 
 sessed, broken and diseased, old men and old women 
 and mothers with children — the past and the future 
 generations — with the present generation strikingly 
 absent! For the young men are held to work the 
 mines and the factories, and the young women are 
 held — but even in France one rarely speaks of that 
 phase of the subject, which is the blackest of all 
 black pages of German occupation. What "efficient" 
 explanation is Germany going to offer, at the big 
 post-bellum tribunal of the nations, for the girls sent 
 into white slavery in the Ardennes? 
 
 Three years have elapsed since the Germans con- 
 quered the northern part of France, and since then 
 the inhabitants have lived in a state of complete iso- 
 lation, cut off from news of their families in free 
 France, sons and husbands who fled before the in- 
 vaders ; cut off also from any reliable information 
 concerning the war or the great outer world. Not 
 a single letter are they permitted to send or receive. 
 This incredible act of mental cruelty I did not be- 
 lieve until I arrived in Evian, questioned the refugees 
 themselves and the authorities, and entered the fam- 
 
130 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 ous letter room, where hundreds of thousands of let- 
 ters are filed, often months ahead of time, awaiting 
 the possible return of some exile relative. 
 
 Newspapers these people have, to be sure, but they 
 are journals printed by the Germans in French, os- 
 tensibly to give current events, but actually to spread 
 German propaganda and despair. I glanced through 
 some of these papers. According to them England 
 is speedily starving to death ; Russia is about to con- 
 clude a separate peace ; France has been bled white ; 
 America is a noisy four-flusher — and Deutschland is 
 ilber alles! Under ordinary conditions such a crude 
 tissue of lies would merit only a burst of scornful 
 laughter ; but given a captured civilian population as 
 isolated from their loved ones as if they were ghosts, 
 a prey to constant anxiety concerning the welfare of 
 France, and this daily insidious attack upon a morale 
 already enfeebled by adversity is bound to have a 
 damaging effect. 
 
 Of these journals the Gazette des Ardennes is the 
 most notorious. 
 
 The first evening I waited at the station I do not 
 know exactly what I expected to see — but, anyhow, 
 something that would rend the heartstrings. I for- 
 got that this station represented to those pilgrims the 
 end of a three-years* captivity ; that every kilometer 
 of the long, wearisome three-days' journey from Bel- 
 gium, where they had been quarantined, brought 
 them nearer letters, nearer a resumption of family 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 131 
 
 ties, nearer a tender welcome from free France. 
 
 It was cold. A light snow had fallen on the circle 
 of mountains, and a chill wind blew up from the lake. 
 The Red Cross ambulance drivers had backed their 
 machines close to the platform to care for the sick 
 and the old, and now they stood by the tracks, ready 
 to lend a hand to the incoming crowd. I was in the 
 mood of Antony : "If you have tears, prepare to shed 
 them now!" when the refugee train pulled into the 
 station; and to my surprise I saw flags bursting 
 from every open window — the French Tricolor, the 
 Stars and Stripes, Red Cross flags, handkerchiefs, 
 bundles, any old thing — frantically waving a welcome 
 from a thousand eager hands ! Who said anybody 
 was sad? Besides flags, the windows were crowded 
 full of heads — -happy, excited children, mothers hold- 
 ing up babies, and smiling, seamed old countenances 
 wreathed in white hair. And from within the cars, 
 above the noisy hubbub, ascended high and sweet the 
 strains of the Marseillaise. 
 
 The train slowed to a dead stop. Suddenly an old 
 man leaned far out of a window, waved both arms, 
 
 and shouted fiercely: *^Vive la France! Vive " 
 
 He broke off sharply, looked down into a face below 
 him on the platform and queried in low, anxious 
 tones: "Say, We are in France, hein?'' What an 
 indiscretion if he had yelled that in German terri- 
 tory! 
 
 "Yes, you are in France. But descend, papa! 
 
132 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Descend, maman! Allans y mes enfants, descendez, 
 s'il vous plait r* 
 
 It was the cheerful voice of the Red Cross man, 
 M. Barrois, himself a rapatrie, with a wife and six 
 children left behind in Lille, who assisted daily at the 
 detraining of the refugees. 
 
 "But these people are not sad!" I objected to M. 
 Barrois, still full of surprise. "They do not even 
 look tired. Are they always gay like this ?" 
 
 "It's a lively crowd to-night," he replied soberly, 
 "on account of so many children. But some days 
 they do not have a word to say. And you must not 
 be deceived by their surface gayety. The sadness is 
 there, underneath, just the same. You'll find it if 
 you stay." 
 
 He was right. The first evening I caught only the 
 false glow of excitement of the returning pilgrims. 
 But as I watched night after night the endless pro- 
 cession of those who passed I began to discriminate, 
 and to note beneath the happy eagerness on those 
 faces the deeper substructure of strain, of suffering 
 so long endured that it had become a habit. And 
 as the thousands marched before me, successive waves 
 of exiles, always different and yet mysteriously the 
 same in their look of subdued suffering, of strain, I 
 had a fleeting realization of what France has borne 
 in this war. 
 
 With such throngs pouring daily into this one 
 small receiving station a very careful organization 
 
 I 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 183 
 
 has of necessity been evolved in order not to congest 
 the transportation. The following is the order of 
 each day: At the last station on the Swiss frontier 
 French Red Cross nurses enter the train and tag 
 the sick and aged. At Evian these are put into am- 
 bulances, the others walking the short distance to the 
 Casino, where await them an ample hot supper, music, 
 and a tender speech of welcome by the mayor of 
 Evian. After which they register, receive their let- 
 ters, pass a medical examination, and are assigned 
 lodgings in the town. 
 
 The first night I waited to see the last malade and 
 the last baby safely stowed inside before I climbed 
 into the front seat with the ambulance driver. As 
 we struck the open lake road an icy wind straight off 
 Mont Blanc made me shiver. A soldier on permission 
 clinging to the running board beside me turned up 
 his collar, muttering : "This is worse than the trenches 
 in the Vosges." He had come up to search for his 
 refugee wife, from whom he had not heard in three 
 years. 
 
 "But she might arrive any day !" he argued hope- 
 fully. "I will teach you something extraordinary," 
 he continued. "A comrade of mine came up here 
 looking for his wife ; he had dreamed a dream about 
 her. And what do you think — the very first woman 
 who stepped off the train was she ! 
 
 "I had another friend, whose wife had died in Lille 
 leaving a little daughter of two, whom the father had 
 
lU OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 never seen. He did not even know what had become 
 of her, for he could get no word. A rapatrie friend, 
 who informed him of his wife's death, could give no 
 news of the little maid. Nevertheless, he came to 
 Evian hoping to find some trace. And each day at 
 the station as the throng passed he stood quietly 
 holding out in his hand what looked like a postal 
 card. And whenever a little girl appeared he thrust 
 that card under her nose. Absurd, eh? A fool, a 
 lunatic, sticking a piece of cardboard into every 
 child's face! But one day when he held it in front 
 of a little maid she suddenly burst into tears and 
 cried out: ^Maman! Mamanr That postal card 
 bore the picture of her mother. And that's the way 
 he found his child !" 
 
 It was twilight when we arrived at the Casino, and 
 already the place was packed. Seated at long tables 
 the refugees had stowed their precious bundles be- 
 neath their feet and were falling upon supper with a 
 will. Between the tables passed the women of Evian 
 with tureens of steaming soup, huge platters of meat 
 that the Germans would have bartered their very 
 souls for, and great pitchers of hot milk and of wine. 
 And how those children gobbled ! And how their eld- 
 ers followed their example ! The platters passed and 
 repassed. Through the big double doors facing Swit- 
 zerland gleamed Lake Geneva, dimly purple through 
 the gloom. Overhead in the balcony the band began 
 to tune up. 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 135 
 
 Suddenly all over the hall the lights flashed on 
 strongly and the same instant the band burst into 
 the stirring impetuous strains of Chasseurs Alpins! 
 As that gay beloved air broke across the room an elec- 
 tric shock of emotion seemed to pass along the tables. 
 Men leaped up, shouting ''Vive la France T* Women 
 began to weep softly. Handkerchiefs were out every- 
 where. Yes, the long blight of captivity, of isolation, 
 was past forever ! That tune proved it ! 
 
 And it was just at this chosen moment that the 
 mayor of Evian came forward to make his speech. 
 It was brief, simple and touching, and at certain por- 
 tions of it women bowed their heads on the table and 
 sobbed aloud. 
 
 "My dear fellow citizens !" began the mayor. "At 
 a moment when, after long and cruel trials, you step 
 foot again upon the sacred soil of la Patrie, I come 
 in the name of the city of Evian to address to you 
 all a very cordial, a very warm and a very affection- 
 ate welcome, 
 
 "We know all that you have suffered. For many 
 months convoys like yours have traversed our little 
 village, and we have heard recounted each day the 
 long martyrdom you have endured. We know that 
 you have suffered cold and hunger; we know that 
 your houses have been burned, that your rich har- 
 vests have been destroyed and the beautiful industrial 
 region of the north has been systematically de- 
 stroyed; and, what is most terrible of all, we know 
 
136 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 that young daughters have been torn from the arms 
 of their mothers and taken away to slavery in the 
 Ardennes. And it is because we do know all this, 
 dear fellow citizens, that we receive you to-day with 
 all of our heart and with all of our soul ! 
 
 "I said just now that you have suffered greatly, 
 but your sufferings have not been alone physical; 
 they have been also, and even above all, spiritual. 
 You have suffered to be without news of those who 
 are dear, and at not knowing exactly how things were 
 going in free France. As for that which concerns the 
 news of the war and of France I am going to tell you 
 at once, in one word, that all you have read in Le 
 Bruxellois and the Gazette des Ardennes is one tis- 
 sue of lies, and that, thanks to the armies of France 
 and her Allies, victory will finally crown our banners. 
 
 "And now, courage, my dear fellow citizens ! Your 
 long martyrdom is about to end. Soon you are going 
 to hear, standing, our sacred hymn, which has not 
 greeted your ears for so long a time, and meantime 
 join me in an act of faith and hope in our well-beloved 
 country, and shout with me: 'Vive la France immor' 
 teller " 
 
 The shout that followed was a shout indeed ! 
 
 In closing, the Marseillaise was chanted, and by 
 now all the audience was frankly in tears. A Red 
 Cross doctor standing beside me cleared his throat. 
 
 "I've seen this thing a dozen times," Jie observed, 
 "and still I choke up every time |" 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 137 
 
 Supper over the rapatries registered and passed 
 to the rear to receive their letters. This letter room 
 is a marvel of perfect arrangement. Here every in- 
 quiry from anxious relatives is received, sorted alpha- 
 betically, and a note of it filed on an index card as if 
 it were a library book. Thus, when a refugee hands 
 his registration card across the counter, all the girl 
 standing behind has to do is to look him up in her 
 index catalogue and see if he has any mail. 
 
 Ah, those long moments of suspense while the girl 
 is looking up a name! Those hundreds of greedy, 
 outstretched hands across the counter ! Those faces, 
 so schooled to endurance, twitching now with uncon- 
 cealed excitement ! How slow the girl is ! "No, there 
 is nothing for you." An outstretched hand drops 
 from the counter. Those mutely borne disappoint- 
 ments are horrible. 
 
 Some of the tales of this famous letter room are 
 harrowing, some humorous. There arrived one day 
 in Evian a woman refugee, with four sons at the 
 Front from whom she had not heard a single line in 
 three years. Her excitement may be conceived. 
 Were they all alive? Were some dead? Which? 
 Impossible that all four should be preserved for three 
 years. The thing was outside probability. For long 
 months she had brooded over the chances, selected 
 for death first one and then another of her sons. Per- 
 haps all had been killed by this time, for she knew 
 her sons were brave ! There was her youngest in par- 
 
138 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 ticular, a dashing daredevil in the Alpine Chasseurs 
 — the pacemakers in every attack. Yes, undoubt- 
 edly he had gone ! She must make up her mind to it. 
 And so she did, and unmade it, a hundred times a 
 day. When she arrived in Evian it was five in the 
 afternoon, and before she stood at the mail counter, 
 registry slip in hand, it was nine — four mortal hours 
 of heart-piercing suspense, during which she had 
 buried one, two, three, four of her sons, and resur- 
 rected them again in a passion of hope. And now she 
 was going to know! Yes, there was a letter for 
 madame — two letters. Blindly she got herself out of 
 the throng. The next moment there was a loud cry 
 and she fell face down in a dead swoon. 
 
 "And for two days," continued the doctor who told 
 me the incident, "she raved with acute dementia." 
 
 "Poor soul!" I said. "All four were killed? Her 
 intuition was right." 
 
 "Not a bit of it," laughed the doctor. "All four 
 of 'em were not killed ! All four were alive and kick- 
 ing. And that was the very trouble. It was a chance, 
 of course, in a million. And winning that chance in 
 the great lottery was too much for her. She had 
 steeled herself for disaster. The strong shock of joy 
 was a knock-out blow! But in a few days she was 
 up and speeding on the way to her sons." 
 
 What the American Red Cross is doing for the 
 children in this situation may be grouped under two 
 heads : First, immediate, temporary aid ; second, per- 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 139 
 
 manent work. Whatever the French Government 
 wishes in the way of personnel, equipment, drivers, 
 and so on, to meet an urgent relief need, the Ameri- 
 can Red Cross stands ready to deliver at an hour's 
 notice. But — and this is important and not gener- 
 ally understood— the French themselves must first 
 express the desire, extend the invitation for aid. We 
 are the guests; they are the hosts. And it is not 
 the policy to rush in, take over the whole French 
 problem, willy-nilly, and begin to run things off on 
 brisk American methods. France has her national 
 pride, like ourselves ; and it is her pride, even in this 
 stress, to care for her own wherever she can. Such 
 a course of procedure on the part of the Red Cross 
 may mean a little more slowness at the outset; but 
 it means a deeper and more sympathetic bond be- 
 tween the two nations in the end — and in the end it is 
 not less successful than the crude head-on attack. 
 Thus in the Evian problem the French struggled for 
 months to care for the thousands of refugees, and 
 with a pitifully scant nursing and medical staff ac- 
 complished marvels. Still, to make a complete medi- 
 cal examination of every incoming rapatrie with sucK 
 a staff would need a day of a hundred hours. And 
 without such medical attention contagious diseases 
 and epidemics were bound to creep into France, 
 which, in fact, they did. 
 
 When these defects were called to the attention 
 of the French Government it at once frankly called 
 
140 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 for American aid. The same week a dozen ambu- 
 lances and drivers, in charge of an American chef de 
 service who had won distinction before Verdun, were 
 dispatched to assist in the transportation. In pass- 
 ing it should be said that the winter work of these 
 Red Cross ambulance drivers upon the borders of 
 that glacier lake, in an ice-box temperature, with a 
 keen zero wind thrusting playful darts between the 
 shoulder blades, deserves a special mention. It is 
 not a spectacular service or, save for pneumonia 
 microbes, especially dangerous. It is simply a 
 plugging, monotonous grind in freezing isola- 
 tion. 
 
 After the ambulances had been dispatched a group 
 of medical specialists were sent out to study the prob- 
 lem on the ground and suggest plans of permanent 
 value. The result of their examination was the es- 
 tablishment of a receiving hospital of one hundred 
 beds in Evian to care for the sick ; a second hospital 
 in Lyons for the chronic cases ; and still a third hos- 
 pital on the Mediterranean for the tuberculosis pa- 
 tients. 
 
 In addition to the hospitals, a clinic has been estab- 
 lished right in the Casino itself, so that no child 
 leaves the building without a medical examination. 
 And these two agencies, the inside clinic and the out- 
 side hospitals, render the situation, so far as the 
 danger to the state is concerned, practically water- 
 tight. For the clinic catches the small, microbe-rid- 
 
CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 141 
 
 den victim and shoots him straight to the hospital, 
 thus turning a secure lock upon the spread of disease. 
 As is the case on the northern frontier, these chil- 
 dren suffer chiefly from malnutrition, contagious skin 
 diseases and tuberculosis. It has been estimated 
 roughly that about ten per cent of the rapatries need 
 hospital attention each day, and about one-third of 
 that ten per cent are tuberculous. 
 
 The hospital at Evian is as modern and complete 
 in its child equipment as expert thought can achieve. 
 At present there is a colony of about fifty workers 
 on the ground. One phase of the hospital service, 
 as the head nurse outlined it to me, is of especial 
 educational value. 
 
 "All of our nurses' aids, our auxiliaires, are French 
 refugee girls," she explained. "This means prac- 
 tically a training school for nurses. And when it is 
 realized that the French nursing standards are as 
 low as the French surgery standards are high the 
 need for general instruction in this line becomes ap- 
 parent. We shall teach these raw, untrained peasant 
 girls simply the first principles of caring for the 
 sick. But if we do no more than instill into them 
 the fundamentals of cleanliness, convince them that 
 all-over baths are not scandalous, that babies do not 
 thrive on wine, that fresh air does not kill, that sheets 
 should be changed slightly oftener than once a 
 month, that pneumonia and tuberculous patients do 
 not prosper in hermetically sealed rooms, and a few 
 
142 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 other modern, common-sense maxims, I for one shall 
 be very content !" 
 
 These hospitals for children, established in needy 
 zones throughout all France as fast as may be, con- 
 stitute one of the most effective and long-range 
 pieces of work that the American Red Cross has un- 
 dertaken, for they minister to the immediate want 
 and at the same time strengthen permanently the gen- 
 eral health tone of a nation. That the French ap- 
 preciate our effort in this field is undoubted, and one 
 of their statesmen has said that the impetus given by 
 America to the conservation of child life in France 
 is one of the most beneficial by-products of this great 
 war. 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 
 
 Hooray! Vive la belle France! I'm going to 
 France ! I'm going to be a canteener ! Maybe I shall 
 go right up to the Front just behind the first-line 
 trenches and be under shell fire and be bombed by 
 boche avions and hear the alerte and have to scurry 
 to ahris and all that sort of thing. I don't know any 
 of the details yet — nobody over here does — but any- 
 how I'm going ! That's the chief thing. 
 
 I'm so excited and thrilled I scarcely know what 
 I'm doing, but outwardly I try to keep poised and 
 calm, for mamma has been disappearing at intervals 
 into her handkerchief ever since she gave her consent ; 
 and as for papa, he doesn't say much; in fact, the 
 dear old sport is quieter than ever — but I catch him 
 looking at me, when he thinks I don't see, in a way 
 that makes me realize I'm the only girl he's got down 
 here below and that he'd never send me if he had a 
 son to give. Not having a son and being a true-blue 
 American with generations of fighting blood inside 
 of him — for the man who said "Don't shoot until you 
 see the whites of their eyes !" was my father's great- 
 
 143 
 
144 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 grandfather — he's figured it out that the best he can 
 do is to send his girl instead. That's the ground 
 of his consent. And mamma's a Daughter of the 
 American Revolution, so that lets her out. 
 
 It was pure accident — or fate — which made me run 
 into Edith on the street a week ago to-day and thus 
 start the wheels of destiny, 
 
 "Come in and have some tea," she said after con- 
 gratulating me on my engagement, which had just 
 been announced, "and tell me all about it — and him. 
 You deep little mouse — to pull this off right under 
 everybody's nose and keep as secret as the grave! 
 Who is he, anyhow?" 
 
 "He's Major B , of the Fifty-blank Infantry. 
 
 He's just received his majority and he's just twenty- 
 nine." 
 
 "Major, eh? That's not so bad." 
 
 "And, oh, Edith, he's leaving for France sometime 
 this month, and I — I don't know what to do !" 
 
 "What would you like to do?" asked Edie, laugh- 
 ing a little at my blushes. 
 
 "I'd like to go over there, too," I replied without 
 hesitation, staring straight into her deep blue eyes. 
 "It doesn't seem as if I could stand it — the long, long 
 separation. Irregular letters. And when they go 
 into action, not knowing, not hearing, maybe never 
 hearing. Never. Just the silence!" 
 
 "You're in the same fix as a million other Ameri- 
 can women right now," replied Edith grimly. 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 145 
 
 "And you've got to stand it. That's our job." 
 
 "I know," I said heavily. "But it doesn't make 
 your own toothache any better to know that there's 
 an epidemic of toothache raging over the whole civi- 
 lized world." 
 
 Edith sat looking at me with a smile deep down 
 in her eyes. She has been married three years, the 
 first of our class ; and now she looks at the entire out- 
 side world with that same air of tender smiling ab- 
 straction. 
 
 "It's all part of the game," she said finally. "And 
 we women must keep the flag flying. Jack" — Jack's 
 her husband — "is going over next month. He doesn't 
 have to, of course, being over the age limit. But he 
 foresaw this two years ago, and went and prepared 
 himself at Plattsburg. He wouldn't volunteer then 
 on account of me and baby. But now the call has 
 come it finds him ready. He feels the whole situation 
 deeply. I'm glad." 
 
 "Oh, Edie, you — brick !" I breathed, squeezing her 
 hand hard. I thought of her left alone with her 
 child — and not any too much money either. 
 
 "Edie's all right," she murmured unsteadily, her 
 blue eyes bright as diamonds. "Don't you fuss about 
 her! But now about you — I have an idea. What 
 can you do? Practically, I mean." 
 
 "I've had a six-months' course in the hospital " 
 
 "They don't take anything but graduate nurses 
 now," 
 
146 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 " and I've had two years of domestic science 
 
 and food values. Then last summer I operated a 
 cafeteria in the suburbs for the Women's League- 
 did all the buying and accounts myself. It was fun. 
 In college I was head of the basket-ball team and the 
 tramping club, and I've never been sick a day in my 
 life." 
 
 "How old are you?" 
 
 "Twenty-four." 
 
 "A bit young. However," said Edith briskly, ris- 
 ing, "I'll see what I can do. There's just a bare 
 chance — ^but I'm not going to tell you beforehand, 
 for fear we burst the bubble. Run home now. Stick 
 round the telephone. There may be a long-distance 
 call. Put a few things into a bag while you're waiting. 
 Do you think you could go on to New York to-night?" 
 
 I suppose my eyes must have been as big round as 
 saucers with excitement, for suddenly Edith bent 
 right over and dropped a kiss on my cheek. "You 
 darned little kid!" she whispered. "I know exactly 
 how you feel. Now trot!" 
 
 I trotted — ^walking on air. 
 
 For the next two hours I hung round the landing 
 where the telephone is, and finally settled down on 
 the top stair. 
 
 "For goodness' sake, child!" cried mamma, stum- 
 bling over me as she came out of the sitting-room, 
 'Vhat on earth are you doing here, all bunched up 
 in the dark .?" 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 147 
 
 T— I'm- 
 
 Just then the telephone rang. I sprang to the re- 
 
 ceiver, 
 
 Oh, I see!" said mamma, laughing as she went 
 downstairs. 
 
 But she didn't. 
 
 Central got the long-distance line cleared and then 
 over the wire there came a woman's clear, crisp, busi- 
 nesslike voice: "I wish to speak to Miss Carlotta 
 Murray." 
 
 "This is she." 
 
 "Miss Murray, could you sail for France a week 
 from Saturday?" 
 
 My heart gave a sort of big thrilly jerk and I had 
 a sudden shock as if my nerves had got short-cir- 
 cuited. 
 
 "Ye-yes !" I gulped faintly. 
 
 "What? Speak louder." 
 
 "Yes !" I shouted into the mouthpiece, holding on 
 to the wall for support. "Dee-lighted !" 
 
 "Very well. Be at our office at eleven to-morrow 
 morning. You'd better come prepared to go straight 
 on to Washington to arrange about your passes. 
 Good-b " 
 
 "Wait!" I cried excitedly. "Who is it speaking? 
 I don't know who you are." 
 
 "Red Cross Headquarters. New York office. 
 Good-by.'* 
 
 She hung up and left me gasping in the darkness 
 
148 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 on the stair. Well, I was in deep over my head now ; 
 and so I found mamma and put it straight up to her: 
 Would she give her consent if papa did? At first she 
 refused up and down, but by six o'clock I had her 
 coaxed round to the point where she was packing my 
 suitcase and making up lists of things I'd need in 
 France — woolen underwear and galoshes and sweaters 
 and first-aid outfits and what nots. And all the time 
 we didn't either of us know what I was going to do 
 when I got over there any more than the man in the 
 moon. The call had tumbled right out of a clear 
 sky. But once I'd got mamma to see the situation as 
 it really was, outside her motherhood so to speak, 
 she was as keen as mustard for it. 
 
 We had dinner upstairs in my room. Delia served 
 it on a tray. And when she heard I was sailing for 
 France she just said, "Oh, my Gawd! Submarines !" 
 and dropped the tray and burst into tears. You'd 
 have thought the submarines were right under my 
 bed. At that mamma broke down altogether and 
 Delia embraced her — Delia's been with us ever since 
 I was born — and there followed a hectic half hour. 
 I was beginning to think Delia had spilled the beans 
 for me with her "Oh, my Gawd !" when all of a sud- 
 den mamma glanced at the clock, pulled herself to- 
 gether and exclaimed sharply: 
 
 "Good gracious, child, get into your clothes — 
 quick ! Do you want to miss that train ? Delia, run 
 down and phone for a taxi." 
 
 I 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 149 
 
 Delia went, still dribbling tears and tomato bisque. 
 Then mamma rushed off a telegram to Uncle Jim to 
 meet me in New York, rushed me into my things, 
 rushed me down to the station, through the gate, onto 
 the train, gave me a swift breathless hug and de- 
 parted. That's the way she is, all tears one second 
 and a regular little whiz-bang field marshal the next. 
 But it was some evening ! 
 
 The next morning in New York Uncle Jim and I 
 breakfasted at the Belmont, after which I walked 
 over to Red Cross Headquarters, had an interview, 
 and took the train to Washington. I had already 
 wired papa, who was down there on business, to meet 
 me, and told him to watch out for a life-size jolt. 
 When I stepped off the train, there he was, leaning 
 against a pillar and looking, as the novelists say, sin- 
 gularly handsome and debonair. 
 
 "Hello, Miss Murray!" he said, taking my bag 
 away from the porter. "Now come on with your 
 jolt." 
 
 "Vive la France T^ I said by way of commencement. 
 
 "Ha! So that's the bill of fare? With all my 
 heart. May she vive forever. But what's that got 
 to do with the price of winter umbrellas ?" 
 
 "The Rochamheau sails a week from to-mor- 
 row." 
 
 "Well," said papa, still bluffing away, though I 
 could see from the way he started that I had landed 
 him one right over the heart, "I haven't any stock in 
 
150 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 her. The submarines may go as far as they like." 
 
 "They want me to sail on her — as a canteener,'* 
 
 "As a whatter?" demanded papa. 
 
 **A canteener. A person that works in a canteen. 
 You know — serves hot drinks and food and all to 
 the soldiers." 
 
 "Who wants you to go?" he growled in his Grossest 
 cross-examining-witness manner. 
 
 "President Wilson. God. American Red Cross. 
 Mamma. Delia. Me." 
 
 "Pretty good references," observed papa dryly. 
 "Especially Delia. But not worth a single red cent 
 in the present Instance — unless indorsed by me. Now 
 let's get down to brass tacks. What is this all 
 about?" 
 
 That's the way papa always talks with me, straight 
 from the shoulder, just as if I were his law partner 
 and we were threshing out a case. And so I told 
 him. I told him how the high commissioner for Eu- 
 rope of the American Red Cross had cabled to Wash- 
 ington for women to be sent immediately to France to 
 work in canteens ; how Washington had telegraphed 
 to New York to collect a group of workers without 
 delay ; how New York had telegraphed to Boston for 
 names of suitable persons with training along that 
 line ; how Edith, the president of her Red Cross chap- 
 ter, had been called into council — and how that led 
 to me. 
 
 "It's the finger of destiny, papa," I wound up; 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 151 
 
 "and it's pointed straight at me — ^like the man in 
 the ad. There's just one hitch." 
 
 "Only one.f^" observed papa with his grim httle 
 half smile. 
 
 "The cable says women over thirty." 
 
 "Well," chuckled papa, "I guess that lets you out 
 — for about six years anyhow. And by that time the 
 war will be over. Though Bairnsfeather says that 
 the first seven years will be the worst, and after that 
 every fourteenth year." 
 
 "I'm within the draft limit," I protested. "And if 
 they take infants of twenty-one to be soldiers I don't 
 see why a college graduate of twenty-four, captain 
 of the basket-ball team and with a record in Greek, 
 hasn't enough gumption to stand behind a counter 
 and deal out sandwiches and coffee. It makes me 
 sick!" 
 
 "Well, all that's a minor matter," said papa, "It's 
 fitness, not age or lack of it, that counts. But let's 
 waive that for the moment and get down to the ker- 
 nel of this proposition. Why are you interested in 
 this thing? Why do you want to go — or think that 
 you want to go? Now don't hand out any cheap 
 sentimentality. Don't insult the cause by any tawdry 
 emotionalism. Come clean. What are your rea- 
 sons ?" 
 
