Part 17

It cannot be said that the Prussians were cowards. They had been ordered to hold their position at any cost; and they fought ferociously, until they were dropped by the bayonet. In their machine-gun pits twenty and thirty Hun gunners were found, piled in heaps, slain by the bayonet, showing they had resisted desperately to the end; and the path to those same pits could be traced by American dead. Neither side asked or gave any quarter, and in those first fierce days of the offensive few prisoners were taken.

[Illustration:

_Copyright, 1918, by the Curtis Publishing Company._ _Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information. Photo, by courtesy of the American Red Cross. Reproduced from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia._

TENT-WARD SHOWING DAMAGE CAUSED BY GERMAN BOMBS. THIS RED CROSS MILITARY HOSPITAL WAS BOMBED BY GERMAN PLANES DURING THE JULY OFFENSIVE WHILE THE AMERICANS WERE WINNING AT CHÂTEAU-THIERRY]

Despite the redoubtable blows of the famous iron-disciplined Prussian Guards and the Bavarian Reserves, shock troops alleged to be irresistible, despite also the hail of bullets and gas shells and high explosives right in their faces, the Americans started a counter-drive. The Germans had initiated this game called “drive,” and now the Americans, under Foch and Pershing, were ramming that same game down their throats. And slowly the German line began to recoil. Slowly those Prussians and Bavarians, fighting like tigers, began to retire. For the first time since America’s entry into the war she began to land substantial body blows upon the enemy; for the first time that enemy began to stagger under the terrible punishing force of those blows, delivered with the whole weight of a powerful angry nation behind them. The Germans had started out to stampede the Americans; the Americans retorted by stampeding the Germans--a little.

And now began two tides: one tide strong, and hourly growing stronger, sweeping the Hun back, pressing into tighter corners and hotter hells, victorious; the other tide composed of those who fell--a quiet, stricken, bloody tide, ebbing slowly toward the rear.

The hospital was waiting to receive them, surgeons and nurses in aprons and caps. In the kitchen a soldier, told off as cook, stoked the big kitchen range until it glowed incandescent on top, and the huge marmites of coffee and cocoa disseminated a fragrant aroma through the house. Ambulances, a steady stream, began to climb the dark, wooded hill road. Two lanterns, like bright, glowing eyes, fastened on either side of the entrance gate, guided them into the grounds. In the rear of the château, in front of the admission tent, they halted; deposited their burdens--silent, immobile, blanket-swathed figures, whose white bandages showed deep crimson stains--retrieved blankets and stretchers; snatched a hasty gulp of strong black coffee, and rumbled off for another load. More drew up, unloaded, departed. And still more and more and more. What a traffic in the dead of night! The traffic sergeant gave low, terse orders. A hooded lantern gleamed here and there. Over all was the infernal voice of the cannon, and those swift, stabbing, crimson flames across the sky.

Inside the admission tent, despite the rush and the constant influx of fresh stretchers, a clean-cut order prevailed. Men, sorely wounded, rested on their litters without change for a few minutes, while their infected clothes were removed and a brief history taken, after which they were borne off by brancardiers directly to the X-ray and operating rooms. Thus with all haste and yet with all order a constant sorting went on, the serious operative cases going forward, the lighter cases remaining behind. These latter were helped into clean pyjamas, given hot soup or cocoa--some of them during the fury of the attack had not tasted food for more than twenty-four hours--their wounds re-bandaged, and put to bed to await their turn in the long procession that led to the operating table. And some of these latter, shelled incessantly, under constant shock and stress, not having closed an eye for seventy-two hours, took the high dive into deep oblivion with the coffee cup still in their hands, and slept solidly for a night and a day on end.

The cots in the admission ward filled up. The stream of badly wounded moved forward and the fresh stream from the ambulances flowed in to its place. Everywhere could be heard a continuous low drone of conversation. There was no excitement. But neither was there silence nor sadness--though some were dying--nor groaning nor evidence of pain. They were talking, indeed, but it was noticeable that no one spoke of his wounds or his sufferings, though some had lain twenty-four hours and more on the field or in the dugouts under intense barrage before they could be brought in. But it was not of this they spoke. The battle, what had happened up there, still intoxicated them, still held their brains in thrall. They talked of horrible, grotesque, fantastic and sanguinary things in low, level dispassionate tones, as if they were discussing the weather:

“I saw my captain and my lieutenant blown straight to hell; it was a head-on collision with a high explosive. My captain was a fine fellow. He always seen we had a place to sleep, and if there was anything to eat going we got it. I was handed one in the chest. We was creeping up on a nest of their machine guns that the dirty boches had hid in a tree. I couldn’t bandage my chest wound, and I was spitting blood pretty bad, so I lay down in a shallow shell hole for the rest of the day.

