IT WAS hard to realize that over this beautiful road, lined much of the distance on either side by blossoming apple trees, we were moving on our way to war. The sky was the soft blue sky of a May day, and as far as the eye could reach peasants, those honest, thrifty tillers of France's rich soil, worked in the fields. One could not believe that only a few miles away from such bucolic scenes men were fighting terrific and destructive battles. The peasants seemed to demand but little from life, only the right to work in peace, and now for the second time in a quarter of a century the German hordes were sweeping over their land.
Car Number 2 dropped out and I stopped to see what was wrong. Nothing serious. A slight adjustment of the carburetor by the French mechanic and I led it back hell-bent towards its place in the convoy. Clinton Curtis was at the wheel of the staff car and I was watching behind when I saw the driver suddenly lose control. A fearful moment passed as the ambulance swung from one side of the road to the other, turned completely around and over on its side. The three cars that we had passed stopped short, and the rest of the convoy, not knowing what had happened, continued. As I ran back the driver and his aid climbed out through the door, badly shaken but apparently not seriously injured. Folds was moaning slightly, and I asked him where he was hurt. "It isn't me," he said. "I'm just thinking what's happened to the four bottles of fine old brandy I stored in the back of the car." A hasty examination reassured him that they were intact, and he smiled again. Peter Moore was especially concerned about the car. It looked pretty well smashed up, and he felt that it was his fault. As a matter of fact I should have taken the blame if any one, for setting too fast a pace. But I liked a well-ordered convoy, with every car in its numerical place. Had I let him come along, after he dropped out, behind the other cars there would have been no accident. However, when I later had occasion to observe the German Army at firsthand I noted that they also were careful about such details, and I believe that the greatness of their organization as a whole is largely due to this attention to small things.
Moore's hand was bleeding quite a lot and I sent him along to Beauvais in the staff car to have it bandaged at a military hospital.
Soon Alex Weeks, our American mechanic, came rumbling up in the heavy repair truck, towing the trailer kitchen. He could get the ambulance up, he said, and it would run. The chassis was all right. Only the body was damaged, and he thought he might be able to fix that. Stout fellow! He placed two extra tires on the road where the upturned wheels would drop to break the shock, fastened a tow-cable between the upper side of the ambulance and the rear of the light repair truck, gave a mighty jerk with the truck, and the ambulance rolled over like a great, clumsy animal and dropped on its four wheels. The ignition key was broken off short in the lock, but this was child's play to Weeks. He detached a wire here, hooked it up there, and the motor ran. Hutchinson drove it for at least another week, when we had need of every car, and then I sent it back to Paris to have the body repaired as it was slowly shaking to pieces.
Although the civilian population had not been evacuated from Beauvais we began to see signs of the war in earnest. It is an important little town in that many highroads meet there, and over these roads from the north and northeast came thousands upon thousands of refugees and soldiers retreating from the Ardennes and Flanders. The streets were cluttered with dust-covered, unshaven soldiers in trucks, on gun carriages, on foot. There seemed to be no order, no one to tell them where to go or what to do. Never have I seen such tired-looking soldiers, and in their eyes one could see the dull expression of men who are so fatigued that they are past caring, of men who have looked death in the face for days and nights, yet have somehow come through alive. They were silent, not so much as speaking to one another. What could they say? They had nothing to talk about but death and defeat. The Germans had already broken through. Those who were walking dragged one foot painfully behind the other, advancing ever so slowly like dazed creatures. They were hardly human. I doubt if they were even thinking, or if they could think. The sight was not a heartening one, and for the first time I began to feel an awful doubt. Was the German army so strong that it could actually conquer France?
The military authorities billeted Section One in a large house, set back from the road in a wild and not unattractive garden. Our first difficulty was to get the kitchen through the gate. There was an iron arch and the kitchen would not pass under it; so it had to be removed. Weeks handled this much as he had handled the upset ambulance. A cable strung between the arch and the rear end of the repair truck, a jerk, and that was all. We felt rather badly destroying property like this, yet our consciences need not have troubled us. A few days after we left the place was levelled by German bombs.
The house was completely empty. However, the men showed themselves to be good soldiers from the start. One detail rustled up some boards and made tables for eating and benches to sit on. Another group brought in a load of straw-filled mattresses, and soon we were comfortably installed. From windows on the top floor we could watch the comings and goings of a fighting patrol of American-built planes, and I saw one come over the field where they landed and do a double "victory roll" which meant that he had shot down two of the enemy. That gave us a great kick and we cheered him.
After we got the house in order there did not seem to be much work to do that first afternoon, and some of us went out to the road that ran down past the western side of the property to watch the refugees go by. It was a never-ending chain of helpless, hopeless misery. It was a sight that one could never forget. That humanity could be made to suffer so in our modern times is beyond belief. They had left all their worldly possessions, these poor people, except what they could carry with them. They had left homes that they would probably never see again, prosperous farms to go to ruin or be destroyed by, the horrors of war; everything that they loved and had worked throughout their lifetimes to build up was now being torn down by a ruthless invader. Simple folk, they could not understand.