 Followed a conference — or moral examination, 
 rather — which lasted for over four hours, straight 
 through dinner, up to eleven o'clock; and still we 
 
152 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 sat on at table, papa smoking one cigar after an- 
 other, until the big hotel dining-room was deserted 
 and the lights went out. There was no question from 
 the first of a downright refusal. He simply talked 
 to me, eye to eye and man to man. He spoke as if 
 I were his son, a soldier, going off to war, and he 
 charted the cardinal points of conduct. He saw the 
 thing big from the start, and I loved him for it. 
 Then we talked about life and love and marriage, the 
 rights of men and nations, and how this war was 
 going to temper and fuse America like steel that's 
 been through fire ; we talked about personal responsi- 
 bility, the Red Cross, and he showed how any human 
 institution rested straight back on the individual, so 
 that if I fell down on my job the whole organization 
 would feel the shock. He didn't give me a whole deca- 
 logue of "Don'ts" to guide me over there, but he did 
 give me three big "Do's." Here they are: 
 
 Number One: Get round your own job and leave 
 it to the other fellow to get round his. 
 
 Number Two: Keep alive and lovable. Women, 
 he said, are a little more apt than men to go to 
 seed. 
 
 Number Three : Keep your sense of humor. 
 
 Altogether, it was the best talk I've ever had on 
 earth, and when it was done he kissed me? and then 
 we sailed out arm in arm for some ice-cream soda at 
 the corner drug store, and I treated him and he 
 treated me — our immemorial custom. 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 153 
 
 It was all settled the next morning that I was to 
 go to war. They didn't even query my age ! 
 
 That morning, after breakfast, papa said, "Guess 
 I'll just walk over with you to that shebang of yours, 
 in case you need identification." 
 
 "No, you don't!" I said. "I'm going to get this 
 on my own credentials — my cafeteria credentials ! — 
 and not because I'm the daughter of Judge Murray, 
 alias Old Silver Tongue. 'Get round your own job 
 and leave it to the other fellow to get round his.' 
 Axiom One." 
 
 Papa grinned. "Strike one — right over the plate. 
 All right. Let me hear what the jury decides." And 
 we went our separate ways. 
 
 At the office in the Women's Bureau it took less 
 than ten minutes to get through the red tape and 
 settle my future, as follows: I'm to be a canteen 
 worker. I pay all my own expenses. And I literally 
 do pay them, with my cafeteria money and a check 
 I received for writing a movie. I've signed on for 
 six months, during which time I can't marry an 
 American army officer — without losing my job and 
 getting sent home to America. Wow! For further 
 orders report to Number Four, Place de la Concorde, 
 Paris, France, seat of a world war for civilization. 
 Think of it, oh, my soul ! Well, sink or swim, live or 
 die, survive or perish, the Murray family gives its 
 heart and its hand to this vote! 
 
 The last week has been one mad, wild, excited 
 
154. OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 scramble — with canteen uniforms, French lessons, 
 gum boots, telephones, typhoid and paratyphoid in- 
 jections, girls dropping in to say good-by, mamma 
 dismal as a corbie crow weeping off in odd corners, 
 and papa humming mournfully : " 'I didn't raise my 
 kidlet to be a soldierette.' " 
 
 On Tuesday night I said good-by to Robert. We 
 dined together downtown and then Bob said, "Let's 
 go round to Lucille's and dance." 
 
 And so we did. But I just couldn't seem to put 
 any spirit into it. 
 
 "Do you realize, Bob," I said, "that this is our 
 last dance together?" 
 
 I suppose my voice sounded rather wabbly, for 
 Robert gave me a sharp look and said, "Not on your 
 life ! Where did you get hold of that notion ? Are 
 you going to throw up the sponge?" 
 
 And then I remembered that my case was exactly 
 that of a million other women scattered all over the 
 land, who were still keeping the flag flying, as Edith 
 had said ; and so I bucked up and we finished up with 
 a very good time. 
 
 On Shipboard, November 12th. 
 I begged papa and mamma not to come down to 
 New York to see me off, but of course they would. 
 However, it turned out all right. Papa blew us to 
 a two-course dinner without wine downstairs in a 
 famous grill frequented by successful actors and ar- 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 155 
 
 tists and writers, after which he packed us off to a 
 musical comedy and kept up a light artillery of jokes 
 all through the evening, and we both laughed so hard 
 that mamma finally lost patience and declared we 
 were a perfect scandal. There was just one awful 
 moment at the last. That was on the boat when papa 
 gave me a big still hug and then held his cheek close 
 to mine the way he's done ever since I was a baby. 
 
 "Papa," I whispered fiercely into his ear, "if you 
 make me cry now I'll kill you !" 
 
 "Shucks, honey!" he murmured back. "If Miss 
 Rankin can cry in Congress I guess a green little 
 soldierette can shed a few tears when bidding a fond 
 farewell to native land and mother, without grave 
 dishonor. Still, I don't want to cramp your style. 
 Cable us when you land. Be a good girl — but not 
 goody. And now, so long, dear. God bless us all 
 together !" 
 
 And still smiling and steady he shook hands with 
 me just as if I were his son, and then marched 
 mamma, sobbing audibly, gently off by the arm. I 
 went downstairs to my cabin. 
 
 No danger of my being sick. My bunk mate is ! 
 I hardly know how to describe my feelings after we 
 had really started and there was time to look about — 
 it all seemed so sort of natural and matter-of-fact, 
 and France still merely a small pink dab on the map. 
 It wasn't a bit startling to be out of sight of land 
 and hear people discussing submarines and lifeboats, 
 
156 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 but it was a horrible sensation to have the boat 
 plunge down and leave your stomach In midair. A 
 gorgeous sunset to-night, but it's rough and going 
 to be rougher, I fear. I walked about some, and then 
 decided discretion was the better part of valor and 
 retired to my deck chair. 
 
 November 15th. 
 Three awful days in my cabin, too sick to stir. 
 But to-day it's smooth and the air is marvelous. 
 After a fine salt bath I came up and pranced about 
 the deck ; and there were lots of nice people to prance 
 with — naval officers, Belgian generals, French per- 
 missionnaires, and any number of Y. M. C. A.-ers and 
 Red Cross men. Played shuffleboard; tried the din- 
 ing-room for ten minutes, and then decided to have 
 all my meals on deck in order to watch for the sub- 
 marines, 
 
 November 24th. 
 Land is in sight — a long low ribbon of mist away 
 on the starboard. That's France! It still doesn't 
 seem reasonable. The trip has been nothing at all. 
 Evenings we would sit out on deck. It was weird with 
 never a light, even cigarettes forbidden; inky black- 
 ness on deck, and stumbling and pitching into some- 
 one at every step. It was awesome from the stern 
 to see two big black funnels silhouetted against the 
 starry sky, the phosphorescence of the water rivaling 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 157 
 
 the splendor of the heavens ; and to realize that all 
 the time this huge mechanical monster beneath our 
 feet was plowing steadily, silently forward, carry- 
 ing seven hundred human lives across three thousand 
 miles of water. 
 
 Paris, November 26tK. 
 Paris af last, beautiful, soft, gray, in a blur of 
 rain. I reported at Number Four, Place de la Con- 
 corde, heard a speech by the commissioner, and was 
 assigned right away. It's just exactly what I wanted 
 and didn't dare to dream I'd get ! I'm to work in a 
 canteen in one of the biggest aviation camps in 
 France. With our own American men! We'll live 
 in barracks, get up at reveille, five-thirty a.m., 
 and — — But I'm somewhat hazy as to our duties. 
 Time will reveal. After the conference I met Lucile 
 
 B , a Bryn Mawr girl, and found she's to canteen 
 
 with me at the same barracks. We embraced and 
 nearly fell downstairs in our excitement. Lucile has 
 moved her things over to my hotel so we can chum to- 
 gether, 
 
 November 27th. 
 Slept — off and on — ^^and Ea'd a breakfast in bed, 
 after the luxurious Continental fashion, — wouldn't 
 Delia sniff? — and then I read Baedeker's Paris aloud 
 while Lucile unpacked. We lunched and did accounts 
 and then walked over to Red Cross Headquarters. 
 
158 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 After reporting there we got our provisional car3s 
 of identity and went down to a shop on the boule- 
 vard and ordered bracelets of identity. Had my hair 
 washed by a poilu on permission and tried out my 
 Boston French on him. He understood me better 
 than I did him ! Later Lucile and I taxied over to 
 Napoleon's tomb, saw the German airplanes in the 
 court of the Invalides, and then went on to Notre 
 Dame. It is wonderful inside, so high and spacious 
 and old and gray, with a scented misty twilight air as 
 though dimmed by many prayers. I made two pray- 
 ers myself — one personal, and the other impersonal 
 for our army, and I only hope they come true. 
 
 November 28th. 
 While waiting to be sent to camp I delved into the 
 subject of canteens in general. And I found that the 
 old canteen idea is as different from the new canteen 
 idea as day is from night. A canteen before this war 
 meant simply a place where a soldier could buy a 
 drink and perhaps procure notions, buttons and 
 needles and thread. But that old idea has expanded 
 and developed until now it really comprises a whole 
 welfare center, a regular community plant for dis- 
 pensing food and comfort and good cheer. There 
 are restaurants, writing rooms, infirmaries, sleeping 
 quarters, pianos, phonographs, entertainments — 
 everything you can possibly think of to keep a col- 
 lection of men far from home happy and sane and 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 159 
 
 sound. Of course not all these canteens are alike, for 
 each one caters to some particular need and thus 
 develops along a particular line. Its location deter- 
 mines its special bent. 
 
 There are, I was told at headquarters, several 
 types of canteen. 
 
 Number One : These are the metropolitan canteens 
 of Paris, situated at the big railway stations — the 
 Gare du Nord, the Gare de I'Est and the Gare Saint 
 Lazare — which catch all the troops coming into or 
 leaving the city. 
 
 Number Two: These are the canteens of the 
 Grande Ceinture, at little stations on the environs of 
 Paris, where innumerable troop trains pass through 
 daily, carrying thousands of soldiers from England, 
 Italy, America, Saloniki, Portugal, Africa. These 
 troops never even enter Paris, but are shifted on the 
 outskirts of the city. 
 
 Number Three: Canteens in the French war zone 
 behind the actual fighting lines in the big transpor- 
 tation centers. 
 
 Number Four: Canteens right on the French 
 Front, in dugouts and abris. In these canteens there 
 are no women helpers. 
 
 Number Five : Canteens in the American training 
 camps, behind the war zone. That's the kind I'm as- 
 signed to. It's the biggest American aviation center 
 in France. 
 
 Number Six: Canteens for American soldiers 
 
160 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 dotted along the lines of communication from the 
 coast ports to the final training centers. All these 
 canteens are under the control of the American Red 
 Cross. 
 
 December 1st. 
 
 In barracks ! Yesterday was my first day. I got 
 up in the dark at bugle call, five-thirty a.m., and 
 dressed in the cold — our stoves are not up yet and I 
 don't know who's going to start the fires when they 
 are ! — ^had some hot coiFee and went over to serve be- 
 hind the counter, serving coffee, chocolate and sand- 
 wiches. A long queue of soldiers stood in line 
 straight through the morning, and, work as hard as I 
 could, the line constantly augmented. Some wanted 
 to linger and chat. It was good, they said, to see a 
 real live American girl who could talk God's lan- 
 guage, and not that scrambled-egg affair the French- 
 ies handed out. One confided he'd not seen a genuine 
 honest-to-goodness girl for four months; since he'd 
 left home, and added that he liked 'em on the Ameri- 
 can plan better than on the European plan. I 
 couldn't do much more than smile in answer, for the 
 orders flew thick and fast. 
 
 By noon the place was so crowded you couldn't see 
 for the forest of campaign hats. A babel of voices ; 
 a rattle of dishes ; the phonograph going ; the piano 
 banging; a bunch of enlisted men trying out Mine 
 Eyes Have Seen the Glory ; canteeners running back 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 161 
 
 and forth with meals for the officers, whose tables 
 were in behind the counter ; rain trickling down my 
 neck from an overhead leak; sleet and windy rain 
 shaking the windowpanes ; sneezes and coughs ming- 
 ling with shouts of laughter; and always the far door 
 opening to let in the storm and still more and more 
 men, till they were packed like sardines in rows — 
 these are my impressions of that first noon hour. 
 
 Suddenly: ''Otto, Sie hahen etwas vergessen!" I 
 heard a low guttural voice speaking close behind my 
 ear. 
 
 "/«, ich weiss,'* replied another. 
 I whirled, visions of spies, explosions and poisoned 
 soup rushing wildly through my brain. 
 
 "What's this?" I cried. "German? In an Ameri- 
 can aviation camp? What are you two doing here?" 
 They stared at me stupidly. One held a mop and 
 the other held a broom. Of course they were spies ! 
 "You are Germans— Deutsche I challenged again, 
 sure that I had uncovered a regular Guy Fawkes 
 plot. 
 
 "Ja," admitted the one called Otto, and jerked 
 a thick dirty thumb toward his working blouse, on 
 the chest of which was inscribed in big black letters 
 "P G" with a slim little "i" between, so that it read 
 "PiG." 
 
 "Pig!" I said wonderingly. 
 
 A soldier across the counter came to my aid. 
 "Prisoners of war," he explained briefly. "P, Q, 
 
162 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 stands for prisonnier de la guerre. Some joker 
 slipped the middle "i" over onto him. And it's not 
 so far wrong at that! Look at the beggars' fat 
 jowls. They help round the camp, unloading trucks, 
 scrubbing up the barracks, and so on. For obvious 
 reasons they're not allowed in the kitchens. They 
 have their own quarters behind barbed-wire entan- 
 glements — ^but you just bet they don't try very hard 
 to get away. This is better than machine-gun fire." 
 
 "Are they good workers?" 
 
 "Not so you'd notice — but they make up by being 
 fine eaters. You should see them tuck away the grub 
 that Uncle Sam sends three thousand miles across 
 the sea to feed his Allies. I reckon they figure that 
 the more they eat the less there'll be for the enemy, 
 and there's more than one way of killing a cat. The 
 French are too easy on them, and that's the fact." 
 
 In the afternoon things went easier for a while. 
 As it was still raining we had mess in the canteen and 
 then sat and made up jam sandwiches. Along about 
 five another tremendous rush began. I was put on the 
 marmites. These are big urns of coffee which are 
 constantly filled and refilled from the boiling-hot 
 vats on the stove. It is heavy, dirty, back-breaking 
 work, and inside of an hour my clean blue blouse and 
 spotless collar looked as though I had slid down a 
 chimney. And my hands — was I ever proud of these 
 red, chapped, grubby-nailed horrors? Nota bene: 
 If you love to be dainty, don't be a canteen maid. 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 163 
 
 At nine-thirty p.m. we closed, and I was so dead 
 tired that I tumbled into bed and unlaced mj boots 
 by the feel. The first shift is from seven a.m. until 
 four P.M., and the second from noon to nine-thirty 
 P.M. But some of the workers are down with severe 
 colds, their substitutes have not yet arrived, and that 
 means double duty for the rest. From five in the 
 morning until nine at night is some day's job, believe 
 me! You have to be hardened before you can stand 
 the pace. A delicate girl would crumple up inside 
 of a week. Of course when we get organized and a 
 system blocked out things will move more smoothly. 
 At present we're a brand-new plant. 
 
 December 5th. 
 
 Superb aviation weather ! For the past week it's 
 been blowing, hailing, raining, snowing, thawing, and 
 then beginning all over again da capo with unabated 
 zeal, like a child with only one tune. Water over- 
 head and slush underfoot. Colds, pneumonia, tonsil- 
 litis, dipththeria, grippe-— these are the enemies our 
 soldiers have to face and conquer or be conquered by, 
 every single day. And yet, despite the hostile 
 weather, the men go up for practice just the same. 
 And thus far only one death. 
 
 Our stoves are up. The P. G.'s have put them in 
 every room. No more rising in the dark in freezing 
 temperature and washing in the water from your hot- 
 water bottle. And we've appointed a fireman to build 
 
164 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 the fires. We're to take the job week about. As 
 there's no water laid on in our barracks yet, we've 
 had also to appoint a water bearer to keep the jugs 
 filled and on the fire. Each morning the P. G.'s swab 
 down the green linoleum floors of our quarters fresh 
 and clean — and inside an hour they are caked with 
 real estate. Entire town lots come away with our 
 boots. 
 
 This morning when I went over to the canteen the 
 cook had not shown up. And in front a long line of 
 waiting doughboys stood, beating a hungry tattoo 
 on the counter. What to do? Of course we could 
 have turned them out while we rounded up another 
 cook, but that's not what we're here for. "Get round 
 your job," said Axiom One, and feeding these men 
 was it. So I went into the kitchen. A soldier vol- 
 unteered his aid. And all through the morning hours 
 we two worked like firemen at a ten-story fire. Bacon 
 and eggs, repas complet; we cooked and cooked and 
 cooked. 
 
 In the afternoon as a change I was assigned to go 
 on a camion to the neighboring farms and collect 
 butter, eggs, vegetables and fruit. It was lowering 
 when we set forth, with a raw chill wind that blew 
 every way at once, and presently the air turned black 
 and the water came down like a waterspout out of the 
 sky. Nevertheless we completed our circuit. It was 
 twilight when we returned. I went into the canteen 
 kitchen. 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 165 
 
 "Well, he's been and gone!" a chorus of voices 
 cried. 
 
 "Who?" I inquired, catching my breath. They 
 tossed me a card and a note. 
 
 It was Bob ! He had got a day's leave unexpect- 
 edly and he spent four hours of it coming down to 
 see me, found me gone, and spent another four get- 
 ting back again. He'd sent a wire last night, but 
 of course it hadn't reached me. I suppose it will 
 arrive the morning after eternity and rout me out 
 of bed! 
 
 I went back to quarters feeling pretty blue. There 
 were little zigzags of fiery pain running up and down 
 my neck from bending so long over the stove; my 
 skirts were sopping; and my feet in their heavy boots 
 with their excess acreage of mud were so heavy I 
 could scarcely drag them after me. I opened the 
 door upon a cozy scene. Lucile was making tea. 
 She had lifted the lid of the small fat-bellied stove in 
 the center of the room, and with a long fork she was 
 toasting the nubbins of war bread down over the live 
 coals. Somebody strange was sitting in our one easy- 
 chair. 
 
 "Come in," cried Lucile, "and shut that door! 
 Here's a lady from 'The Saturday Evening Post'; 
 she's come down to look at the animals in the 
 zoo." 
 
 "Well, what do you think of us?" I asked. 
 
 "I think," she replied, looking first at Lucile bend- 
 
166 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 ing over the stove, then round at the bare board walls 
 hung thick with mackintoshes and storm skirts, at 
 the shelves containing each girl's toilet articles, at 
 the cots ranged along the sides covered with dark 
 army blankets, at the trunks standing everywhere, at 
 a leak in the roof from which the rain was decanting 
 with a steady tap-tap onto my pillow, and finally 
 back at Lucile again — **I think it's a cross between 
 a girls' boarding house, an East Side tenement and a 
 Western mining shack. And I think you girls are 
 ripping to rough it like this !" 
 
 "Pooh!" said Lucile, taking up her banjo and be- 
 ginning to strum. "We love the hardships. Of 
 course a weakling couldn't stand the racket. You 
 have to be sound through and through, or sooner or 
 later it gets you. In a month or so, though, we're 
 going to have enlarged quarters, and then two girls 
 will have a cubby-hole to themselves and we'll be rid of 
 all this clutter. Also we're going to start an officers' 
 club where we serve hot meals to the aviators ; in the 
 same building will be recreation rooms, and just out- 
 side a garden and a tennis court. Then we'll be 
 grand luxe! As yet we're still in the making, like 
 creation on the fourth day." 
 
 "How do you keep clean?" the visitor wanted to 
 know. 
 
 "You don't," I said grimly. "Look! But since 
 Lucile has bought a rubber bathtub we manage a 
 bath once in a while." 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 167 
 
 "She thinks our boots are funny," said Lucile. 
 
 "She wouldn't think they were quite so funny if she 
 had had to oil them and keep them clean. You should 
 have seen mine the other day when I slipped and fell 
 in front of the post-office. I thought the whole camp 
 and the hangars and the flying field were coming right 
 along with me like the top of a layer cake. I give 
 you my word, for a second I was afraid to move my 
 feet for fear I'd lift the town." 
 
 The lady rose to go. Lucile went over to her trunk 
 and got her diary, which the lady had asked to see. 
 After some debate I gave her mine, too. I only hope 
 she uses discretion! 
 
 December 11th. 
 
 Dazzling sunshiny weather. I counted seventeen 
 planes up. Got back my diary. The lady said she 
 read it in bed and whooped so over some of the pas- 
 sages that we could have heard her clear out to camp, 
 it was the parts where I told what I thought about 
 men. She swore, though, she wouldn't use them; 
 and I hope she keeps her word ! Worked at the mar- 
 mites in the forenoon and behind the counter in the 
 afternoon. Right in the middle of the rush, when I 
 was pushing hot chocolate and sandwiches across the 
 counter as fast as my two hands could fly, I suddenly 
 heard a voice say: "One coffee, please — and step 
 lively!" 
 
 It was Robert! I was so busy that there was no 
 
168 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 time then for more than a handshake. After Robert 
 had squeezed my hand he turned it over in his palm 
 and stared steadily down at it, all chapped and rough 
 and red. I cut my thumb yesterday, and the 
 bandage was ragged and coifee-stained. Altogether, 
 not a hand that you'd enter at a beauty show. But 
 Bob only said **Bully little flapper!" and couldn't 
 seem to let go of it. Then for an hour he helped me. 
 He'd got another leave, he said, and thought he'd 
 try my camp again. 
 
 At four I went off duty and the directrice lent us 
 her sitting-room, where we had tea together and — 
 well, sort of caught up on arrears. Afterward we 
 strolled about the camp in the early twilight and 
 came by the post-office for the mail. Robert and I 
 stood off at one side and watched the soldiers hurry- 
 ing from all directions like ants converging upon 
 that one radiant doorway of warm streaming light. 
 The board walks resounded to their footsteps. On 
 and on they came, some on the dead run. It was 
 weird to see those figures suddenly evolve out of the 
 gloom. 
 
 "And that's not all," said Robert. "This one 
 camp with its thousands of men is the epitome of 
 scores of other camps over here, where at this twi- 
 light hour exactly the same performance is taking 
 place — thousands on thousands of lonesome soldiers 
 hastening, with eagerness in their hearts, to get that 
 word from home. That's one end of the line. At the 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 169 
 
 other end are the girls and wives and mothers at 
 home writing those letters with cheerfulness and 
 faith — thousands of Susie Smiths and Mamie 
 Joneses! A Whitman could make a fine poem out 
 of that, naming every girl and her town. And be- 
 tween those two ends so far apart is the big invisible 
 rope of love. They talk about the necessity of guns 
 and effectives, but, by George, if they lived in one 
 of these god-forsaken little villages behind the Front 
 they'd realize that it's the guns plus the letters of the 
 Susie Smiths and Mamie Joneses which are going to 
 win this war!" 
 
 December 20th. 
 
 Robert left that same night, and ever since I've 
 been laid up with tonsillitis — the first time I've been 
 ill in my life. It was a splendid opportunity to think 
 — only there wasn't anything to think about. That's 
 the bother with this war — it kills thought. But I 
 kept the fires up and the big jugs heating for the 
 baths, and cleaned the girls' boots, and talked with 
 the P. G.'s, and indexed our new library, and counted 
 the flies on the wall, and made the tea every after- 
 noon. Nevertheless I could feel my brain begin to 
 disintegrate with idleness. That's the worst trouble 
 with the soldiers in the trenches — nothing to do. It 
 gives them the cafards, the black butterflies, the blue 
 devils, the jimjams, the hump. 
 
170 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Christmas Day. 
 
 Raining again, slowly but surely. However, I'm 
 on my job again — in waders ; and with three pairs of 
 heavy woolen stockings underneath. These frame 
 buildings just can't help but leak, and they always 
 want to leak wherever the back of your neck is. To- 
 day we gave out Red Cross Christmas boxes to all 
 the soldiers and cadets and officers. You should have 
 seen the rush! Men who at home were used to re- 
 ceiving from their fathers a six-cylinder car as a gift 
 and then remarking casually "Oh, thanks awf'lly, old 
 chap !" came crowding up for those boxes, as eager 
 as kids for tin horns. And there was no put-on about 
 it. They wanted their Christmas presents ! 
 
 After a full day we had mess — turkey ! — ^with some 
 of the officers, and then half a dozen of us went over 
 to the Y. M. C. A. hut to see the movies. We sat in 
 the front row — six women among five hundred men. 
 These evening entertainments are a great boon. And 
 the shows are so well attended that they have to give 
 two performances each night. Later we danced, over- 
 shoes and all. After that we tramped over to the 
 barracks of the P. G.'s to see their Christmas tree. 
 Altogether it was a strange Christmas. Where shall 
 we be this time next year? All those solid husky 
 youngsters who filled the hall with their jolly laugh- 
 ter? All these slim young aviators with their bud- 
 ding mustaches and their straight, keen, fearless eyes ? 
 What has 1918 in store for us? 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 171 
 
 December 31st. 
 
 IVe been transferred ! There was a call for more 
 workers at a certain canteen, and so some of us 
 
 were shifted round. Now I am at X , which is a 
 
 canteen on the environs of Paris, of Number Two 
 Type. Here thousands of troops pass through each 
 day from all parts of France, carrying the Allied 
 man power for redistribution upon every Front. Oc- 
 casionally soldiers lie over a few hours while new 
 trains are being made up, but usually they go straight 
 through, with a ten-minutes' stop for food. Some- 
 times the men have traveled from thirty-six to forty- 
 eight hours without a bite to eat. Thus our chief 
 work is upon the platforms or quais, distributing hot 
 coffee, chocolate and sandwiches. The heavy rushes 
 come between six and eight in the morning, at noon, 
 and once more at dusk. Often there will be trains on 
 two tracks at the same time, one full of grim, silent 
 troops bound for the Front, the other filled with jolly 
 permissionnaires going home on leave. There is a 
 sharp contrast of mood between those two trainloads 
 of Frenchmen, so close together upon those narrow 
 parallel tracks. The incoming ones face home and a 
 brief spell of happiness ; the outgoing ones face — an- 
 other year! And the unending weariness of it, the 
 bitter black nostalgia, is to be read in those black 
 eyes straining out at you from the windows. 
 
 Thie is to-day's record — my first day here : I rose 
 and was on the quai by six-thirty. It was dark, and 
 
172 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 the cold was appalling. It had been snowing, and 
 a high wind slapped icy particles against my cheek. 
 The pavement of the quaiy where it was not covered 
 with snow, was caked with dirty, slippery ice so that 
 one had to step gingerly for fear of accident. My 
 feet were freezing, despite the customary three pairs 
 of stockings and heavy boots. 
 
 "You'll have to get some clogs," said a white-haired 
 American worker beside me. "Look !" She lifted her 
 skirts and I beheld thick wooden-soled boots — sabots 
 with leather tops. "Sweet, aren't they.? But better 
 than frozen feet!" 
 
 The train was late. The marmites of boiling hot 
 coffee stood waiting by the track, each with its 
 padded flannel jumper to keep the contents hot. The 
 basket of ham sandwiches, apples and Camembert 
 cheese were covered with oilcloth as protection from 
 the wet. The workers, some Americans, some French, 
 in blue blouses and veils, swathed to the eyes in their 
 mantles, huddled in the sheltered lee of the station 
 and stamped their feet and swung their arms to keep 
 warm. Those drafty quais in the raw dawns are the 
 native heath of pneumonia microbes. 
 
 Suddenly the captain of the gave blew his whistle. 
 
 "Here she comes !" cried the white-haired American, 
 and seized her coffee cart and started down the track. 
 The rest of us followed with sandwiches. The long 
 train slowed to a halt. Snow piled high upon the 
 roofs of the cars ; snow upon the steps and vestibules ; 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 173 
 
 icicles dripping from the eaves — and nobody de- 
 scended! Not a move or a stir. It looked like a 
 specter train. 
 
 '^Cafe! Cafe, messieurs! Descendez, messieurs! 
 You have ten minutes !" 
 
 It was the gay voice of a little French canteener 
 as she ran from car to car, tapping on the window- 
 panes. And then — ^bang ! Some of the windows were 
 let down, heads began to poke out, and tin cups 
 stained with pinard appeared at the end of arms. 
 
 "No, no, messieurs. Descend if you please. You 
 have time. And we can't wait on you all up there. 
 Ah, you little monster" — this to a big giant who sud- 
 denly loomed above — "come down from that window. 
 The coffee is good and hot !" 
 