“Along toward night I says to a comrade shot through the arm, who had crawled in alongside: ‘Steve,’ I says, ‘we’ve got to beat it. This is getting too lively for me.’ By that time the shells was busting at regular intervals at a distance of about five feet apart. No use scrouchin’ down to dodge ’em; if you did you lost your interval--see? And the next one caught you straight! So we just stood up and walked along kind of slow. We made it that way for about a mile, stumbling along, not going too fast or too slow, for fear of losing that danged interval, when suddenly I flopped down. I’d been bleeding pretty freely right along.

“‘Steve,’ I says, ‘I’m not going to make it. You hike on.’

“But he helped me to stand, and so we kind of leaned up against each other like some of these funny dead drunks you see, and staggered along until presently we saw something looming ahead. I let out a feeble little yip. It was a French machine gun right on top of us, and they was just drawing off to fire! Yes, sir! That holler, for all it was so feeble, was the best little piece of business I ever pulled!”

Some of their stories, I am bound to say, were whoppers, and their figures as inflated as those of watered stock. They saw things heroic size. This phase of battlefield psychology is well known to war surgeons. One soldier, for example, declared his entire division had been wiped out. Another made modest mention of the fact that his company alone, single-handed, against overwhelming odds, had started the Hun on his return trip to Berlin.

“Aw, dry up!” groaned out an exasperated realist, with a grimace of pain. “You four-flushers make me sick, blowing like that!”

“Well, anyhow,” retorted the youth who had boasted of his company, “we whaled ’em in that pocket!”

The realist lifted himself with labor, for a contemptuous look at the optimist.

“What’s the matter with your eye?” he demanded.

“Left it on the battlefield to look after things,” said the other with utter sang-froid. “What’s a little private eye or two in a war of this size?”

“Well, you’re no tin-horn sport!” admitted the realist grimly. And he laid himself down again.

Near the entrance to the admission tent lay a man on a stretcher, his leg bandaged above the knee. The trouser leg had been cut away, the white bandage gleamed ominously red, and down his leggings, down to the heel of his heavy boot, oozed slow drops of red which formed a dark pool on the stretcher. His eyes were closed; his eyelids were violet; his face, under the gleam of the surgeon’s torch, showed ghastly white; and a week’s growth of black beard emphasized the pallor.

“Get him right up to the house,” commanded the surgeon after an expert squint, not so much at the leg as at another bandage round the chest. “Have you taken his history?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then shoot him in ahead of the others. Tell the nurse to have him X-rayed at once, and pass him into the operating room. It’s a long chance at that.”

The brancardiers bore him away.

Down in the other wards the cots were fast filling with the gassed. For these, in an evacuation surgical hospital, nothing could be done save to remove their gas-impregnated garments, bandage their blisters and burns, feed them, rest them--and rush them on to the rear. Upon one of the beds lay a boy, gassed by phosgene. He lay in a kind of stupor, wondrously beautiful and pale, a statue carved in pure marble, the mobile boyish mouth curved in a faint smile. No visible breath. No pulse. And for him, too, rest--absolute rest.

Still the cannons thundered and their vivid flames painted momentarily the black sky. The ambulances never ceased their steady rumble. The drivers got down for a draught of hot coffee, a word with the sergeant, and then drove off in the dark. It was an unending procession.

And now another tent down in the grounds, isolated from the others, began to be filled. Some of the occupants were wounded, some gassed; some groaned and called out in guttural accents of agony, of fear; some were too far gone to groan. A guard stood at the door.

“Guess they think we’re going to murder them!” opined he grimly to the brancardiers as they bore in still another litter.

“We caught quite a bunch to-night between the devil and the deep blue sea,” remarked a brancardier jovially. “Now then--steady! One--two--three! Drop the stretcher!” They lifted the silent figure into bed. “This poor devil is almost in. He’ll be going West before long. Here’s another. Says his name is Max. All right. Max! You’re in America now! Nothing but a kid--is he? Can you make out what he’s chewing the rag about?”

The guard bent down his head. The German prisoner, young, pale, with still a lingering, childlike softness of contour about the chin, rolled his head ceaselessly to and fro, to and fro, while he muttered in a delirium of pain: “Oh, my poor old mother! Oh, my little sister! The Germans did not want the war!” Over and over again, like a litany.

Up in the pre-operative ward in the château the beds and the floor and the hallway were encumbered with men on stretchers waiting to be fed into the X-ray room. Here, as down in the admission ward, there was a constant circulation, the gravest cases being rapidly pushed forward and fresh stretchers from the outside filling their places. Suddenly an orderly, who had been bending above a still figure on a cot, straightened himself, and with panic in his face stepped across the room to the nurse.

“That guy in the corner’s dying, I think,” he muttered in her ear. “Anyhow, he’s stopped breathing.”

