S.S. Rochambeau, May 26.
SANDY HOOK LIGHT lies an hour behind us. The pilot has gone back, and the last shore lights have faded away in the shadows of the sea.
Just now the hearts of all of us on board are not light. There were many friends, many parents, some sweethearts, and a few wives to say good-bye to the boys of the party. A good many forgot to be brave at the last minute, and it was hard to turn away. When we backed out of the slip to steam down the river, the boys attempted a cheer, but it broke in the middle and failed utterly, miserably.
You see, we all feel that the trip across is the most dangerous part of it all. Over there one has, even in the tightest places, a chance of getting out. Out here, even though the boats are always swung overside and fully provisioned, we could not last long in the cold and rough water.
At night it is forbidden even to smoke on deck and there. are no lights outside at all. The portholes are covered and we must go to bed at eleven o'clock. Daily at three we are to don our cork jackets and take part in the lifeboat drills in order to be prepared.
All these things are rather terrorizing now, if one stops to consider them, but doubtless in a day or so we shall be quite accustomed and think no more of it.
Somewhere on the Atlantic, May 27.
One has too much time to think out here. I shall be glad when we are over. The sea is very rough to-day and many of the party are seasick. In fact, most of the fellows I know are down below and extremely unhappy. I have somehow drifted through without feeling the roll, but my time may come.
One pleasant experience I have had so far at least. This morning, as I wandered about the boat on top deck, I came upon a miserable bundle of steamer-rug and girl and dog. The steamer-rug was new, the girl seven, and the dog two. It seemed the youngster had climbed up to see her doggy, who was kept up there, and was afraid to go down while the boat was pitching so.
Her name was --- I swear it and can prove it ---Doris. Doris what, I don't know. She is French, but speaks English a good deal better than I "parlez-vous Français." I think we shall be good pals for the sake of the name if nothing else.
How beautiful it is out here to-night! I have sat a long time on the deck looking back along our twisting wake to where the up-slanting horizon shuts out the western sea with a veil of pale night and barely showing stars. The moon, three quarters full, makes a broad rippling path across the easy-rolling water. People here and there upon the deck talk in low tones and laugh subduedly now and then. Above on the boat deck a dozen college fellows are singing songs softly and with harmony. Now a pall hangs over all. The necessity always of restraint and caution lays a heavy hand on hearts that would be gay.
At least one letter of news I suppose should lie among those I send back, for you would doubtless like to know. Besides, the censor will probably need a rest after reading the others. We have not yet been informed what sort of things we should not write, so I will tell most of what I know and the Paris post-office can do the rest.
Have I told you how our gunners were constantly on watch and the pieces loaded --- how the lights on deck are forbidden and the lifeboats swung overside? I have spoken of the lifeboat drills, and perhaps of the order to remain on deck fully dressed the last two nights, so there is little left to tell of the precautions taken against the submarines.
This boat was attacked on the last voyage by a U-boat and the crack gunner of the ship's crew sank the latter with two shots from the forward gun. The captain turned the boat quickly in the direction of the submarine and avoided the torpedo by about a hundred and fifty feet. It was rather a close shave, but an experience I wouldn't mind having if equally successful. The French Government gives a prize of twenty-five thousand francs to each ship's crew that sinks a U-boat. In addition the passengers gave considerable, I understand.
There are three hundred ambulance men aboard, almost all college men, so we have a fairly good time, although no one seems inclined to much play. It is a rather serious crowd. There is a good deal of gambling, but very little drinking on board. The food is excellent and plentiful, which is saying a good deal considering the appetites such a gang can raise.
There are twenty-two women aboard --most of them old enough to know better. The only attractive girls speak French only, so my conversation is mostly limited to "Good-morning --- how are you?" "Good-afternoon --- it is a pleasant day," and "Good-night," after which the day's work being over, I promenade with some of the gang.
We are most all of us in uniform, so that it looks rather like a transport ship. The sea has been good to us, and I have never been really sick and most of the time have felt splendidly. Lots of fresh air and sleep have given me a chance to take on some much-needed weight. I am also somewhat tanned and altogether quite fit physically.
Bill Gemmill, George Scholes, and Bob Meyer, all U. of C. Dekes, are next to me in the corridor. One of my roomies is a Phi Delt from Wabash College by the name of Tate Carll. He and I went through high school together in Indianapolis, played on the same football team, and have always been good friends. Neither of us knew the other was going and did not meet till we went to our cabin for the night. It was a pleasant surprise, indeed.
