Part 12

In order to detect the approach of Zeppelins the French military authorities have recently adopted the novel expedient of establishing microphone stations at several points in and about Paris, these delicately attuned instruments recording with unfailing accuracy the throb of a Zeppelin’s or an aeroplane’s propellers long before it can be heard by the human ear.

For the protection of London the British Government has built an aerial navy consisting of two types of aircraft—scouts and battle-planes. Practically the only requirement for the scouting planes is that they must have a speed of not less than one hundred miles an hour and a fuel capacity for at least a six-hour flight, thus giving them a cruising radius of three hundred miles. That is, they will be able to raid many German ports and cities and return with ease to their base in England. Their small size—they are only thirty feet across the wings—and great speed will make them almost impossible to hit and it is expected that antiaircraft guns will be practically useless against them. They will constantly circle in the higher levels, as near the Zeppelin bases as they can get, and the minute they see the giants emerging from their hangars they will be off to England to give the alarm. Their speed being double that of a Zeppelin, they will have reached England long before the raider arrives. Then the new “Canada” type, each carrying a ton of bombs, will go out to meet the Germans. These giant biplanes, one hundred and two feet across the wings, with two motors developing three hundred and twenty horse-power, have a speed of more than ninety miles an hour and can overtake a Zeppelin as a motor-cycle policeman can overhaul a limousine. They are fitted with the new device for insuring accuracy in bomb-dropping and, with their superior speed, will hang above the monster dirigibles, as a hawk hangs above a hen-roost, plumping shell after shell into the great silk sausage quivering below them.

Both the French and British Governments now have a considerable number of hydroaeroplanes in commission. These amphibious craft, which are driven by two motors of one hundred and sixty horse-power each and have a speed of about seventy-five miles an hour, are designed primarily for the hunting of submarines. Though a submarine cannot be seen from the deck of a vessel, an aviator can see it, even though it is submerged twenty feet, and a bomb dropped near it will cave its sides in by the mere force of the explosion, particularly if that bomb is loaded with two hundred pounds of melinite, as are the ones carried by the French hydroaeroplanes.

But the most novel of all the uses to which the aircraft have been put in this war is that of dropping spies in the enemy’s territory. On numerous occasions French and British aviators have flown across the German lines, carrying with them an intelligence officer disguised as a peasant or a farm-hand, and have landed him at some remote spot where the descent of an aeroplane is scarcely likely to attract the attention of the military authorities. As soon as the aviator has landed his passenger he ascends again, with the understanding, however, that he will return to the same spot a day, or two days, or a week later, to pick up the spy and carry him back to the French lines. The exploits of some of these secret agents thus dropped from the sky upon enemy soil would make the wildest fiction seem probable and tame. One French officer, thus landed behind the German front in Flanders, succeeded in slowly working his way right across Belgium, gathering information as he went as to the resources of the Germans and the disposition of their troops, only to be caught just as he was crossing the frontier into Holland. Though the Germans expressed unbounded admiration for his coolness, courage, and daring, he was none the less a spy. He died before the rifles of a firing-party.

It has repeatedly been said that in this war the spirit of chivalry does not exist, and, so far as the land forces are concerned, this is largely true. But chivalry still exists among the fighters of the air. If, for example, a French aviator is forced to descend in the German lines, either because his machine has been damaged by gun fire or from engine trouble, a German aviator will fly over the French lines, often amid a storm of shrapnel, and drop a little cloth bag which contains a note recording the name of the missing man, or if not his name the number of his machine, whether he survived, and if so whether he is wounded. Attached to the “message bag” are long pennants of colored cloth, which flutter out and attract the attention of the men in the neighborhood, who run out and pick up the bag when it lands. It is at once taken to the nearest officer, who opens it and telephones the message it contains to aviation headquarters, so that it not infrequently happens that the fate of a flier is known to his comrades within a few hours after he has set out from the aviation field. Perhaps the prettiest exhibition of chivalry which the war has produced was evoked by the death of the famous French aviator, Adolphe Pegoud, who was killed by a German aviator whom he attacked during a reconnoissance near Petite Croix, in Alsace. The next day a German aeroplane, flying at a great height, appeared over Chavannes, an Alsatian village on the old frontier, where Pegoud was buried, and dropped a wreath which bore the inscription: “To Pegoud, who died like a hero, from his adversary.”