 That cheerful, laughing voice, so absolutely French 
 in its intonations, roused the silent train. And then 
 thej^ came pouring out like a cloudburst and almost 
 mobbed the coffee machine. Hundreds of hands and 
 cups were under the faucet at once. 
 
 ''Dix centimes J messieurs! Dix centimes, n*est-ce 
 pas?'' 
 
 The little mademoiselle shook her tin cup, and the 
 sous rattled into it — but still the men did not speak. 
 They drank their beloved scalding hot beverage in 
 silence. The snow fell steadily, tipping their mus- 
 taches, the visors of their kepis, the edges of their 
 coats — with a powder of white, like silhouettes. And 
 still they uttered no word ! Remember, it is the day 
 
174 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 before New Year's — a day dear to every French- 
 man's heart — and these men were returning to the 
 Front. The whistle blew. 
 
 "En voiture!" 
 
 The circle of hands about the coffee machine melted 
 as if by magic. The train sucked them inw And still 
 not a single word had been spoken! I turned, that 
 strange grim muteness of a voluble warm-hearted race 
 sinking into my heart. I turned, and the spell was 
 broken. I heard a young French voice. It was a 
 soldier, who at the risk of losing his train had lin- 
 gered to thank the white-haired canteener for filling 
 his coffee cup. She was down on her knees in the 
 snow, decanting the last drop of precious liquid from 
 the machine. Her white hair was powdered still 
 whiter with shining crystals. Her face streamed with 
 perspiration and was rosy from exertion. 
 
 "Ah, madame," said the soldier, "it is the sym- 
 pathy and courage of women like you that give us 
 strength to go on with this dirty war !" 
 
 She did not understand a word of his rapid lingo, 
 but she patted his arm and smiled. Each compre- 
 hended the other ! The next instant the train was a 
 rushing shadow on the blinding white landscape. 
 
 And then before we could draw breath or refill our 
 marmites another train was upon us. This time it 
 was permissionnaires returning home. They hopped 
 out like joyous schoolboys, with a fusillade of teas- 
 ing banter. 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 175 
 
 "Aha! 'Tis the pretty little Americans! Say! 
 You are all right, you know, you Americans !" 
 
 "I have an American marraine. Will you be my 
 marraine, mademoiselle? You don't know how nice 
 I am ! Not 'naughty boy' !" 
 
 "Look! Ham sandwiches ! My, God, we're in Par- 
 adise !" 
 
 They bought out the apple basket and had apple 
 fights. And while we were rushing the growlers cross- 
 tracks for more coffee they marched up and down 
 arm in arm and chanted in our honor a trench ditty 
 about a new relative they've acquired. The chorus, 
 loosely translated, runs hke this : 
 
 « 9 
 
 Tis my Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam! 
 
 He is a fine copain* 
 
 He comes from AmSrique. 
 
 The terror of the German, 
 'Tis my Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam! 
 
 He is sympathique. 
 
 The great Repuhlicain. 
 
 The met or y of demain, 
 'Tis to Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam!" 
 
 And when at length the train pulled out, heads were 
 thrust from the windows, cups and kepis were waved, 
 and a rousing ''Vive V AmSrique!'' floated back to us. 
 For these men were going home, 
 
 * Pal. 
 
176 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 January 4, 1918. 
 
 Aside from the work on the quais we also run a 
 canteen in behind the station, where we serve meals 
 to the men obliged to wait for their trains. In ad- 
 dition next month we intend to start a buffet counter 
 right on the tracks, where the hungry soldier pass- 
 ing through with only ten minutes at his command 
 may obtain a solid meal of soup, meat, vegetables and 
 coffee. The benefit of this kind of service to troops 
 traveling, sometimes in open cattle cars, a day and 
 a night without food, can never be estimated. 
 
 In our canteen we feed all the sons of earth — even 
 German prisoners. Yesterday was our banner day. 
 We began with some English from the Royal Flying 
 Corps. Then followed in rapid succession Alpins 
 Chasseurs ; a company of Arabs, whose French officer 
 had a tiny baton with which he waved them in and 
 out and set them down to table like children in a 
 row ; Senegalese ; Annamites ; American negroes ; Ca- 
 nadians; Hindus; Chinese; Portuguese; and train 
 upon train of French and American troops. We 
 were so rushed in the cluttered and cramped little 
 kitchen that we had to establish a sort of bucket 
 brigade to pass the food forward to the men. 
 
 Our cook, a mountain of jelly, is almost the ugliest 
 woman in France; and her husband, a cross-eyed, 
 bandy-legged little ogre, is certainly the ugliest man. 
 And yet each considers the other a perfect paragon 
 of beauty. Leonie brags about her handsome mart; 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 177 
 
 and Andre chants the praises of his exquisite "petit 
 angcy** and they nod and smile and coo endearing 
 compliments to each other among the pots and pans. 
 By profession Andre is a sexton, and it is only in his 
 off hours, when he is not sweeping the church or bury- 
 ing the dead, that he consents to grace our kitchen 
 with his Apollolike form. 
 
 Besides serving food, a canteen of this description 
 is a sort of emergency bureau where almost anything 
 may turn up. Buttons are sewn on, wounds ban- 
 daged, cough medicine administered, letters written 
 home, and general physical and moral good cheer 
 kept on tap day and night. After the great Italian 
 debacle, when thousands of French troops were being 
 rushed down, our canteeners worked twenty-four 
 hours at a stretch upon these icy quais. The emer- 
 gency came in a minute, and they had to handle it in 
 a minute. And the food they served was all the food 
 those famished troops received. No time to halt and 
 feed hungry mouths, with the Prussians battering 
 down the gates of Italy ! At another canteen, farther 
 south, a trainload of French wounded came through 
 from Italy. And the canteeners flew aboard with 
 food, bandages and first-aid appliances, and in the 
 brief time allotted transformed those starving, un- 
 tended sufferers. 
 
 The other day a bunch of Montana cow punchers 
 tramped into the canteen, and when the leader — a 
 loose, lank, lean giant of seven feet nothing — saw the 
 
178 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 American flag he took off his hat and said, "Thank 
 Gawd, boys, we're found — at last. We're home." 
 
 It turned out that in the shift of trains they had 
 somehow got separated from their detachment, and 
 for over two days they had wandered about the 
 frozen little town, without a word of French, without 
 money — for they had not yet received their pay — and 
 consequently without lodging or food. 
 
 "But why on earth don't you ask for something 
 to eat ?" I exclaimed. "You're nothing but great big 
 sillies !" 
 
 The leader drew himself up proudly. "I reckon 
 we warn't going to let none of them fly Frenchies get 
 onto our little private plight and give us the merry 
 ha-ha — was we, boys?" 
 
 "Not by a dern sight !" agreed the strayed maver- 
 icks stoutly. 
 
 We fitted them out with food, postals, an English- 
 French dictionary, some French money with written 
 instructions as to its value, and steered them on their 
 way. 
 
 Yesterday I had an experience of still another sort. 
 It was in the middle of a bleak afternoon, and the can- 
 teen was empty. I was sitting in the kitchen by the 
 stove, making up the baskets for the evening rush on 
 the quais — so many slices of ham, so many apples, 
 so many pieces of cheese — when the far door opened, 
 an American soldier drifted in, leaned over the buffet 
 for a time, and finally with a strong Texas drawl 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 179 
 
 said : "I wish you'd write me a letter, ma'am — to my 
 wife." 
 
 "What's the matter with your writing it yourself?" 
 
 "I don't know exactly what to say. It's dog-gone 
 delicate, and that's a fact. You see, I got a bad die- 
 ges-tion." He pronounced it as if it were three 
 words, with a heavy stress on the "die." 
 
 "But you don't write with your die-ges-tion." 
 
 "No; but it's this way, ma'am. My wife, she's 
 went and divorced me. And it's all along of my bad 
 die-ges-tion. I don't blame her no way. I reckon 
 that bad die-ges-tion did sort of get between her and 
 me. But that ain't what I aim to say in the letter. 
 It's about this here new insurance. I've made mine 
 out in her name." 
 
 "But if she's divorced you on account of your bad 
 die-ges-tion she has no claim on you now." 
 
 "I don't give a whoop in hell about that," he re- 
 sponded soberly. "I want her to get it, that's all. 
 And I kind of thought maybe you might fix it up for 
 me in a letter, so's she'd understand, and tell her I 
 don't bear no grudge. I got a bad die-ges-tion." 
 
 And so I fixed it up for him in a letter ; and there's 
 one woman in America who has lost a man with a 
 mighty good heart even if he has a bad die-ges-tion. 
 
 January 10th. 
 Transferred again. But this time I'm settled for 
 good. This is a canteen of Type Number Three, in 
 
180 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 the French war zone, in a big transportation center 
 within sound of the guns of Verdun. Anywhere from 
 three to ten thousand troops pass through daily. 
 Here again, this canteen is absolutely different from 
 the two others, because the conditions are different. 
 It is a canteen which the French call grand luxe. A 
 beautiful spacious building, given by the French 
 Government; tastefully decorated interiors; rest 
 rooms with papers, writing materials, piano, tables 
 and easy-chairs; restaurant; sleeping quarters, 
 hot baths ; gardens with statuary ; and ahris in 
 case of aerial attack — altogether the poilu's de- 
 light. 
 
 **Tres chic, hein?^* murmurs the Frenchman. He 
 stares about him at the clean airy place, gay with 
 chintz curtains, painted garlands on the walls, and 
 even the electric globes veiled with soft yellow Chinese 
 silk. And he catches the idea at once. "Pas mili- 
 taire, pas du tout du tout,'' That's it exactly. It's 
 not military at all at all. The French artist who 
 conceived the scheme was so nauseated with every- 
 thing military that he let himself loose on this can- 
 teen to make it cozy and homelike and gay. Its soft 
 beauty delights the poilu ; and its baths, its disinfect- 
 ing plants where he can rid himself of vermin, its 
 kiosk where he can buy his beloved pinard, its hot 
 chocolate — made with milk, after an American recipe 
 ■ — contribute to make it a very paradise of canteens. 
 Its fame is known all over the French war zone. The 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 181 
 
 poilus come miles to see if it's as good as report. 
 At night in the rest room thej lie outstretched in 
 those canvas easy-chairs — ^just how easy none but a 
 weary poilu can know!— and they stare through 
 dreamy half-closed eyes at the warm charm of the 
 place, soaking it in at every pore; the smoke of 
 countless cigarettes rises in a kind of enchanted mist ; 
 there is an occasional bubble of laughter or the low- 
 toned give-and-take of copains round the brazier ; but 
 chiefly there is silence, luxurious well-earned ease for 
 tired limbs — linked sweetness long drawn out. Oc- 
 casionally, when the wind is right, a vague distant 
 rumble seems to echo in the air. Is it thunder, or is 
 it bombardment? Or are those ears so accustomed to 
 the ceaseless roar of heavy artillery that they still 
 hear it resounding, even in this quiet spot.? A poilu 
 rolls over, opens one eye, listens. 
 
 "What is that? Les canons?" 
 
 His companion cocks an ear. 
 
 *'Mais non,'* 
 
 *'Mais oui" 
 
 "You're crazy! Whence, then?" 
 
 The first soldier sits up and takes his bearings. 
 
 " 'Tis Verdun," he proclaims. ''N'est-ce pas, 
 mademoiselle?'* 
 
 "Yes," replies the canteener at the desk ; "we can 
 often hear the guns of Verdun on a thick night." 
 
 "Me — I come from Verdun," says the poilu, al- 
 ways ready for a chat. 
 
182 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "Were you one of those who held Verdun when the 
 Crown Prince made that terrible attack?" 
 
 "Ah, those glorious heroes of Verdun!" murmurs 
 the canteener with misty eyes. 
 
 The simple poilu looks at her, puzzled, angry, and 
 finally blazes forth: 
 
 "Heroes ! Heroes ! I'm always hearing about 
 those people — those heroes. But I never saw any- 
 thing of them. They weren't in the fight. I tell you, 
 it was we, we Frenchmen alone, who won Verdun !" 
 
 The canteener apologizes tathe unconscious hero. 
 
 In a canteen of this description, serving anywhere 
 from three to ten thousand men a day, the work must 
 be organized down to its last detail. And it is. The 
 mechanism runs as smoothly as a well-oiled auto- 
 mobile. For one thing, our directrice has a "flair" 
 for handling people, for getting along with the 
 French domestics — we have a kitchen staff alone of 
 twenty — and for making her workers contented and 
 at home. Nor is the work itself so hard as in the 
 other canteens. For one thing, labor is plentiful. 
 For another, we live in a town. And in our time off 
 we can shop or stroll or laze about the comfortable 
 big house we've leased for quarters. Our hours, too, 
 are well arranged. As the canteen remains open all 
 night and meals are served straight round the clock, 
 the day is divided into four shifts: From seven a.m. 
 to one P.M. ; from one to seven ; from seven to eleven- 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 183 
 
 thirty; and from eleven-thirty p.m. to seven a.m. 
 In addition there is an extra shift to help at the rush 
 hours, which occur usually about ten a.m. and four 
 P.M. At these times the big dining-room resembles 
 nothing so much as a six-o'clock subway rush. The 
 poilus are packed in tight as they can squeeze — 
 every one with his head pointed toward the caisse, 
 where are sold the tickets for the repas complet. 
 Each meal costs seventy-five centimes. 
 
 January 16th. 
 
 Of all the shifts I love the morning best. Then the 
 men come storming in so ravenous that it's a pleasure 
 to see them eat. And then is when they're gayest. 
 The afternoon is apt to be prosaic. But the night 
 shift is the most interesting of all. Then things seem 
 to stand out, to take on personality, to become more 
 alive, vivid and real. Then impressions, pictures, 
 scenes are stamped on the brain as clean as if cut with 
 a die, true in every trivial detail. Soldiers playing 
 cards by the light of a flickering candle, their huge 
 ungainly shadows capering up against the wall. 
 
 Now and again from the shadows emerges a clear 
 profile, aquiline, delicate, a living medallion with 
 closed eyes. Over in yonder corner, for example, is 
 a boy fast asleep. His head tilted against the wall 
 reveals a face as finely chiseled as any on an old 
 Roman coin. His curly lashes lie flat on his thin 
 cheeks. His nostrils are slightly pinched. Two 
 
184 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 perpendicular lines run from nose to jaw. How 
 young he looks, how white and worn! His mobile 
 mouth, softly closed, droops at the corners, like that 
 of a tired child. He stirs and mutters something. 
 And now he smiles! He is dreaming, that boy, I 
 know. If his mother could see him now ! . . . The 
 rear door opens, the guard thrusts in a head and calls 
 a certain train. The young soldier rouses, staggers 
 for his pack, drunk with sleep, his face still soft with 
 dreams. 
 
 I remember one night a slumbering poilu sprang to 
 his feet, shouting ^^Aua: armesT* And his voice was 
 so thrilling and terrible, so charged with hoarse com- 
 mand, that all the soldiers leaped up, wide awake on 
 the instant, and glared wildly about them. The next 
 minute the room was filled with curses, not loud but 
 deep. 
 
 Work of this kind, hard and monotonous as it un- 
 doubtedly is, is yet the most satisfying in the world 
 — provided one has a gift for it. It takes hold of 
 the heart. It is immediate, it has the warm personal 
 touch, and it ties you straight up with humanity in 
 the raw. The abstract philosophy of the war — ^who 
 is the most to blame and why — ceases to vex you. 
 You become absorbed in your own little circle. Life 
 beyond it seems remote. You love the poilu and he 
 loves you — and makes no bones about it. So let the 
 Huns rage over behind yonder ridge, and imagine 
 vain things. Somehow, all that does not concern 
 
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 185 
 
 you. You have become confident, gay, certain of 
 destmy-like the simple little poilu. It's service that 
 does it. 
 
 Last night when I returned home from work it had 
 stopped raining. Overhead the great overturned cup 
 of sky glittered and gleamed— with half its stars 
 dropped down into the dark flowing river by my side 
 And there was a second moon down there, pale and 
 drowned. An enchanted mist, fine as a bride's veil, 
 hung over all. By night the Marne is beautiful. Far 
 off came the boom of the Verdun guns, that hammer- 
 ing which has been going on now for years, "as if two 
 armies of giants were striking unceasingly at an un- 
 shakable gate of bronze." Here it was nothing but 
 an echo on the wind. There, as one Tommy put it, 
 it was "hell multiplied by six." 
 
 ■ They say the Germans will break through this way. 
 I think of the thousand thousand poilus who have 
 tramped through our canteen, each one an anony- 
 mous hero— and I smile. It's all right. Let the 
 Huns come on ! 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 In the beginning we did not intend to go to Ver- 
 dun. We did not dream that it was even within the 
 bright reahns of possibility. At the moment — a su- 
 premely painful and suspense-filled moment, fraught 
 with danger to France and the Allied world — ^Verdun 
 belonged strictly to the forbidden zone. Forbidden 
 to all outsiders, men and women, to all civilians and 
 civilian affairs; forbidden, indeed, to all the world 
 save those grim horizon-blue-clad veterans who were 
 rushing northward by trainloads, together with heavy 
 effectives. 
 
 Permission had been stopped. Stopped also the 
 parcels to the Front. It was not the hour for the 
 manifestation of woman or love or the transmission 
 of tokens of affection. It was the hour for men and 
 arms. Paris, a military camp shelled in the day by 
 long-range guns and bombed in the night by Gothas, 
 was locked to the north with a staunch lock, and the 
 Grand Quartier General held the key. You could 
 come in if you chanced to be caught up there when 
 the storm broke, but you could not get out again. 
 
 i86 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 187 
 
 For it was the closing week of March, 1918. The 
 long-awaited, much-heralded offensive had arrived. 
 For months it had been the first word in the mouths 
 of privates, officers, statesmen, editors — the entire 
 civilized world. When, where, how — some one of 
 those three aspects of the universal question cropped 
 up in every conversation in the course of half an 
 hour. 
 
 Well, now we knew the partial answer to those 
 three questions. For the shadow of the menace of 
 the long months was beginning to realize itself ; it had 
 become flesh and dwelt among us, a fabulous red 
 monster of carnage and slaughter up there in the 
 north. 
 
 When the Germans struck their first sledge-ham- 
 mer blow and the Fifth British Army recoiled before 
 the blow the entire line from north to south felt the 
 thrill of the shock. Paris, the goal of the enemy, 
 felt it, too, and there went up from the city a kind 
 of big sigh, a long exhalation, which was almost a 
 breath of relief. At any rate the long suspense was 
 past. At the end of the third or fourth day refugees 
 began to pour in by thousands, a poor, tragic, dazed 
 procession, twice bereft of their scanty possessions. 
 They brought with them wild, incoherent, garbled 
 accounts of the terrible sanguinary losses on both 
 sides. 
 
 Paris, perhaps all France, possesses the feminine 
 temperament. In hours of ease she is willful, coy and 
 
188 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 hard to please — especially with strangers ; she is 
 charming, baffling, impatient, outspoken over the 
 foibles of her best friends and allies, keenly aware 
 of the ridiculous, gay with a spice of maliciousness ; 
 her caricatures, often grossly unjust, are master- 
 pieces of fine satirical wit. But in the hour of trial 
 she gathers herself together with a courage, a poise 
 and a profound tenderness for those of her people 
 who have been stricken that are exceedingly good to 
 see. 
 
 And that is what happened now. Paris found im- 
 mediate food and shelter for the fugitives ; printed 
 proclamations that appeared all over the city, bid- 
 ding the citizens to remain steadfast and unshaken 
 in their faith of victory and put no credence in lying 
 rumors ; and at the same time, as the Big Berthas con- 
 tinued their vehement spitting at intervals, and the 
 air raids harried and took toll of the city's innocent 
 poor — for it is chiefly the workers, the servants, the 
 little people of Paris living in the top stories up 
 under the roofs who had to descend each night to the 
 caves at the call of the siren — the newspapers urged 
 all families who could afford it, all those who had 
 children or old or sick to remove themselves out of 
 the new zone of danger to the tranquillity of the 
 country. 
 
 And thousands followed the wise advice. Hotels 
 de luxe were emptied inside of a week. Shopkeepers 
 and workers who could manage to leave ordained a 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 189 
 
 spring holiday and departed to their relatives in the 
 provinces. It was an exodus. There were left the 
 big wide empty places of Paris, filled with a gray- 
 blue gossamer mist soft as chiffon, which wrapped 
 all the city in an enchanted web ; the tranquil garden 
 walks deserted by children, vivid with rhododendrons 
 and the drifting pink and white petals of chestnut 
 blooms ; and the good solid block of reliable Paris 
 citizens, neither frightened nor fugitive, who had 
 lived through the Marne and the Mons and the Cham- 
 pagne and the Verdun attacks, and who read the dis- 
 quieting communiques with composed faces and went 
 about their affairs as usual. 
 
 Practically no troops are now routed through the 
 capital, but occasionally one saw small detachments 
 of fantassins with their heavy marching equipment 
 filing through the empty squares. They did not look 
 warlike, those poilus, veterans of four years, when 
 they appeared in the streets of Paris. They marched 
 slowly, laboriously, one foot lagging after the other, 
 shoulders bent beneath the weight of the kit, their 
 eyes fixed on the ground. The horizon-blue uniforms 
 were faded and patched and their clumsy storm coats 
 with the skirts buttoned back gave them an indescrib- 
 ably pathetic air. Seen thus at twilight and melting 
 into the dusky background there was something about 
 these somber, slow-plodding, burdened figures that 
 hurt the heart. One felt an overwhelming tenderness, 
 a pity for these brave little men. And yet these were 
 
190 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 the selfsame poilus who a few days later stemmed the 
 furious German tide — and they sang as they went 
 into battle. And nearly four years they sang ! 
 
 It would not be untrue to say that underneath her 
 courageous calm Paris did not feel the cruel strain 
 of that first uncertain week of the offensive. The 
 strain of the situation was brought home to me, wait- 
 ing for my passes, by several incidents. Naomie, the 
 trim little femme de chambre, pretty as a pink ca- 
 mellia, whose voice has the soft deep throb of a cello, 
 went about with a face as pale as the linen she bore 
 on her arm. And as she made the bed and swept and 
 aired the room she wept, quietly, steadily, the silvery 
 globules stealing silently one by one down her cheeks. 
 When they obstructed her vision she stopped, brushed 
 them away methodically and went on. My pillow was 
 wet with Naomie's tears. 
 
 "I am ashamed, mademoiselle ; I ask pardon to be 
 like this," she murmured one morning when I had 
 caught her outright drying her eyes. "One must be 
 strong these days. But my husband, he has been 
 transferred up north on the British line. And now 
 I have not heard from him, here it is over a week. 
 Before he always sent me a little word each day. He 
 never failed — some little word each day." She 
 plaited the counterpane with unseeing eyes as she 
 muttered: "Ten days! Yes, it is that — ^just. And 
 not one little word. But one must be strong, n*est~ 
 ce pasy mademoiselle?*' 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 101 
 
 The next disturbing thing that happened was the 
 
 news that B had deserted. His wife was my 
 
 friend. B was a Frenchman in a famous fight- 
 ing regiment, sensitive, fine-strung, none too strong, 
 who had been in the trenches since 1914. What evil 
 of fear, irritation, revolt or sheer brain collapse led 
 to the decision we shall never know. But one day he 
 threw down his gas mask in the midst of an attack 
 and walked out of the trenches. His battalion had 
 been incessantly shelled for weeks. In the front-line 
 trenches they were hammered by the guns. In the 
 back areas, en repos, they caught the bombs. No 
 sleep in either place. This kept up week after week. 
 
 And suddenly, like an elephant, B had "gone 
 
 bad." 
 
 He appeared suddenly in Paris at a time when not 
 a single Frenchman was on leave ; and he walked the 
 boulevards with the number of that famous fighting 
 regiment on the collar of his tunic blazing forth for 
 all the world to see. It was a miracle he was not in- 
 stantly caught. As it was he was a prisoner ; for he 
 had no papers, and therefore he could not send a 
 telegram or register at a hotel or take a train or 
 
 leave the city. A friend telegraphed for B 's 
 
 wife, who was in the country, sending a noncommittal 
 
 wire so as not to alarm B 's mother, an ardent 
 
 patriot, who would have instantly handed over her 
 recreant son to the police. The wife arrived. To 
 her B declared his intention of joining the For- 
 
192 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 eign Legion. That meant that his brain flare or mo- 
 mentary cowardice had passed. 
 
 Anyone may join* the Foreign Legion. There no 
 embarrassing questions are asked. They take on all 
 comers, and then pitch them headlong into the very 
 kottest hell of the battle. Accordingly B , know- 
 ing that if he could once win to their offices he would 
 be safe from arrest, stole out from his doorway one 
 morning and, avoiding officers and gendarmes, gained 
 the recruiting bureau. 
 
 But here an unexpected blow fell. The recruiting 
 end of the bureau had been shifted to Lyons. But 
 how to get there! He could not ride in a train or 
 a public conveyance. He could not dine openly in a 
 restaurant or sleep in a hotel. And to be seen tramp- 
 ing south in this crisis meant certain arrest and 
 death. However, there was nothing for it but to 
 make the attempt — to walk by night and lie hidden 
 in the day. He started forth — and no word has been 
 heard of him since. 
 
 In time the news of his desertion leaked out. And 
 the gendarme on the beat took it upon himself to 
 
 rebuke Madame B for having such a villain 
 
 husband. He is a fat, greasy, bald-headed little man, 
 this gendarme, who sits long over his grenadine, and 
 has never been nearer the Front than the city forti- 
 fications, 
 
 Madame B flew at him like a fury. 
 
 "Have you ever been out there — fat embusque?" 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 193 
 
 she shrilled, shaking her finger under his nose. 
 "Have you fought four years in that hell? Been 
 wounded five times, had fever, rheumatism, suffered 
 from shell shock, been made deaf from bombardment, 
 had your nerves shattered so that j^ou never sleep? 
 Is your hair turned gray at twenty-five years? Oh, 
 my God! No? Then keep your mouth shut! »Tis 
 not for such as you to speak of this war I 'Tis for 
 those who have endured." 
 
 It was this courage made human by the private 
 griefs of the people of France, who after four weary, 
 crucifying years were still bearing the cross, filling 
 the breach, saving the day, and saving it with a su- 
 perb dash despite individual heartbreaks, that filled 
 my mind as, our passes obtained, we journeyed north- 
 ward. It seemed to me that perhaps the month of 
 March, 1918, was to be made memorable by the fact 
 that at that particular time America began definitely 
 to shift to her own young shoulders the weight of 
 the agonizing burden France had borne so long. For 
 this reason the opening offensive marked a transition 
 period, for theretofore we had held only quiet sec- 
 tors. 
 
 But it was not the fact of the shifting of the out- 
 ward burden that interested me so much as to dis- 
 cover if possible whether that shift was to extend 
 also to the spirit — whether the soul of France, the 
 soul of her soldiers, her poilus, was to pass into the 
 soul of this new, strong, eager young Army. For the 
 
194 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 quality that distinguishes the poilu from his enemies 
 and from his allies alike is not brute force, or body 
 fitness, or stubborn pride, or stiff resistance, or 
 obedience, or cohesion, or physical valor — but sheer 
 spiritual stamina. He has an invincible come-back. 
 His soul can't be beat. The French, who are an ex- 
 tremely clannish race, say that they feel a closer 
 bond with Americans than with any other people on 
 earth. This is not mere diplomatic balder-dash. 
 They declare that aside from possessing the same 
 democratic ideals, the same passion for scientific re- 
 search, there is a decided similarity of temperament. 
 In both peoples there are the same swiftness of per- 
 ception, the same suppleness of mind, lightness of 
 wit and comradeliness toward life and toward each 
 other which have made France like one great family. 
 And now that the two nations in this offensive are 
 fighting side by side and brigade by brigade, the 
 French in their speeches and editorials and communi- 
 ques have announced that the spiritual metal of the 
 two armies is the same; that the spontaneous, un- 
 quenchable, ^^En avant! Tou jours en avantT* qual- 
 ity of attack, attack, and again attack of the French 
 poilu is also the salient characteristic of the new- 
 comers. It was this particular declaration that put 
 a keener edge on my observations during my jour- 
 ney. I was on the lookout for signs in our men of 
 the conquering will of the poilu. 
 
 It is not germane to the subject to describe in 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 195 
 
 detail that eight-day motor trip through the heart 
 of the American war zone in France. We covered 
 each day hundreds of kilometers of the lovely rolling 
 meadow and hill country of Lorraine — orchards, 
 fields and woods radiant in shimmering green, clothed 
 in primal light of leaf. We passed scores of red- 
 tiled hamlets, each the identical facsimile of the other, 
 with steaming manure heaps adorning the front yards 
 of prominent citizens, hens and bouncing babies 
 scratching therein, and toothless old dames sitting 
 on the doorsteps peering out upon the world with 
 faded eyes. 
 