The other fellows in this cabin are Humphreys, Phi Psi from Northwestern, and Ellis, Beta from Northwestern, and a Yale man by the name of Edwards. None of us have been ill and we have got along finely together. Things are pretty crowded but we all came prepared to rough it and don't mind much. Every cabin on the boat is taken, this being the largest passenger list come to France since the beginning of the war. We are also said to have the most valuable cargo.
We have a forward deckload of ether and high explosive chemicals said to be worth a large fortune themselves. There are many motor-trucks and hospital supplies aboard. I do not know whether we have any munitions or not, but suppose so.
Our distinguished passenger list includes M. Rossi, of the Metropolitan Opera Company; Lillian Geurze, a pretty little Winter Garden Danseuse; Miss Anne Morgan, daughter of the late J. P.; Mme. Gillmore; an unknown actress; a French consular official; a Count and Countess de Somebody; and a number of army men (French reservists).
The army men are second-class passengers, as they are on passes. We go down and talk to them often and find them mighty interesting. They tell us a good deal of conditions "out there" ---sometimes with tears in their eyes.
They praise our service very nicely and all express the hope that they may see us. Their English and our French must be a ludicrous combination to any one who understands both well. However --- I expect to be able at least to ask for my bath in French on the trip back.
Enough of this --- I have rambled on at a greater length than I had thought.
We are in the Bay of Biscay now --- the danger zone for us, but only another day and night from port. There have been long, lazy days, although the last two have been rather apprehensive ones. Can you imagine how it seeps into one to have to carry a life-belt around with one all the time -to be fully dressed and ready to go overboard ---to spend the night trying to sleep on the boards of the deck while those too nervous to sleep tramp endlessly by?
It has its funny side too, though. Big elephantine women become mobile mountains when swathed in the extra clothing they fully expect to need, and waddle around like clumsy ducks in a back-yard pond. People attempting to sleep in steamer-chairs topple over when the steamer gives an extra lurch and go sprawling across the deck.
A thousand wild rumors float around and have credence here and there even when utterly ridiculous. No one really knows anything truly, as, for obvious reasons, no bulletins are given out. Ordinary compasses are useless in the presence of so much steel; so we know not by what route we came. Our course is a zigzag one, so that the sun and stars do not help us much, being now on the one bow, now on the other. The convoy told about at home has never materialized, although from time to time we pass other ships close at hand and signal for news.
Safe in the harbor now after a rather sleepless night. Deck-chairs are hard, and the dodgings and twistings of the boat in its course were interesting enough in addition to keep one awake. We saw no submarines at all and kept in touch with the French patrol by signals most of the latter part of the night. The dodging tactics were evidently resorted to to make us hard to follow or hard to hit if seen. As soon as the tide turns we shall go up the river to Bordeaux and on to Paris at once --- another sleepless night. But then it is well to get used to that. Behind us in the harbor lie the spars of craft sunk by mines and submarines --- suggestive of the fate we might have had.
Last night, as I wandered hither and thither on the boat, I found my little friend Doris awake and wandering about. I took her on my lap and told her fairy tales of the kind I liked as a child and some things from Kipling's "Just-So Stories." She finally went to sleep there and I held her a long time wondering many things.
I must go below and pack duffle-bags and so forth. I shall try to cable home as soon as I land this afternoon.
I got here to-day very tired after an all-night ride from Bordeaux. It is a good deal more than seventy-two hours since I have slept or changed my clothing, but I suppose I shall soon get used to that.
I have spent most of the afternoon trying to find out if my cablegram had got through to you. My French was taxed to the breaking point in so doing, but a sufficient number of "oui's" finally convinced me that it had. This letter may not be a long one, as it is nearly time for me to go on guard duty, and I start toward the front to-morrow morning at seven o'clock. Out there, for the next two weeks at least, I shall be much too busy to write. Things are so tied up here that I cannot get an ambulance for about six weeks, so I am going to do relief driving in the transport service ---another new division of this service. This will be harder work than the other, but it is only temporary. Ambulance men work about three days and three nights a week with about a month off out of the six altogether, according to what they tell us here. During the two weeks I shall be in the transport I shall work seven days and four nights a week. The work is that of carrying up supplies from the dépôts to the concentration parks. It is hard, grueling work, without honor or glory, but France needs us and I am glad to do it for the little while at least.
