True Stories of the Great War, Volume 4 (of 6): Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses
History
True Stories of the Great War, Volume 4 (of 6): Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
I promised. The Ambassador kept his word. A week later, vaccinated and
injected against disease of every character, clad in khaki, with the
coveted badge of mercy sewed on the left sleeve, I was taken into the
ranks of the Croix Rouge as an ambulance orderly. I remained for two
months--first hauling wounded from great evacuation stations about
Paris to hospitals within the walls. Most of our wounded went to the
American Ambulance, when we broke all speed laws going through the
Champs Elysées, en route to Neuilly. Later I was stationed at Amiens
with the second French army, at that time under the command of General
Castelnau. We slept on the floor in a freight station and we worked in
the black ooze of the railway yards. The battle front was still many
miles away.
One morning when the weather was bleakest (it was now December) and
the black ooze the deepest, and the straw from where I had just risen
was flattest and moldiest, I received word from Paris to get back
quick--that at last the War Office would send correspondents to the
front, and that the Foreign Office was preparing the list of neutrals
who would go.
I resigned my ambulance job and took the next train. But I kept my
brassard with the red cross upon it. I wanted it as a proof of those
hard days and sometimes harder nights, when my profession was blotted
from my mind--and copy didn't matter--I wanted it because it was my
badge when I was an ambulance orderly carrying wounded men, when I
came to feel that I was contributing something after all, although a
neutral, toward the great sacrifice of the country that sheltered me.
I shall keep it always for many things that I saw and heard; but I
cherish it most for my recollection of Trevelyan--the Rue Jeanne d'Arc
and those from a locality called Quesnoy-sur-Somme.
II--STORY OF TREVELYAN--THE ORDERLY
The orderly on the first bus was sitting at attention, with arms
folded, waiting for orders. It was just dawn, but the interior of his
bus was clean and ready. He always fixed it up at night, when the rest
of us, dog tired, crept into the dank straw, saying we could get up
extra early and do it.
So now we were up "extra early," chauffeurs tinkered with engines,
and orderlies fumigated interiors; and the First Orderly, sitting at
the head of the column, where he heard things, and saw things, got
acquainted with Trevelyan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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