Some rode in automobiles, mostly broken-down affairs that certainly would not carry them far, others in farm wagons of various sizes drawn by beautifully cared-for Percherons, the powerful farm horses of northern France and Belgium. Often one saw four generations of the same family in one wagon, and in the larger carts there would sometimes be more than twenty people. The big horses clop-clopped slowly by, and uncomprehending expressions covered the faces of the people. They all seemed to be mutely asking the same question, Why? The poorer ones, who possessed neither automobiles nor horses and wagons, went by on bicycles, in push-carts, on foot. Mothers pushed babies in baby carriages or on handle bars. Old men dragged doggedly at the shafts of carts in which sat old women, their wrinkled, weather-tanned faces pictures of complete bewilderment. Children cried or laughed or were silent. Some realized that tragedy was stalking them, while others thought that the whole thing was a sort of huge picnic. These were the ones who had not yet been bombed or machine-gunned from the air. Once they experienced that, they knew the never-ending caravan was not bent on pleasure.
Military police watched the refugees closely. They were on the lookout for spies and fifth columnists coming through in disguise. Once the officer in charge asked me abruptly if I was armed. I said I was not. "Look out, then," he said. "Here comes a suspicious character." He signalled to one of his men and they started up the road.
I must admit the nun did look like a man, and rather like a German. They drew their pistols and stopped her, and I moved closer to see and hear what was happening. She was very calm and showed her papers without a protest. They were in order, but the officer was taking no chances. He made an almost imperceptible movement, touching her breasts, then apologized. The nun smiled. "I understand, Captain. I also am French, and we cannot be too careful."
When the military police had gone off in another direction a woman, very nervous and excited, rushed up to me and reported that two suspicious-looking characters who did not speak French had just passed, heading north. Would I go and find out about them? They had just turned the corner. I carefully pointed out that the Germans were far too intelligent to send suspicious-looking men who did not speak French as fifth columnists, but as she insisted I followed her. Naturally they had disappeared in the crowd. This was the strained atmosphere in which we found ourselves at Beauvais. There was an unbelievable terror, a fixed idea that spies were everywhere. The war of nerves was going against the French.
All night long we could hear the refugee carts rumbling by, and the movement of military trucks, artillery and tanks. The sweet spring air seemed charged with a certain ominous feeling which kept me from sleeping, and I was glad when day broke. Even the birds did not sing as they should at this season of the year, and the odor of flowers was not pleasant. The world was all wrong, and there was nothing that could be done to put it right.
An orderly came from the hospital next door and asked if we could lend a hand with the wounded. Their own stretcher-bearers were dead tired. This was not our job, but the men jumped at the opportunity to serve. They must do something besides watching the refugees file past, and listening for the birds that failed to sing.
The hospital was filled with wounded, mostly soldiers, but also many civilians. It was the first direct contact for most of the men with this sort of thing, this horrible suffering, the odor of fresh blood, to say nothing of the sight of it, and the drugs and bandages and stained stretchers. They took it well, without so much as a shudder, and worked until the sweat stood out on their faces and soaked their clothes. I do not know how they felt inside. Personally I had gotten soft since the last war, and I am free to admit that I suffered both mentally and physically, a certain nausea taking hold of me. Definitely I must harden myself against any weakness. It was my job to set an example.
One of the nurses asked me to speak to an English lieutenant whose French was rather limited. He was a strapping young fellow, and had lost his right arm at the shoulder when the troop train in which he was going to the front had been bombed near Amiens. Even though he must have been suffering extreme pain he did not forget good breeding. "Will you have a seat, sir?" I thanked him and sat down by the bed. He did not seem to mind the arm so much. He neither looked at it nor mentioned it. What was particularly worrying him was the loss of his shaving kit, toothbrush, and a photo of his wife. This is what he had been trying to tell the nurse who had fetched me. The last he had seen of his kit was before the train was bombed. Would I try and locate it? This was an impossible feat, but I said I'd do my best. From the gray coloring that was even now coming into his boyish face I knew that he would not live long enough to hold me to my promise. Even while I talked to him I could see the signs of death approaching. The nurse whispered into my car that he also had a stomach wound. As I did not wish to tire him I excused myself. "Will you drop back for tea, sir?" he surprised me by saying. An English gentleman to the very end. I did go back, and found his face covered over with a sheet. There was no use looking for the shaving kit, toothbrush and photograph of his wife now, even if I had the least chance of finding them. I stood for a moment gazing at the inanimate form beneath the sheet, and asked myself why. Why was this handsome fellow, scarcely more than a lad, dragged from his country and the wife he obviously loved, to be mangled and killed in a foreign land? I shook my head and went away. It did not make sense.
After that I drove down to the railway station to watch the loading of a Red Cross train. It was especially constructed, with long rows of stretcher racks, three deep and separated by aisles where the doctors and attendants could pass. Everywhere there were wounded, some groaning feebly, though for the most part they suffered in silence, their big eyes either staring straight before them or watching us move about. There were men without arms, without legs, and one I remember with the right arm and the left leg gone. His haunting eyes never left me. I do not know what he thought I was and why he watched me, but I do know that I shall never forget the expression in those great black eyes.