I cannot tell you in so short a space all my first impressions of this beautiful country. We had no sleep the last two nights on the boat as we were forced to stay on decks through the danger zone. At four o'clock Monday afternoon we made the dock at Bordeaux after a run up the Gironde through the greenest and prettiest lands I ever saw. Our train left for Paris at ten-thirty that night, and, as we traveled third-class on our military permissions, we made no attempt to sleep, but had what I suppose few Americans have had --- the privilege of traversing the château country in the moonlight.
We are quartered here in a very pretty private park of about twenty-five acres of sloping ground on the banks of the Seine just above the Trocadero. This is, of course, right in the middle of the more historic regions of Paris. During my work this week driving a camion I have seen many of the things worth seeing here and on my afternoon off visited several others. I must go now. There were no particular incidents of the trip worth reciting. I do not know by what route we came. I shall have to be very particular not to say the wrong things, so I shall not give you much news till I know what is proper to send.
My German name has handicapped me several times, but they have been convinced of my good faith eventually. God knows I wish I could do more for these people. Even this little while has taught me that they have given of the best they have; that no sacrifice is too great; that the best men of France are being killed for the sake of great ideals. Only now does one begin to realize what the war is really like. I hope that our own fair land will never have to suffer as has France, but may the day soon come when we prove to them at least that we are ready if necessary.
I am late. Au revoir.
Tent 4, St. 8, A.F.S.
Somewhere in France.
To-day we came up toward the front on slow-moving troop trains (two hundred of us) to take charge in a few days of eighty supply trucks driving for France. We debarked at a little village that had been fought over and largely deserted permanently in the early days of the war. Trenches and entanglements, shell-holes and ruins, were everywhere, and as we rolled across the hill country in transports a little later there were more and more of these things.
Here to-night, after half a day of hard work erecting tents, digging ditches, building kitchens and water-lines, we rest where a German field division had had its headquarters two years before. Nature has been kind and the ugly marks of the war's progress are overgrown with the close green foliage so prevalent in France.
Our company street is on a natural terrace of a great green-topped hill with the bare rocks rising a hundred feet behind us. Below us is the mansion house --- our officers' quarters ---and farther down still the car park where many five-ton Pierce-Arrow trucks await us.
We can hear the booming of the big guns out beyond, and all the time hundreds, seemingly, of aeroplanes are humming past us overhead. We are in the war zone and close to our coming service, yet never have I camped in a more peaceful or more beautiful spot. It is like our Brown County in midsummer here and so pleasant it is harder to realize we are in the fighting than it was in Paris.
Our work begins at five o'clock, and this morning before six we were started by motor to a French transport camp. A brave soldier, convalescent from wounds he had received in action, was to receive the Croix de Guerre, and we had been asked (a special favor to us) to take part in this ceremony. The men from the other camps were there, too, making five hundred Americans in all. It was a thrilling thing itself to see the five hundred of us form a hollow square around the Stars and Stripes before the march. Our new uniforms looked neat and handsome and the sun shone pleasantly on dull-polished rifles and helmets as we stood at attention.
There were French soldiers, officers, and a band played the "Marseillaise" as the man to be decorated was escorted into the cleared space in the forest. The service was short and impressive consisting of a reading of the citation, a few words of presentation, the pinning-on of the cross, and the kiss on each cheek, while we and the French poilus stood at "present arms."
Afterward, we passed in review, had inspection by a French general, ate lunch, and had a short concert by the band before going to work hauling oil for our machines.
To-night the big guns out there are tired of roaring at each other and are still. I am very glad, for it gives me a chance to forget the things of yesterday when I was nearer the front. I was prepared for a good deal, I think, before I went and the separate incidents did not disturb me much, but when I got home to record my impressions in my diary, and saw it all written down, it was depressing to find how much of it there was in this small section, where there is little activity, and to think how much there must be over all the front.
But here, when we rolled into the grounds as the dusk was settling, it was very different. Picture if you can the dense forest, with the château of white stone and roofed with blue tile set in a clearing. From each corner of the front of the house stretch long rows of brown army tents to where the hill rises sheer for a hundred feet beyond. Two hours ago there would have been goats feeding in the center park and peacocks and pheasants preening themselves on the lower terrace. Now it grows dark and they are gone.
The men are scattered about the grounds cooling off after a long drive that kept us out till nine o'clock. The stars are coming out and peace settles over us for the night. Another week of this and then no one knows where we shall be, for we are getting hardened rapidly and the time will soon come when we shall take up our full service sleeping and eating when and where we can.
Somewhere in France,
near Soissons,
June 14, 1917.