Hastily the nurse sought the alleged moribund’s cot, leaned down and felt his pulse. Normal. She held her palm above his nostrils. The man was sound asleep! He was slumbering softly, tranquilly, like a babe in its crib. The orderly, accustomed to the labored, stertorous respirations of those who fight a running fight with death, thought a man must be dying if he did not make a noise!

Stepping carefully along that crowded corridor I bent down to rearrange the blanket of a stretcher case, and ask the soldier how he did.

“I’m all right,” he replied quietly. “It’s only my foot. I was cleaning my automatic and suddenly it went off accidentally and shot me through the ankle.”

At that word “accidentally” a kind of cold chill assailed me. Why had he used that ill-omened word at all? Before now I had heard of the S. I. W.’s--self-inflicted wounds. These were soldiers who, through cowardice or momentary panic or spite, raging against some real or fancied wrong committed by a superior officer, shot themselves in the hand or foot in order to be sent back to the rear. In any aggregation of humans mounting up to more than a million there are bound to be a few such weaklings. But not this youth with the quiet voice and the clear, candid eyes! A second time he explained the incident, elaborating the details--with painstaking care--and a second time he used that fatal word. My heart was troubled. My head--that cool, hard, alien, dispassionate observer that sits up aloft in us all--whispered that this foolish lad had given the game clean away by the double use of that damning word. But my heart cried out that his story might be true.

Angry at myself, and even more at this savage war, at those monstrous taskmasters, the guns, which put to the same acid test all men, whether strong or weak, I passed the closed doors of the operating room to the deserted veranda and sat down upon the steps. A stray hound, coiled on the lower step, stirred at my coming, thrust its cool muzzle into my lap and licked my hand. And so we sat in mute companionship, the dog and I, and listened to the pounding of the guns. And it seemed to me that night that the dog had the best of it!

Presently a scream--or, to speak more exactly, a yell--pierced the quiet of the house and brought me, startled, to my feet. It was not a cry of terror or of anguish--nothing at all like that. It was the loud, chesty, rebellious roar of a lusty infant asserting his human rights. But this particular infant was well within the draft limits. Softly I crossed the hall, the dog tagging my footsteps, and opened the door of the operating room. In that brilliantly lighted little theater of healing and pain three tables were occupied, three teams of surgeons were working.

On the table nearest the door a big red-headed young colossus with the chest and huge freckled arms of a Samson, was just going under ether. Or rather, he was not going to do any such thing if he could help himself. At the head of the table, behind him, sat the anæsthetist. With one hand she held the ether cone over his nose while with the other she poured the ether over the cotton. Perhaps the giant had taken fifteen or twenty whiffs--just enough to decide he didn’t like the smell and that he was going to be boss of his nose! At the hot-water tap stood the major, soaping his hands for this new case while the nurse tied on a sterile apron.

As I opened the door the young giant, with a swift twist of his head--the only part of him that was free--whirled the offending cone to the floor. It was for all the world like the action of an obstreperous young colt refusing the bridle. The anæsthetist retrieved it, affixed it firmly to his nose and soaked it in ether.

Sounded a muffled roar: “Stop! Stop, I tell yah! Don’t you know how to stop?” More ether. “Stop you!” By this time he was struggling violently. He had taken just enough to be rebellious, and he looked sufficiently strong to rise up and walk off with the table strapped to his back. “I want--I--wanta--wanta----”

“Easy there, old man,” counseled the major reassuringly. “Take it easy.”

But Redhead did not intend to take it easy or any other way. Another whisk of the head. Off flew the ether cone. This time the major himself picked it up and took the anæsthetist’s chair. But before he could readjust the cone the blue eyes in the crimson face beneath opened widely, the giant struggled determinedly and roared in strangled tones:

“I--I--wanta--I wanta s-s-s--I wanta--spit!”

The major chuckled as he lifted the cone. “All right, old man, shoot! Now then--count. One--two--three. Louder! Breathe deep. Four--five--six. That’s the stuff! Seven. Keep it up! Loud! Ten----”

The breathing turned into a strong regular snore, and soon the giant had slid fathoms deep into the state of profound unconsciousness. Softly I closed the door.

Some of these men, strong husky youngsters, pulsing with life, hard as nails from their free out-of-door habits, are about as easy to put under ether as would be a wild steer off the range. Every atom of their physical nature rebels at surrendering consciousness. Others go under like lambs. It is largely a matter of temperament. Once a private laughed as they lifted him upon the table, and catching a whiff of ether he chuckled: “Hi! Give me my gas mask!” Then he cuddled the cone comfortably into place over his nose, settled down to snooze, and took the high dive into complete unconsciousness without a single kick.