I noticed a young woman, dishevelled and rather lovely, sobbing bitterly over a little boy who had lost his foot. She was trying to comfort him, and he was looking up at her with an almost placid expression on his pale face, as though he would like to comfort her. When she noticed that I was watching she straightened up and came over to me. "Oh, please, Mister Officer," she sobbed. "Please have some one else talk to the little boy. He is so young and sweet, and so badly wounded. I cannot stand it any longer. He is not my child." For a long moment she could not control her voice. Then she said, "My little Claudette was killed by bombs on the road this morning."
It was indeed with a very heavy heart that I left the station to return to our headquarters, and I began to fear that I would not become hardened as easily as I wished. "My God! My God!" I said to myself. "How can any one on earth cause so much suffering? Is anything in this world worth such a price?"
Back at the house I found that Colonel Soulier, under whose direct command we were, had just sent a message asking me to report at his office. I hastened to obey. The orders were as follows: Four cars would go to Montdidier to evacuate a hospital, two would remain at Beauvais for liaison, and the rest of the Section would report immediately at Cempuis for duty. The six cars would join the main unit on the following day. Here was action at last. Well, we had asked for it, and although my drivers were dead tired from their day-long labors as stretcher-bearers they welcomed these new instructions to break camp and move forward. We had slept one night in the house.
I asked the French lieutenant to take the four cars to Montdidier. Coster would remain at Beauvais with George King and Gregory Wait, while I would take the main part of the Section on to Cempuis.
Backs were tired and hands blistered from carrying stretchers, but it was not long before everything was packed and we were once again on the road. The men did everything with a speed and willingness which proved that they had above all one wish-to serve well.
It was not difficult to find Cempuis, although it was off the main road, and I brought my convoy of fourteen ambulances, two trucks, kitchen and staff car to a stop in the quiet little village at about twenty minutes before midnight. Luckily we had a full moon, which made driving without lights relatively easy. Also we had carefully covered over or disconnected the tail lights that come on when brakes are used. A long line of these when the convoy slowed down or stopped would have made too good a target for enemy planes.
An orderly helped us find our way up through a very narrow lane to a place where field and woods met. This was ideal. The cars could be well hidden under the trees, and the field was there for turning, or sleeping for those who preferred the moon and stars to the closer quarters inside their ambulances.
I walked about the field listening to the night sounds, breathing in the good air, noting carefully that no lights were allowed to show, and thinking. Night before last we had slept in Paris. How terribly remote and far away all that seemed, and how little we had realized what was really happening away from the great city. Even now most of the people there knew nothing of the terrible refugee problem, or of the many wounded and killed. They knew that a battle was raging, but surely they could not picture the horrors of all I had seen during that long, long day. I wondered what Josette would think if she had seen, and I imagined her walking through the hospitals and on the station platform at Beauvais. There is no doubt that she would have accepted it bravely and with the courage of which I knew her capable. She too seemed far away, and yet I wanted her presence near me. I needed her there in Cempuis to impart to me some of her courage. In my mind I pictured her, smiling through her tears, waving goodby as we drew away from the Arc de Triomphe only yesterday morning. Time had no more meaning. Nor did distance. Only space seemed real, and I looked up at the stars and moon. They were there, separated by great space, and all the rest was unreal, dreams, some bad, some good.
"Hey!" I yelled. "Watch that light." A voice answered in French and I could see the shadow of a soldier coming quickly towards me. He had covered his flashlight, or put it out. The moon was bright and he could see me plainly.
He was out of breath from running up the hill. "Colonel Soulier---calling from---Beauvais, sir."
The phone was some distance away and I followed the orderly (it was the same fellow who had kindly helped us locate the field), on the double.
The now familiar voice, soft, kind and tired, of my commanding officer came to me over the phone. "Lieutenant Muir?" "Oui, mon Colonel." "You are to take your full convoy, proceed to Amiens and bring as many wounded as you can from Hospital No. 3 back here. The greatest haste is necessary. Can you go at once?" "Oui, mon Colonel. At once." Coster was in the Colonel's office and spoke to me. He was taking his two cars to Amiens. There had been terrific bombings. The town was in flames. The Germans were coming in. Perhaps we would meet there. Good-by. Good luck. I never heard his voice again in France.
I ran back to the Section and blew short sharp blasts on my whistle, the order to assemble. Out of the cars the men tumbled, rubbing sleep from their eyes, and in from the field. "We're moving," I said. "Immediately." Some one asked where to, and I answered Amiens. That was all. Silently and with efficient haste they put their cars in order, started the motors and formed the convoy. Where in the hell were Smitty and Easton? They were not in their car, and not in the field. A search party quickly found them peacefully sleeping in a nearby barn, and before they realized what was happening they were driving down the narrow lane. It had taken fifteen minutes from the time I blew my whistle until now when we were back in the village ready to start.
Silently we had arrived in Cempuis, and silently we left it, on our way to Amiens.
THE long day just past had been a Sunday. I do not know why I thought of this as I watched the ambulances, shining gray in the bright light of the moon, swing one by one around a curve behind us. One day was very much like another whether it was the third, fifth, or seventh in the week. Perhaps that is why this particular date impressed itself so strongly on my mind. There had been no pealing church bells, no toilers taking their day of rest and peace and quiet in Beauvais. A Sunday so unlike any other Sunday I had ever known in France. Even during World War One, the Sabbath was strictly observed a few miles behind the fighting lines. Now one was always in the shadow of bombing planes, and we had been warned eight times by the alarm sirens that German fliers were in the vicinity.