I am really at work over here now, although it is not nearly so hard as it will be later. You can imagine that I was much disappointed to find on arriving in Paris that I could not get an ambulance for a long time, and that it was a choice of loafing in Paris or doing this transport work. I did not much want to come at first, feeling as I did that I had both a duty and a right to drive an ambulance. But I now realize how difficult it is to communicate facts about the service both from the difficulty of describing conditions adequately and of getting real information through the censorship. Further, having seen more of the war as it really is, I find that there is more need for men in this service, that we are more directly connected with the army and therefore better cared-for and fed, that the work is more regular, and, although harder, nearly as interesting. So I am content to stay here till I have word that my car is ready and I hope that I can work well here. I am pretty soft, but so are all eighty of us, and the officers realize it well and are considerate. So far we have done no real working to the front, it being mostly training for five or six hours a day, and army drills and camp work after that. Our cars are five-ton Pierce-Arrow trucks which loaded weigh close to eleven tons --- a considerable load to handle in these hills. But the cars are powerful brutes and built for it, and I shall soon get used to the hard work over the wheel.
Our officers all speak English and are fine fellows who are more than willing to help us in every way possible. Unfortunately, I left my French grammar in Paris and cannot use any of the three or four hours of loafing during the day for study that way, but my corporal is helping me while we are out on the road and I am picking up considerably.
Our camp is sixteen miles from the German first lines, within range of the "forty-fives" if they wanted to shoot this far. Our tents are pitched on the terraced lawns of a château where two years ago the Germans had a field headquarters after having killed the family that lived in the place. There are peacocks and pheasants on the lawns and goats running loose in the courtyard. Back of us is a high wooded hill full of wild life. My team-mate caught a baby fox last night and we hope to be able to tame it. We may hear from its mother, however.
Last night and to-day there has been very heavy cannonading along our sector of the front, and this morning many ambulances came in. If the battle was important you will probably know it before we do. The only piece of news we have had since arriving in Paris was a bulletin of Constantine's abdication.
I have been in the trenches several times, but not in any active ones, you may be sure. These were five miles back of the nearest artillery and had been abandoned a month ago .... There were both French and German ones and some barbed-wire entanglements. Things were pretty well shot to pieces all right.
To-morrow night we are to go out for an all-night drive without lights. I am going to turn in now and rest up for it. Please write me lots.
Each day here is so much like the other that I did not know that this was Sunday until I came to write and took out the calendar. One is always tired by evening here. All day our cars have run beneath burning summer skies and the foot-deep dust rose in such clouds as to hide us one from the other, though we were but fifty feet apart. The constant jar and the straining at the ponderous wheel had wearied me till I could not have slept, so I took my writing-pad and pen and wandered alone out into the woods beyond the camp.
Sometimes when the day's work is over and we sit smoking in the dark the old, old home songs are softly sung. Another week and there will be all work and no play until time to go home. Then---oh, how eagerly we shall set our faces westward ---how some of us greet the swift passage of the crowded days, knowing that each is a forward step to the 26th of November. For it is then --- so our orders read --- that we may start back if our service has been well performed. For most of the men, no doubt, this will not be the end of working in the war, but we are coming home, at least. France is a wonderful country, her people most valiant, but every man of us would rather go out to the sometimes dangerous work with the Stars and Stripes of our own home land waving from the flagstaff of headquarters.
We sent some pictures into Paris to-day to be developed. I shall send them on when they come back. Our uniforms are not white --- that is merely a coating of dust. Also don't let the guns excite you ---they are 1878 models and used only for drilling and as an extreme precaution on the road.
Let me tell you of our first trip toward the lines the other day when we carried our first loads of supplies. It is, I guess, typical of them all except that most will be at night. The twenty cars of the train load at a supply park and slowly wind up and down through the hills, passing now, and then long lines of marching men and crawling, horse-drawn convoys. As we swing away to the east the sound of the guns grows nearer and aero patrols drone overhead.
It is the first time Americans have gone through this sector with supplies. I, fortunately, have the lead truck of the first rank and I have put a small flag --- one of France and one of the home land --- on the radiator. Troops see it and give us a cheer and a salute. Even French officers give us a good-natured wave of the hand and when the train stops on the wayside for a little while, women leave the ponderous ploughing oxen in the field and, gathering daisies and poppies from the roadside, throw them to us, shouting "Vive l'Américain."
Soon they will be used to us, and as many more come on, will cease to cheer, but it is good to know that we have been thus looked for.