VII THE RED BADGE OF MERCY

Corporal Emile Dupont, having finished a most unappetizing and unsatisfying breakfast, consisting of a cup of lukewarm chicory and a half-loaf of soggy bread, emerged on all fours from the hole in the ground which for many months had been his home and, standing upright in the trench, lighted a cigarette. At that instant something came screaming out of nowhere to burst, in a cloud of acrid smoke and a shower of steel splinters, directly over the trench in which Emile was standing. Immediately the sky seemed to fall upon Emile and crush him. When he returned to consciousness a few seconds later he found himself crumpled up in an angle of the trench like an empty kit-bag that has been hurled into a corner of a room. He felt curiously weak and nauseated; he ached in every bone in his body; his head throbbed and pounded until he thought that the top of his skull was coming off. Still, he was alive, and that was something. He fumbled for the cigarette that he had been lighting, but there was a curious sensation of numbness in his right hand. He did not seem to be able to move it. Very slowly, very painfully he turned his head so that his eyes travelled out along his blue-sleeved arm until they reached the point where his hand ought to be. But the hand wasn’t there. It had quite disappeared. His wrist lay in a pool of something crimson and warm and sticky which widened rapidly as he looked at it. His hand was gone, there was no doubting that. Still, it didn’t interest him greatly; in fact, it might have been some other man’s hand for all he cared. His head throbbed like the devil and he was very, very tired. Rather dimly he heard voices and, as through a haze, saw figures bending over him. He felt some one tugging at the little first-aid packet which every soldier carries in the breast of his tunic, he felt something being tied very tightly around his arm above the elbow, and finally he had a vague recollection of being dragged into a dug-out, where he lay for hours while the shell-storm raged and howled outside. Along toward nightfall, when the bombardment had died down, two soldiers, wearing on their arms white _brassards_ with red crosses, lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him between interminable walls of brown earth to another and a larger dug-out which he recognized as a _poste de secours_. After an hour of waiting, because there were other wounded men who had to be attended to first, the stretcher on which Emile lay was lifted onto a table over which hung a lantern. A bearded man, wearing the cap of a medical officer, and with a white apron up to his neck, briskly unwound the bandages which hid the place where Emile’s right hand should have been. “It’ll have to be taken off a bit further up, _mon brave_,” said the surgeon, in much the same tone that a tailor would use in discussing the shortening of a coat. “You seem to be in pretty fair shape, though, so we’ll just give you a new dressing, and send you along to the field ambulance, where they have more facilities for amputating than we have here.” Despite the pain, which had now become agonizing, Emile watched with a sort of detached admiration the neatness and despatch with which the surgeon wound the white bandages around the wound. It reminded him of a British soldier putting on his puttees. “Just a moment, my friend,” said the surgeon, when the dressing was completed, “we’ll give you a jab of this before you go, to frighten away the tetanus,” and in the muscles of his shoulder Emile felt the prick of a hypodermic needle. An orderly tied to a button of his coat a pink tag on which something—he could not see what—had been scrawled by the surgeon, and two _brancardiers_ lifted the stretcher and carried him out into the darkness. From the swaying of the stretcher and the muffled imprecations of the bearers, he gathered that he was being taken across the ploughed field which separated the trenches from the highway where the ambulances were waiting. “This cleans ’em up for to-night,” said one of the bearers, as he slipped the handles of the stretcher into the grooved supports of the ambulance and pushed it smoothly home. “Thank God for that,” said the ambulance driver, as he viciously cranked his car. “I thought I was going to be kept here all night. It’s time we cleared out anyway. The Boches spotted me with a rocket they sent up a while back, and they’ve been dropping shells a little too close to be pleasant. Well, s’long. When I get this bunch delivered I’m going to turn in and get a night’s sleep.”

The road, being paved with cobblestones, was not as smooth as it should have been for wounded men. Emile, who had been awakened to full consciousness by the night air and by a drink of brandy one of the orderlies at the _poste de secours_ had given him, felt something warm and sticky falling ... drip ... drip ... drip ... upon his face. In the dim light he was at first unable to discover where it came from. Then he saw. It was dripping through the brown canvas of the stretcher that hung above him. He tried to call to the ambulance driver, but his voice was lost in the noise of the machine. The field-hospital was only three miles back of the trench in which he had been wounded, but by the time he arrived there, what with the jolting and the pain and the terrible thirst which comes from loss of blood and that ghastly drip ... drip ... drip in his face, Emile was in a state of both mental and physical collapse. They took him into a large tent, dimly lighted by lanterns which showed him many other stretchers with silent or groaning forms, all ticketed like himself, lying upon them. After considerable delay a young officer came around with a note-book and looked at the tag they had tied on him at the dressing-station. On it was scrawled the word “urgent.” That admonition didn’t prevent Emile’s having to wait two hours before he was taken into a tent so brilliantly illuminated by an arc-lamp that the glare hurt his eyes. When they laid him on a narrow white table so that the light fell full upon him he felt as though he were on the stage of a theatre and the spot-light had been turned upon him. An orderly with a sharp knife deftly slashed away the sleeve of Emile’s coat, leaving the arm bare to the shoulder, while another orderly clapped over his mouth and nose a sort of funnel.