We seemed to be the only living beings moving north towards Amiens. On the other side of the road the silent, terror-stricken parade of refugees marched by in the opposite direction. They were mostly on foot now. The luckier ones, with automobiles and horse-drawn conveyances had gone ahead. Fathers pushed carts, piled high with what belongings they had hastily saved before the arrival of the Hun. Mothers carried babies in their arms or on their backs. Others carried heavy bundles containing all they possessed to begin life anew when the enemy had passed, or in some other part of France. And some just walked along empty handed, as completely dazed as the soldiers from the Ardennes. I watched these piteous folk, fleeing before the ruthless invader, and gritted my teeth. One thing was certain in my mind. It came to me on that winding, refugee-crowded road to Amiens. The Germans could not win. They might enjoy the fruits of temporary or even lasting victory, but before God, if there be a God, they would one day have to answer for this crime, and in the eyes of men they would be a hated nation forever.
This thought eased my mind a little, and I turned my eyes ahead and began to give my full attention to the business of leading the convoy to Amiens at as fast a pace as I deemed safe. We were following the shortest route over small country roads. Had the moon not been shining bright I would have gone by the much longer but easier national highway.
In ghostlike silence the convoy rolled through the beautiful countryside of Picardy, one car after the other at perfectly spaced intervals of about six yards. I watched it twisting and turning along the road behind the staff car, and it resembled a long gray snake gliding swiftly through the night, the moon shining down on its glistening, scaly back.
This was their first night convoy, and they had not been forty-eight hours out of Paris, yet every man drove like a veteran. They did everything like that. Their motto seemed to be: "To serve, and to serve well." I had never thought it possible to assemble such a fine crowd of fellows. They made the work of Section Leader a pleasure, and I was proud of them all.
For some distance the dust was terrible and made driving most difficult. All that the drivers could see were the white spots, painted expressly for night driving, on the rear ends of the cars ahead, but they swallowed the dust, blinked it out of their eyes, and held their distance. In spite of all this we were rolling fast and making good time. Something in Colonel Soulier's voice had told me that there was not a moment to lose. On thinking back now I know that this was one of the greatest convoys I ever led, probably the greatest.
The two boys who had had the accident on the first day were with us. They insisted that their place was with the Section, and had refused to go back to Paris for medical treatment. Peter Moore was running a high fever from a shot of antitetanus the doctor had given him in Beauvais without asking whether or not he had already been inoculated. George Folds was sleeping in the back of the staff car with two fractured ribs. However, he had uttered no complaint since learning that his fine old brandy had come through intact. The sick car, ably handled by Hutchinson, rattled along in its place at No. 2.
On we rolled, and on and on, into the night, with the stream of refugees and retreating soldiers passing endlessly in the opposite direction. Eerie is perhaps the best adjective to describe this silent, ever-moving scene in life's most tragic drama.
Slowly, as we advanced, a dull red glow appeared in the sky to the north. It was not the right direction for the sun to rise, and anyway my watch showed only two-thirty, daylight saving time. I located the next village we came to on my map, using a flashlight which I had covered with dark blue paper so that it could not be seen from ten feet away. To the north was Amiens! The glow must be that city---proud possessor of one of the world's most beautiful cathedrals---in flames. And that was our objective!
The glow became brighter and brighter as we advanced, until great columns of black smoke could be seen rising and billowing out against the sky. And in these clouds were reflected flames from the burning town below, making a scene at once magnificent and terrible, a scene which Dante in his most imaginative moments could scarcely have surpassed.
I halted the convoy for a final check on top of a hill overlooking Amiens. In 1918 I had watched the bombardment by German cannon of this same town from the very spot on which we now stood. It seemed incredible. What a different matter this war was from the last. In fact, as I stood there in the night watching the flaming city and turning back the pages of years to 1914--18, I thought of the old war as a romantic war. At the time it had seemed highly mechanized, but now. . . . Amateurish was the word that came to my mind. I remembered the cannon hammering away for days and weeks on end without doing the damage that a single passage of fifty bombing planes could do in thirty seconds today. The Germans had certainly used their so-called advanced civilization to perfect themselves in the art of dealing out death and destruction, unhappiness and misery. What, I asked myself, could they hope to gain by this mass creation of unhappiness and misery, by this wholesale sowing of death and destruction? Surely they must realize that it would come back on them some day; they must know the parable about reaping what you sow.
The convoy was intact. Even Alex Weeks, driving the heavy truck with the kitchen-trailer in tow, was there. But could I lead the men into this burning hell? The question flashed through my mind and was quickly answered. The Colonel's orders. I had answered, "Oui, mon Colonel." And there were the wounded.
To our rear and in the direction from which we had just come another great flame went up and lighted the sky even more brightly. It was almost like broad day on the road now, although we would not see the rising sun for several hours more. There were no planes in the sky, so this latest fire must have been set off locally, probably by a fifth columnist. It was surely an oil reservoir, I thought, as the flames continued to mount and the fire to blaze more fiercely. A gunpowder depot would have gone up with one great burst and a terrific explosion, and an ammunition dump would have continued to explode for hours as the heat set off the shells.
