Читать книгу: «And they thought we wouldn't fight», страница 18

All of it was coming from the left, – coming from the German nests located in the trees at the apex of the V-shaped field. Those guns were not a hundred yards away and they seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of ammunition. Twenty feet away on my left a wounded Marine was lying. Occasionally I would open my right eye for a painful look in his direction.

He was wounded and apparently unconscious. His pack, "the khaki doll," was still strapped between his shoulders. Unconsciously he was doing that which all wounded men do – that is, to assume the position that is the most comfortable. He was trying to roll over on his back.

But the pack was on his back and every time he would roll over on this it would elevate his body into full view of the German gunners. Then a withering hail of lead would sweep the field. It so happened that I was lying immediately in line between those German guns and this unconscious moving target. As the Marine would roll over on top of the pack his chest would be exposed to the fire.

I could see the buttons fly from his tunic and one of the shoulder straps of the back pack part as the sprays of lead struck him. He would limply roll off the pack over on his side. I found myself wishing that he would lie still, as every movement of his brought those streams of bullets closer and closer to my head. I even considered the thickness of the box respirator on which I had elevated my head off the ground. It was about two inches thick.

I remembered my French gas mask hanging from my shoulder and recalled immediately that it was much flatter, being hardly half an inch in thickness. I forthwith drew up the French mask to my head, extracted the British one and rested my cheek closer to the ground on the French one. Thus, I lowered my head about an inch and a half – an inch and a half that represented worlds of satisfaction and some optimism to me.

Sometimes there were lulls in the firing. During those periods of comparative quiet, I could hear the occasional moan of other wounded on that field. Very few of them cried out and it seemed to me that those who did were unconscious when they did it. One man in particular had a long, low groan. I could not see him, yet I felt he was lying somewhere close to me. In the quiet intervals, his unconscious expression of pain reminded me of the sound I had once heard made by a calf which had been tied by a short rope to a tree. The animal had strayed round and round the tree until its entanglements in the rope had left it a helpless prisoner. The groan of that unseen, unconscious wounded American who laid near me on the field that evening sounded exactly like the pitiful bawl of that calf.

Those three hours were long in passing. With the successive volleys that swept the field, I sometimes lost hope that I could ever survive it. It seemed to me that if three German bullets had found me within the space of fifteen minutes, I could hardly expect to spend three hours without receiving the fatal one. With such thoughts on my mind I reopened conversation with Hartzell.

"How's it coming, old man?" I shouted.

"They're coming damn close," he said; "how is it with you? Are you losing much blood?"

"No, I'm all right as far as that goes," I replied, "but I want you to communicate with my wife, if its 'west' for me."

"What's her address?" said Hartzell.

"It's a long one," I said. "Are you ready to take it?"

"Shoot," said Hartzell.

"'Mrs. Floyd Gibbons, No. 12 Bis, Rue de la Chevalier de la Barre, Dijon, Côte d'Or, France.'" I said slowly.

"My God," said Hartzell, "say it again."

Back and forth we repeated the address correctly and incorrectly some ten or twelve times until Hartzell informed me that he knew it well enough to sing it. He also gave me his wife's address. Then just to make conversation he would shout over, every fifteen minutes, and tell me that there was just that much less time that we would have to lie there.

I thought that hour between seven and eight o'clock dragged the most, but the one between eight and nine seemed interminable. The hours were so long, particularly when we considered that a German machine gun could fire three hundred shots a minute. Dusk approached slowly. And finally Hartzell called over:

"I don't think they can see us now," he said; "let's start to crawl back."

"Which way shall we crawl?" I asked.

"Into the woods," said Hartzell.

"Which woods?" I asked.

"The woods we came out of, you damn fool," he replied.

"Which direction are they in?" I said, "I've been moving around and I don't know which way I am heading. Are you on my left, or on my right?"

"I can't tell whether I'm on your left or your right," he replied. "How are you lying, on your face or on your back?"

"On my face," I said, "and your voice sounds like it comes from in back of me and on the left."

"If that's the case," said Hartzell, "your head is lying toward the wrong woods. Work around in a half circle and you'll be facing the right direction."

I did so and then heard Hartzell's voice on my right. I started moving toward him. Against my better judgment and expressed wishes, he crawled out toward me and met me half way. His voice close in front of me surprised me.

"Hold your head up a little," he said, "I want to see where it hit you."

"I don't think it looks very nice," I replied, lifting my head. I wanted to know how it looked myself, so I painfully opened the right eye and looked through the oats eighteen inches into Hartzell's face. I saw the look of horror on it as he looked into mine.

Twenty minutes later, after crawling painfully through the interminable yards of young oats, we reached the edge of the woods and safety.

That's how it feels to be shot.

CHAPTER XVII
"GOOD MORNING, NURSE"

Weakness from the loss of blood began to grow on me as Lieutenant Hartzell and I made our way through the deepening shadows of the wooded hillside in the rear of the field on which I had been shot. In an upright position of walking the pains in my head seemed to increase. We stopped for a minute and, neither of us having first aid kits with us, I resurrected a somewhat soiled silk handkerchief with which Hartzell bound up my head in a manner that applied supporting pressure over my left eye and brought a degree of relief.