 We stopped at numerous American base-hospital 
 centers, some in stone cantonments, formerly army 
 barracks turned over by the French; some former 
 hotel resorts ; and still others brand-new frame build- 
 ings, entire villages with duck-board streets. We 
 motored through endless series of repos stations, one 
 following hard upon another like beads on a string, 
 of English, American, French, Italian, Portuguese, 
 Annamlte and Senegalese troops. At the close of 
 the day in the rosy smolder of the afterglow we 
 hunted aviation camps In the advanced war zone, and 
 found the vast aerodromes so shrewdly camouflaged 
 that we could scarcely discern them from the dappled 
 landscape. We passed through the center where Is 
 situated the training school for army officers, a beau- 
 tiful old fortressed town set like a coronet high on a 
 wooded hill. We stayed the night at Army Head- 
 
196 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 quarters in a hotel packed with the hierarchy of the 
 General Staff, where automobiles with flags drew up 
 before the door and mackintoshed generals berib- 
 boned and bestarred strode in out of the lashing rain. 
 
 Our quest took us from the drowsy, tranquil rear 
 of the war zone clear up to the Luneville sector be- 
 yond Toul, where we witnessed two air fights in the 
 course of one morning. It was the portion of France 
 given over to the American effort. We traversed 
 and crisscrossed it back and forth and from end to 
 end. And everywhere we met the same phenomenon 
 — the lithe, clean-limbed, khaki-clad American sol- 
 dier. The land was alive with him ! Several months 
 previously I had been over this same territory, and 
 then even a Red Cross man was a rare animal which 
 the natives paused to regard. Now, after eight 
 months, the entire countryside hummed and buzzed 
 like a vast beehive. It was the visible result before 
 our eyes of all the sweat and labor and strain of a 
 mighty nation intent on a single goal — to transport 
 men to France. 
 
 Well, here were the men, hundreds of thousands of 
 them, scattered over a vast camp ground. We met 
 battalions of them swinging along the roads in step 
 and singing a lively marching air. We came across 
 them in sunny fields prodding dummy Huns with bay- 
 onets ; we passed groups of them in remote and peace- 
 ful valleys picking off targets at rifle ranges. We 
 met them at lonely crossroads, together with a 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 197 
 
 French comrade, acting as military police. They 
 gave us the salute that is known as the Pershing — 
 bringing the hand smartly up to the forage cap in 
 an abrupt little gesture full of style. And they in- 
 variably followed the salute with an infectious after- 
 grin. The salute was Pershing's. The grin was all 
 their own. We saw them tearing along roads at a 
 breakneck clip in those snorting demons of motor- 
 cycles called "wife-killers." We overtook them driv- 
 ing camions and transports and mule teams. 
 
 Later we met an entire division on the move — ar- 
 tillery, infantry, ammunition and cook wagons — a 
 long strung-out procession against the drab sky line. 
 They were bound up there, they vaguely told us. But 
 we knew and they knew that they were going to par- 
 ticipate in a struggle compared to which life in the 
 drowsy Toul sector was as but a holiday fete. We 
 glimpsed them driving powerful American locomo- 
 tives, beside which the diminutive French engines 
 seemed like toys that one could pick up in the palm 
 of the hand — and they leaned far out of their ca- 
 booses to cheer. We saw them packed like herrings 
 in the dingy low-ceiled dining-rooms of provincial 
 towns, drinking their pinard diluted with water in 
 true poilu style, then fetching out their makings and 
 rolling a smoke in true American style. We saw 
 them in camp, en repos, in hospital, on the march. 
 
 There is a pageantry about war when one sits 
 back thus and views its effects from the outside — a 
 
198 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 kind of large, glittering nobility which thrills and 
 quickens the blood despite oneself — until one sees the 
 wrecks. And in the hospitals we began to get the 
 
 wrecks. In , a famous old town turned into a 
 
 hospital center, we stopped to look up some missing 
 men. The other members of the party went to visit 
 the wards, but I wandered about the streets and pres- 
 ently came upon a squad of privates in wrinkled, 
 freshly disinfected uniforms, the tunics skin-tight, 
 revealing the owners' slim waists and finely swelling 
 shoulder muscles. But they had a pale washed-out 
 look, as if they themselves had undergone the ordeal 
 of disinfection along with their uniforms. A lieuten- 
 ant was calling the roll. 
 
 Aside from the line-up a few paces stood a husky 
 private with a sulky lowering face. He had crowded 
 his battered sombrero down over his bloodshot eyes 
 and was scowling like a movie pirate. "What's hap^ 
 pening to those men?" I asked, nodding at the squad. 
 
 "They've been gassed and now they're declared 
 O. K. and are going back to the Front." 
 
 He spoke in a curious broken rasping whisper, 
 which I recognized. 
 
 "You've been gassed, too ?" I hazarded. 
 
 "Yes," he croaked. "And I'm just as well as any 
 fellow in that gang. We all got it at the same time. 
 But the doc, when he heard my voice, wouldn't let me 
 go. But damn it all, a guy don't fight with his 
 voice !'* 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 199 
 
 *^He's playing favorites, that doc," whispered an- 
 other lank, humorous-eyed young giant strolling up, 
 his peaked forage cap drawn low so as to shelter, if 
 possible, those bloodshot eyes. "Wouldn't let me out, 
 either ! Durn the durned docs, I say !" 
 
 "But you were burned as well as gassed," I ob- 
 jected, for the entire lower part of his face and neck 
 was an angry red peeling blister. "What kind of 
 gas was it?" I demanded. 
 
 "Mustard. Burns your insides out if you get a 
 bad case. I tell you I've had enough to last me one 
 life. No more mustard on cold beef for mine!" 
 
 "And how is the gas-mask discipline?" 
 
 "Well, that depends on the battalion. In my bat- 
 talion the commander was strong for drills. We had 
 them morning, noon and night, and in the middle of 
 the night. Seemed as if the old man had gone crazy 
 on gas discipline. But when the big gas attack came 
 we had only a four per cent casualty list, and the 
 battalion alongside, which had been going easy on 
 drills, caught it something fierce. Our battalion got 
 recommended to G. H. Q. I caught my gas in a 
 dugout the next day." 
 
 "And you are still keen to get back into all that ?" 
 
 "Am I?" he repeated, his eyes hardening. "I'll 
 tell you how I feel : When I first came over I had a 
 kind of sneaking notion that Heinie wasn't so dusky 
 as he was painted. But I lost that notion pretty 
 quick when I got up front and saw my lieutenant 
 
200 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 shot in the back by a boche prisoner who had thrown 
 up his hands. Now I want to lick the Huns till they 
 holler, and then keep on licking them for a year after 
 that for the good of their souls." 
 
 Inside of the hospital were grimmer cases. In one 
 iof the wards we came on a Texan with the bright, 
 clear-gazing eyes that one sometimes finds in old sail- 
 ors. They had taken his leg off. When we asked how 
 he was making it he turned on us those straight deep 
 eyes, and there was trouble in them. 
 
 "There's just one thing I'm sorry for," said he. 
 
 "What is that?" 
 
 "That I didn't have more time." 
 
 Time for what, I wondered. And then looking 
 down on that wrecked body, with the covers lifted 
 high over apparatus so as not to touch the tormented 
 nerves, I thought I understood. He was sorry he 
 didn't have more time to get out of the way. That 
 was it. It was what anybody would wish for — two, 
 three, five seconds of grace to have gotten out of 
 the way. Lying here through the long hours empty 
 of everything but pain, he had doubtless worked out 
 the problem to the finest precision, and he knew to 
 the last trick just how much more time it would have 
 taken to have dropped to the ground, to have eluded 
 that exploding shell. Now all his life long he was 
 going to regret the lack of those few precious sec- 
 onds. 
 
 "Yes," he repeated slowly, laboriously, the trouble 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 201 
 
 still in his eyes, "I'd like to have had more time. 
 Don't seem right somehow. 'Tain't fitting to be lying 
 here with the show just begun. I'd like to have done 
 more damage. But," he brightened, "I've figured 
 there's still some jobs a peg-legged man can do over 
 here. And I tell you one thing : I'm not going home 
 till we've licked the Huns or the Huns have licked 
 us." 
 
 He laughed at the latter impossibility, and the 
 laughter shook his body and turned him pale. And 
 still he laughed on. I thought when he wished for 
 more time that he was thinking in terms of self and 
 personal safety, and all the time he had been thinking 
 in the biggest terms of service to mankind. 
 
 It was not until the fifth day of our trip that Ver- 
 dun loomed on the horizon as a rosy possibility. We 
 were dining in Nancy at Voltaire's with M. Martin, 
 the sous-prefet of the department of Meurthe-et- 
 Moselle. M. Martin, it appeared, had never been in 
 Verdun. Since we had business at a French hospital 
 fifteen kilometers from the citadel he thought it pos- 
 sible, probable — of course, nothing was sure; abso- 
 lutely no Verdun passes had been issued for ten days 
 — still, one never could tell ; and if we would like him 
 to try — he paused to beam and smile — if we would 
 give him our papers he would send them in to the 
 Grand Quartier General, together with his own, and 
 then — well, in short we would await the turn of 
 events. 
 
202 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "Whether we shall be accorded permission at this 
 crucial moment is doubtful," he concluded. "But at 
 any rate we may hope." 
 
 So we turned in our papers and we hoped. To see 
 Verdun at this crisis, when to the north millions of 
 men were crashing together in terrific combat, with 
 an appalling sanguinary back tide of wounded and 
 dead, lent the occasion a deep significance, for Ver- 
 dun to the whole world has become a symbol of con- 
 fidence, a kind of ark of the covenant to battling 
 mankind. I did not conceal from myself that what 
 gave Verdun its specific interest to me was the news 
 that our troops round Montdidier and Amiens were 
 now engaged in the present titanic struggle. That 
 fact took the famous fortress out of the list of mere 
 great monuments of history ; it made it in short our 
 own, part and parcel of America, its glories our 
 glories, its defense our defense, its high challenge our 
 challenge, its victory our victory. But there was 
 something more than that in the back of my mind. 
 Verdun was behind the French, so to speak, finished 
 history. Our Verduns were still of to-morrow, a 
 promise, a prophecy. The actors were those humor- 
 ous-eyed khaki-clad soldiers standing at lonely cross- 
 roads who had given us the smart little salute with the 
 friendly aftergrin. Thus it was with the feeling of 
 reading ahead of time a page of history not yet evoked 
 but inevitable that I prepared to go to Verdun. 
 
 The past week had been of a piece with the raw 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 203 
 
 spring weather, lowering, foggy or sluicing water 
 by the liquid ton out of a somber sky. With one 
 accord we prayed for sunshine in order to view the 
 surrounding heights. Cote 304, Saint Mihiel, Douau- 
 mont, Veau and Mort Homme. But the day that 
 dawned was brother to the rest — ^bleak, dark, with a 
 clinging fog, which muffled the landscape and grew 
 ever thicker as the hours passed. Our passes had 
 arrived from French Headquarters, but the final vise, 
 the permission to enter Verdun itself, must be ob- 
 tained at V , fifteen kilometers from the citadel, 
 
 and if there was heavy shelling either of the fort or 
 of the surrounding roads we should certainly be re- 
 fused. 
 
 It was six o'clock in the morning when as guests of 
 the French Government and of M. Martin in particu- 
 lar we clambered into a military automobile, one of 
 those lean, powerful drab monsters that go cycloning 
 along the highways behind the lines at a stupefying 
 rate of speed. We had estimated that, including 
 necessary stops at French hospitals containing 
 American wounded, we should arrive at Verdun about 
 noon. Therefore we had taken the precaution to 
 bring our luncheon, with the intention of picnicking 
 among the ruins and perhaps obtaining some coffee 
 from the poilus' mess. The chefs d*oeuvr^s of the 
 provisions were two tiny cold fowl de luxe weighing 
 about a pound apiece, which had cost eight round 
 silver dollars* 
 
204. OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 The next four hours on my part were given to the 
 task of keeping my hair and my ears on. For the 
 wind as it swooped by tried to drive us bodily from 
 the car; the cold congealed us in cramped positions 
 and the fog chilled us to the bone. We could not 
 discern the road twenty yards ahead. The car 
 roared forward into a barrage of thick mist which 
 shredded on the hillcrests only to sag more heavily 
 in the valleys. This, M. Martin assured us, was 
 typical Picardy weather. At crossroads where we 
 were stopped by the police M. Martin presented his 
 card of identity, signed in Joifre's own hand, and 
 we were waved onward with honorable presentations 
 of arms. As we neared our destination we diverged 
 from the straight highroad, making a detour, for 
 some routes are reserved for ingoing and some for 
 outgoing traffic, and these routes are constantly al- 
 tered in order to safeguard materials and confound 
 the Hun. 
 
 Arrived at V we drew up in a long rank of 
 
 machines in front of Headquarters and M. Martin 
 vanished to make his felicitations to the command- 
 ant and to telephone in to Verdun. Our fate still 
 hung in the balance. The minutes slipped by. Gen- 
 erals — French, American, British — dashed up in 
 their automobiles, descended, saluted and vanished or 
 stood talking in earnest groups. Americans, recog- 
 nizing compatriots, saluted us from streets and door- 
 ways and strolled over to ask of home and how the 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 205 
 
 Statue of Liberty fared. She was a pretty fine old 
 girl, quoi? — as the French say. 
 
 An hour passed. And still M. Martin tarried. At 
 the end of twenty minutes more he reappeared down 
 the end of a street, his civilian black standing out in 
 striking relief against the motley of khaki and hori- 
 zon-blue uniforms and gold braid. 
 
 **En avant!" he exclaimed gayly, climbing into the 
 car. "They got the commanding officer of the cita- 
 del on the wire. He expects us and asked us to mess 
 with his officers in the citadel, but I refused, as it 
 will be long past one by the time we arrive. This 
 fog after all has served us well. They are not bom- 
 barding the fortress to-day." 
 
 I do not recall the last fifteen kilometers of that 
 journey, save that we sped like the wind, straining 
 our eyes through the mist for the first glimpse of the 
 famous stronghold. Presently "There! There!" 
 broke simultaneously from our lips, and a few min- 
 utes later we were rolling under a noble stone arch- 
 way, green and mossy with age, which looked as if 
 it had been reared in the days of Uther Pendragon, 
 and were being greeted by the commanding officer of 
 the citadel of Verdun. We were to take everything 
 out of the car, said he, and come right in. Lunch 
 was waiting. In vain M. Martin protested. The 
 colonel waved his protests aside with a smile. He 
 led us into the fortress, down a long underground 
 tunnel, which rang hollowly beneath our feet, to a 
 
206 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 set of guests' dressing rooms, where we repaired tHe 
 ravages of the long ride. A few minutes later he re- 
 turned, conducted us through another series of cor- 
 ridors, through an enormous mess hall, where the 
 men as he entered sprang clattering to their feet, and 
 ushered us into the officers' mess room. 
 
 It was small, that dining room situated forty feet 
 underground in the stone heart of the citadel, seat- 
 ing scarce a dozen persons, and simple, lofty-ceiled, 
 severe. And yet it was a veritable jewel, flashing 
 with rich strong colors, magnificent with its brilliant 
 sheaths of battle flags, and glittering with the steel 
 and silver and gold of its souvenirs of valor — armor 
 and medals and trophies which gleamed from cabinet 
 and wall. Here had collected at one time and an- 
 other all the great chiefs of the Allies ; and here the 
 presumptuous Crown Prince had sworn to eat his 
 triumphal banquet. 
 
 Over the mantelpiece hung the pennants of all the 
 Entente Powers, a bright formidable array, topped 
 with the watchword of the impregnable fortress, "Ow 
 ne passe pas" a phrase descending from the days of 
 the Little Corporal. The opposite wall bore medals 
 of honor — the Croix de Guerre, the Medaille Mili- 
 taire and the Legion d'Honneur bestowed by a grate- 
 ful nation upon the citadel itself, as if it possessed 
 a glorious soul. Here and there hung heavy-studded 
 shields surrounded by rayons of ancient swords and 
 battle-axes. 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 207 
 
 What we ate or whether we ate I cannot recall. 
 The colonel had left us, bidding us genially to make 
 haste, as there was much to see, much to recount, 
 and we sat drinking in the spell of that wondrous 
 little room, steeped in the atmosphere of valor, heark- 
 ening to the voice of the past, rejoicing in the brave 
 prophecy of the future, and trying to realize that 
 even as we sat French and American troops were 
 rushing north to stem the furious onslaught of the 
 Hun. 
 
 "Well, now," said the colonel, opening the door, 
 ''if you are refreshed we will begin. We shall take 
 first the view of the heights, then I shall show you 
 the fortress, and after that the ruins of Verdun." 
 
 We had asked M. Martin to recount the history 
 of the great offensive, and he had turned over the 
 appeal to the commanding officer of the citadel, who 
 had promised to describe the climax of the decisive 
 battle on the exact spot where the Germans made 
 their final stubborn stand and were beaten back with 
 stupendous loss. 
 
 Outside, the weather had settled to a continuous 
 drizzle. We wound round the hill by a serpentine 
 road and presently attained its crest. Here we aban- 
 doned the car and stumbled over a torn and wrenched 
 terrain, pitted with shell holes fifty feet across and 
 partially filled with black filthy water. Filled also 
 with old dismantled cannon, unexploded cartridges, 
 rusted bayonets, twisted iron fragments of great 
 
208 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 shells, and an occasional sodden kepi. Between these 
 craters the hummocks were dotted with graves 
 marked with a cross and the simple French cocarde. 
 Standing under that bleak sky and gazing out across 
 that sinister smitten landscape with its gaunt shot- 
 off trees and its deep gashes of trenches marked by 
 blood-red earth was like looking upon some huge mon- 
 ster frozen in a horrible death agony. It had been 
 foully murdered, that hill, and it lay like a mutilated 
 corpse, stiffly outflung, uncovered, indecent, its hid- 
 eous wounds gaping up to the sky. 
 
 The colonel came to a halt. "Here we are," he 
 began. "Here is the farthest point that the enemy 
 penetrated. Here he was beaten back — just at your 
 feet, mademoiselle." He pointed with his cane, and 
 I stared down, expecting to see I scarce know what, 
 some visible sign, some chalk mark or whitewashed 
 tennis-court line, to identify that tremendous check. 
 But there was nothing. My feet were pressing down 
 a clump of fresh blue violets, wet-eyed from the rain. 
 I stepped off them hastily. 
 
 The colonel continued his narrative. The wind 
 blew back the heavy skirts of his greatcoat; his 
 sturdy, compact figure, firmly planted as a statue, 
 defied the elements ; his leonine white head, which re- 
 minded one of Joffre's, glistened with rain drops ; his 
 voice, gentle, level, dispassionate, filled one with utter 
 conviction. We knew what he said was true. Here 
 came the enemy from that direction — ^he pointed — 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 209 
 
 and from there, and there, all converging on this one 
 point. And when they were very near, advancing 
 shoulder to shoulder in dense mass formation, two 
 concealed French batteries, one from either side, 
 opened on their serried columns a terrific enfilading 
 fire. It was close-range slaughter — such as was go- 
 ing on even now in the north. Their first ranks lay 
 in windrows. Their dead covered this hill like a car- 
 pet. And still their thinning numbers were filled 
 with rushing hosts from behind and they pressed on 
 and on, wave upon wave, the farthest of which had 
 broken just at the point where we stood. There it 
 was pushed back by a spirited counter thrust by the 
 French fantassins. 
 
 "And your own troops, mon colonel, I suppose 
 they gave a good account of themselves ?" queried M. 
 Martin. 
 
 "You have said it," replied the colonel with proud 
 simplicity. "My brave men in that attack covered 
 and recovered themselves with glory." 
 
 In the meantime, he continued, down below — ^he 
 would show us presently — another strong enemy force 
 had tried to force an entrance to the fortress at one 
 of the tunnel exits. This exit, leading by a series 
 of passages on different levels to the very innermost 
 heart of the citadel, gave on the outside upon a con- 
 tracted open space between two ridges, and was pro- 
 tected first by a deep surrounding fosse filled with a 
 maze of barbed wire, and second by a fifteen-foot 
 
210 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 stone wall which formed part of the outer fortifica- 
 tions. Down this wall the Germans had leaped like 
 a tumbling cataract. The first wave fell into the 
 fosse and was followed by another and another, until 
 the ancient moat was heaped level with a writhing 
 human bridge across which the hostile troops rushed 
 and gained the narrow space before the mouth of the 
 tunnel. 
 
 "And were there no French machine guns playing 
 upon them from the entrance?" 
 
 "Oh, yes — there were two seventy-fives," said the 
 colonel quietly, "less than a hundred yards away." 
 We could perhaps imagine, he continued, what car- 
 nage they wrought in that confined space. Germans 
 had dropped down from that height like overripe 
 fruit trained against a wall. The French gunners 
 obliterated the first, the second, the third and the 
 fourth waves ; and the fifth broke right on the flam- 
 ing sjiouts of their guns. The sixth gained the tun- 
 nel entrance. Here the garrison counter-attacked, 
 and the enemy turned tail and ran. But not far. 
 The wall was before them and the guns were behind. 
 That particular hostile force was wiped out to a 
 man. 
 
 The colonel's calm voice flowed on and on, describ- 
 ing the desperate details of that epic attack, and 
 now and again he pointed with his stick into the fog, 
 locating great enemy batteries which had poured a 
 deadly hail of shells upon this hill. Altogether, he 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 211 
 
 said, the French had lost in killed during that six 
 months' offensive one hundred and ten thousand ; the 
 Germans more than half a million. And most of 
 them had fallen on and round this height on which 
 we stood. I looked about that somber, brooding, 
 ghost-haunted hill, where half a million souls slain 
 violently in battle had flown upward in a thick mist 
 — and as I looked it seemed that the fog had a ruddy 
 under tinge as if a subtle crimson reek exuded from 
 the blood-drenched ground. 
 
 As the colonel continued his narrative I tried in 
 fancy to reconstruct the vision of the battlefield. Of 
 German prisoners I had seen a-plenty with their 
 close-cropped, bullet-shaped heads and furtive yet 
 arrogant eyes. The French poilus also — those gay, 
 stout-hearted little men, some of the greatest fighters 
 and the greatest phrase-makers on earth — were fa- 
 miliar figures in my mind. So that all the ingredi- 
 ents of the picture were at hand. Nevertheless, all 
 unconsciously I kept making a curious mental error. 
 The intensity of the combat still raging to the north 
 somehow drew the picture out of focus, causing it to 
 appear, not past history but something which was 
 still actually going on. I knew it was past, and still 
 it fused in my mind with the unfinished present. 
 
 Added to that, my brain was so saturated with 
 images of our American troops as I had seen them 
 the past week, and those images were so vivid, pow- 
 erful and real that I could visualize nothing else. 
 
212 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Thus, when the colonel said '*nos soldats,^' my mind 
 unconsciously translated "our soldiers"; and I saw, 
 not the horizon blue of the poilus but the clean, lithe 
 khaki-clad Americans with their fresh faces and good- 
 humored eyes. And when he said "Our brave troops 
 charged here — and here — and here," my mind saw 
 "our brave troops charging here — and here — and 
 here." I tried to rid my mind of that delusion — 
 for it was too painful on that dusky death-smitten 
 hill, with the knowledge that even at that very mo- 
 ment our own brave troops were indeed charging to 
 the north upon some other hill. But the past week 
 had etched the images too deeply on my mind; and 
 I could not wipe them out. 
 
 M. Martin interrogated the colonel concerning 
 their losses. 
 
 "Yes," replied the colonel soberly, "one hundred 
 and ten thousand of our men fell." 
 
 "One hundred and ten thousand of our men fell !" 
 reiterated my heart with a pang. Never before had 
 that figure seemed so monstrous. Why, that was 
 one, two, three, four, five whole divisions ! Our first 
 division, that I had seen, our second, all those fine 
 Rainbow fellows — pshaw! It was incredible! 
 
 "One hundred and ten thousand are a great many 
 men to die I" I remarked aloud. 
 
 And even as I spoke, my mind, righting itself, said 
 within itself: '*But of course those one hundred and 
 ten thousand men were Frenchmen I Not Americans. 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 213 
 
 Our men have only just gone north. Don't you 
 remember, you saw the — th Division on the move?" 
 Thus mentally I righted myself. Nevertheless, one 
 hundred and ten thousand were indeed a great many 
 men to die, and I repeated my remark. 
 
 "Pas tropF* — not too many! — replied the colonel 
 simply. And those two words, soberly spoken, were 
 the epitome of the Verdun spirit. 
 
 Later he pointed out a cemetery on a distant hill- 
 side containing five thousand fallen heroes. "In that 
 one cemetery," said he, "lie thirty of my own 
 officers." 
 
 "And you, you have been wounded, my colonel?" 
 inquired M. Martin. 
 
 "Three times only," replied the colonel with a 
 shrug. "Once seriously. But I would not leave the 
 citadel. I do not like hospitals — those white places. 
 They are not for me. If I die I die here where I 
 belong, with my men." 
 
 The rain still continued, a steady drenching down- 
 pour. "But you may be thankful," remarked the 
 colonel, wiping his streaming face, "as otherwise this 
 hill would be impossible. To-day the cannon are giv- 
 ing us a rest." 
 
 He led the way to the nearest tunnel entrance to 
 the citadel. With the others I followed, eagerly 
 listening to his explanations. But my mind was still 
 in a whirl. That dark and desolate blood-soaked hill, 
 the staunch old colonel, with the dewdrops in his 
 
214s OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 white hair, recounting the valorous deeds of his fallen 
 heroes, those acres on acres of graves, the ascending 
 hosts of souls — ^were not some of them perhaps still 
 lingering in this lonely spot, dazed by their violent 
 severance from the flesh, ignorant that they had 
 passed across ? Would they not cry out at night for 
 aid, for news of the battle front : "Why are we aban- 
 doned thus? Who wins? Vaterland? La PatrieV^ 
 • — the Americans, who had not engaged in this strug- 
 gle, to be sure, but were now fighting in an even 
 mightier struggle — all these things mingled con- 
 fusedly in my mind like the unmatched parts of a 
 puzzle. 
 
 Thanks to my classical education, I had no proper 
 conception of what constitutes a modern fortress. I 
 had vaguely imagined it as a city ringed round with 
 a very substantial stone wall, crenelated and tur- 
 reted, with dozens of peepholes for the doughty gun- 
 ners to take pot shots at the enemy established out- 
 side. In the very heart of the city would be the 
 citadel, which figured in my mind as a big, round, 
 impregnable stone tower bristling with teethlike rows 
 of cannon, its foundations naturally extending scores 
 of feet underneath. Accordingly when we set out to 
 traverse the long series of dimly-lit reverberating 
 subterranean passages, descended flights of slimy 
 stone stairs to lower and danker levels, stopped in 
 gun and ammunition rooms, electric-plant rooms, 
 kitchens, mess rooms, infirmaries, chapels, musees, 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 215 
 
 cinema and rest rooms, dormitories, cavernous 
 abodes, twenty, thirty and forty feet below ground, 
 I began to wonder when we were going upstairs. 
 
 "But there is no upstairs," responded M. Martin, 
 laughing in answer to my query — "not in this citadel. 
 Here it all is, just as you see, underground. You 
 observed those big iron mushroom affairs six inches 
 or so aboveground when we were up on the hill ?" 
 
 "But I thought they were the observation posts of 
 hidden guns— like that of the Big Bertha." 
 
 "So they are — they are our own Big Berthas. 
 Nevertheless, those observation posts are all the up- 
 stairs there is to this citadel. What do you suppose 
 would happen to the superstructure of a fort if it 
 were hit by a shell which made a crater as large as the 
 one we saw on the hill— fifty feet across and twenty 
 feet deep ? Not much upstairs left, eh ?" 
 
 So much for a classical education ! 
 
 "And all the French troops eat and sleep and pray 
 and drill down here? There are none billeted in 
 Verdun?" 
 
 "There's nobody in Verdun." 
 
 "No old men and old women who still cling to their 
 ruined firesides and creep out into the morning sun- 
 shine after a night's bombardment?" 
 
 "Not a single soul. It's a blanched city of the 
 dead." 
 
 By this time it was well upon six o'clock and we 
 stopped for a moment to view a mess hall where, 
 
216 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 seated at long refectory tables, about four hundred 
 poilus were taking sustenance from great steaming 
 casseroles of ragout placed in the centers of the ta- 
 bles. Here indeed were the veritable heroes of Ver- 
 dun! The indomitables ! I looked for halos, but 
 found none but the fragrant encircling wreaths of the 
 smoking ragout, which the heroes were bolting down 
 like one o'clock. These men, however, were no callow 
 youths, but tough-muscled, tanned and bearded vet- 
 erans — or if they were youths they were veteran 
 youths with lines in their faces and gray in their hair. 
 As the commanding officer loomed in the doorway they 
 sprang to their feet as one man. The colonel waved 
 them back to their stew, explaining that here were 
 some of their allies — American friends. What a 
 cheer it was that rose! Some of the Americans 
 frankly wiped their eyes. The colonel beamed round 
 upon us all with a kind of indulgent fatherly grace. 
 His blue eyes caressed his troops with affectionate 
 regard. 
 