One thing was certain: we could waste no time in Amiens. We must find the hospital as quickly as possible, load the wounded, and clear out. I had a hunch that the German fliers would be back at dawn. Undoubtedly most of the wounded would be stretcher cases. Those able to sit up could be evacuated in trucks. I ordered that the racks be lowered and everything put in readiness so that the loading could be done in a hurry and without delay.
All set! As I walked quickly towards my staff car at the head of the convoy, looking into each ambulance to see that the racks were properly placed, the men gave me the impression of outward calm. If they felt any inward fear they did not show it. Weeks later, however, a driver confessed that he had hated me but once: at that moment when I stepped onto the running board of my car and blew one long and one short blast on my whistle-the order to advance.
I led the convoy at top speed towards flaming Amiens. We were back on the main highway and it was as brightly lighted as Broadway at Times Square. Nearing the outskirts we were forced to go more slowly because bombs had torn down many telephone and telegraph wires, and they lay in tangled masses across the street. Often we had to stop and clear them away, and they made queer, tinkling sounds as wheels ran over them. Once or twice they became caught in the wheels or under the cars, and it was a tough job to get them out. Then, too, we never knew when they were alive.
All this slowed us up more than I liked, and I kept my ears open for the sound of airplane motors. Also I watched anxiously above the glow of hundreds of fires for signs of sunrise, when I was sure the Boches would return with their hellish bombs.
The further we penetrated into the town the worse the debris and tangled wires and flames became, but there was nothing to do except go ahead and hope to find the hospital. There was not a human being in the streets to direct us, and soon I found that it was possible to follow only the one street over which we were rolling. Every side street, to right and left, was blocked by burning houses and debris. Finally we came to a point that seemed at first glance to end our hopes of getting through at all. On either side of the street high buildings blazed furiously. Ominous crackling, as the flames ate away everything which was inflammable, broke the stillness of the night, and I halted the convoy. The interiors of the buildings were like blast furnaces, and only the shells stood, silhouetted grotesquely against the roaring inferno within. Would the walls stand up until we passed through? That could not be answered. We would have to try.
I ran the gauntlet in my staff car, with Clinton Curtis smoking calmly at the wheel, to see if the way was clear on the other side. There was no use getting the whole convoy caught in a pocket if it were not. My car could turn quickly and possibly get back if the walls fell, but fourteen ambulances and two trucks were not so easily handled. The street beyond was clear. It was a nasty moment for me. We had to go ahead and get the wounded out, yet if the walls crumbled a second too soon I might lose half of my Section. The risk was terrific. Already the walls seemed to be tottering---or was this only my imagination?
Curtis drove back to the Section. I do not believe the fellow had a nerve in his body. He turned, and I piped the order on my whistle to follow me through. God! What a moment! "One, two, three, four, five, six . . . ... I counted them as they got into the safety zone beyond the fires. A few short moments after Weeks, bringing up the rear in his truck and trailer-kitchen, had thundered past, one of the walls fell, burying the street completely under several feet of molten ashes.
I think I had been praying. I really do not remember. Now we were blocked from behind. Probably the idea of turning back never crossed any of our minds, and if it had it was too late now.
On we drove, through unknown streets lighted only by flames. Amiens is a large town, spread out over a good-sized area, and I was beginning to despair of finding the hospital before daylight, if at all, when a French ambulance came tearing in our direction. It stopped beside my car, which was in the lead, and a Red Cross nurse jumped out from beside the driver.
"Hurry," she said. "Follow us. They are waiting for you to evacuate the hospital, and there is just time. The Germans have taken the lower half of the town." Before completing this last phrase she had jumped back into her car, the driver had turned, and we found ourselves following this marvellous woman who had almost surely saved us all from being captured. Nor had she seemed unduly excited. Only efficient and to the point.
There were a great many wounded at the hospital, some even lying on the ground outside in the main courtyard. We could, I saw at a glance, never carry them all in one load, and we would never get back for a second before the Germans took the whole town. Perhaps even now we would not get out before they arrived.
The loading went too slowly for my taste, and I tried to hurry it up. The French stretcherbearers were in a daze, knowing that they would probably be taken prisoners in a few hours, and our fellows lent a hand. I told the Frenchmen that they might get out in time if they worked fast, but they were resigned to their fate and it was impossible to encourage them. Their morale seemed completely broken.
When the wounded understood that we were not going to be able to carry them all there were heartbreaking scenes. They were afraid to stay in Amiens, where they had witnessed such horrors, and the idea of escape from there was uppermost in their minds. Women and children whimpered and begged us to take them, and men protested that they had wives and families to which they must return. We took our orders from the military doctor in command and carried the cases he indicated as being the worst. Orders are orders for a soldier even under such distressing circumstances. I guess I was getting hard more rapidly than I had expected, and heaven knows that this was necessary.
During the time that the cars were being loaded I took a moment to look down over the city, which was dominated by the hospital. The conflagration was spreading fast, aided by a fairly strong breeze, and it was my impression that Amiens would soon be nothing but a vast, charred ruin. There was no one to fight the flames. In fact, there appeared to be no one even to fight the advancing Germans. I strained my ears for the sound of shooting, and could hear nothing except the crackling of the near-by fires. The great cathedral, stark and black, stood out towering above it all like some mighty giant. It did not seem to have been touched or damaged, and was not burning. Was this the answer? Would it be Christianity and the Church that would in the long run win out against war and a barbarous people? I wondered.