We roll along through narrow, fertile valleys or labor over wooded hills, all full of peace and shaded solitude --- the distant roaring of the guns seeming more like the portentous mutterings of an oncoming thunder-storm.
One last hill and a curve in the road and we enter Soissons --- shell-riddled since the early war. Here trenches line the road and gut the untilled fields. Long miles of barbed wire in quadrupled rows rust in the weather, and shell-pits hold their tiny lakes of filthy water.
Beneath the trees at intervals one passes many, many graves, each marked with the simple cross of laths and France's colors. Here and there are names of the fallen ones, but mostly only "twelve braves fallen for France," or something similar.
Again we go into the hills over roads new-made since shells and trenches cut them up. Around is desolation terrible --stark trunks remain of once fine forest trees and fields are torn to bits past all reclaim. German signs still line the roads, and on a stop we collect from their trenches many relics, but pass quickly by the places where their dead were put.
Vondron lies just beyond, and where three thousand souls once lived in that sweet rural peace such as France only knows, no single wall stands whole.
Now we come closer to the fight --- now and then even within sight, from the hilltops, of the smoking batteries. Our point of return is reached without having been near enough to see any of the battle-line, and so they say it will always be. There is more danger, we are told, of going into the ditch and getting a nasty spill than of being hit by shells. We go no closer than the ambulances and but few are even hurt. There is but little chance of winning honor and the work is harder far; but having come to do the best I might in the little while, I am willing to be a plugger for that long.
Coming by another road, for traffic goes but one way on each, here we pass the wounded and the dying and the signs of war, till, as the sun rolls from the top of the most distant hill, we make our way through painted picture-lands whose father artist has taken from the rainbow his fine pigments and wrought a master work. Flashes of gold and lighter green of the fields stand out against the deep rich color of the distant forests. Field flowers of blue and of white are everywhere, while Nature, in her sense of the fitness of things, has lined the "old abandoned trenches with great-cupped poppies---blood red.
Such is the land. The day's tasks are over and we are rolling to our home by the broad highway eagerly forgetting the land "out yonder."
It is Sunday again. Another week of unnamed, undated days of work has made its rapid passage. Four days it has rained incessantly. Our canvas walls leak and steam and sweat---little pools form on the ground, and our clothes and us are never dry. The real work started this week, our probation period being over---started in a sea of mud. The burdened trucks slide down the soft hill roads, sometimes sideways, sometimes entirely backwards ---skidding this way or that and snapping heavy skid chains like so much twine. Uphill it is low-gear all the time, while the motor foams and boils, inching along now and then with a line thrown round a tree spending hours where a day before only minutes had been needed.
Hard, tiresome days these four have been, but it has been a relief from the inaction (comparatively speaking) of the training period. And it is good to come back to quarters knowing that one has really accomplished a very little something in this gigantic struggle.
For the past twenty-eight hours we have been on our cars without sleep, with such food as we brought along, --- driving without lights part of the time, which is a nervous business in the rain and mud. When I came in at midnight a little while ago, wet through and with no dry place to sleep, dispirited by the rain and tired for the lack of sleep, imagine how it cheered to find letters from home.
Things have settled down to a fair semblance of routine, although our life is hardly regular enough to be called routine. Our probation period was over last week and after a long series of trial runs we have been put to work. In a day or so we shall be transferred to another section via Paris. Then things will begin in earnest.
Were it not for my connection with the ambulance, I would, I think, much prefer to stay in this work rather than go to the ambulance-driving when my car is ready. Ambulance men have too much loafing time under present conditions, and loafing in this country in these times is neither an interesting nor a wholesome business. That service has been over-recruited, too, and there are many more sections than will probably be needed before our army comes, and it will bring enough ambulances with them, so this service, where men are really needed to take the place of the Frenchmen who have been killed or worn out in the war at the truck wheels, is important.
We are well fed and decently treated; the work is interesting and if not as much honored is at least as honorable and more necessary.
I wish I could tell you all of the things I am seeing and doing, but suppose there are good reasons for our being instructed to refrain from too detailed descriptions. I have written to Dick Little that I can't send any news stories for the "Herald."
I think I am beginning to understand more why we are in the war and to feel very glad that we are as a nation come to the aid of France in this hour of need. One cannot be angry over false or inaccurate statements about the conditions of service or costs when there is so much to do. I hardly see how the French can have kept at it so long and so hard and prepare still to go on.