When he returned to consciousness he found himself again in an ambulance rocking and swaying over those agonizing _pavé_ roads. The throbbing of his head and the pain in his arm and the pitching of the vehicle made him nauseated. There were three other wounded men in the ambulance and they had been nauseated too. It was not a pleasant journey. After what seemed to Emile and his companions in misery an interminable time, the ambulance came to a stop in front of a railway-station. At least it had once been a railway-station, but over the door between the drooping Red Cross flags, was the sign “Hôpital d’Évacuation No. 31.” Two _brancardiers_ lifted out Emile’s stretcher—the same one, by the way, on which he had been carried from the trenches twenty-four hours before—and set it down in what had been the station waiting-room. It was still a waiting-room, but all those who were so patiently and uncomplainingly waiting in it were wounded. Two women, wearing white smocks and caps and with the ever-present red cross upon their sleeves, came in carrying trays loaded with cups of steaming soup. While an orderly supported Emile’s head one of the women held a cup of soup to his lips. He drank it greedily. It was the best thing he had ever tasted and he said so. Then they gave him a glass of harsh, red wine. After that he felt much better. After a time a doctor came in and glanced at the tags which had been tied on him at the _poste de secours_ and at the field-hospital. “You’ve a little fever, my lad,” said he, “but I guess you can stand the trip to Paris. You’ll be better off there than you would be here.” If Emile lives to be a hundred he will never forget that journey. It was made in a box-car which had been converted to the use of the wounded by putting in racks to hold the stretchers and cutting windows in the sides. In the centre was a small stove on which the orderly in charge boiled tea. In the car were fifteen other wounded men. On the journey four of them died. The car, which was without springs, rolled like a ship in a storm. The jolting was far worse than that in the ambulances on the _pavé_ roads had been. Emile’s head reeled from weariness and exhaustion; his arm felt as though it were being held in a white-hot flame; he was attacked by the intolerable thirst which characterizes amputation cases, and begged for water, and when it was given him pleaded desperately for more, more, more. Most of the time he was out of his head and babbled incoherently of foolish, inconsequential things. It took twenty hours for the hospital train to reach Paris, for a great movement of troops was in progress, and when well men are being rushed to the front the wounded ones who are coming away from it must wait. When the train finally pulled under the sooty glass roof of the Paris station, Emile was hovering between life and death. He had a hazy, indistinct recollection of being taken from the ill-smelling freight-car to an ambulance—the third in which he had been in less than forty-eight hours; of skimming pleasantly, silently over smooth pavements; of the ambulance entering the porte-cochère of a great white building that looked like a hotel or school. Here he was _not_ kept waiting. Nurses with skilful fingers drew off his clothes—the filthy, blood-soaked, mud-stained, vermin-infested, foul-smelling garments that he had not had off for many weeks. He was lowered, ever so gently, into a tub filled with warm water. _Bon Dieu_, but it felt good! It was the first warm bath that he had had in more than a year. It was worth being wounded for. Then a pair of flannel pajamas, a fresh, soft bed, such as he had not known since the war began, and pink-cheeked nurses in crisp, white linen slipping about noiselessly. While Emile lay back on his pillows and puffed a cigarette a doctor came in and dressed his wound. “Don’t worry about yourself, my man,” he said cheerily, “you’ll get along finely. In a week or so we’ll be sending you back to your family.” Whereupon, Corporal Emile Dupont turned on his pillow with a great sigh of content. He wondered dimly, as he fell asleep, if it would be hard to find work which a one-armed man could do.

From the imaginary but wholly typical case just given, in which we have traced the course of a wounded man from the spot where he fell to the final hospital, it will be seen that the system of the Service de Santé Militaire, as the medical service of the French army is known, though cumbersome and complicated in certain respects, nevertheless works—and works well. In understanding the French system it is necessary to bear in mind that the wounded man has to be shifted through two army zones, front and rear, both of which are under the direct control of the commander-in-chief, to the interior zone of the country, with its countless hospitals, which is under the direction of the Ministry of War.