 And as we departed he commented: "You will 
 please note one thing: I did not order that cheer. 
 It sprang spontaneously from the hearts of my 
 men." 
 
 He continued to speak of America, of the deep 
 fraternal tenderness existing in the hearts of the 
 French for the splendid young army from over- 
 seas; of the fine morale America was exhibiting 
 in the business of food conservation; of the hope 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 217 
 
 tHey Had in American aviation. Simple, brave, 
 friendly words from a brave, friendly soul. 
 
 We tramped on through vast resounding twilight 
 caverns, slippery underfoot with mud and exuding 
 large clammy dewdrops from the overarching walls. 
 Sometimes it was pitch dark and a pocket torch or 
 the outstretched hand of the colonel guided our 
 course. Once we climbed by a kind of vertical ship's 
 ladder fastened against the solid wall up into the 
 platform of a monstrous subterranean gun which 
 hurled annihilation miles away. For months the Ger- 
 mans had been assiduously trying to locate that gun. 
 
 It was the colonel who suggested the idea of Ver- 
 dun as a Mecca for tourist parties after the war. 
 
 '*Here they will come," he chuckled, "by train and 
 ship loads from all over the civilized world to view 
 this historic spot. They will passionately collect 
 every old piece of shrapnel or cap or exploded cart- 
 ridge, every stick, every brick, every stone. And 
 when all of the veritable souvenirs have been snatched 
 up doubtless our ingenious guardians of the citadel 
 will resow the sacred ground with another artificial 
 crop from a huge factory established hard by. 
 'Twill be an industry. They will charge — let me see 
 — three francs admission." And the colonel laughed 
 heartily over his prophecy. 
 
 "But they will not have the commanding officer of 
 the citadel for their guide!" interjected M. Martin 
 slyly. 
 
218 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 *^If they have the commanding officer of the citadel 
 for their guide it will be five francs," said the colonel 
 firmly. "Three francs for an ordinary tour; five 
 francs with the commanding officer for guide. That 
 is not too dear !" 
 
 They elaborated the idea with gayety. Instead 
 of great rough soldiers with clattering bayonets and 
 clumping boots, the hollow corridors would rever- 
 berate to soft, pretty laughter and the click-clack of 
 ladies' high-heeled boots. And downy college lads 
 and pig-tailed misses, with bespectacled tutors bear- 
 ing Baedekers — no, mon Dieu, not Baedekers ; doubt- 
 less American histories! — and peaceful and portly 
 papas and mammas who vaguely remembered the 
 great war in their extreme youth would stroll through 
 these echoing passages pensively, hand in hand. For 
 it would then be a public musee, this impregnable 
 citadel, and its tragic battles a troubled dream of 
 yesterday. 
 
 "But in the meantime," warned the colonel, laugh- 
 ing, "I am going to charge five francs !" 
 
 After the citadel he proceeded to show us the town, 
 demolished beyond hope of reconstruction. Fine 
 ancient f^9ades with filigree stonework delicate as 
 thread lace; matchless old cathedral closes of the 
 fourteenth century designed and wrought in solid 
 granite by a master mason who was also a master 
 builder ; fortification walls dating back to the days of 
 the Caesars; medieval turrets beneath which trouba- 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 219 
 
 dour soldier lovers sang ; glorious architecture of the 
 Louis the Fourteenth period — ineffable masterpieces 
 of structural art never to be reproduced on earth, 
 they lay in smashed and huddled fragments on the 
 ground. 
 
 We entered a church, its roof caved in, massive 
 columns rent, holy statues razed, empty as an egg- 
 shell — the result of a single cannon shot. 
 
 ^*Un coup de canon — and there you are!" the 
 colonel commented grimly. 
 
 We sped past the Big Canal and the Little Canal, 
 tranquil stretches of twilight water, colored like gor- 
 geous rose windows by a liberated gleam of the west- 
 ering sun ; reminiscent of Venice, with their overhang- 
 ing houses, now glooming ruins whose window holes 
 stared like sightless sockets of men blinded in battle ; 
 past the business and the residence sections of the 
 city, dead and desolate as the tombs of the Pharaohs ; 
 and finally wound up to the summit of a hill whence, 
 the colonel explained, we could obtain a comprehen- 
 sive view of the havoc the Huns had wrought. And 
 when we had gazed our fill on that tragic exhibition 
 of arrogance and hate, the colonel, like the fine artist 
 he was, led us into a lovely quiet garden close whose 
 darkening air was sweet with the scent of hyacinths, 
 violets, crocuses and spring roses. And kneeling 
 down on the damp turf and getting out his clasp- 
 knife he proceeded to gather us each a nosegay in 
 honor of the event. 
 
220 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "For," he observed sagely, "flowers are better 
 souvenirs than bits of iron shells." 
 
 When we wondered how he came to be possessed of 
 a garden on this deserted hill-top among the crum- 
 bling ruins he explained it was his favorite point of 
 observation. Knowing his love for the spot his men 
 had secretly made this garden for him and tended it 
 carefully and kept it in fresh bloom. 
 
 Returning to the citadel we dined once more in the 
 famous mess room, this time with the colonel and all 
 his officers. It was nine o'clock when we finally took 
 leave of him, standing bareheaded in the rain to 
 assure us of the warm pleasure we had given him ! It 
 had been an amazing day, crowded with images, emo- 
 tions, events ; and not least amazing was this French 
 colonel, commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun, 
 bubbling over with gayety and humor, filled with pro- 
 found tenderness and knowledge of life, a savant, 
 learned in history and languages, a distinguished 
 warrior who had been tried in the fiery furnace of 
 battle, and yet simple-hearted as a child or one of 
 his beloved poilus. 
 
 It was long after midnight when we arrived in 
 Nancy. Those two tiny fowls de luxe which cost 
 eight dollars we had fallen on and devoured in the 
 night. The following day, on our return to Paris, we 
 learned that the battle to the north was still raging. 
 But the Germans had been checked. Our troops, the 
 ones we had seen moving north, were in the great 
 
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 221 
 
 struggle too. They were being heavily gassed and 
 shelled. 
 
 "Worse than Verdun!" said my informant, an 
 American who had just returned from the British 
 Front. "I saw several hundred of our fellows who 
 had been mustard-gassed, lying in a field hospital. 
 They lay on cots, their smarting eyes bandaged with 
 soothing lotions, and they talked to each other in low 
 broken whispers. It gave one a choke in the throat 
 to see all those stalwarts lying flat, eyes bandaged, 
 whispering to the comrades they could not see. I 
 tell you, it made me feel mighty ugly toward the 
 Hun ! I wished some of our peace propagandists at 
 home might see that sight, hear those low, choking 
 whispers !" 
 
 "What were they talking about? Home? Mother? 
 [Where is my wandering boy to-night ?" 
 
 The officer gave a grim laugh. "Not by a jolly 
 jugful! They were trying to fix the exact hour of 
 the gas attack in order to reckon how soon they'd 
 be back in the trenches to tackle the Hun!" 
 
 This, then, was the spirit of the Americans who 
 had entered the great fight. It was the spirit of the 
 poilus before Verdun. It was the spirit of that in- 
 domitable colonel who had replied that one hundred 
 and ten thousand brave lives were not too many to 
 give for such a cause. Verdun of to-day was the 
 heritage of these men in khaki who lay with bandaged 
 eyes and spoke in choked whispers. And the Ver- 
 
222 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 duns of to-morrow would be theirs by the same sign : 
 The conquering force of spirit controlling the con- 
 quering force of arms. 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 
 
 This is a story of causes. And those causes pro- 
 duced certain effects. I hope you will be patient with 
 the causes — which, like all causes, are more or less 
 dull — and read on until you come to the effects. 
 There I can promise you some excitement. 
 
 When, in the midst of the March offensive, so 
 disastrous in its initial phase, General Foch took com- 
 mand of the various Allied armies in France with the 
 intention of merging those several distinct and often 
 conflicting units into a single compact whole, one and 
 indivisable, which should be at' least as supple and 
 cohesive as that of the foe, nobody on the outside 
 even dimly realized how fundamental, how far-reach- 
 ing would be the changes involved. For after three 
 years and a half of fighting as separate entities each 
 nation had rutted deeply into its own peculiar man- 
 ner of waging war. England held one sector; Bel- 
 gium another; France another; and when American 
 overseas soldiers landed in France they were assigned 
 another portion of the line in Lorraine. 
 
 And of his own particular sector each nation was 
 223 
 
224 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 supreme lord, of both the front and the back areas, 
 the advanced and the rear war zones. That was his 
 terrain, his stronghold. Therein he could do as he 
 pleased, make war as seemed to him best, without let 
 or hindrance. Thus England built up one policy of 
 war strategy, of transportation and hospitalization ; 
 France another ; America a third. There were three 
 autonomies, three great war chiefs, three grand head- 
 quarters. Each autonomy fought in a water-tight 
 compartment, so to speak — water-tight so far as con- 
 cerned the others ; but unfortunately not water-tight 
 to the boche. 
 
 So rigorously was this sense of independence held 
 by each country, so distinctly did each nation cover 
 its zone and its zone alone, that the fresh divisions 
 held in reserve in back areas in case of a possible 
 grand attack could not be stationed save in their own 
 respective territories. French reserves could not be 
 stationed in the British zone; British reserves could 
 not be stationed in the French zone. Even if every 
 sign pointed to a powerful massed action in one par- 
 ticular sector, all the neighboring sector could do was 
 to hold mobile troops, together with trains and 
 camions, in its own area ready to move. Naturally 
 this caused great delay; precious time was lost in 
 conveying troops. 
 
 For example, on March twenty-first, when the 
 Fifth British Army fell back, fighting valiantly, be- 
 fore the furious onslaught of a Hun host of quad- 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 225 
 
 ruple strength, and a temporary breach was made in 
 the line which opened the road to Paris, the French 
 generals, Pelle and Humbert, rushed up their reserves 
 from Picardy and Champagne. These two generals 
 had received special instructions from the French 
 High Command to study the different hypotheses of 
 attack on the British Front and to hold themselves 
 responsible for all consequences. An agreement had 
 been entered into by the British and the French com- 
 manders, fixing the sixth day of battle as the one 
 when the French should intervene if necessary and 
 come to the assistance of their British allies. But so 
 fast and furious waxed the offensive, so urgent ap- 
 peared the crisis to the onlooking French generals, 
 that it was not six days but scarcely more than that 
 number of hours when the blue casques of the French 
 began to appear in the frightful melee and the Ger- 
 man flood in full drive began to be stemmed. 
 
 But it was a narrow squeak. And a good part of 
 its narrowness consisted in the fact that fresh troops 
 could not be held in readiness behind the danger zone, 
 but had to be transported by camion, without their 
 organizations behind them, often without sufficient 
 guns or ammunition, from a long distance, and then 
 hurled without a minute's rest into the very heart of 
 the maelstrom. Had the French reserves been massed 
 near at hand in the British back areas so that they 
 could have gone immediately into action, there is no 
 doubt that thousands of British soldiers, now Gerjnan 
 
226 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 prisoners, hundreds of wounded in hospitals, not to 
 speak of the loss of guns, supplies and evacuation 
 hospitals along the entire front line of that sector, 
 would have been saved to the Allied arms. It was a 
 bitter, grim lesson, and its price was high. But not 
 too high to pay for a unified command. 
 
 Now in the present engagements the Germans are 
 meeting French, British, Americans and Italians, all 
 within a few miles upon the same sector. They are 
 intermingled and interwoven, as the need arises, regi- 
 ment by regiment, company by company, and even 
 man by man. The old partitions have been com- 
 pletely torn down. 
 
 One of the most distinctive features of the old 
 regime was the hospitalization system. Here as else- 
 where each nation carried on in its own fashion. The 
 British evolved one type of organization ; the French 
 another ; the Americans a third ; so that there existed 
 side by side three separate networks of systems, each 
 elaborate, ramified, complete, which never touched 
 each other. In the British sector, for example, the 
 seriously wounded are evacuated as rapidly as pos- 
 sible back to England, where are located most of their 
 big base hospitals. In the French system the evacu- 
 ation hospitals are dotted all along the sector a few 
 miles behind the firing line, with their large base and 
 convalescent hospitals scattered throughout the in- 
 terior, in the Midi or down on the Riviera, far from 
 the rude northern winds. And when the Americans 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 227 
 
 were assigned their sector in Lorraine they organized 
 their system along similar lines. 
 
 First come the evacuation hospitals, as close up 
 behind the Front as possible, in order to catch the 
 wounded man within two, three or four hours of the 
 time he falls on the field. Here he is operated on 
 without delay, rendered fit for transportation, and 
 then shipped to some big base farther back in the 
 rear. As the hospital formation recedes from the 
 advance zone of the army, and therefore from acute 
 danger and unstable tenure arising from likelihood 
 of capture, shelling and bombing raids, the bases 
 grow in size and elaboration, until at some points 
 they are vast beehives, community centers with a 
 capacity of ten to twenty thousand beds. Between 
 the two extremes of the formation, the evacuation 
 hospitals just behind that invisible and most uncer- 
 tain quantity called the front line and the big solid 
 base situated some hundreds of kilometers away — 
 between these two types there exists the greatest dif- 
 ference. 
 
 The base, as its name implies, is solid, immobile, 
 permanent, steady as the Rock of Gibraltar or the 
 skyscrapers of New York. The evacuation hospital, 
 on the contrary, creeping up as close as possible be- 
 hind the fighting forces is light, mobile, supple, easy 
 to move, consisting largely of tents, stuff that can be 
 loaded swiftly on trucks and motor lorries and car- 
 ried away. If during a big push the line begins to 
 
228 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 sway perilously, to strain, to crack, with breaches 
 showing here and there, and the order comes to retire, 
 the evacuation hospital can fold up its tents like the 
 Arab and silently steal away, not on camels but their 
 modern substitutes, camions, with the orderlies on 
 the rear truck, thumb to nose, wagging derisive fin- 
 gers at the oncoming boche, who if he does break 
 through will find — just nothing at all. 
 
 That is one difference between evacuation and base 
 hospitals. And there are others. The bases do good 
 straight honest and honorable surgical and medical 
 work of the type that is known in America. They 
 have a fine regime, and this regime is rarely over- 
 turned. They are, therefore, prosaic. But an evacu- 
 ation hospital is dramatic, picturesque, full of poten- 
 tialities and surprises, with tragedy, comedy and 
 broad farce competing for first place every hour in 
 the day. 
 
 Here during a big offensive, when Allied and 
 enemy wounded are pouring in in a continuous stream, 
 surgeons, nurses and personnel work like fiends under 
 a tremendous pressure, twelve, twenty-four, even 
 forty-eight hours at a stretch. Here are to be wit- 
 nessed in the operating room running fights with 
 death as tense and thrilling as anything upon the 
 battlefield. Sometimes the wounded man is exactly 
 upon the great divide, hovering between life and 
 death, an extra hair's weight capable of sending him 
 to either side ; shrapnel in his chest, his lungs full of 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 229 
 
 blood, breathing like a trumpeter, suffering from 
 shock, exhaustion, lack of food — and still able to 
 smile up into the surgeon's eyes and say faintly: 
 "I'm all right, sir. Take that other poor guy. He's 
 worse off than me." 
 
 In cases like these, three minutes more or less in 
 the length of the operation spells all the difference 
 between time and eternity. The surgical team works 
 with the perfect union of a football eleven. In their 
 white aprons, caps and masks they look like priests 
 performing a rite. The sweat stands out on their 
 foreheads. Their expert fingers move like lightning, 
 yet precise, unhurried, sure. 
 
 In an operation of this kind, with life and death in 
 the saddle and both riding hard, I have seen the 
 assistant hold a watch on the operating team, as if 
 it were a horse race, and call aloud the minutes, thus : 
 "Three ! Five ! Seven ! Ten !" Two minutes too long, 
 and the patient may expire on the table, or die of 
 pneumonia from the added strain of ether on the 
 lungs. Here margins are short and time more pre- 
 cious than the weight of iron in rubies. 
 
 Here also is to be seen what is known as the new 
 war surgery. The wounded men are X-rayed before 
 entering the operating room, and the exact position 
 of the foreign body indicated by an indelible cross on 
 the patient's skin. Consequently the surgeons need 
 not go delving and exploring and guessing all over 
 the landscape, but make a clean straight dive for 
 
230 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 the intruder. As the greatest danger in all these 
 wounds is that of infection from the gas-gangrene 
 germ, which infests the soil of France and therefore 
 every particle of the soldier's clothes, and as in addi- 
 tion the wounded are often forced to lie twelve, 
 twenty-four or even thirty-six hours on the field on 
 account of a violent enemy barrage, these wounds are 
 often badly infected by this germ before ever they 
 reach the evacuation hospital, near as that may be. 
 In order, then, to prevent the further spread of the 
 poison throughout the body the wound is laid wide 
 open, the crushed and torn tissues shorn clean away, 
 and a big clean wound created. This is thoroughly 
 cleansed, packed with gauze soaked in Carrel solution, 
 after which the entire area is wrapped in compresses, 
 solidly bandaged, strapped or splinted — and the 
 patient is ready to be shipped a hundred miles. 
 
 From this it will be seen that it is at the outset of 
 the game, after the man is first wounded, that the 
 time element is most precious. Upon the speed with 
 which an ambulance can deliver a soldier to the near- 
 est evacuation hospital, divest him of his dirty, in- 
 fected clothes and lay him on the life-saving operat- 
 ing table depends largely the speed of his recovery 
 and return to the lines. Delays there are bound to 
 be — violent shelling of trenches, back areas or cross- 
 roads, which may block every form of transportation 
 for hours. And it is to counteract these unavoid- 
 able delays that evacuation hospitals are creeping 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 231 
 
 closer and closer up to the Front, risking bombard- 
 ment and air raids in order to save a greater per- 
 centage of life and limb. 
 
 Behind these hospitals, then, stand the big solid 
 bases, imposing, safe and sane. In front of them is 
 still another formation. Briefly, it is something like 
 this: A soldier is wounded on the field, in the 
 trenches, in a wood. If alone, he applies his own first 
 aid. If he has given it away to a comrade, he uses 
 his belt for a tourniquet, his bootlaces — anything. 
 If he cannot get at his wound or if he is knocked un- 
 conscious, he lies until he is picked up by friend or 
 foe. If he is not picked up he "goes West," joining 
 the great host of immortal comrades, and all is well. 
 That is the first step, where each individual attends 
 to himself, is attended to by others or is lost. 
 
 The second step consists of getting him to a dress- 
 ing station, usually in some abri, where he is ban- 
 daged, given a hot drink, an injection of anti- tetanus 
 serum, and an iodine cross is marked on his forehead 
 to indicate that he has received the same. If he 
 is suffering acutely he is in addition given a morphia 
 tablet. After this he is transported by ambulance 
 to the divisional field hospital, where if he is in good 
 condition he is not even unloaded but sent straight on 
 to the evacuation hospital a few miles farther back. 
 Thus he receives personal, regimental and divisional 
 first aid before ever he strikes the evacuation hospital. 
 
 All of which, if he is lucky, he may get inside of 
 
232 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 two or three hours, and be safely tucked away in his 
 cot coming out from under ether, raving not of home 
 and mother but of going over the top, shouting in 
 stentorian accents: "Shoot 'em to hell, boys! The 
 dirty skunks ! Shoot 'em to hell !" to the infinite de- 
 light of his comrades in the tent ward, who cheer him 
 on: "That's the stuff, buddy ! Attaboy! Eat 'em 
 alive!" 
 
 Finally, after much batting of wobbly eyelids, he 
 opens his eyes feebly upon the white-capped nurse at 
 the foot of the bed and murmurs in weak flat tones 
 of pleasure : "Well, hello, chicken ! How'd you ever 
 git here ? Gosh ! That's a foul taste in my mouth. 
 Say, can a guy spit in this place?" And if he has 
 come through thus far alive the chances are he will 
 stick. He is the stuff that survives. 
 
 This sketches in the large the hospital formation 
 that the American Army built to care for its wounded 
 behind the Lorraine sector under the old regime. 
 All of the units, the string of evacuation hospitals, 
 base hospitals and transportation facilities were 
 designed and constructed on the principle of Ameri- 
 ca's holding that particular sector. 
 
 And then, presto. General Foch took command. 
 
 That simple statement merits an entire paragraph 
 all to itself, for it wiped out the old order and engen- 
 dered a whole new realignment of policies and plans 
 — in hospitalization especially. For manifestly if 
 American troops were to be shifted here and there, 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 233 
 
 up and down the Western Front as the need rose — as 
 they must indeed be shifted if the Allied army was 
 to be as swift and mobile as that of the foe — then a 
 hospital formation away over east in the Lorraine 
 country was not going to be a great advantage to 
 American troops fighting up north round Montdidier 
 and Chateau-Thierry. Nor could the American 
 Army all at once, by the wave of a magic wand, con- 
 jure into being another system. And even if it could 
 there would still remain the question of conflicting 
 French and American traffic over already congested 
 lines. 
 
 Yet something had to be done to cover this situa- 
 tion, and done at once, for our troops were already 
 on the move. The French command, in collaboration 
 with the American command, solved it in the only pos- 
 sible fashion. It was decreed that when American 
 troops fought in a French sector the wounded should 
 be evacuated along with the French through the 
 French system; when they fought with the British 
 their wounded should be evacuated with the British 
 to England. And so the affair stood. 
 
 Americans went up to the British Front in Flan- 
 ders. They went to the French Front in Picardy 
 and Champagne. They stayed at home on their own 
 Front in Lorraine. And the wounded began to be 
 evacuated by all three systems. So far, so good. 
 And yet, not altogether good. Good perhaps from 
 a purely military point of view ; not so good from a 
 
234 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 human point of view. For the Americans in the 
 French hospitals were lonesome. There was no use 
 blinking the fact. They did not do well. Hearing 
 never a word of their own language, unable to make 
 their wants known, unable also to comprehend the 
 soft babble of words by which the gentle French 
 sisters tried to express their sympathy, they sick- 
 ened, not so much from their wounds as from pure 
 nostalgia and longing for the familiar home tongue. 
 
 And one man died. But while he was ill in that 
 strange hospital in a foreign land he kept a little 
 journal which he called The Philosophy of Loneli- 
 ness. From that little book of scribbled notes it ap- 
 peared that this young soldier grieved and grieved 
 for lack of someone to speak to him in his own tongue. 
 And at last, when his isolation became intolerable, he 
 decided to rise up and go in search of human com- 
 panionship. But the tall woman in black, with the 
 black veil, like one of the Fates, kept thrusting him 
 back into bed. Her hands were gentle but strong. 
 He told her, quite simply, that he only wanted some- 
 body to talk to. She replied with a torrent of strange 
 unintelligible sounds. And then he shouted aloud, in 
 order to drown her babble and hear some good honest 
 American speech. 
 
 It was no use ; she could not comprehend ; she held 
 him down, gently but firmly, pouring out over his 
 fainting soul the soft strange babble of sounds. He 
 swooned under the torment. The next day he tried 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 235 
 
 again. Again the tall black-veiled figure thrust him 
 down with hands that were gentle but strong. Again 
 the hated sounds. Again he swooned. The third 
 day, very weak but resolute, he recorded in his jour- 
 nal his intention to try once more, and strove to rise. 
 But over him, as ever, was that black unyielding 
 figure, holding him down ; and so she held him, gentle, 
 ruthless, unknowing, babbling into his ears those 
 strange sounds until he died. 
 
 In comment upon this incident Major Perkins, 
 Chief Commissioner for Europe of the Red Cross, 
 said: "Wlien I read the few pitiful pages of that 
 journal of one of our men who had gone to his end 
 in utter loneliness of soul I decided that something 
 must be done. Either Americans must have their own 
 hospitals or else we must put American nurses into 
 French hospitals." 
 
 Accordingly American women, nurses, visitors and 
 aids, were assigned to fifty-two French hospitals con- 
 taining American men. One day it chanced in a cer- 
 tain French hospital that one of these aids, a bright, 
 pretty girl, was working in a ward. And as she 
 moved here and there, busy at her tasks, she sang 
 softly under her breath the following cheerful ditty : 
 
 "Where do we go from here, boys? 
 Oh, where do we go from here?" 
 
 "I don't want you to go anywhere from here!" 
 
236 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 came an abrupt voice from a bed behind her. Turn- 
 ing she beheld a wounded American, a pale new- 
 comer, regarding her from inflamed, bloodshot 
 eyes, 
 
 "Well," she replied, laughing, "I don't intend to 
 go anywhere this very minute. What's the matter 
 with your eyes? Gassed?" 
 
 "Nothing," he replied laconically. "I've not slept 
 for seventy-two hours. They shelled us up there for 
 three days. That's where I got mine. I've been 
 lying here watching you for an hour and trying to 
 make up my mind which I wanted to do most — go to 
 sleep or go on looking at you. And I decided I'd 
 rather go on looking at you. I don't know," he 
 added wistfully, "whether you consider that much of 
 a compliment or not?" 
 
 "I consider it the finest compliment I ever had in 
 my life, bar none — from a man who hasn't slept for 
 seventy-two hours." 
 
 "Yes, but I haven't seen an American girl for five 
 months. And so I figured it would rest my eyes more 
 to look at you than it would to go to sleep." 
 
 This is not an extraordinary case. Nine men out 
 of ten would have felt the same. Their eyes were 
 starved for the sight of American girls. But one 
 woman spread out among many men did not go far. 
 It was like trying to spread a small pat of butter 
 over an acre of bread. However, it was the best 
 best that could be done. French hospit^-ls could not 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THEIRRY 237 
 
 be crammed with American workers. There was no 
 place to put them. Their plants were already 
 swamped with overwork. 
 
 In the meantime the Army and the Red Cross were 
 not idle. It was felt that something must be done not 
 only for the morale of the lonely American soldiers 
 but also to relieve the tremendous pressure on the 
 French system, which was handling the wounded of 
 three nations. Accordingly the Army went on a 
 still hunt, not any the less urgent because it was 
 still, for hospitals already equipped and in action 
 that could be used for this new American sector. 
 That sector, roughly described, extended from 
 Amiens on the north down to Chateau-Thierry, and 
 then eastward to Rheims, with Paris in a direct line 
 to the rear. Paris, then, became the logical point 
 for base hospitals. The American Army would de- 
 pend, according to agreement, upon French evacua- 
 tion hospitals immediately behind the lines, but as 
 soon as possible it would convey its wounded back to 
 Paris and thus relieve the congestion in the front 
 zone. 
 
 But how to get hold of any hospital.'' Fortunately 
 the Red Cross, the emergency department of the 
 Army, had a nucleus of hospitals already to hand. 
 This nucleus was composed of some half dozen plants 
 — some large, some small, some militarized, some, 
 civilian, but all in excellent running condition. In 
 addition to this group it had in its warehouses in 
 
238 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 complete readiness for just such a crisis whole hos- 
 pital units, complete in every detail, from tents down 
 to the final safety-pin, ready to put into the field at 
 any point the Army should designate. Moreover, it 
 had the camions for transportation and the surgical 
 teams and nurses at hand for instant summons by 
 telephone. 
 
 All this preparation had been done months before. 
 Now this fine intensive long-sightedness began to yield 
 its excellent fruit. For the Army gave orders to 
 these hospitals to double, treble, quadruple their bed 
 capacity and to hold themselves free for instant 
 action. This was done. Just outside Paris another 
 Red Cross tent hospital sprang into being. It sprang 
 up almost overnight, with more than a thousand beds, 
 its white tents dotting the field like mushrooms. 
 
 In Europe the Red Cross has achieved an almost 
 fantastic reputation for efficiency and speed — those 
 two most commonplace factors of every successful 
 business concern in America — and in this particular 
 crisis, grave beyond all other crises so far as the wel- 
 fare of our own fighting forces was concerned, it was 
 going to need every ounce it possessed of both of those 
 qualities. It was going to have the opportunity of 
 saving hundreds of American lives. It did not know 
 it. The Army did not know it. Nobody knew it. 
 But so it was to be. A catastrophe was impending. 
 
