The Cornhill Magazine (Vol. XLI, No. 241 new series, July 1916)Various
General
The Cornhill Magazine (Vol. XLI, No. 241 new series, July 1916)
Various
England -- Periodicals; English literature -- Periodicals; Short stories, English -- Periodicals
At about six in the evening we reached our destination some forty miles
north-east 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 chateau, 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 railhead, 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 cross-road, 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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