A soldier touched me on my arm, breaking my trend of thought, and asked me to come to the commanding officer's bureau. I found him bent over a table writing a note by candlelight. As I entered he looked up. "A word for Colonel Soulier," he said, and went on writing. He seemed very old in that flickering, dim light, his gray hair ruffled and his face drawn with care and sorrow, as he wrote what might easily be his last words with a pencil on a dirty sheet of paper, and I felt strongly attracted to him all of a sudden when I realized that if he had not meant to stick to his post he would not be writing that note. His place was there as long as there were French wounded to be cared for, and I have always loved courage. He had not reached the end of the note when a puff of wind through a broken window blew out the candle, and he finished it in the dark before I could find a match. When I relit the candle he was folding the paper. "There," he said, looking up at me with a wan smile. "Will you give that to the Colonel with my respects? " He shook my hand and returned my salute. "Adieu."
Dawn was breaking and the air-raid sirens were sounding dismally as the convoy moved off with its full load of mangled humanity, both soldiers and civilians. The Boches were coming over to bomb that part of the town which they had not yet occupied, showing what perfect co-ordination there was between the advanced troops and the aviation. Some one rushed out from the hospital and tried to stop us, shouting that we should put the wounded back in the cellars before the bombardment. The man had lost his head. The planes would be back in Germany before we could unload, so I waved him off and we continued, deploying as soon as we possibly could.
IT WAS an easy matter to get out of town by the southern road which led to Beauvais, some forty miles south, and we were well on our way before the bombers reached Amiens. I had taken the wheel of the staff car to give Clint Curtis a rest. He was one of those fortunate people who can live on cat-naps taken anywhere, in any position, and under all circumstances. His steel helmet bumped and bumped against the window of the car as he slept soundly, slouched over in his seat, his head wobbling from side to side. But he awoke as easily as he fell asleep, and when I called to him that enemy bombers were circling over the road not far ahead, he was instantly alert.
I signalled the convoy to halt under the only trees in sight. This happened to be along the main street of a village where there was some sort of a factory with a high brick chimney, which offered an excellent target to the planes flying above. I did not like this, and when a convoy of French gasoline trucks pulled up under the trees across the street I decided that we would be safer taking our chances on the open road. Larry Schwab made desperate gestures that he could not move, and I ran back to see what the trouble was. One of his wounded, an old woman, had slid with surprising agility off her stretcher, climbed to the ground and was performing an act of nature beside the ambulance. With some difficulty she was returned to her place and, ordering the cars to run at one-hundred-yard intervals, I led off at a good pace. It was better to jolt the wounded and get them as quickly as possible out of the danger zone.
The planes passed over us and let loose a few sprays of machine-gun bullets which did no damage. Either they thought that it was not worth wasting bombs on single cars, or else they had already dropped their deadly loads elsewhere, perhaps on Amiens.
The rest of the trip was without incident. On the road Alex Weeks filled his big repair truck and the trailer-kitchen with refugees, taking some thirty-odd in all of what appeared to him the most helpless cases. However, this sudden calm on the road, in contrast to the excitement of a sleepless night, made it difficult to remain awake. Curtis was sleeping soundly, his helmet clicking against the window, and I found it very hard not to do the same. As the sun rose higher and warmed the inside of the car I had to struggle against nodding and wrecking the car. Several times I pulled myself out of a doze just in time to jerk the car back on the road and avoid going into a ditch. I know of few things more terrible than this overwhelming sensation of sleep when one is forced to drive. Curtis could have been awakened, but I was damned if I was going to admit my weakness; so I tried every trick imaginable to keep alert. I bit my hands until the blood came, took off my helmet and beat my head with my fists, pulled at my thinning hair until some of it came out in my hand, held one foot off the floor, then the other, and then tried holding them both in mid-air. The last ten miles were torture, but I kept on the road. Without doubt the other drivers were having the same trouble. However, when we pulled up at the Jeanne Hachette Hospital to discharge the wounded, all were present, filthy and smiling. They knew, as I knew, that they had put across a great piece of work.
This time we were not billeted in the town, but on a hill overlooking it near the Agel Hospital. Colonel Soulier was moving to this hospital and wanted us near him. There was no shelter except trees, so we would sleep on the ground and in the ambulances---if we slept! This was not unlike the spot we had chosen at Cempuis. There was a large field for turning and plentiful green foliage to hide the trucks, kitchen, and ambulances from enemy planes. There was a sunken road into which we could jump if there was bombing. On first inspection it looked all right, and we established ourselves there.
It was still fairly early in the morning when Lieutenant Couture returned with his four cars. They had not only fetched their wounded back from Montdidier, but had also gone for a load in Amiens, arriving in time for the bombing we had luckily escaped. It had been devastating. A direct -hit had taken off the end of one wing of the hospital, which rocked from the terrific explosions until it seemed about to tumble down and crush the many inmates. There must have been between fifty and a hundred planes, Jon Thoresen said, and he feared that the town was now completely destroyed. They had just gotten away when another wave of bombers came into view. None of my men from this convoy were hurt, although it was easy to see that their nerves were badly shaken.