The next morning broke into one of those exquisite soft mellow days for which this part of the country, called by the French the heart of France, seems celebrated. It was like a perfect rose, a day when Nature, by her clear sheer beauty, seems to shame man for his deeds of anger and blood. Still the ambulances climbed the hill, a steady stream, and vanished to the rear. At the moment, however, they were carrying more gassed than wounded. And thus the surgeons were snatching a rest. One or two of them appeared in the doorway for a moment, pale, with circles under the eyes and heavy lines from nostril to jaw. When they walked, it was slowly, and I had the impression that they might make it on a dead level, but that they would stumble over a pin.

When the major appeared he proposed a walk to the laundry plant. The change of linen on a thousand to fifteen hundred beds a night during a rush means a well-organized washing system--and this hospital had to depend on the village women. We strolled through one of the loveliest woods in France, the branches overhead interlacing into Gothic arches of lucid green, while far above, great white billowy clouds, like graceful schooners under full sail, bowled along through the deep uncharted blue of some unknown port. And as we strolled the major spoke of something extraordinary that had occurred the night before.

“It was a queer piece of psychology,” he said, “and I don’t know that I can get it over to you. It will probably sound unreal, exaggerated, in this calm morning sunshine. But you must try to realize the setting; try to comprehend the tensity, the strain of that operating room. We had been operating for twenty-four solid hours without a break, upon our men. Fine brave fellows, who went on the table without a groan. Men shot to pieces, horribly mangled, done to death. It’s heart-breaking work, if one’s got any heart to break. At the end of the night we all felt mighty blue. Then they brought in an American captain, a medical officer, already in a moribund condition. Well, to see one of our own corps in that state touched us pretty close. He was blown to pieces. He hadn’t a chance, and he knew it. And the sight of his calm, his high fine courage, hit us hard. But we did what we could for him--which was just nothing at all. After that was over I called out: ‘Fetch in the boches!’

“And as they brought in the first German wounded I was aware of a peculiar atmosphere, a sense of strain, a clear antagonism in the room. It was like a live magnetic current. You cannot conceive--nobody can--the terrific night we’d been through trying to salvage our brave fellows. The emotional stress was stupendous. Well, now we were looking on those who had caused that ruin, and the revulsion of feeling ran high. As the anæsthetist fixed the ether cone in place on the Prussian he said to me: ‘Sir, would you consider it a crime if I were just to go on pouring ether on this Hun’s nose?’

“That brought a laugh and cleared the strained atmosphere. And we cleaned up their wounded exactly as if they had been our own. But I’ll not deny we were glad when it was done!”

Returning to the château the major suddenly stopped and inquired: “Have you ever seen any cases of shell shock?”

I had not, though I had heard of them in the French and British armies.

“We don’t know exactly what it is yet,” continued the major. “Nobody does. But we have a special American hospital for its treatment. Look here: You see those two chaps crouching down by the steps? They both have it--hard.”

I looked. I had noted those two hunched figures before, and had taken them for orderlies, dead with fatigue, snatching a few minutes’ sleep. Now I looked closer. And looking closer I perceived it was not fatigue that caused them to squeeze themselves into the smallest possible space; it was not fatigue that caused them to hunch their shoulders and bow their backs as before a storm, draw their heads down into the curved hollow of their chests and try to hide themselves in the ground. It was fear--abject, ghastly, insane fear. They were obsessed, petrified, rendered deaf and dumb--by fear.

The major bent down to one, laid a hand on his shoulder, spoke a friendly word. The man’s fixed gaze stared straight through him as if he had been composed of air. He was deaf to reason, deaf to human appeal--but not deaf to the roar of the cannon. For each time that an ambulance rolled by or distant thunder issued from the clouds banking in the western sky his head jerked in the direction of the sound as though pulled by invisible wires. But not one word would he utter. Only his eyes seemed alive, wild, dark, affrighted. For the moment he was not human, but an effigy galvanized by fear. The noise, the continuous shelling, with probably some additional culminating shock, had temporarily bereft him of reason. For both of these men were unwounded, unscathed.

Later, in the admission ward, with the help of an orderly I induced one of these men to eat. The other patients watched with indifference. They had long since become hardened to uglier sights than that of a man crazed in battle. It was like feeding an infant ostrich. The mouth opened methodically to receive the food, but not one move, not one sound would he make. One hand upheld in air, the index finger raised, marked the tensity of his strained attention. His blue eyes forever darted from side to side. At each distant volley his body trembled and shook. And those straining eyes, full of horror, and that raised index finger followed questing through the air for the sound. It was infinitely pitiful.

“Don’t coddle him!” called the major, passing through. “It’s the worst thing in world you can do.”

“May I see if I can get him to talk?”

“Certainly. But treat him like an ordinary individual.”

“He’s afraid to talk,” said the orderly, pausing by the stretcher. “He’s a nut. He thinks if he opens his mouth the Germans will hear him and send over a shell.”

In taking his record I discovered his first name was Thomas.