 You have not read thus far, I hope, without realiz- 
 ing the supreme, the vital importance of those evac- 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 239 
 
 uation hospitals crouching up there close behind the 
 fighting lines. They are the life savers. Upon their 
 nearness to the Front and the speed with which the 
 wounded are delivered depend the success of the en- 
 tire hospital system. They are the keystone of the 
 arch. Let an army lose its string of evacuation hos- 
 pitals and it loses not merely its physical property — 
 a mere bagatelle — but also the power to save a large 
 percentage of its wounded. For delay causes infec- 
 tion; infection causes amputation, and too often 
 causes death. 
 
 To summarize briefly the elements of the situation : 
 America, in common with the other Allies, had her 
 own hospital system behind the Lorraine Sector, and 
 when our troops moved up into the French sector it 
 was agreed that the wounded should be evacuated 
 through French hospitals ; to relieve the tremendous 
 pressure a nucleus of Red Cross hospitals in Paris 
 was constituted to drain this area. 
 
 And now perhaps, with these cards in your hands, 
 and in your head the general outlines of the May 
 offensive, recalling especially the fact that the Ger- 
 mans made an advance in that very sector of more 
 kilometers than I like to recall, you may have a glim- 
 mering of the nature of the blow that fell. Yes, the 
 French lost a certain number of their front-line 
 evacuation hospitals. They were in the area and they 
 were captured. That was the catastrophe. 
 
 It is the catastrophe that always happens when a 
 
240 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 considerable slice of territory is lost. It is what 
 happened in Italy. It is what happened to the Brit- 
 ish in March. It is what had often happened to the 
 French. Now it was happening to the Americans. 
 And that is why I am writing about it. What made 
 the situation more acute was that the French were 
 handling all of the wounded for that sector. Their 
 remaining hospitals were rapidly being swamped. 
 Each day the combat raged with increasing violence. 
 What was to be done with our men ? Transport them 
 clear back to Paris ? There was no other course. It 
 was bitter hard, but inevitable. And the Army was 
 mighty glad to have this port in the storm. 
 
 And now let us glance for a moment at Chateau- 
 Thierry and see what was taking place up there. On 
 May thirtieth, upon this portion of the line the 
 French were retreating, and two American divisions 
 were swung in to stem, momentarily, the tide. All 
 the world knows now which those two divisons were, 
 for their exploits received the congratulations of 
 General Pershing and of the French High Command. 
 On June first, in they came, the first lot, twenty-four 
 trainloads — fresh, cool, gay, hard-headed youngsters. 
 They came with no organization behind them; not 
 an American Army hospital in the sector; not an 
 ambulance; not even a field dressing station. They 
 came with nothing but the packs on their backs and 
 their rifles in their hands — and five hours later they 
 were holding the line. ........ 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 241 
 
 On their way up, as they were being rushed 
 through, their trains stopped at a station which we 
 
 shall designate as X . Here lay several hundred 
 
 British wounded waiting for a train to the rear. For 
 it is one of the ugly necessities of war that, during 
 an offensive, fresh guns and men take precedence over 
 those who have been knocked out. And so these 
 British wounded lay scattered about on litters in the 
 station, on the platforms, on the grounds. 
 
 First aid they had received, but nothing more. 
 Their condition was piteous. At the arrest of the 
 trains the Americans clambered down briskly from 
 their places and began relieving the immediate wants 
 of these unfortunates. 
 
 "Maybe I'd best clear my poor chaps out of here," 
 said an anxious British medical officer to an Ameri- 
 can captain. "The sight of them may disturb your 
 men." 
 
 "On the contrary," replied the American grimly, 
 "it's the best thing that could happen. It'll put the 
 iron into their soul." 
 
 And it did. Even the Hun was amazed at the 
 sternness of that American reception committee. For 
 though the bombardment was heavier than that dur- 
 ing the height of the Verdun offensive, the shells fall- 
 ing like iron hail less than five feet apart, with a 
 low raking machine-gun fire that moved with auto- 
 matic precision up and down the field, and the hurri- 
 cane of high explosives and shrapnel and gas created 
 
242 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 an inferno compared to which Gettysburg was as 
 calm as the Elysian Fields — yet those American 
 troops did not falter. 
 
 Step by step they disputed every foot of advance, 
 clinging close to the ground, fighting for hours 
 against an enemy six times their superior. The Ger- 
 mans pushed, pushed again and kept on pushing. 
 Assault succeeded assault, wave followed wave, each 
 one more formidable as the Germans waxed wroth 
 at the check. But the Americans held on ; they dug 
 in with their spades ; they remanned their guns as 
 their gunners fell, wiping out each successive enemy 
 wave; they even reached out on either wing and re- 
 trieved nests of batteries in the woods, and from 
 these fresh points of vantage they popped away at 
 the astounded and bewildered Hun, who could not 
 believe that two divisions alone, and only parts of 
 these, were blocking his advance. 
 
 But as a matter of fact those two divisions were 
 not alone. The whole United States of America stood 
 solidly behind them, shoulder to shoulder, a vast shad- 
 owy host, warming their hearts and strengthening 
 their blows. 
 
 Now these troops had been planted at that par- 
 ticular point in the line merely to plug for the moment 
 the passage while the French took up new defensive 
 positions in the rear. But these aggressive, mordant 
 young allies did not conceive that merely to stem the 
 boche tide wa-s the whole of their duty. They 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 243 
 
 dreamed better than that. So after surprising the 
 enemy by their tenacity and cheek they proceeded 
 to sail in on a lively counter-attack of their own 
 and drive the intruder back. And drive him back 
 they did, with a nerve, a grit, a kind of brisk keen 
 joyousness, intrinsically western, that brought down 
 the applause of the world. It was in fact a superb 
 bit of fighting. And the best part of it all was that 
 the men did not consider they had done anything fine 
 or out of the way. That was on June first, second 
 and third. 
 
 A wounded machine gunner, with a hole through 
 his chest, gave me his explanation of their valor. 
 
 "It was like this," he said: "In those training 
 camps back in the States they taught us a lot of 
 things about war. And when we came over on this 
 side they taught us a whole lot more. Seems like we 
 learned about everything there was to know. But 
 one thing they didn't teach us." 
 
 He paused, matter-of-factly, to cough up some 
 blood. 
 
 "What was it they didn't teach you?" I asked. 
 
 "They didn't teach us how to quit. And so we 
 didn't. We just kept on going!" He added reflec- 
 tively: "It's their artillery that counts. Get those 
 Dutchmen up close and there's nothing to them. We 
 fought them off their feet." 
 
 It was the veritable truth. 
 
 But it is not to be conceived that this was a blood- 
 
244 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 less victory. The first day of June a thin stream of 
 crimson began to trickle to the rear from the wounded 
 American Army. And those first days that thin 
 crimson stream trickled all the way from Chateau- 
 Thierry to Paris, a distance of fifty-one miles, with- 
 out intervention or hospital care. One Red Cross 
 hospital there was, indeed, but soon this was swamped. 
 Men with nothing beyond first-aid bandages began 
 pouring into the Paris hospitals. It was one of those 
 inevitable conditions of war that are bound to occur 
 when evacuation hospitals are lost. 
 
 Close up behind the Front the French evacuation 
 hospitals, diminished in number, crippled in resources, 
 were already glutted with British, French and Ameri- 
 can wounded and gassed. They lay on litters in the 
 corridors, the doorways, the verandas, and overflowed 
 into the yards and along the roadsides. Several 
 American women canteeners came to help the French 
 in this dire emergency. They found most of the per- 
 sonnel of one hospital already flown, the town being 
 under direct shell fire. And for several days in that 
 swamped hospital, together with a few brave French 
 doctors and nurses, these American volunteers toiled 
 like impassioned fiends day and night; ran the 
 kitchen, cooked the meals, served out hot coffee, 
 bathed the wounded, bandaged fresh amputations, 
 held up dying heads, wrote letters, injected morphine, 
 assisted at operations, and continued their labors 
 tirelessly hour after hour, in an atmosphere of inde- 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 245 
 
 scribable filth, impregnated with the odors of gas 
 gangrene. 
 
 Twice, two nights in succession, the Red Cross 
 representative in that sector tore at full speed down 
 to Paris, returning with a camion load of surgical 
 supplies, ether and bandages. And when they arrived 
 such was the pressure of the hour that the surgeons 
 themselves ran out from their operating tables, dived 
 their hands down into the precious box, caught up an 
 armload and ran back, shouting directions over their 
 shoulders. 
 
 It was during this period of stress that a noble idea 
 occurred to the Red Cross representative, which he 
 proceeded to act upon at once. 
 
 A short distance away was an abandoned French 
 hospital, empty, its beds scarce cold. He drove over 
 and asked to rent it. 
 
 "What for?" demanded the French authorities. 
 
 "To use for our American wounded. To relieve 
 the pressure. To take them off your hands." 
 
 And he struck a bargain then and there. That 
 accomplished, once more he scorched the road to 
 Paris. This time he loaded up fifteen tons of stuff — 
 one of those complete hospital units the Red Cross 
 had stored in its warehouses against just such a crisis 
 as this. That unit contained tents, beds, bandages, 
 nitro-oxide plants, ether, instruments, and the 
 entire equipment for three surgical teams. By tele- 
 phone, surgeons and nurses were summoned to hurry 
 
246 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 out by automobile. The representative himself 
 hastened back to the other end. But while he was 
 still on the way, by one of those swift military 
 changes the hospital he had rented became untenable 
 by reason of a shift of the American troops into 
 another army zone. 
 
 So now he had an outfit, but no plant. Nothing 
 daunted, for in his automobile he was still a lap or so 
 ahead of his slower convoy, he started to comb the 
 countryside for another hospital. And so successful 
 were his efforts that by the time his material caught 
 up with him he was able to direct it to a new loca- 
 tion. Then came the installation of the plant. A 
 chateau had been taken over for headquarters, oper- 
 ating and X-ray rooms. Behind the house in a fair 
 open field back by cool pine woods were ranged the 
 hospital tents, each with a capacity of about fifty 
 beds. 
 
 And now began a piece of spectacular teamwork. 
 A detachment of soldiers began policing — cleaning up 
 — the grounds; the nurses in the operating room 
 commenced to boil their instruments ; the sergeant 
 began tacking up on the valuable tapestried walls 
 lengths of white oilcloth; in the kitchen, the deep- 
 seated heart of it all, the dietitian had already started 
 the fire and marshaled her minions ; the night teams 
 of surgeons donned caps and aprons — and when a 
 gray dust-covered army limousine raced up and the 
 chief surgeon of that sector crisply demanded "How 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 247 
 
 soon do you figure you can handle some wounded?" 
 the commanding officer of the new evacuation hospital 
 responded: "As soon as you like. Shoot 'em right 
 along!" 
 
 And inside of an hour the army ambulances began 
 to roll in and the stretcher bearers began to lift out 
 the litters with the recumbent immobile figures, 
 wrapped in blankets and many of them caked with 
 mud and blood. 
 
 On June first the Americans began to attack. By 
 June fourth this new Red Cross evacuation hospital 
 had been installed behind Chateau-Thierry and was 
 operating day and night on Americans only. And 
 thus the thin stream of crimson, which for three days 
 had trickled from the front lines practically without 
 interruption clear back to Paris, was abruptly tour- 
 niqueted. It was a fine piece of emergency work and 
 an excellent example of the complete collaboration be- 
 tween the Army and the Red Cross. The prepared- 
 ness of this latter organization, its warehouses 
 stacked to the roof with extra supplies so that it 
 could multiply its entire hospital bed capacity by six 
 without a strain; its camion service ready to trans- 
 port these goods to any designated point in the ad- 
 vance zone; and these two facilities, materials and 
 transportation put absolutely at the command of the 
 Army in a vital and trying hour went far to avert 
 what might have been a tragedy. 
 
 It was a brilliant sunshiny day when I arrived nl 
 
248 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 this Red Cross evacuation hospital behind Chateau- 
 Thierry. At the moment there was a lull on the 
 Front. Twice during the month of June the Germans 
 had sought by means of smoke barrages and pontoons 
 to cross the Marne, that river of ill omen to Prussian 
 hopes, and twice the Americans had held them. And 
 so aggressively had these gay yet austere youngsters 
 fought that it was a common jest along that sector 
 that the Kaiser was seeking peace terms. 
 
 There were now other units there, and they divided 
 the honors with the veteran poilus who flanked them 
 on either side. 
 
 The hospital itself, situated in a splendid grove of 
 pines and purple beeches, was by this time operating 
 as smoothly as if it had been established months in- 
 stead of days. The entire bed capacity of that plant 
 I may not give, but an idea of its elasticity may be 
 obtained from the fact that upon one night, after an 
 evacuation, the patients numbered three, and upon a 
 subsequent night, during a rush, the kitchen fed more 
 than nine hundred persons and showed no signs of 
 pegging out. 
 
 Upon the afternoon of my arrival patients were 
 scattered throughout many of the wards, bringing 
 up the total to quite a considerable figure. In com- 
 pany with the commanding officer. Major M , I 
 
 had gone the rounds of the tents. Suddenly in the 
 midst of a remark he was called to the telephone. 
 
 It was long distance — that is to say, it was some 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 249 
 
 headquarters up behind the lines. The major re- 
 turned with a sober face. 
 
 "It's an order," said he, "to clean out everybody, 
 make a clean sweep, get ready the beds. I suppose 
 you can guess what that means." 
 
 "An attack?" 
 
 "Well, I dare say the boche will try to pull off 
 something. They've been massing up behind Chateau- 
 Thierry now for days. But they're not the only ones 
 that have been massing, and don't you forget it. 
 Our men on this side the Marne are lying in wait, a 
 cordial little reception party, and if some of their 
 scoundrels do cross the river they'll never live to tell 
 the tale !" He laughed — the cheerful buoyant laugh 
 of utter confidence which prevails upon the Front. 
 "But this order means that we'll evacuate this eve- 
 ning. It's better for the men, even the serious cases, 
 to be sent back to a quiet base where they can have 
 constant attention ; they must have it, and we can't 
 possibly give it to them here. In the midst of a big 
 fight our hands are full with the fresh influx. More- 
 over, it stands to reason that the sooner we can get a 
 patient in fit shape to travel out of this cyclone belt 
 the better it is for all concerned. And yet it's the 
 hardest thing in the world to let some of these men 
 go. Some are special cases where we've fought for 
 their lives. We'd like to guard them through the 
 critical stage. As for the nurses, they cry like babies 
 when they have to surrender some of their pets. 
 
250 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 You'll see to-night. Just watch my staff ; see if they 
 don't try to hang on to some of the men." 
 
 This was about five in the afternoon. He disap- 
 peared into the chateau to have a conference with his 
 head nurse upon supplies. A few minutes later. 
 
 Colonel X , chief surgeon of all the American 
 
 forces in that center, stepped down from his limou- 
 sine, and the first words with which he greeted the 
 major were these : "How many beds have you filled ?" 
 
 The major gave the budget of the day. 
 
 "Well, clean them right out. If you've not suffi- 
 cient ambulances, send down the line to X . But 
 
 get the men out of here to-night. Get your beds free. 
 What about supplies — enough to stand a pretty big 
 racket ? How are you on ether ?" 
 
 Major M gave the account of his plant. 
 
 Everything was in perfect readiness for the storm. 
 
 "Fine!" pronounced the colonel. "Well, I've got 
 to beat it. This is my busy day." 
 
 "Just when and where do you think the Germans 
 are going to attack ?" I ventured to put in my oar. 
 
 The colonel looked me up and down with a whim- 
 sical smile. Women are rare phenomena in the land- 
 scape of the Front. When they do arrive so far from 
 their natural habitat, the safe and sober rear, it is 
 taken for granted they are there with just and suffi- 
 cient cause, and they are treated with a deference, a 
 consideration and a fine camaraderie that are good 
 to experience. 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 251 
 
 "If I knew the exact reply to your very pertinent 
 question," laughed he, "I'd not be standing here; 
 I'd be burning the road to G. H. Q. ; and we'd put 
 something over on the boche to remember us by. As 
 it is, we can only say things seem mighty imminent. 
 They're massing guns and effectives. So are we. 
 Just where the point of the thrust will come no man 
 can say. Your guess is as good as mine. But we've 
 got to be ready. And we are ! Wait. I'll show you 
 something. But you mustn't put it in the Post !" 
 
 Whereupon he sat himself down, hauled out his 
 secret map and his secret notebook — a small black, 
 leather-bound affair, in which were jotted cryptic 
 figures representing positions and numbers of Ameri- 
 can forces which a German spy would have bartered 
 his worthless soul to possess ; and with these two, the 
 map and the notebook, he outlined his plan of cam- 
 paign in the event of a German drive. Here and 
 there were troops, American troops. Here and there 
 behind them were American hospitals, each one capa- 
 ble of caring for so many wounded each day. All 
 together they represented an ample bed capacity. 
 Those first unorganized days of June were well over ; 
 by now the Army had arranged a hospital system 
 that effectively drained the sector. And not only 
 that — alternative positions had been located in case 
 the evacuation hospitals had to clear out and rein- 
 stall farther to the rear. Every emergency had been 
 planned for. All was indicated on that secret map. 
 
252 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "By the way, major," concluded the colonel, snap- 
 ping to his little black notebook as he rose, "how 
 soon could you up-stakes and move?" 
 
 The major stated the exact number of hours, and 
 when I say that that number amounted to less than 
 three hundred minutes you may realize how simple 
 and supple are the component parts of such a plant. 
 "I'll have the sergeant get out the tent bags," he 
 added, "and stack them outside the tents." 
 
 "May as well be ready," agreed the colonel, step- 
 ping into his car. "Not that there's the slightest 
 chance in the world that the boche will break through, 
 but it would be criminal not to be prepared." 
 
 "We'll be prepared, sir," promised the major 
 quietly. 
 
 "Good. They may start something about two in 
 the morning. So long!" 
 
 "That's two warnings," said the major amusedly 
 as the colonel's car rolled away. 
 
 Later, at mess out in the chateau grounds in a tent, 
 with the westering sun over behind the dark pine 
 woods, a great globe of fire drowning the fields and 
 the tents in a fine golden light, we received a third. 
 This time it came in the form of a note from the 
 French headquarters hard by. It was in French and 
 it read: 
 
 "We have the honor to announce to you that an 
 important German attack is hourly expected in our 
 sector. It will be advisable for you to evacuate in- 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 253 
 
 stantly as many patients as you possibly can, in 
 order to have the greatest number of beds free for 
 the emergency." 
 
 "Looks as if the boche really meant business," 
 commented the major. "Do you care to watch the 
 evacuation ? If so I recommend the rear steps of the 
 chateau as a good reviewing stand." 
 
 I took my place as directed, well removed from 
 the traffic. Upon the road beneath just in front of 
 the hospital tents were lined up a long string of 
 ambulances. A sergeant was in charge of the affair. 
 Inside the tents, orderlies and nurses had their hands 
 full preparing the men for transportation. Some 
 of the patients were up, superintending their own 
 moving; some, in vivid pink-striped Red Cross pa- 
 jamas — the gift of some gay soul — were sitting on 
 their cots, swinging bare legs and shouting for foot- 
 gear; some, disdaining such effete trappings of civi- 
 lization, had wrapped the drapery of their couches 
 about them, squaw-wise, and were standing barefoot 
 on the grass outside enjoying the festal scene. It 
 was like a great gipsy encampment: 
 
 Still farther down the road one man had boldly 
 snatched another's sole garment of attire, a dressing 
 robe, and the owner, reduced to his birthday suit, 
 started a chase. Ensued a picturesque race. This, 
 however, was but a brief kaleidoscopic film, which 
 danced across the road for a minute like a Greek 
 frieze, and was abruptly censored by the sergeant. 
 
254 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 A nurse appeared at the flap of the tent, an anxious 
 look in her eye. She caught sight of the tall statu- 
 esque Indian who, with his blanket hunched well round 
 his head and his pyjamas swelling gently in the 
 evening breeze, stood rubbing one big bare foot lux- 
 uriously over the other big bare foot and discoursing 
 to another young Indian buck thus : 
 
 "Yes, sir, I'm telling you, friend, I sure thought 
 the end had come. "There I was, sitting under a little 
 short tree by the road writing home to my mother. 
 I'd just finished writing *Well, mamma, I've come 
 through lucky so far,' and looked up. There was a 
 whole wagonload of grenades passing, and at that 
 minute a shell burst in the road right ahead. And 
 I'm telling you, friend, suddenly it seemed like all the 
 world rose up in the air but me " 
 
 "You, Fred Murphy," interrupted the nurse se- 
 verely. "Where are those slippers I gave you? 
 Don't you know you can't travel in bare feet.'' It 
 isn't done in France !" 
 
 "Miles too small for my trilbies," explained Mur- 
 phy succinctly. He turned his face toward her a 
 brief instant and then, turning it back, continued 
 
 without a halt : " but me, and I went down. And 
 
 when the lieutenant helped me to my feet he said that 
 nobody but a damn fool or a Marine could sit under 
 a little short tree like that writing letters while a 
 whole wagonload of grenades exploded, and get away 
 with it. And he showed me the tree top blowed clear 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 255 
 
 •down the valley and sitting up there like an open 
 umbrella." 
 
 A medical officer came hurrying over to the nurse. 
 
 "The orderly said you wanted me. What is it?" 
 
 "It's that chest case. He can't go. He's on the 
 list, but there must be some mistake. Oh, I 
 think it's terrible to send a man on the road like 
 that!" 
 
 They passed into the deeper gloom of the tent. I 
 followed. Near the door on a cot sat a doughboy, a 
 shoulder case, garbed as per army regulation as far 
 as his waist, and from thence upward his fine torso 
 naked save for strappings and splints which held his 
 arm in an immobile apparatus. 
 
 With his free hand he was pawing wildly among 
 the effects of his kit, while he exclaimed in loud ex- 
 cited tones, "I can't find it! I never got it. If I 
 had it I'd remember it, wouldn't I? Say, wouldn't 
 a guy remember a thing like that? I guess yes! 
 You never gave it to me — see?" 
 
 The orderly — later killed when the hospital was 
 bombed by boche planes — was down on his haunches 
 lacing up the patient's boots. He looked up with a 
 grin. 
 
 "What's biting you, buddy? The last thing I 
 gave you was slum, and I notice you wolfed that down 
 like one o'clock." 
 
 "It's my shrapnel. The piece the doctor took outa 
 me. He promised before he put me to sleep on the 
 
256 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 operating table to pin it onto my shirt. Say, look 
 in my pocket, will you?" 
 
 The orderly obliged. But the shrapnel was not 
 there. Just then the doctor passed. "Say, captain, 
 did you operate on this guy ? He says you promised 
 to save his shrapnel." 
 
 The doctor squinted uncertainly through the 
 gloom, 
 
 "Yes, sir, you did !" affirmed the private with con- 
 fidence. "And you promised, sir, to pin the shrapnel 
 onto my shirt." 
 
 "That's right. I remember now, old man." A 
 look passed between the young surgeon and the or- 
 derly. Was it a wink that caused the orderly's left 
 eyelid to droop so flat upon his cheek? 
 
 "Sir, shall I go get his shrapnel? I think I know 
 where it's at." 
 
 "Good!" said the surgeon, laughter in his voice. 
 "You'll find it wrapped in a piece of gauze." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 The orderly departed. But just outside the tent 
 he paused, dived down into his pocket, brought up 
 several objects, examined them attentively, and then 
 hurried back to the rear entrance, where by the light 
 of an electric torch the nurse was making up her 
 hst. 
 
 "S-s-t! Gimme a gauze compress, sister!" said a 
 husky voice in her ear. Absently she pointed to a 
 parcel on the table. The orderly helped himself. 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 257 
 
 The next moment he was back in the front tent. 
 
 "Here you are, buddy! That'll hold you for a 
 while!" And he deposited an object twisted up in a 
 bit of gauze in the soldier's eager palm. It was a 
 copper bullet the size of a marble. 
 
 "Oh, boy!" ejaculated the private in deep ecstatic 
 joy. "She's a whale! A regular Big Bertha! No 
 wonder she stopped me. Say, captain," he hailed the 
 surgeon who was passing, "can't I go back to my 
 outfit? I don't want to lose that gang. And I 
 feel fine." 
 
 The orderly chuckled as he warped his man's free 
 arm into the flannel shirt. "Feel so darned nifty 
 you'd like to go out and chop down a couple or three 
 trees just for sport — hey?" 
 
 Outside, upon the road, the ambulances were load- 
 ing rapidly and rumbling off into the gloom. The 
 sergeant, the man of the hour, oversaw all. 
 
 "Gently there !" This to the brancardiers as they 
 lifted a litter with a recumbent figure swathed in 
 blankets and shot it into the ambulance. "You have 
 three in there?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Well, beat it! Now how many more are there 
 left?" 
 
 From the steps of the chateau Major M , in 
 
 white cap and operating apron, surveyed the scene. 
 The procession passed briskly. 
 
 Ambulances rolled up, loaded and disappeared. 
 
258 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 Not a light showed. The men were mere dusky 
 patches of gloom moving through denser gloom. 
 Overhead the sky was equally dark, fitting the earth 
 close, like the stopper of a bottle. 
 
 "I wonder how it feels," I said, "to be lying in the 
 little black interior of those ambulances and rumbling 
 off to God knows where." 
 
 "Sometimes very dramatic things happen in those 
 same little black interiors," observed the major 
 grimly. 
 
 An orderly approached, saluted the major. 
 
 "Sir, there's a light shining out of one of the upper 
 windows. It makes quite a projection. One of the 
 drivers marked it far down the road." 
 
 "Go up and tell the nurse to close the shutter," 
 commanded the major tersely. "Tell her to go all 
 over the house. We don't want a bomb dropped in 
 the midst of this party." 
 
 "Have you ever had any disagreeable experiences 
 with wounded German prisoners ?" I inquired. 
 
 "We've not had many of their wounded, but one 
 night we got in a Prussian lieutenant. I put him in 
 a tent with a bunch of Germans, all in pretty bad 
 shape. He shouted and swore like a trooper for be- 
 ing subjected to the hideous ignominy of having to 
 breathe the same polluted air as his men. 'Twas an 
 American atrocity ! He said he was a Prussian offi- 
 cer, and he haughtily demanded to be changed to an 
 officers' ward." 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU^THIERRY 259 
 
 "And what did you do? Assign him to a private 
 room with a special nurse and send up iced cham- 
 pagne ?" 
 
 "Something like that ! I ordered his cot changed, 
 and I placed him between two poor German devils 
 who were dying of gas gangrene. They smelled to 
 heaven! I thought if our own nurses could tend to 
 those fellows it might do his lord-highmightiness good 
 to lie between 'em for a while! In contrast to his 
 conduct I had a young American lieutenant out in 
 one of the tents, Ward B, and it was not until he was 
 evacuated that I learned he was an officer. 
 
 " 'Why, lieutenant,' I said, *why didn't you tell 
 me? I'd have placed you in the officers' ward.' 
 
 " 'Oh, that's all right, sir,' he laughed. 'What's 
 good enough for my men is good enough for me.' 
 And that is the difference in a nutshell between 
 autocracy and democracy." 
 
 One of the medical staff approached hurriedly. 
 "Sir, I'd like to keep some few of these cases. They're 
 in bad shape. I hate to start them on the road. It 
 — it's against my conscience." 
 
 "All right. Use your own discretion. You heard 
 the orders, though — to make a clean sweep. It may 
 seem hard, but the men will receive better attention 
 than we'll be able to give them once the rush begins. 
 But keep them if you feel you should." 
 
 With a breath of relief the officer turned away to 
 countermand his order. 
 
260 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "Sergeant!" called the major. 
 
 "Here, sir !" came a steady reliable voice from the 
 dark. 
 
 "Put all the wounded that are left into one tent — 
 Ward A. How many have you?" 
 
 "About twenty-five, sir." 
 
 "Good. Tell your men to clean up all the rest of 
 the wards and get them into condition. And, ser- 
 geant " 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Where are those tent bags — the ones in which we 
 pack the tents ?" 
 
 "Upstairs in the storeroom, sir." 
 
 *'Get them down. Place one outside each tent and 
 instruct your men in their use. Maybe you'd better 
 assign a patrol on this road to-night." 
 
 "Yes, sir. The officer of the day has already 
 spoken to me about it, sir." 
 
 "All right, sergeant. Then I guess we're about 
 ready for whatever may turn up. You'd better try 
 to snatch some sleep." 
 
 "I think I'd rather stay up, sir, if you don't mind." 
 
 The sergeant saluted. We went inside. Already 
 the surgeons and the nurses had sought their re- 
 spective quarters to summon what sleep they might 
 before the storm broke. I said good night also, and 
 was conveyed to my billet in the village, the major 
 promising to have me roused if anything occurred. 
 By now the sky was clear, a deep soft firmament of 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 261 
 
 gleaming stars which blinked friendly reassurance 
 to the troubled earth atom below. 
 
 "It's all right !" they seemed mutely to say. "See, 
 we're still here ! It's all right !" 
 