We shan't see much fighting, I suppose, --- at least the trench fighting. Several times the truck trains have been stopped near abandoned German trenches and we have collected a carload of trophies --helmets, bayonets, spades, etc. We pass through many ruined towns in many of which not a wall stands. Once or twice we have seen puffs of smoke from batteries and we can always hear the roar in the distance.
This morning a Boche bombing-machine flew over camp in too much haste to send us a message. There are some aeroplane escadrilles near by and the German planes had sought them out. Two Spads went in pursuit and the anti-aeroplane guns opened up fire, but we do not know what the outcome was, as the machine dived into a cloud-bank.
Never be alarmed unless two weeks go by without my writing some of you, as I may not always make the boat.
Lots of love.
As I write I am sitting on a shock of wheat thrown down from a harvest-pile in a hilltop field. It is rather a rendezvous of mine, for the hill is high and one can see for many miles --- to the north and east the smoke of battle, to the south and west such fertile valleys as remind me of the hilly south of our own State. The hour is early, for at three this morning I awoke from my first full night's sleep in many a day, and breakfasted and sent away some cars. They are keeping us pretty busy now. There has been much fighting hereabouts, of which you will have read and no doubt will forget before this reaches you. There is Craonne, between the Chemin des Dames and the twin plateaus of Chartinbrise and Californie, where the French have withstood such tremendous onslaughts in the last two weeks ---and all of it we have served a little with our trucks.
Our ambulances were delayed, so I joined one hundred, and fifty fellows who were going up to drive the big army trucks. There are five hundred of us now from Yale, Cornell, Dartmouth, Chicago, California, and a dozen other universities, and though we were a bit disappointed in the change at first, we feel now that we are helping France the most by doing so.
I suppose that we never can make the name that the Ambulance Corps did for itself. There is none of the romance or glory, no chance of gaining, the distinction that the men who came before us honorably did with their little ambulances. Mostly it is just hard, plugging, jarring, straining labor with the five-ton loads, which may be anything from logs to shells and nitroglycerin.
It rains too much, and even the excellent roads here cannot stand the traffic. Sometimes for a week at a time the game is mostly sliding sideways down the hills, with your eyes shut and praying that the other fellow keeps his distance. When we go up close, it is always at night, and there are no lights---even cigarettes---allowed, so we stand a pretty good chance of sliding into the man ahead, although the night work is getting to be more or less instinctive now.
I no longer drive very much, as I am a brigadier of the company, and am kept jumping on and off the trucks a good deal, but often on the way home, when we have been going pretty hard for a bit and I have not slept, I wake from a doze at a slackening of the speed and make a frantic grab for the brake lever which is not there, from the habit of running in the dark.
You will want to know if we have been under fire, I suppose, and what it felt like. The answer is yes, but the experience was much less terrifying, even on the first occurrence, than I had anticipated. Several of us (I for one) have nicks in our steel helmets which we hope some day to display. But, of course, those pieces were pretty well spent before they came, or I would not be writing this letter.
One man in another company is reported to have complained to his lieutenant that some one from our company had thrown rocks at him the other day. Investigation showed the top of his car well shredded and eleven pieces of shell in the bottom of the car.
But somehow they do not seem to get us. The men take unholy chances sometimes, for the sake of seeing all there is to see, but a fool's Providence takes care of those who do such things, and no one has been hurt so far.
Tell the anxious ones at home who think this work more perilous than the ambulance that it is not so. We go to the same places they do every day, and one has only to see a big shell burst to know that if we are to meet one it does not matter what our load is.
I suppose we are all to become fatalists by now with regard to life and death. It is well, for the philosophy will let us live each day with all the fervor in us, and it leaves no place for cowardice. There are loved ones at home whose memory will not let us want to die, but if it comes we can count our lives well spent, at least. Sometimes it galls a bit to know that we are almost outsiders in the war, that though we carry guns and drill and stand our turn at guard, are in the vast army of France, we are not really of it. To see the things the war has done to France; to drop down into some back trench and talk to men who have been where hell was popping hour by hour; to pass the miles of roadside unnamed graves, each in part responsible for the black that veils the womanhood of France; to see a little town that once housed happy families made into dust before your eyes, or view the pitiable human dust of wounded, worn-out men that straggle ever back to rest while others take their places, ---it makes you want to fight and question why you have a right to stay unscathed.