Only Coster and his two cars were missing now. I asked Couture if he knew where they were. They had passed him, he told me, as he came out of Amiens. Against his advice, and with the knowledge that the Germans were in one part of the town, if not all of it, Coster was courageously leading his two cars back for a last load of wounded. Clement had joined King, Wait and himself to lend a hand with the loading.
The morning dragged on, hour after hour, and still the four men did not return. Several times I drove down to the house where we had first been quartered, hoping against hope to find them waiting there. I tried to occupy my mind giving orders about the new camp, but found it impossible to take my thoughts away from my four friends. Stuart Benson and I made a mental calculation. They had been seen on the outskirts of Amiens; before seven o'clock. From there to the hospital, and the loading of two ambulances, could not have required more than half an hour. We allowed them a full hour in the event that they might have been held up in an air raid. That meant they should have been back on the highroad by eight. Two more hours, running at the very slowest speed, was all that it could have taken them to make the trip to Beauvais. If one car had had an accident the other could have towed it in, or at least brought the news and asked for a fresh car. It was hard to believe that both cars had had an accident, unless it had been by action of the enemy. Benson looked at his watch. "Eleven o'clock," he said. "That makes them an hour overdue even with the slowest calculation for the time it would ordinarily have taken." "And.," I added, "they're four smart lads and would have done their job in the minimum time. They'd have been back two hours ago if nothing out of the ordinary had happened."
At noon I gave up Don Coster, Gregory Wait, George King, and John Clement as lost in action, and sent a report in to the Paris office to the effect that they had disappeared while carrying out a dangerous mission under orders from their commanding officer, Colonel Soulier. They had been killed, wounded, or captured on duty.
Three times I tried to get back into Amiens to see if I could find something, some trace, that would tell the story---smashed cars, spattered blood, I do not know what---but the Germans held the whole town now and the French would not allow me within several miles of it. Each trip I noticed that the volume of smoke rising above the town grew less and less dense. There was probably nothing left to burn in what one week before had been a prosperous, busy, happy place, where many thousands of citizens went about the business of living and working in peace. The lightning-war had struck and done the damage of a major earthquake. "God damn the Germans," I swore, as I returned from my last failure to enter Amiens.
In the afternoon eight cars were ordered to Crèvecœur, a small village northwest of us. I left the French lieutenant in charge and led them up. On the way we practised a new hand signal that I had invented for deploying and assembling again without stopping a convoy. As far as I knew there was nothing to cover this in the military manuals, and it seemed to me not only useful but also highly necessary when enemy planes were sighted and one did not think it advisable to halt, as for example in the case when the road was open and there were no trees to hide under. To deploy I moved my arm slowly back and forth at about a ninety degree angle, parallel with the ground. The first cars would speed up so that the others could hold their paces and at the same time spread out until one hundred yards roughly separated each car. The signal to assemble was given by raising the arm six or eight times from the level of the open window to the top of the car. Then those in the rear had to increase their speed until they were again running at six-yard intervals. When I gave these signals they were repeated by each driver, so that there was no danger of those in the rear not seeing them.
Another most important thing that we learned on this run, something that helped us very much in the terrible days to come, was to watch any one who was passing on foot. If he was looking up towards the sky, or crouching down, or standing under trees, or running for cover, it was the danger signal that bombers were not far distant. Our cars drowned out the sound of approaching motors, but the ears of pedestrians could spot them a full thirty seconds away, sometimes more, depending on the wind, the thinness of the air, etc. If you looked in the direction where the eyes of these human detectors were turned you Invariably spotted dark planes not far away.
We could see the church steeple and some of the roofs of the village when Nazi planes began to come over in waves. There seemed to be hundreds of them, both bombers and fighters, the tiny Messerschmidtts circling high above the heavy bombers like angry wasps ready to attack any intruder. The sky was literally filled with them, and while I hated the sight it fascinated me and I could not take my eyes away from it.
Luckily there were apple trees on either side of the road, and we concealed our cars under them and stood watching. They bombed Crèvecœur (what a name---Heartbreak---for such a tragic village) time and again, until a great column of smoke rose from it. Then they ran up and down the road at low altitudes, strafing with machine-guns. Frank Hamlin and I were standing under the same tree. A bullet clipped off a leaf and it fluttered slowly to the ground under our startled gaze. "Christ!" I said to Frank. "I don't see how they missed you." We both laughed. He was six feet six inches tall, weighed nearly three hundred pounds, and was by far the best target in the Section.
For half an hour the planes circled, and circled again, bombing and machine-gunning without opposition. Then a tiny speck roared out from nowhere, and we recognized a lone French fighter. What courage! The odds against him were certainly fifty to one. He rose at a steep angle right under the belly of the nearest bomber and let go with his machine-guns. There was a puff of smoke, a burst of flame that quickly spread, and the huge ship turned on its side, broke up, and dropped to earth with a tremendous explosion of its unused bombs. Four parachutists had jumped at the first burst of flames. One dropped straight, the parachute having refused to open. The Frenchman turned and came back with the speed and grace of a hawk. He shot down two of the parachutes in mid-air. The third landed and its occupant was seized by waiting soldiers. By the time the Messerschmitt pilots realized what was happening and dived in several squadrons the lone French hero had disappeared in the direction from which he had come. For a moment Hamlin and I stood silent, overwhelmed by our great admiration for this display of skill and courage, then simultaneously we broke into a cheer. "If the French even had one plane for three of the Boches they could win," I said. But we knew that the odds against them were higher than that.