 The wind was toward the Germans. Therefore, 
 though already the big guns had waked to their 
 nightly orchestra, and vivid lightninglike flashes from 
 their flaming throats played constantly across the 
 low horizon, yet not a single sound could be heard. 
 All through the night, when at intervals I rose to 
 watch, that leaping devil's dance played noiselessly 
 across the rosy sky. It was uncanny — lightning 
 without thunder. Where was the sound? In the 
 upper air reaches ? 
 
 The next morning I woke to discover I had not 
 been called. The drive, then, had not materialized. 
 At the hospital I found that such was even the case. 
 There was a smile in the air, and a whisper that the 
 Americans, the previous night, had dumped twelve 
 thousand gas shells down upon the Hun just as he 
 was clambering over the top. The push for the mo- 
 ment was averted. Nevertheless a few wounded were 
 trickling in, and upstairs in the officers' ward I found 
 two bed-fast lieutenants. One, by his soft velvety 
 drawl, was a Southerner. Later I learned his exact 
 habitat was Memphis, Tennessee. The other young 
 officer apparently had been recounting some knavery 
 of the boche, for with my hand on the open door I 
 heard the Tennesseean respond fervidly : "Yes, suh. 
 
262 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 They're dirty snakes. You can't have no commerce 
 with them. Yuh just got to kill their souls !" 
 
 I drew back and listened, for the Tennesseean was 
 beginning a tale. 
 
 "Yes, suh," his cool, placid voice flowed on, "they 
 was murderin' us in that woods. They'd got us in a 
 pocket and from nests of machine guns they was 
 shellin' us three ways. We'd had no meat for over 
 two days. It was tough, I'm tellin' yuh, suh. So 
 that night I took my sergeant and went foraging in 
 the village. It was deserted and the shells was fall- 
 ing right lively. Presently I shoved open the door of 
 a barn, and there was a fine fat hawg rooting away 
 inside. 
 
 " ^Sergeant,' I says, *that hawg in there tried to 
 bite me.' 
 
 " 'Well, suh,' says the sergeant, 'there ain't no 
 French hawg born that can bite my lieutenant and 
 get aw^y with it. We-all ain't going to stand that 
 from no hawg. No, suh !' And so that night we had 
 a fine mess of po'k chops. Yes, suh, those po'k chops 
 certainly tasted grand." 
 
 I slipped inside to have a look at the raconteur. 
 He was a tall, lean, lank, freckled, solemn-looking 
 young gentleman, with a broken ankle and a quiz- 
 zical brown eye. Somehow he reminded me of 
 Lincoln. 
 
 "Yes, suh," he was remarking, "this sure is one 
 (damn funny man's wah." After I had established 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 263 
 
 myself I demanded what led him to such a cynical 
 conclusion. But he refused to be drawn, and 
 asked instead the condition of a patient in the 
 adjoining shock ward. I told him the man was 
 dead. 
 
 "I'm sure sorry to heah that," he said simply. 
 "That man was in my outfit and a bettah boy never 
 spit. He got his after I came in. I left a squad of 
 five in a dugout on the side of a knoll and I told 
 them not to stir until the shelling let up. Well, this 
 boy says it got pretty hot and crowded inside and 
 he stepped out a minute to breathe. And that very 
 minute a shell dropped. He might have saved his life 
 if he'd bandaged his leg right off; but no, suh, he 
 told me he couldn't think of nothing but hauling those 
 poor fellows from that caved-in wreck — and him with 
 one leg blowed off. That boy deserves a Croix de 
 Guerre. I'm goin' to write to his mothah." 
 
 I was called away for a few minutes, and when I 
 returned the lieutenant was embarked upon another 
 tale: 
 
 "Yes, suh, I just couldn't bear to see that boy's 
 body lyin' out in the blisterin' sun. By the clothes 
 he was a Marine, and I expect he'd been hangin' up 
 against that bob-wire some time. I didn't care if it 
 was No Man's Land. It wasn't no fit land for an 
 American's body to be lyin' out in the sun, and so I 
 started out to fetch it in. 
 
 " 'Lemme go, lieutenant !' one of my outfit says. 
 
264 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 I've got the finest outfit of boys, miss, you ever laid 
 eyes on." 
 
 "Maybe that's because they've got such a fine lieu- 
 tenant!" I said slyly. 
 
 "No, suh, that isn't it at all !" he retorted earnestly. 
 "Well, I says to him: *Man, I can't ask for volun- 
 teers for this. It's too danged dangerous.* And 
 that boy, he says to me : ^Shucks, lieutenant ! I'll 
 die for yuh any day with pleasure. But for God's 
 sake, don't leave me lie out there like a dawg.' So I 
 promised, and he went out and fetched the Marine 
 in. Two hours later that boy was shot straight be- 
 tween the eyes by a sniper's bullet. I remembered 
 what he'd said: 'For God's sake, lieutenant, don't 
 leave my body lie out like that' — and it kind of hurt 
 my soul. So I sent him back to the rear. And we 
 buried that boy with honahs. Yes, suh, this sure is 
 one damn funny man's wah !" 
 
 Downstairs the hospital seemed drowned in a 
 drowsy Sabbath calm. Not a breath stirred. Roses 
 drooped in the hot stillness. High overhead in a 
 light azure sky Allied planes swam like gnats across a 
 sun-lit stretch of water. To complete the note of 
 peace two stray hounds dreamed on the steps or 
 snapped languidly at blue-bottle flies. Who said 
 there was a world war on hand? And yet, late the 
 night before, still another warning had come over 
 the wires, and the remaining twenty-five patients 
 had been hurriedly transported to safer climes. 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 265 
 
 Down the road thousands of camions were passing, 
 a steady sluggish stream. The level, poplar-bordered 
 highway was alive with them as far as the eye could 
 see. Camions filled with French troops ; camions filled 
 with artillery, guns, guns, guns ; camions filled with 
 horses, two to a vehicle. And after that stream of 
 blue casques had flowed by, with scarcely a minute's 
 interval, came another stream — United States khaki, 
 going up on the line. The heavy American lorries 
 thundered by in a cloud of dust, their wheels tearing 
 the gravel out of the roads. The men were covered 
 with a coating of dust, thick as if they had come 
 through a desert sandstorm. Their eye-lashes were 
 powdered gray ; their eyebrows were bleached white ; 
 their fresh skins were burned brick red; and their 
 eyes, unprotected by that abominable visorless over- 
 seas cap, were inflamed with dust and fatigue and 
 lack of sleep. And yet how they hurrahed, leaning 
 far out to yell as they flashed by ! They were going 
 into hell, and they knew it. 
 
 They had no illusions about war. But the sight 
 of those dirty, sweaty, confident men thrilled us. 
 
 At five, in front of the chateau, the chaplain read 
 the burial service over the hero who had given his 
 life to save his comrades in the dugout. Over the 
 pine box lay the folds of the flag, a mantle of glory. 
 Upon the rude casket some friend had placed a cross 
 of crimson ramblers, the rich splendor of their hue 
 and their fragrance symbolizing mutely the beauty 
 
266 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 of soul of him who lay underneath. Red roses for 
 those who die in youth for their country! They 
 seemed to burn in the quiet air. Their fragrance 
 mounted like rare incense. The chaplain read the 
 immortal words of hope : "I am the resurrection and 
 the life : he that believeth in me, though he were dead, 
 yet shall he live. . . ." High overhead the faint 
 reassuring drone of Allied planes mingled with the 
 murmur of the detachment of soldiers, who with bared 
 heads repeated softly "Our Father who art in Heaven 
 . . ." while off on the side lines stood a group of 
 French children, awed, curious, respectful, with 
 bunches of field daisies clutched tightly in their hands, 
 with which, after the Americains had departed, they 
 proposed to decorate the strange soldier's grave. 
 
 Later, in search of consolation, I wandered back 
 to the Tennesseean's ward. I was not disappointed. 
 That liquid drawl flowed on, soft as the Mississippi 
 at twilight. 
 
 "Yes, suh, we called that outfit the Midnight Regi- 
 ment. I reckon yuh-all heard of them; they was 
 
 stationed a while at B . They was officered with 
 
 white folks, and a friend of mine was major. Well, 
 suh, they put that regiment alongside some French 
 niggers from Upper Africa. Yuh'd think those two 
 sets would amalgamate, coming from the same family 
 tree. But no, suh! There was just one perpetual 
 uproar. They was a-hackin' and a-choppin' each up 
 with knives from mawning until night! Yuh nevah 
 
BEHIND CHATEAU-THIERRY 267 
 
 heard such takin's-on. And the officers couldn't find 
 what was the row nohow. So one night the major, 
 he says to his sergeant, a big negro : 
 
 " 'Sergeant,' says he, *I want yuh to go out and 
 make a private investigation of just what's the 
 trouble between yuh Americans and those French 
 niggers, and hand in a confidential report.' 
 
 " 'I don't need to go out and make no 'vestigation, 
 major,' says that sergeant. *I can report to yuh 
 whut-alPs the trouble right now. Yes^ suh !' 
 
 " 'All right, sergeant. What is it ?' 
 
 " 'Well, suh, it's like this : Evah since this heah 
 Midnight Regiment come over to France and been 
 a-takin' part in this man's wah, us-all's been hearin' 
 the white folks talkin' French. All the white folks 
 gettin' to talkin' French. Yes, suh. And now we 
 come up alongside these strange nigger folks and find 
 them gabblin' French too ! And when niggers goes to 
 gittin' stuck up like that and puttin' on proud white 
 folks' airs they's jest naturally boun' to be trouble! 
 Yes, suh, that's whut it is !' " 
 
 The afternoon shaded gently into night ; the night's 
 dark hours slipped by, silent as bats' wings ; morning 
 came again, calm, sunshiny — and still no threat of 
 attack. It was ominous, menacing. The hospital 
 staff rested with taut nerves, like a football team 
 ready at a given signal to spring into intense action. 
 But the signal was withheld. 
 
 Then suddenly one July morning about two o'clock 
 
268 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 the storm burst. The atmosphere trembled and 
 shook to the clamor of mighty guns. Even in Paris, 
 fifty-one miles away, their deep-throated orchestra 
 could be heard. Fluff! Fluff! Fluff-pluff! Dis- 
 tant, yet clear, unmistakable, sounded those soft and 
 sinister volleys through the night. Not since the 
 Battle of the Marne in 1914 had Parisians heard suchi 
 a violent bombardment. Some flew to the telephone. 
 Was it a Gotha raid? Was that the outer anti- 
 aircraft barrage ? No. It was the long-delayed July 
 offensive. 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 
 
 The third phase of the great German offensive of 
 1918 began with the first light of dawn on July the 
 fifteenth. In Paris, fifty-one miles behind Chateau- 
 Thierry, that distant bombardment, violent beyond 
 all precedent, could be distinctly heard. It could be 
 heard, but the explosions were not like real explosions. 
 They were like tiny, far-away echoes, ghosts of ex- 
 plosions — as if baseballs were being hurled with ex- 
 treme force against a wall heavily padded with cotton 
 wool. Pluff! Pluff-pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Pluff! 
 Pluff ! Distinct, yet muted, they came, those distant 
 thuds ; denatured, so to speak, with all the sound vio- 
 lence extracted. 
 
 Parisians rose from their beds, stepped to the win- 
 dows and leaned from their casements to listen. But 
 immediately the nearer night noises of the city 
 eclipsed those distant ghost roars of battle. The 
 whir of a belated taxi through the deserted streets, 
 the hollow ring of footsteps on the pavement, even the 
 blinking of an eyelid — and those soft sinister booms 
 were completely blotted out. But back in bed once 
 
 269 
 
270 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 more, with the windows shutting out the city sounds, 
 the dull pounding commenced again, steady, persist- 
 ent as the beat of the blood in the arteries: Fluff! 
 Pluff-pluff! Fluff! 
 
 Thus at Faris, the heart of the world. But up at 
 Chateau-Thierry, the seat of alarms, it was a vastly 
 different affair. There was nothing dim, distant, dis- 
 solved, denatured or cotton-woolly about the can- 
 nonading in that sector. It was the storm center of 
 the tornado. The air was thick with clamor. The 
 heavy guns bellowed incessantly. In order to hear 
 each other men had to lean close and shout, and then 
 it was only by the lip movement that they could be 
 understood. It was like trying to speak during the 
 rushing thunder of an express train. The Frussian 
 storm troops were attacking formidably, with all 
 their immense prestige, and the Americans were re- 
 sponding coolly, methodicaly as the Concord minute- 
 men, with machine gun and rifle. 
 
 It cannot be said that the Frussians were cowards. 
 They had been ordered to hold their position at any 
 cost; and they fought ferociously, until they were 
 dropped by the bayonet. In their machine-gun pits 
 twenty and thirty Hun gunners were found, piled in 
 heaps, slain by the bayonet, showing they had re- 
 sisted desperately to the end ; and the path to those 
 same pits could be traced by American dead. Neither 
 side asked or gave any quarter, and in those first 
 fierce days of the offensive few prisoners were taken. 
 
Copyright, 1918, by the Cttrtis Publishing Company. 
 Photograph passed by the Comtnittee on Public Infortnatiou. Photo, by courtesy of the 
 
 American Red Cross. Reproduced from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia. 
 
 TENT-WARD SHOWING DAMAGE CAUSED BY GERMAN BOMBS. 
 THIS RED CROSS MILITARY HOSPITAL WAS BOMBED BY GER- 
 MAN PLANES DURING THE JULY OFFENSIVE WHILE THE 
 AMERICANS WERE WINNING AT CHATEAU-THIERRY 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 271 
 
 Despite the redoubtable blows of the famous iron- 
 disciplined Prussian Guards and the Bavarian Re- 
 serves, shock troops alleged to be irresistible, despite 
 also the hail of bullets and gas shells and high ex- 
 plosives right in their faces, the Americans started a 
 counter-drive. The Germans had initiated this game 
 called "drive," and now the Americans, under Foch 
 and Pershing, were ramming that same game down 
 their throats. And slowly the German line began to 
 recoil. Slowly those Prussians and Bavarians, fight- 
 ing like tigers, began to retire. For the first time 
 since America's entry into the war she began to land 
 substantial body blows upon the enemy ; for the first 
 time that enemy began to stagger under the terrible 
 punishing force of those blows, delivered with the 
 whole weight of a powerful angry nation behind them. 
 The Germans had started out to stampede the Ameri- 
 cans ; the Americans retorted by stampeding the Ger- 
 mans — a little. 
 
 And now began two tides: one tide strong, and 
 hourly growing stronger, sweeping the Hun back, 
 pressing into tighter corners and hotter hells, victori- 
 ous ; the other tide composed of those who fell — a 
 quiet, stricken, bloody tide, ebbing slowly toward the 
 rear. 
 
 The hospital was waiting to receive them, surgeons 
 and nurses in aprons and caps. In the kitchen a 
 soldier, told off as cook, stoked the big kitchen range 
 untU it glowed incandescent on top, and the huge 
 
272 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 marmites of coffee and cocoa disseminated a fragrant 
 aroma through the house. Ambulances, a steady 
 stream, began to climb the dark, wooded hill road. 
 Two lanterns, like bright, glowing eyes, fastened on 
 either side of the entrance gate, guided them into the 
 grounds. In the rear of the chateau, in front of the 
 admission tent, they halted ; deposited their burdens 
 — silent, immobile, blanket-swathed figures, whose 
 white bandages showed deep crimson stains — re- 
 trieved blankets and stretchers ; snatched a hasty 
 gulp of strong black coffee, and rumbled off for an- 
 other load. More drew up, unloaded, departed. And 
 still more and more and more. What a traffic in the 
 dead of night ! The traffic sergeant gave low, terse 
 orders. A hooded lantern gleamed here and there. 
 Over all was the infernal voice of the cannon, and 
 those swift, stabbing, crimson flames across the sky. 
 Inside the admission tent, despite the rush and the 
 constant influx of fresh stretchers, a clean-cut order 
 prevailed. Men, sorely wounded, rested on their lit- 
 ters without change for a few minutes, while their 
 infected clothes were removed and a brief history 
 taken, after which they were borne off by brancar- 
 diers directly to the X-ray and operating rooms. 
 Thus with all haste and yet with all order a con- 
 stant sorting went on, the serious operative cases 
 going forward, the lighter cases remaining behind. 
 These latter were helped into clean pyjamas, given 
 hot soup or cocoa — some of them during the fury of 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 273 
 
 the attack had not tasted food for more than twenty- 
 . four hours — their wounds re-bandaged, and put to 
 bed to await their turn in the long procession that 
 led to the operating table. And some of these latter, 
 shelled incessantly, under constant shock and stress, 
 not having closed an eye for seventy-two hours, took 
 the high dive into deep oblivion with the coffee cup 
 still in their hands, and slept solidly for a night and 
 a day on end. 
 
 The cots in the admission ward filled up. The 
 stream of badly wounded moved forward and the 
 fresh stream from the ambulances flowed in to its 
 place. Everywhere could be heard a continuous low 
 drone of conversation. There was no excitement. 
 But neither was there silence nor sadness — though 
 some were dying — nor groaning nor evidence of pain. 
 They were talking, indeed, but it was noticeable that 
 no one spoke of his wounds or his sufferings, though 
 some had lain twenty-four hours and more on the 
 field or in the dugouts under intense barrage before 
 they could be brought in. But it was not of this 
 they spoke. The battle, what had happened up there, 
 still intoxicated them, still held their brains in thrall. 
 They talked of horrible, grotesque, fantastic and san- 
 guinary things in low, level dispassionate tones, as if 
 they were discussing the weather : 
 
 "I saw my captain and my lieutenant blown 
 straight to hell ; it was a head-on collision with a high 
 explosive. My captain was a fine fellow. He always 
 
274 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 seen we had a place to sleep, and if there was any- 
 thing to eat going we got it. I was handed one in 
 the chest. We was creeping up on a nest of their 
 machine guns that the dirty boches had hid in a tree. 
 I couldn't bandage my chest wound, and I was spit- 
 ting blood pretty bad, so I lay down in a shallow 
 shell hole for the rest of the day. 
 
 "Along toward night I says to a comrade shot 
 through the arm, who had crawled in alongside: 
 'Steve,' I says, 'we've got to beat it. This is getting 
 too lively for me.' By that time the shells was bust- 
 ing at regular intervals at a distance of about five 
 feet apart. No use scrouchin' down to dodge 'em; 
 if you did you lost your interval — see ? And the next 
 one caught you straight! So we just stood up and 
 walked along kind of slow. We made it that way for 
 about a mile, stumbling along, not going too fast or 
 too slow, for fear of losing that danged interval, 
 when suddenly I flopped down. I'd been bleeding 
 pretty freely right along. 
 
 " 'Steve,' I says, 'I'm not going to make it. You 
 hike on.' 
 
 "But he helped me to stand, and so we kind of 
 leaned up against each other like some of these funny 
 dead drunks you see, and staggered along until pres- 
 ently we saw something looming ahead. I let out a 
 feeble little yip. It was a French machine gun right 
 on top of us, and they was just drawing off to firel 
 Yes, sir! That holler, for all it was so feeble, was 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 275 
 
 the best little piece of business I ever pulled!" 
 
 Some of their stories, I am bound to say, were 
 whoppers, and their figures as inflated as those of 
 watered stock. They saw things heroic size. This 
 phase of battlefield psychology is well known to war 
 surgeons. One soldier, for example, declared his 
 entire division had been wiped out. Another made 
 modest mention of the fact that his company alone, 
 single-handed, against overwhelming odds, had 
 started the Hun on his return trip to Berlin. 
 
 "Aw, dry up !" groaned out an exasperated realist, 
 with a grimace of pain. "You four-flushers make me 
 sick, blowing like that !" 
 
 "Well, anyhow," retorted the youtH who had 
 boasted of his company, "we whaled 'em in that 
 pocket !" 
 
 The realist lifted himself with labor, for a con- 
 temptuous look at the optimist. 
 
 "What's the mater with your eye?" he demanded. 
 
 "Left it on the battlefield to look after things," 
 said the other with utter sang-froid. "What's a little 
 private eye or two in a war of this size.^" 
 
 "Well, you're no tin-horn sport!" admitted the 
 realist grimly. And he laid himself down again. 
 
 Near the entrance to the admission tent lay a man 
 on a stretcher, his leg bandaged above the knee. The 
 trouser leg had been cut away, the white bandage 
 gleamed ominously red, and down his leggings, down 
 to the heel of his heavy boot, oozed slow drops of red 
 
276 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 which formed a dark pool on the stretcher. His 
 eyes were closed; his eyelids were violet; his face, 
 under the gleam of the surgeon's torch, showed 
 ghastly white; and a week's growth of black beard 
 emphasized the pallor. 
 
 "Get him right up to the house," commanded the 
 surgeon after an expert squint, not so much at the 
 leg as at another bandage round the chest. "Have 
 you taken his history?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Then shoot him in ahead of the others. Tell the 
 nurse to have him X-rayed at once, and pass him into 
 the operating room. It's a long chance at that." 
 
 The brancardiers bore him away. 
 
 Down in the other wards the cots were fast filling 
 with the gassed. For these, in an evacuation surgical 
 hospital, nothing could be done save to remove their 
 gas-impregnated garments, bandage their blisters and 
 burns, feed them, rest them — and rush them on to the 
 rear. Upon one of the beds lay a boy, gassed by 
 phosgene. He lay in a kind of stupor, wondrously 
 beautiful and pale, a statue carved in pure marble, 
 the mobile boyish mouth curved in a faint smile. No 
 visible breath. No pulse. And for him, too, rest — 
 absolute rest. 
 
 Still the cannons thundered and their vivid flames 
 painted momentarily the black sky. The ambulances 
 never ceased their steady rumble. The drivers got 
 down for a draught of hot coffee, a word with the 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 277 
 
 sergeant, and then drove off in the dark. It was an 
 unending procession. 
 
 And now another tent down in the grounds, iso- 
 lated from the others, began to be filled. Some of 
 the occupants were wounded, some gassed; some 
 groaned and called out in guttural accents of agony, 
 of fear ; some were too far gone to groan. A guard 
 stood at the door. 
 
 "Guess they think we're going to murder them!" 
 opined he grimly to the brancardiers as they bore in 
 still another litter. 
 
 "We caught quite a bunch to-night between the 
 devil and the deep blue sea," remarked a brancardier 
 jovially. "Now then — steady! One — two — three! 
 Drop the stretcher!" They lifted the silent figure 
 into bed. "This poor devil is almost in. He'll be 
 going West before long. Here's another. Says his 
 name is Max. All right. Max! You're in America 
 now ! Nothing but a kid — is he ? Can you make out 
 what he's chewing the rag about?" 
 
 The guard bent down his head. The German pris- 
 oner, young, pale, with still a lingering, childlike soft- 
 ness of contour about the chin, rolled his head cease- 
 lessly to and fro, to and fro, while he muttered in a 
 delirium of pain: "Oh, my poor old mother! Oh, 
 my little sister! The Germans did not want the 
 war I" Over and over again, like a litany. 
 
 Up in the pre-operative ward in the chateau the 
 beds and the floor and the hallway were encumbered 
 
278 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 with men on stretchers waiting to be fed into the 
 X-ray room. Here, as down in the admission ward, 
 there was a constant circulation, the gravest cases 
 being rapidly pushed forward and fresh stretchers 
 from the outside filling their places. Suddenly an 
 orderly, who had been bending above a still figure on 
 a cot, straightened himself, and with panic in his face 
 stepped across the room to the nurse. 
 
 "That guy in the corner's dying, I think," he mut- 
 tered in her ear. "Anyhow, he's stopped breathing." 
 
 Hastily the nurse sought the alleged moribund's 
 cot, leaned down and felt his pulse. Normal. She 
 held her palm above his nostrils. The man was sound 
 asleep ! He was slumbering softly, tranquilly, like a 
 babe in its crib. The orderly, accustomed to the 
 labored, stertorous respirations of those who fight a 
 running fight with death, thought a man must be 
 dying if he did not make a noise ! 
 
 Stepping carefully along that crowded corridor I 
 bent down to rearrange the blanket of a stretcher 
 case, and ask the soldier how he did. 
 
 "I'm all right," he replied quietly. "It's only my 
 foot. I was cleaning my automatic and suddenly it 
 went off accidentally and shot me through the 
 ankle." 
 
 At that word "accidentally" a kind of cold chill 
 assailed me. Why had he used that ill-omened word 
 at all? Before now I had heard of the S. I. W.'s — 
 self-inflicted wounds. These were soldiers who, 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 279 
 
 through cowardice or momentary panic or spite, 
 raging against some real or fancied wrong committed 
 by a superior officer, shot themselves in the hand or 
 foot in order to be sent back to the rear. In any 
 aggregation of humans mounting up to more than a 
 million there are bound to be a few such weaklings. 
 But not this youth with the quiet voice and the clear, 
 candid eyes ! A second time he explained the incident, 
 elaborating the details — ^with painstaking care — and 
 a second time he used that fatal word. My heart was 
 troubled. My head — that cool, hard, alien, dispas- 
 sionate observer that sits up aloft in us all — ^whis- 
 pered that this foolish lad had given the game clean 
 away by the double use of that damning word. But 
 my heart cried out that his story might be true. 
 
 Angry at myself, and even more at this savage 
 war, at those monstrous taskmasters, the guns, which 
 put to the same acid test all men, whether strong or 
 weak, I passed the closed doors of the operating room 
 to the deserted veranda and sat down upon the steps. 
 A stray hound, coiled on the lower step, stirred at 
 my coming, thrust its cool muzzle into my lap and 
 licked my hand. And so we sat in mute companion- 
 ship, the dog and I, and listened to the pounding of 
 the guns. And it seemed to me that night that the 
 dog had the best of it ! 
 
 Presently a scream — or, to speak more exactly, a 
 yell — pierced the quiet of the house and brought me, 
 startled, to my feet. It was not a cry of terror or of 
 
280 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 anguish — ^nothing at all like that. It was the loud, 
 chesty, rebellious roar of a lusty infant asserting his 
 human rights. But this particular infant was well 
 within the draft limits. Softly I crossed the hall, the 
 dog tagging my footsteps, and opened the door of the 
 operating room. In that brilliantly lighted little 
 theater of healing and pain three tables were occu- 
 pied, three teams of surgeons were working. 
 
 On the table nearest the door a big red-headed 
 young colossus with the chest and huge freckled arms 
 of a Samson, was just going under ether. Or rather, 
 he was not going to do any such thing if he could 
 help himself. At the head of the table, behind him, 
 sat the anaesthetist. With one hand she held the ether 
 cone over his nose while with the other she poured the 
 ether over the cotton. Perhaps the giant had taken 
 fifteen or twenty whiffs — ^just enough to decide he 
 didn't like the smell and that he was going to be boss 
 of his nose! At the hot-water tap stood the major, 
 soaping his hands for this new case while the nurse 
 tied on a sterile apron. 
 
 As I opened the door the young giant, with a swift 
 twist of his head — the only part of him that was 
 free — whirled the offending cone to the floor. It was 
 for all the world like the action of an obstreperous 
 young colt refusing the bridle. The anaesthetist re- 
 trieved it, afBxed it firmly to his nose and soaked it in 
 ether. 
 
 Sounded a muffled roar : "Stop I Stop, I tell yah I 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 281 
 
 Don't you know how to stop ?" More ether. "Stop 
 you !" By this time he was struggling violently. He 
 had taken just enough to be rebellious, and he looked 
 sufficiently strong to rise up and walk off with the 
 table strapped to his back. "I want — I — wanta — 
 
 wanta " 
 
 "Easy there, old man," counseled the major reas- 
 suringly. "Take it easy." 
 
 But Redhead did not intend to take it easy or any 
 other way. Another whisk of the head. Off flew the 
 ether cone. This time the major himself picked it up 
 and took the anaesthetist's chair. But before he could 
 readjust the cone the blue eyes in the crimson face 
 beneath opened widely, the giant struggled deter- 
 minedly and roared in strangled tones : 
 
 "I — I — ^wanta — I wanta s-s-s — I wanta — spit !" 
 
 The major chuckled as he lifted the cone. "All 
 
 right, old man, shoot! Now then — count. One — 
 
 two — three. Louder ! Breathe deep. Four — five — 
 
 six. That's the stuff ! Seven. Keep it up! Loud! 
 
 Ten " 
 
 The breathing turned into a strong regular snore, 
 and soon the giant had slid fathoms deep into the 
 state of profound unconsciousness. Softly I closed 
 the door. 
 
 Some of these men, strong husky youngsters, puls- 
 ing with life, hard as nails from their free out-of-door 
 habits, are about as easy to put under ether as would 
 be a wild steer off the range. Every atom of their 
 
282 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 physical nature rebels at surrendering consciousness. 
 Others go under like lambs. It is largely a matter 
 of temperament. Once a private laughed as they 
 lifted him upon the table, and catching a whiff of 
 ether he chuckled: "Hi! Give me my gas mask!" 
 Then he cuddled the cone comfortably into place over 
 his nose, settled down to snooze, and took the high 
 dive into complete unconsciousness without a single 
 kick. 
 