The war as we can see it here is far from being fought all out. America will have to give at least a part as much as France, and do without and die and sorrow as the present generation never has. Many of us who are the young men of the day will have to give the best we have to pay. There is no more glamour about it all any more, no glory. The things I have seen in days to come will make me shudder when I have time to think. But I guess I am willing enough to "carry on," at that. The best of it out here is that we do not have time to think, but feel somehow a sense of duty that sends us along well enough content, and we live more or less on the day-to-day excitement. Besides, you are not to think we live in calm enough to permit of such speculation as I have indulged in this early hour to-day. Mostly it is laughter and joke about the things that happen, no matter how serious they may be, and sing a bit at night.
Sometimes, when some one is laid up for a day or so, he breaks out with a poem or a song or adds some new choice bit to our atrocious slang. Altogether, perhaps the fun is a bit unreal, born of the reactions from the cessation of the crash and rush of wind and shock of the big guns up front. But we are all right, and for the time, at least, we would not change places with our own army, for we are having a lot of action. Later, perhaps, we can join them when they are doing things. I hope so.
Since writing the foregoing, two men have come in rather badly dazed from catching a pair of spent balls in the side of the head. I have given them first aid and shipped them off to the hospital --- it is nothing much, but it spoils our record. Except for three broken arms there had been no other injuries so far.
We are in the thick of it nowadays and working pretty hard. To-day all France is honoring our independence, and we have a partial holiday, although some of the work must be done.
This morning ten companies of the transport men were reviewed and addressed by our French Chief, Captain Mallet, and this afternoon there is to be a ball game, but I have some office work to do and shall probably not go.
We have new quarters since yesterday which took the place of the damnable tents we had at the other camp. It rains here very much and, except for the day I had in Paris, my clothing has not been dry in three weeks. Here we sleep in "camionnettes," or covered auto-trailers which are high, dry, and warmer.
Since I have become a corporal, I no longer drive, so that I do not work so hard as to miss the sleep I am losing. We work largely at night and without lights. One hardly knows whether to be glad or not for the moonlight, for while it makes the driving easier, it makes one a good target also. However, we are pretty small objects from a fast-moving aeroplane, and though the Boches fly over us now and then, they have never tried to hit us. We were in rather a nasty place last night when a Boche was bombing a quarry on one side of us and the French were firing upon an aeroplane which was directly over us. We did some lively moving for five minutes, and got out of it nicely, but it was interesting to say the least.
We see many air battles almost daily, but seldom know how they come out. We have seen one German machine fall in flames after being hit by a "seventy-five" shell, and last night about ten o'clock we saw searchlights and star shells employed in finding a fleet of Boche planes as they flew over the lines. The lines are only three to six miles away and by climbing a hill it is easy to see the shells bursting. There are ambulance sections nearby and we work under the same conditions and in the same radius.
I have written to Chicago about staying in this service rather than going to the Ambulance Corps when I can get a car. I have learned this game now, and would have to waste more valuable time learning the other. It is, moreover, easy to see that men are more needed here, as the Ambulance service is too well recruited.
I have been made one of the four noncom. officers of the company with a chance to do better and want to stay. My mind is made up about the business unless the frat. objects and I don't think it will.(*)
I have had no mail for three weeks and only one letter from any of you. I hope more are coming, for they are badly needed out here.
I have been remarkably well and had no colds during the rainy spell. I also have a charming young mustache and a good coat of tan, not to mention ten pounds to the good.
*[NOTE: The author was sent to drive an ambulance furnished and maintained by the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. (Editor.)]
Here follows a little résumé of my sojourn to date, taken in part from my diary which will tell best what I have been doing.
June 4. Landed at Bordeaux and took midnight train for Paris, riding in military carriages and without having slept for three nights. Was in Paris three days, during one of which I slept and one I went sight-seeing and shopping, and the other merely sight-seeing. Paris is not very gay just now --- everything stops at nine-thirty, even the street-cars and subways. I had the extreme good fortune aboard ship to be able to serve a French-American lady, a Madame Crane, who knew the better side of Paris well and showed us many things and gained us entrée into many places otherwise closed at this time. It was she also who made it possible to send the letter back by the French official and she who gave me the truth about the conditions here. I think I understand the war a good deal better from having seen it through the eyes of the French. The things I told you, if you got the letter, are far from being an exaggeration.
After my three days in Paris I went, together with several hundred others, to a training-camp which I have described elsewhere. Two weeks of practice runs, and we were put to hauling well behind the lines till we proved up. Meanwhile we were organized into sections of twenty cars each with forty drivers and five officers. My section was the first to get away from our particular concentration camp, and now lies in a town about five miles behind the lines.