After this the Germans went off and we proceeded, running at hundred-yard intervals, into the village. The hospital was easy to find. It was the schoolhouse that had been pressed into service. At the moment we located it I saw the Germans coming back. The cars were grouped together on the main square, and although they were under trees one bomb could have destroyed them all; so I gave the order to deploy on the road leading out to the west. I left the staff car and hung on to one of the ambulances so that I could watch and direct. It was Johnny Cutler's car and we went like hell, the planes coming on directly above our heads. By luck, plus Johnny's skillful driving, we kept one jump ahead of the falling bombs. It reminded me of racing down the road ahead of a speeding cloud shadow that came up on you by slow degrees. We would have left one spot seconds before it was hit, then another and another. I could distinctly see the bombs falling. They were not very large ones, and looked like fast flying-fish as they came down and crashed. Then the road turned off and we were safe for the moment.
In the field where we stopped there were several dead horses and cows from a previous bombing. Some of them had been killed by flying steel, and their wounds gaped nauseatingly and were covered with flies. Already there was stench of rotting flesh. Others had been killed by concussion. They had swelled up to double their normal size and their legs stuck up in the air. They were grotesquely funny, like freak animals in a side show, and the idea came to me that they would have been most amazed if they had had time to realize what had happened. Because a man named Adolf Hider in faraway Berlin gave an order about going to war these peaceful cows and horses of Picardy had suddenly been changed from normal grazing animals into lifeless, balloon-shaped things with their feet in the air. I caught myself about to chuckle, perhaps laugh aloud. Of course I was tired, else I should not have had such thoughts. But I must watch my nerves. The war had only begun in earnest.
Some one was missing. A quick check showed that it was Watts. I was told that he had stopped in a side street instead of coming with us. Cutler and I went back to look for him. He was covered with dust and dirt when we found him, but outwardly was unhurt. A wall had fallen on his back as he was trying to protect a woman and her two children. It had partially buried them. By luck it was a flimsy wall and he had been able to get them out safe. He himself had a strained back which forced him, against his will, to have a couple of days of medical treatment. He seemed slightly dazed when Cutler and I came up to him. The children were crying and the mother was on her knees praying---"Sainte Jeanne d'Arc! Sainte Jeanne d'Arc!" Watts laughed nervously, and admitted that he too had been praying to Saint Joan of Arc.
The schoolhouse was filled with military and civilian wounded. I heard the medical officers cursing the Germans with particular violence, and asked a captain the reason. Without replying he beckoned to me and I followed him down a long corridor. He opened a door and I saw five French soldiers and an officer lying dead on the floor. Still this did not answer my question, as dead soldiers were nothing unusual. After a moment he explained. "They formed the crew of a tank. While attacking the Boche one of their caterpillar treads came off and they were forced to surrender. The swine disarmed them, ordered them to do a right-about-face, and shot them point-blank in the backs of their necks. Look. You can see where the powder has singed their hair." He spat in anger. I thought of my four men who had disappeared in Amiens: that morning. Jesus! Suppose the Germans were not taking any prisoners!
When we got back to camp, after having dropped the wounded at Jeanne Hachette Hospital, in Beauvais, it was dark. Much to my surprise I found the cars lined up in a field by the road, instead of under the trees. They made an excellent target in the bright moonlight, and I asked the French lieutenant the reason. He said that a priest had told him the Germans were coming into Beauvais. He thought that we had surely been captured, and explained that he was preparing to withdraw the Section, or what was left of it, farther up the road. I was furious, told the men not to move without orders from Colonel Soulier or myself, and set out to look for the priest who was spreading false news, feeling sure that he was a fifth columnist in disguise. After his attempt to spread fear, however, he had completely vanished, swallowed up by the darkness. I told my men to grab him if they ever saw him again, but he never came back.
Although German planes did practically level Beauvais while we were there, the infantry did not occupy it for another two weeks, confirming my opinion that there was no immediate danger and that the man in priest's clothing was a fifth columnist, attempting to spread terror and panic by his lies within the French lines.
All that night we worked frantically evacuating the aged and crippled, the sick and the wounded, from the Hotel Dieu (a sort of municipal poorhouse) to the station where they were loaded into a Red Cross train for transport to a less dangerous region. We were working against time, trying to get the train out of the station before daylight when we expected a bombardment. I drove from the station to the Hotel Dieu, back and forth again and again, hurrying, pressing, encouraging, even threatening when the work moved too slowly. As usual the Field Service men did their job beautifully, but the French were inclined to lag. Beauvais had not been bombed until then, and they saw no reason for any particular haste. As a matter of fact the train had hardly pulled out when enemy planes appeared in the distance, flew over, and dropped a load of bombs, narrowly missing the station.