 The next morning broke into one of those exquisite 
 soft mellow days for which this part of the country, 
 called by the French the heart of France, seems cele- 
 brated. It was like a perfect rose, a day when Na- 
 ture, by her clear sheer beauty, seems to shame man 
 for his deeds of anger and blood. Still the ambu- 
 lances climbed the hill, a steady stream, and vanished 
 to the rear. At the moment, however, they were car- 
 rying more gassed than wounded. And thus the sur- 
 geons were snatching a rest. One or two of them 
 appeared in the doorway for a moment, pale, with 
 circles under the eyes and heavy lines from nostril to 
 jaw. When they walked, it was slowly, and I had the 
 impression that they might make it on a dead level, 
 but that they would stumble over a pin. 
 
 When the major appeared he proposed a walk to 
 the laundry plant. The change of linen on a thou- 
 sand to fifteen hundred beds a night during a rush 
 means a well-organized washing system — and this 
 hospital had to depend on the village women. We 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 283 
 
 strolled through one of the loveliest woods in France, 
 the branches overhead interlacing into Gothic arches 
 of lucid green, while far above, great white billowy 
 clouds, like graceful schooners under full sail, bowled 
 along through the deep uncharted blue of some un- 
 known port. And as we strolled the major spoke of 
 something extraordinary that had occurred the night 
 before. 
 
 "It was a queer piece of psychology," he said, 
 "and I don't know that I can get it over to you. It 
 will probably sound unreal, exaggerated, in this calm 
 morning sunshine. But you must try to realize the 
 setting; try to comprehend the tensity, the strain of 
 that operating room. We had been operating for 
 twenty-four solid hours without a break, upon our 
 men. Fine brave fellows, who went on the table with- 
 out a groan. Men shot to pieces, horribly mangled, 
 done to death. It's heartbreaking work, if one's got 
 any heart to break. At the end of the night we all 
 felt mighty blue. Then they brought in an American 
 captain, a medical officer, already in a moribund con- 
 dition. Well, to see one of our own corps in that 
 state touched us pretty close. He was blown to 
 pieces. He hadn't a chance, and he knew it. And 
 the sight of his calm, his high fine courage, hit us 
 hard. But we did what we could for him — ^which was 
 just nothing at all. After that was over I called out : 
 *Fetch in the boches !' 
 
 "And as they brought in the first German wounded 
 
284 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 I was aware of a peculiar atmosphere, a sense of 
 strain, a clear antagonism in the room. It was like 
 a live magnetic current. You cannot conceive — no- 
 body can — the terrific night we'd been through trying 
 to salvage our brave fellows. The emotional stress 
 was stupendous. Well, now we were looking on those 
 who had caused that ruin, and the revulsion of feel- 
 ing ran high. As the anaesthetist fixed the ether cone 
 in place on the Prussian he said to me: 'Sir, would 
 you consider it a crime if I were just to go on pouring 
 ether on this Hun's nose ?' 
 
 "That brought a laugh and cleared the strained 
 atmosphere. And we cleaned up their wounded ex- 
 actly as if they had been our own. But I'll not deny 
 we were glad when it was done !" 
 
 Returning to the chateau the major suddenly 
 stopped and inquired: "Have you ever seen any 
 cases of shell shock?" 
 
 I had not, though I had heard of them in the 
 French and British armies. 
 
 "We don't know exactly what it is yet," continued 
 the major. "Nobody does. But we have a special 
 American hospital for its treatment. Look here : You 
 see those two chaps crouching down by the steps.'' 
 They both have it— hard." 
 
 I looked. I had noted those two hunched figures 
 before, and had taken them for orderlies, dead with 
 fatigue, snatching a few minutes' sleep. Now I 
 looked closer. And looking closer I perceived it was 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 285 
 
 not fatigue that caused them to squeeze themselves 
 into the smallest possible space; it was not fatigue 
 that caused them to hunch their shoulders and bow 
 their backs as before a storm, draw their heads down 
 into the curved hollow of their chests and try to hide 
 themselves in the ground. It was fear — abject, 
 ghastly, insane fear. They were obsessed, petrified, 
 rendered deaf and dumb — by fear. 
 
 The major bent down to one, laid a hand on his 
 shoulder, spoke a friendly word. The man's fixed 
 gaze stared straight through him as if he had been 
 composed of air. He was deaf to reason, deaf to 
 human appeal — ^but not deaf to the roar of the can- 
 non. For each time that an ambulance rolled by or 
 distant thunder issued from the clouds banking in 
 the western sky his head jerked in the direction of the 
 sound as though pulled by invisible wires. But not 
 one word would he utter. Only his eyes seemed alive, 
 wild, dark, affrighted. For the moment he was not 
 human, but an effigy galvanized by fear. The noise, 
 the continuous shelling, with probably some addi- 
 tional culminating shock, had temporarily bereft him 
 of reason. For both of these men were unwounded, 
 unscathed. 
 
 Later, in the admission ward, with the help of an 
 orderly I induced one of these men to eat. The other 
 patients watched with indifference. They had long 
 since become hardened to uglier sights than that of a 
 man crazed in battle. It was like feeding an infant 
 
286 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 ostrich. The mouth opened methodically to receive 
 the food, but not one move, not one sound would he 
 make. One hand upheld in air, the index finger 
 raised, marked the tensity of his strained attention. 
 His blue eyes forever darted from side to side. At 
 each distant volley his body trembled and shook. 
 And those straining eyes, full of horror, and that 
 raised index finger followed questing through the air 
 for the sound. It was infinitely pitiful. 
 
 "Don't coddle him!" called the major, passing 
 through. "It's the worst thing in world you can do." 
 
 "May I see if I can get him to talk?" 
 
 "Certainly. But treat him like an ordinary indi- 
 vidual." 
 
 "He's afraid to talk," said the orderly, pausing 
 by the stretcher. "He's a nut. He thinks if he opens 
 his mouth the Germans will hear him and send over a 
 shell." 
 
 In taking his record I discovered his first name was 
 Thomas. 
 
 "Why, Thomas," I said, "I've a brother by that 
 name. What do they call you — Tom ?" For the first 
 time his eyes fixed themselves on mine. "No, no, 
 don't point up there !" For now his index finger was 
 lifted toward the canvas roof, upon which the first 
 pattering drops of the storm were beginning to fall, 
 and his wide blue eyes were straining after the sound. 
 "It's raining, Tom," I explained. "Rain, rain, rain. 
 You know what rain is ! Now put that hand inside." 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 287 
 
 With the faint, troubled smile of a child he obeyed. 
 But the next instant that listening index finger was 
 upraised again in the air. Resolutely I thrust his 
 hand under the blanket. 
 
 "Look at me, Tom. Tom ! Look !" He brought 
 his strained gaze down from the roof. "Look round 
 you and see where you are. Do you see those nurses ? 
 Do you see these beds ? You're in a hospital. You're 
 not fighting now. No shells can get you here. So 
 you've got to buck up and feed yourself. We're all 
 busy here. Take your spoon. Now! Can you find 
 the road to your mouth?" 
 
 With another smile, infinitely pathetic, he man- 
 aged to convey a very wobbly loaded spoon some- 
 where near the region of his face. The second one 
 found the goal. But it was a prodigious effort. The 
 sweat poured off him. The startled blue eyes lost 
 their fixed glare. Still he had not spoken. When 
 finally he finished the soup and started to haul the 
 blanket up over his head I drew it back and tucked 
 it firmly under his chin. And again those blue eyes 
 smiled! And now for the first time he recognized I 
 was a woman. Before then I had simply been a vague 
 irritant which prevented his proper listening. 
 
 With hesitation he pointed to his shirt pocket. 
 This was the first movement, unconnected with his 
 obsession, he had made of his own initiative. 
 Thomas was coming on ! I drew forth a small worn 
 black leather Testament and laid it in his hands. 
 
288 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 With trembling fingers, for at intervals he still 
 quaked like a leaf, he opened to a photograph — most 
 obviously himself and his young wife. At sight of 
 this girl looking out at him with frank laughing eyes 
 a ray of joy broke across his troubled countenance. 
 He stared hard, his face working — and then he burst 
 into sobs. 
 
 "Who is it, Tom? Your brother?" 
 
 He shook his head violently and pointed to him- 
 self. And now the fugitive smile reappeared. 
 
 "Not you !" I exclaimed in hearty surprise. 
 
 He nodded, fully absorbed. But still he would not 
 commit himself to speech. 
 
 "Then tell me. Say it. Speak!" 
 
 He thumped on his chest to indicate it was himself ; 
 his face worked ; his eyes begged, implored me not to 
 insist, not to drag him forth from his cellule of 
 silence. 
 
 "Who is that, Tom?" 
 
 He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, and with the 
 sweat starting out on his forehead he pronounced 
 huskily: "Me!" 
 
 The sound of his own voice seemed to terrify him 
 utterly, and again he burst into tears. 
 
 "And who is this with you, Thomas — your grand- 
 mother ?" 
 
 Again that ray of vivid joy. No need to ask 
 Thomas' sentiments about his wife! That one look 
 told it all. Again the violent head shake. 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 289 
 
 "Thomas, it's no use shaking your head at me. 
 You've got to tell me who this lady is !" 
 
 And with a tremulous laugh and an effort that 
 brought the tears into his eyes and mine Thomas 
 responded proudly, brokenly : "My wife !" 
 
 The ice was broken. In stumbling accents, like a 
 child, Thomas began to talk. And when an hour 
 later he was evacuated back to a base which treats 
 these mental breakdowns it was Thomas himself, from 
 the dark interior of the ambulance where he lay on a 
 stretcher, who called out weakly: "Good-by, miss! 
 Good luck!" 
 
 Thus Thomas came back from the land of fear. 
 
 Later I went down through the wards searching 
 for the man who had shot himself through the ankle. 
 
 "Oh, you mean the S. I. W. .?" replied the nurse to 
 my interrogation. "Well, he's keeping pretty quiet 
 this morning. There he is." 
 
 "But he's not an S. I. W.," I protested rather 
 faintheartedly. "He told me it was an accident." 
 
 "Maybe he did," she retorted with a significant 
 smile. 
 
 "Well? Did he confess later?" 
 
 "No. Not consciously. But after the operation, 
 while he was coming out from under ether, he gave 
 the whole thing away. He blabbed the entire story 
 before all the men. It seemed he had a grievance 
 against some officer and took this way of getting out 
 from under his command. Somebody," she finished 
 
290 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 humorously, "ought to tell those S. I. W.'s that they 
 can't get away with those accidental-on-purpose self- 
 inflicted wounds. Lie as they may, when they're put 
 under ether out plumps the truth. All the ward 
 hears it, and the poor devil, regaining consciousness, 
 wonders why it is that all his comrades turn away 
 their eyes or look him up and down with a cold, con- 
 temptuous stare. That chap down there is suffering 
 agonies right now. You see he has pulled up 
 the sheet over his head and is pretending to be 
 asleep." 
 
 A word to the wise is sufficient. Those privates 
 who try to take the law into their own hands and 
 change the deal by means of a self-inflicted wound, 
 heed the advice of this friendly nurse — and don't. 
 You can't get away with it. Ether will find your 
 guilty secret out. Fortunately, cases of this type 
 are few and far between. 
 
 As the afternoon waned into evening and darkness 
 fell the cannons resumed their bellowing, and the am- 
 bulances, which during the day had fallen off, began 
 once more to climb the hill. And this time it was not 
 only gassed that were flowing in but wounded as well. 
 Despite the swiftness and the precision with which 
 the hospital machinery moved the stretchers began to 
 congest, to mass, to lie in the corridors, on the porch, 
 and down on the moon-blanched grass. Men shat- 
 tered and torn to pieces, patient, incomparably brave, 
 with a smile or a joke for the orderlies who worked 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 291 
 
 among them, lay in the open night under the stars 
 awaiting their turn at the table. 
 
 Ah, those dark, silent, blanket-draped figures, lying 
 so still under the moon! Those ghastly pale faces 
 smudged with mud and blood, summoning a smile from 
 their fainting souls as they look up into your eyes! 
 All the papers were glowing with the magnificent 
 deeds of the American heroes. Well, here they were, 
 those heroes, lying before our eyes mangled, torn, 
 bleeding to death with a smile. Somehow in the face 
 of all this the glory and the bombast of those printed 
 eulogies seemed tawdry and cheap. 
 
 One of the wounded men on a stretcher called at- 
 tention to the night. And it was a night worthy of 
 attention. The moon — ^large, lustrous, flat as an 
 ancient golden plate of Babylon, chased with strange 
 designs — ^was just appearing over the somber pine 
 woods and drowning the fields and the hospital tents 
 in a glimmering silver mist. But it was not the 
 beauty that the private remarked. 
 
 *'^Fine night for a Hun raid !" he observed grimly ; 
 and raising himself with effort on one elbow he stared 
 about him at the hospital tents and the chateau 
 crowded with helpless men. But if this evacuation 
 hospital w as to be bombed — which at the moment I 
 did not believe — it would be an act of sheer wanton 
 brutality, of inhuman reprisal because our troops 
 were winning at Chateau-Thierry. For on a night of 
 brilliant moonshine like this those blanched tents and 
 
292 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 the huge white cross on the grass — insigne of mercy 
 — were visible at a height of ten thousand feet. No, 
 certainly the Germans would not bomb this hospital. 
 They had bombed other hospitals before, it was true, 
 but they would not bomb this one. Why, they 
 had flown over it dozens of times! Thus we all 
 argued. 
 
 The early hours of night passed, to the wounded 
 mortally slow, each second packed to its full weight 
 of agony. Down in the wards the cases already oper- 
 ated on were being settled into their cots and, ac- 
 cording to how the ether took them, they were laugh- 
 ing, sobbing or reliving the grotesque scenes of the 
 battlefield. No lights here, save the blanched moon 
 rays which filtered in or the occasional gleam of an 
 electric torch directing the movements of the bran- 
 cardiers. On the beaten grassy sod of the tent floor 
 their heavy tread fell noiselessly ; their voices were 
 hushed ; and one sensed rather than saw many pres- 
 ences in that dark place. Some of the men were 
 asleep ; some, too ill to sleep, racked by anguish, by 
 thirst or a mortal restlessness, called feebly for a 
 drink. One there was, lying high on his pillows, 
 passing in pain, who punctuated each gasping res- 
 piration with a long-drawn "O-o-o ! O-o-o !" 
 
 By his side another, obviously coming out of ether, 
 babbled, babbled ceaselessly, in dull drugged tones. 
 A nurse sat by him. 
 
 "Say," his voice, weak, dragging, half submerged 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 293 
 
 in unconsciousness, came out of the dark, "are — are 
 you — my mother?" 
 
 "No, boy. Go to sleep." 
 
 Again the submerged, dragging voice: "Don't 
 seem — to have no appetite — for sleeping. . . . Fine 
 appetite — for fighting. . . . No appetite — for sleep. 
 . . . Haven't slept — I don't know when. . , , Shell- 
 ing. Say, they murdered us — in that wood " 
 
 "Sh !" whispered the nurse. "There's a man in the 
 next bed that's pretty bad who's trying to sleep. 
 You wouldn't like to wake him, would you ?" 
 
 "Sure not !" He caught hold of the soothing hand 
 and held it fast with the instinctive tenacious grip of 
 a drowsy baby. "Worse off than me, is he? . . . I've 
 
 not got much the matter with Oh, God !" — this 
 
 in a high wrenched voice of clear agony — "what have 
 you done to me ? I can't — I can't move !" 
 
 "Sh ! It's all right. But you mustn't try to move, 
 boy ! Lie right still." 
 
 "Awright! . . . Say, did you say you was my 
 mother?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "I knew you wasn't my mother ! But you kind of 
 sound — like her. . . . But she's far away from here 
 — I know that. . . . Can't fool me! . . . I'm in a 
 hospital. Say, are you my sister?" 
 
 "No. I'm the nurse. Try to sleep, old top." 
 
 "Awright — anything to please a lady. . . . Say, 
 my mother'd hate to see me like this, wouldn't she? 
 
294 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 . . . Say, the folks at home don't know a damn thing 
 about this war — what goes on up here. . . . I'm not 
 going to write to my mother about being here. . . . 
 What's the use? . . . Did you say that guy in the 
 next bed was worse oif than me ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Is that him making that noise in his throat?" 
 
 "Yes. Does it bother you?" 
 
 "Hell, no ! Say, ask him what his outfit is. . . . 
 Maybe he got his in that wood along with me." Sud- 
 denly, before the nurse could thwart him, he sprang 
 to a sitting position and shouted in a strong, clear 
 voice: "Say, are they any fellows here from my 
 outfit?" 
 
 "What's your outfit?" came a husky voice from 
 across the aisle. 
 
 "Blank machine guns. Battery C." 
 
 No reply. 
 
 "Wait until morning," soothed the nurse as she 
 eased him gently back again. "Then you can look up 
 your comrades. And don't move quick like that 
 again, sonny. It's bad for you. It might start you 
 to bleeding. Lie still. Try to sleep." 
 
 "Don't want to sleep. . . . Any fool can sleep. 
 . . . Say, do you know why they didn't answer when 
 I called out to see if any of my outfit was here ? . . . 
 It's because there ain't any of the outfit left but me ! 
 . . . The whole blank division's gone — ^wiped out — 
 shot to hell. They murdered us in that wood " 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 295 
 
 "Sh! Sh! There's lots left up there, boy! Don't 
 you fret. They're cleaning the boches right 
 out. We're so proud of you we can't see straight. 
 Now go to sleep. Try. Just a little. Won't you 
 try?" 
 
 "Awright ! . . . Say, you sound an awful lot like 
 my mother. . . . Can I have a drink? . . . More." 
 
 "It'll make you sick, boy. Now lie still . . . still 
 . . . still . . . very , . , ve-ry — — " 
 
 "Say!" 
 
 "Sh!" 
 
 "No, but say — I want to say something. , . . JVill 
 you write a letter to my captain?" 
 
 "Yes, in the morning." 
 
 "No — right now. I want you to send it off right 
 now — before they move out." 
 
 "All right, old man. Wliat do you want to say?" 
 
 "Write this:" The voice was clear and smooth 
 now. 
 
 "*Dear Captain: I'm so sorry I disappointed 
 you that I can't sleep. I'm trying, but I can't. I'm 
 here in the hospital. They've took off my leg, I think, 
 but I'm not sure yet. But what I wanted to say was 
 this : I gave the orders just as you told me. But the 
 damn cooks ran away. I couldn't much blame them. 
 The Huns would have shot them to hell if they'd 
 stayed. But I gave the orders, exactly as you said. 
 I wanted you to know.' 
 
296 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "That's all." 
 
 Still holding the nurse's hand he appeared to 
 drowse. She breathed a sigh of relief, and gently, 
 very gently, sought to disengage herself. Instantly 
 the grip tightened. And the private's voice, quiet, 
 utterly rational, sounded out of the dark : 
 
 "Say, you know my captain — ^he was killed. He 
 was standing just a little way in front of me as I 
 came up to give my report, and a shell busted straight 
 in front of us and tore his whole r" 
 
 "Sh! Sh!" 
 
 "My captain, he was a fine captain. . . . He — 
 sure was kind — to us — all " 
 
 The voice, weak, dragging, came to a halt, paused, 
 died away. At last the boy slept. 
 
 And now the tremulous moaning sigh of the dying 
 man was the only sound in the ward. 
 
 "0-0-0 ! 0-0-0 ! 0-0-0 !" He was passing fast on 
 his lonely road. 
 
 It drew on toward midnight. The moonlight, now 
 at full strength, bathed the tents and the road in a 
 radiant silvery flood. Down behind the wards a 
 grove of somber pines seemed to draw all the dark- 
 ness of the night into its own heart and leave the 
 surrounding air clear and pale like a halo. One ex- 
 pected to see fairies with lustrous iridescent wings 
 and morning-glory skirts come trooping out from 
 that solemn enchanted wood to dance among the 
 crimson poppies. 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 297 
 
 On the rear porch of the chateau the line of wait- 
 ing stretchers had been moved inside. The stream 
 trickled, man by man, through the X-ray room into 
 the operating theater. There, under a brilliant con- 
 centrated light, the surgeons toiled, without ever 
 glancing up, under a tremendous pressure. But they 
 were catching up with the game. 
 
 Suddenly, between the moon and the blanched 
 earth, whirled a monstrous black shape. Lower and 
 lower it swooped. And now the air was filled with a 
 terrible vibrating hum. The interrupted drone of 
 twin motors chanted louder and louder. It became 
 an enveloping, stupefying roar. Not continuous, but 
 rhythmical, rising and falling, savage beating waves 
 of sound. 
 
 C-r-r — ash ! A blinding flash. All creation seemed 
 to go up in the earth-shaking roar of explosion. The 
 air was black with acrid smoke. 
 
 C-r-r — ash ! Again. A tent, struck squarely, was 
 slit to ribbons. Terror insensate, blind, gripped one 
 by the throat. 
 
 "The boches! They're bombing us! They're 
 bombing the hospital !" 
 
 Screams, groans, horror indescribable. Men with 
 broken arms and legs threw themselves out of their 
 beds, sought refuge underneath. Wounds broke 
 open. A shell-shock patient sprang from his cot with 
 a crazy yell and ran out into the night. Down, down, 
 he rushed, panting, down into the heart of those black 
 
298 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 pines. Another shell-shock case flew to a heap of 
 army blankets in the corner and burrowed out of 
 sight. He fancied he was in a dugout. An orderly 
 who kept his head found time to bend down and tuck 
 his feet in, saying: "Now they won't find you, old 
 sport !" 
 
 A high shrill scream. Another. The wounded 
 were being hit again. The dark air was filled with 
 death. Pieces of shrapnel hurtled through the air 
 like knives. The tent walls gaped with holes like a 
 sieve. And still that deafening roar of twin motors, 
 which seemed settling right on their heads. An or- 
 derly standing in the moon-blanched road scuttled 
 like a rabbit to cover. He flung himself under the 
 wheels of an ambulance. And there his destiny found 
 him. A piece of shrapnel passed through his body. 
 His soul took instant flight. 
 
 Up in the operating room the surgeons worked on, 
 their faces the color of chalk. Whang! Whang! 
 Pieces of metal bit into the iron shutters. The win- 
 dows splintered into a million shards. One flying bit 
 of shell whizzed through the air, less than four feet 
 
 from Major M and lodged in the opposite wall. 
 
 The orderly fled in blind panic. 
 
 "Hi! Go and stand in the corner for a dunce!" 
 commanded the major sternly. Turning to his sur- 
 geons he said : "Come on, men. We can't let our pa- 
 tients suffer!" and faced back to the table. His 
 cheerful sang-froid stiffened the nerve of them all. 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 299 
 
 The orderly crawled out from his corner. The nurse 
 handed round tin hats. Silent, they bent to their 
 tasks. 
 
 And still overhead the terrific ear-splitting bour- 
 don, the infernal interrupted drone of a machine 
 swooping down to less than three hundred meters in 
 order to make no mistake! C-r-r — ash! Another 
 blind, earth-rocking roar. It was the third bomb. 
 And again it hit the mark. Luckily it was the recre- 
 ation tent — and nobody was playing just then! 
 Good-by, phonograph. Good-by, comfortable easy- 
 chairs! Screams from the adjoining tent as the 
 whistling missiles flew. 
 
 But by now another blessed racket had set up. 
 Crack! Crack! Crack-crack! The antiaircraft 
 guns began to bellow from a dozen concealed points. 
 Sparks of fire burst in the clear upper air. Would 
 the boche plane drop its fourth bomb ? One waited in 
 anguished suspense. And now that infernal vibra- 
 tion began to lift; the savage rhythmical whir 
 sounded less and less fierce, died down, faded away. 
 The French guns had scared the intruder off. 
 
 The surgeons straightened backs, which despite 
 themselves had humped beneath the iron hail, drew 
 deep breaths, and smiled at each other with lips that 
 were still a trifle stiff. 
 
 "Scared pea green !" admitted one. 
 
 "Thought it was going to roost on the rooftop all 
 night." 
 
300 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 "Gee ! Some roar !" 
 
 Yes, it was over. It had lasted just six minutes! 
 For six eternity-long minutes hell had yawned wide. 
 Then,^ suddenly as it came, the danger had passed. 
 
 Major M settled his tin hat firmly on his head 
 
 and, looking like a mandarin in his long white blouse, 
 started forth to estimate the damage and collect the 
 rewounded for operation. Fortunately one of the 
 large tents which had been struck square amidships 
 was empty. Here twisted beds, gutted mattresses, 
 bits of uniforms and tatters of clothes were pasted 
 over the landscape as if a degenerate monster had 
 been at play. In another ward he discovered the 
 patients down on all fours, just clambering out from 
 under cover. 
 
 "What's all this ? What are you doing under those 
 beds?" demanded the major in mock severity. 
 
 An Irishman poked out his head from his refuge, 
 but cautiously, like a tortoise emerging from its 
 shell. 
 
 "We were blown here, sir !" he explained solemnly. 
 
 The burst of laughter that followed this menda- 
 cious sally cleared the atmosphere. With the aid of 
 nurses and orderlies the patients were got back to 
 bed; shattered nerves were soothed by sleeping po- 
 tions ; the rewounded victims carried up to the cha- 
 teau ; one shell-shock case was retrieved from his dug- 
 out and the other from the wood; the dead orderly 
 was tenderly borne away ; the wounded nurse, struck 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 301 
 
 in the side by flying metal, brought in for operation 
 — and a semblance of peace settled down once more 
 over the hospital. 
 
 Up in the operating room Joe, one of the toughest 
 little toughs that the Bowery ever reared, and one of 
 the gamest sports, was being prepared for the table. 
 He was one of the bomb victims. By a perverse freak 
 of fate a second piece of shrapnel had re-entered his 
 old wound. He had been struck twice in exactly the 
 same spot. And as that spot was a sizable hole in 
 his back, and as he had already acquired pneumonia 
 to boot, Joe was staggering under the envious darts 
 and slings of a very adverse circumstance indeed. 
 He had grim need for all of his toughness now ! 
 
 "Them blanky dash boches," commented Joe 
 weakly to the orderly who was stripping him, "they 
 ain't no slouches when it comes to hittin' de mark. 
 Look at me now. They had two shells wit' my name 
 on, and both of 'em found me out. And I ain't no 
 general, nor yet a colonel — dem big guys is easy to 
 find. What's more, them two shells pinked me twice 
 in de same spot — a double bull's-eye. Can youse beat 
 it? If they got a toid shell wit' my name on it — it's 
 good night, chicken, wit' Joe!" 
 
 "If they've got a third shell with your name on it, 
 kiddo, you call an alibi," advised the orderly. 
 
 "I'm a-callin' one right now, friend, and don't you 
 fergit it," retorted Joe earnestly. "I ain't takin' 
 no chances wit' dem blanky dash boches !" 
 
302 OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 
 
 They lifted him onto the table. 
 
 Outside, the moon, high, pale, tranquil, drenched 
 the dark earth with a silvery flood. The somber 
 pines sucking the blackness from the surrounding air 
 still seemed the abode of enchantment. It appeared 
 incredible that a short half hour ago this quiet land- 
 scape had witnessed such an atrocious deed. The 
 raid had been an act of wanton, inhuman brutality. 
 In honest, open warfare the Americans were winning 
 at Chateau-Thierry, and in revenge the Huns had 
 wreaked their rage on helpless wounded men. It 
 was a futile, insane act. 
 
 Nor did it achieve its end — to terrorize the enemy. 
 On the contrary, that enemy, with a white flame of 
 wrath burning high in its heart, kept steadfastly on 
 with its appointed work. The surgeons, the nurses, 
 the orderlies, the drivers — redoubled their vigilant 
 care. The ambulances continued to rumble in, a 
 steady stream. From their dark interiors stretchers 
 were lifted gently out and deposited on the grass. 
 Again it was a wave of gassed. Among them moved 
 orderlies and nurses with food and soothing lotions 
 for the burns. When the tents were filled the lighter 
 cases lay out on their blankets under the moon. It 
 was like a vast gypsy encampment. The men leaned 
 on their elbows, drank hot coffee and talked of hor- 
 rible, grotesque, fantastic and sanguinary things in 
 low, level, dispassionate tones as if they were discuss- 
 ing the weather. 
 
 W 8 8^ 
 
THE SPITE ATTACK 303 
 
 Up there the battle still raged with a ferocious 
 violence unconceived of in far-away safe America. 
 Overhead the sullen German cannon still boomed and 
 boomed and boomed. 
 
 And still the Americans advanced — advanced — ad- 
 vanced ! 
 
 THE END 
 
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