The Martial Adventures of Henry and MeWhite, William Allen
History
The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
White, William Allen
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
So we ate and listened to the singing, while the moon rose, and
with it came a fog--more than a fog--a cloud of heavy mist that
hid the moon. We moved our baggage from the tent to a vacant room
in a vacant ward in the big hospital. We saw in the misty moonlight
a great brick structure running around a compound. The compound was
over 200 feet square, and in the centre of the compound was a big
Red Cross made of canvas, painted red, on a background of whitewashed
stones. It was 100 feet square. On each side of the compound a
Red Cross blazed from the roof of the buildings, under the Geneva
lights--lights which the Germans had agreed should mark our hospitals
and protect them from air raids.
At midnight we left the hospital to visit those ambulance men who
were stationed at the first aid posts, up near the battle line.
It was an eery sort of night ride in the ambulance, going without
lights, up the zigzags of the hill to the battle front of Verdun.
The white clay of the road was sloppy and the car wobbled and
skidded along and we passed scores of other vehicles going up and
coming down--with not a flicker of light on any of them. The Red
Cross on our ambulance gave us the right of way over everything but
ammunition trucks, so we sped forward rapidly. It was revitalment
time. Hundreds of motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions,
food, men and the thousand and one supplies needed to keep an army
going, were making their nightly trip to the trenches. When we
reached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had been
climbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were at
a first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one could
see the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yards
into the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags. In the
dugout was a little operating room where the wounded were bandaged
before starting them down the hill in the ambulance to the hospital,
and three doctors and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standing
inside out of the misty rain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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