Friends of France : $b The Field Service of the American Ambulance described by its membersVarious
History
Friends of France : $b The Field Service of the American Ambulance described by its members
Various
American Field Service; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, American
At about six in the evening we reached our destination some forty
miles northeast of Bar-le-Duc. The little village where we stopped
had been a railroad centre until the day before, when the Germans
started bombarding it. Now the town was evacuated, and the smoking
station deserted. The place had ceased to exist, except for a hospital
which was established on the southern edge of the town in a lovely
old château, overlooking the Meuse. We were called up to the hospital
as soon as we arrived to take such wounded as could be moved to the
nearest available rail-head, which was ten miles away, on the main
road, and four miles south of Verdun. We started out in convoy, but
with the then conditions of traffic, it was impossible to stick
together, and it took some of us till five o'clock the next morning to
make the trip. That was the beginning of the attack for us, and the
work of "evacuating" the wounded to the railway stations went steadily
on until March 15. It was left to the driver to decide how many trips
it was physically possible for him to make in each twenty-four hours.
There were more wounded than could be carried, and no one could be
certain of keeping any kind of schedule with the roads as they then
were.
Sometimes we spent five or six hours waiting at a crossroad, while
columns of troops and their equipment filed steadily by. Sometimes
at night we could make a trip in two hours that had taken us ten in
daylight. Sometimes, too, we crawled slowly to a station only to find
it deserted, shells falling, and the hospital moved to some still more
distant point of the line. Situations and conditions changed from day
to day--almost from hour to hour. One day it was sunshine and spring,
with roads six inches deep in mud, no traffic, and nothing to remind
one of war, except the wounded in the car and the distant roar of the
guns, which sounded like a giant beating a carpet. The next day it was
winter again, with mud turned to ice, the roads blocked with troops,
and the Germans turning hell loose with their heavy guns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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