As soon as a soldier falls he drags himself, if he is able, to some sheltered spot, or his comrades carry him there, and with the “first-aid” packet, carried in the breast pocket of the tunic, an endeavor is made to give the wound temporary treatment. In the British service this “first-aid” kit consists of a small tin box, not much larger than a cigarette-case, containing a bottle of iodine crystals and a bottle of alcohol wrapped up in a roll of aseptic bandage gauze. Meanwhile word has been passed along the line that the services of the surgeon are needed, for each regiment has one and sometimes two medical officers on duty in the trenches. It may so happen that the trench section has its own _poste de secours_, or first-aid dressing-station, in which case the man is at once taken there. The medical officer dresses the man’s wound, perhaps gives him a hypodermic to lessen the pain, and otherwise makes him as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. His wounds temporarily dressed, if there is a dug-out at hand, he is taken into it. If not, he is laid in such shelter as the trench affords, and there he usually has to lie until night comes and he can be removed in comparative safety; for, particularly in the flat country of Artois and Flanders, it is out of the question to remove the wounded except under the screen of darkness, and even then it is frequently an extremely hazardous proceeding, for the German gunners apparently do their best to drop their shells on the ambulances and stretcher-parties. As soon as night falls a dressing-station is established at a point as close as possible behind the trenches, the number of surgeons, dressers, and stretcher-bearers sent out depending upon the number of casualties as reported by telephone from the trenches to headquarters. The wounded man is transported on a stretcher or a wheeled litter to the dressing-station, where his wounds are examined by the light of electric torches and, if necessary, redressed. If he has any fractured bones they are made fast in splints or pieces of zinc or iron wire—anything that will enable him to stand transportation. Though the dressing-station is, wherever possible, established in a farmhouse, in a grove, behind a wall, or such other protection as the region may afford, it is, nevertheless, often in extreme danger. I recall one case, in Flanders, where the flashing of the torches attracted the attention of the German gunners, who dropped a shell squarely into a dressing-station, killing all the surgeons and stretcher-bearers, and putting half a dozen of the wounded out of their misery. As soon as the wounded man has passed through the dressing-station, he is carried, usually over very rough ground, to the point on the road where the motor-ambulances are waiting and is whirled off to the division ambulance, which corresponds to the field-hospital of the British and American armies. These division ambulances (it should be borne in mind that the term _ambulance_ in French means “_military_ hospital”) do as complete work as can be expected so near the front. They are usually set up only four or five miles back of the firing-line, and have a regular medical and nursing staff, instruments, and, in some cases, X-ray apparatus for operations. As a rule, only light emergency operations are performed in these ambulances of the front—light skull trepanning, removal of splintered bones, disinfection, and immobilizing of the wounded parts.

At the beginning of the war it was an accepted principle of the French army surgeons not to operate at the front, but simply to dress the wounds so as to permit of speedy transportation to the rear, for the division ambulances, being without heat or light or sterilizing plants of their own, had no facilities for many urgent operations or for night work. Hence, though there was no lack of surgical aid at the front, major operations were not possible, and thousands of men died who, could they have been operated on immediately, might have been saved. This grave fault in the French medical service has now been remedied, however, by the automobile surgical formations created by Doctor Marcille. Their purpose is to bring within a few miles of the spot where fighting is in progress and where men are being wounded the equivalent of a great city emergency hospital, with its own sterilization plant, and an operating-room heated and lighted powerfully night and day. This equipment is extremely mobile, ready to begin work even in the open country within an hour of its arrival, and capable of moving on with the same rapidity to any point where its services may be required. The arrangement of these operating-rooms on wheels is as compact and ingenious as a Pullman sleeping-car. The sterilization plant, which works by superheated steam, is on an automobile chassis, the surgeons taking their instruments, compresses, aprons, and blouses immediately from one of the six iron sheets of the autoclave as they operate. Six operations can be carried on without stopping—and during the sixth the iron sheets are resterilized to begin again. The same boiler heats a smaller autoclave for sterilizing rubber gloves and water, and also, by means of a powerful radiator, heats the operating-room. This is an impermeable tent, with a large glass skylight for day and a 200-candle power electric light for night, the motor generating the electricity. Another car contains the radiograph plant, while the regular ambulances provide pharmacy and other supplies and see to the further transportation of the wounded who have been operated on. Of seventy operations, which would have all been impossible without these surgical automobile units, fifty-five were successful. In cases of abdominal wounds, which have usually been fatal in previous wars, fifty per cent of the operations thus performed saved the lives of the wounded.