Unless I hear to the contrary, I shall not go into the ambulance service at all --- it is too much waste of time and this is more important. There are now so many ambulances that they work only about a third of the time if they are lucky. If you are as unlucky as some of the boys who came on the Rochambeau, you get attached to a section en repos and spend months loafing.
We have had only two days off so far and have worked up to eighteen hours at a stretch and then gone right out again. It is better so --- we came to work and we are getting it with plenty of chance to rest after a day or so. If it would quit raining four days out of seven (this being the dry season here), we couldn't find a kick in the world. Since we got out of the leaky tents we had and moved into our palatial auto-trailers, we have been decently dry at home at least.
Of course you will want to know if I've been under fire and in danger. I suppose one would say yes, although it did n't seem very dangerous. You see, they are not anxious to have us killed or lose their expensive machines particularly; so they don't make us take very grave chances.
There is no chance for us to go astray prowling around the front, as it is well guarded against wanderers. It is only at night that we go up to the trenches, and then along screened roads and without lights, so it is only by the wildest chance that they could get to us on the road.
The dépôts where we unload get hit pretty often, but as soon as a shelling starts, we are ordered into dugouts till it is over. There is plenty of time, for the first shells are always wild and you can hear any of them coming long enough to duck. Shrapnel has landed above us and around us and scattered harmlessly once or twice when we were in the dugouts, and I have picked up pieces still warm. They tell us, however, that we will seldom get to see things that close. On this occasion we were only two miles from the German batteries and were way in front of the French batteries.
I have acted on a good hunch and brought my writing-pad along with me on the road. We have been standing here for an hour waiting to be unloaded of our five tons each of barbed wire. In front and behind, as far as the eye can see, there are long lines of trucks loaded with the various materials of war, while the returning trains raise such clouds of dust that I find it necessary to wear my goggles while I write.
It is a great job we have here. Four hundred of us Americans are quartered in one town, living in the trailers of our machines. Every day or night (and sometimes both) we go in groups of six to eighteen cars each up to supply dépôts and from there on to the front.
We have been up to the third-line trenches in the hill country and in front of the heavy-gun batteries. Several times each day we see aero-battles either between Boches and French planes or Boche planes and the French batteries of "seventy-fives." Last night there was one of the biggest air battles of the war only about three miles away, and it was a wonderful sight. Hearing the heavy bombardment, we ran up the hillside and saw seven huge searchlights playing upon a fleet of Boche planes, There were huge white star shells which followed the flight of the planes and about twenty batteries of "seventy-fives" sought for the range. It was brilliant moonlight and it was now and then easy to see the German machines when they came our way flying quite low.
This is only one of the many interesting and sometimes exciting incidents of the work. We go where we are told, the cars are very good, and the men work well and are happy. The hours are long and irregular, but it does n't matter, and every day as I saw it distantly yesterday --- a dustheap disturbed twelve to twenty hundred times a day by German shells.
One cannot imagine what a single shell can do till he has seen one burst. The other night, when we were up with fourteen cars to serve a new sortie very close up, we took refuge in a Red Cross poste de secours while shells were falling in a stone courtyard beyond. The destruction was enormous and fragments struck above us nearly a thousand feet away with wounding force.
It is not as terrifying to be under fire as I had thought it would be, but then we've never had it very bad and we play it pretty safe by taking two cars at a time past dangerous points during intervals in the firing.
Some of the fellows are inclined to be foolish at times, but Providence guides them in some mysterious way, and out of all the men who have served since the service was started, not one man has been injured in his camion.
You doubtless had the reports that were in the Chicago and New York papers that the Rochambeau had been hit on our way over, but there was no truth to the report. The ship did catch on fire about five hours out, but we did n't know it till we made dock. We had to leave the pier before the hatches were taken off and saw nothing of the fire, although it burned the forward part pretty badly.
Please try to get some cigarettes and tobacco through to me. The French Government will now frank them through to our military address if our postal authorities will take them. French tobacco hardly suits our palates and the worst kinds and cheapest are about equivalent in price to "Pall Mall" as a steady diet. Pipe tobacco is out of the question.
Pardon the disparity in note-papers. Most of mine has become hopelessly damaged by the incessant rains and I use what I can get.
Write soon, be good, don't worry, for I am "more weller" than I've been in years and working hard enough to keep happy in spite of anything over here. I get pretty homesick once in a while for you all and David in particular. Tell the Imp(*) to put some chewing-gum and chocolate in his suitcase, for he can't buy the former and the latter costs us thirty cents a cake for the small size.
*[NOTE: David]