Hartzell told me later that I was staggering slightly when we reached a small relief dugout about a mile back of the wood. There a medical corps man removed the handkerchief and bound my head with a white gauze bandage. I was anxious to have the wound cleaned but he told me there was no water. He said they had been forced to turn it over to the men to drink. This seemed to me to be as it should be because my thirst was terrific, yet there was no water left.

We stumbled rearward another half mile and, in the darkness, came upon the edge of another wooded area. A considerable number of our wounded were lying on stretchers on the ground. The Germans were keeping up a continual fire of shrapnel and high explosive shell in the woods, apparently to prevent the mobilisation of reserves, but the doctors, taking care of the wounded, proceeded with their work without notice to the whine of the shells passing overhead or the bursting of those that landed nearby. They went at their work just as though they were caring for injured men on a football field.

Hartzell stretched me out on the ground and soon had a doctor bending over me. The doctor removed the eye bandage, took one look at what was beneath it and then replaced it. I remember this distinctly because at the time I made the mental note that the doctor apparently considered my head wound beyond anything he could repair. He next turned his attention to my arm and shoulder. He inserted his scissors into my left sleeve at the wrist and ripped it up to the shoulder. He followed this operation by cutting through my heavy khaki tunic from the shoulder to the collar. A few more snips of the nickel-plated blades and my shirt and undershirt were cut away. He located the three bullet holes, two in the arm and one across the top of the shoulder, and bound them up with bandages.

"We're awful shy on ambulances," he said; "you will have to lie here a while."

"I feel that I can walk all right if there is no reason why I shouldn't," I replied.

"You ought to be in an ambulance," said the doctor, "but if you feel that you can make it, you might take a try at it."

Then turning to Lieutenant Hartzell, he said, "Keep right with him, and if he begins to get groggy, make him lie down."

So Hartzell and I resumed our rearward plodding or staggering. He walked at my right side and slightly in front of me, holding my right arm over his right shoulder and thereby giving me considerable support. We had not proceeded far before we heard the racing motor of an automobile coming from behind us. An occasional shell was dropping along the road we were now on.

A stick struck my legs from behind in the darkness. And then an apologetic voice said:

"Beg your pardon, sir, just feeling along the road for shell holes. Ambulance right behind me, sir. Would you mind stepping to one side? Come on, Bill," to the driver of the ambulance, "it looks all clear through here."

The automobile with the racing motor turned out to be a light ambulance of a popular Detroit make. Its speeding engine was pure camouflage for its slow progress. It bubbled and steamed at the radiator cap as it pushed along at almost a snail's pace.

"All full?" Hartzell shouted into the darkness of the driver's seat.

"To the brim," responded the driver. "Are you wounded?"

"No, but I have a wounded man with me," said Hartzell. "He can sit beside you on the seat if you have room."

"Get right in," said the driver, and Hartzell boosted me into the front seat. We pushed along slowly, Hartzell walking beside the car and the driver's assistant proceeding ahead of us, searching the dark road with his cane for new shell craters.

Occasionally, when our wheels would strike in one of these, groans would come from the ambulance proper.

"Take it easy," would come a voice through pain-pressed lips; "for Christ's sake, do you think you are driving a truck?"

I heard the driver tell Hartzell that he had three men with bullet splintered legs in the ambulance. Every jolt of the car caused their broken bones to jolt and increased the pounding of their wearied nerves to an extremity of agony. The fourth occupant of the ambulance, he said, had been shot through the lungs.

Some distance along, there came a knock on the wooden partition behind my back, – the partition that separates the driver's seat from the ambulance proper. The car stopped and the driver and Hartzell went to the rear door and opened it. The man with the shot through the lungs was half sitting up on his stretcher. He had one hand to his mouth and his lips, as revealed in the rays of the driver's flashlight, were red wet.

"Quick – get me – to a doctor," the man said between gulps and gurgles.

The driver considered. He knew we were ten miles from the closest doctor. Then he addressed himself to the other three stretcher-cases – the men with the torture-torn legs.

"If I go fast, you guys are going to suffer the agonies of hell," he said, "and if I go slow this guy with the hemorrhage will croak before we get there. How do you want me to drive?"

There was not a minute's silence. The three broken leg cases responded almost in unison.

"Go as fast as you can," they said.

And we did. With Hartzell riding the running board beside me and the crater finder clinging to the mud guards on the other side, we sped through the darkness regardless of the ruts and shell holes. The jolting was severe but never once did there come another complaint from the occupants of the ambulance.

In this manner did we arrive in time at the first medical clearing station. I learned later that the life of the man with the hemorrhage was saved and he is alive to-day.

The clearing station was located in an old church on the outskirts of a little village. Four times during this war the flow and ebb of battle had passed about this old edifice. Hartzell half carried me off the ambulance seat and into the church. As I felt my feet scrape on the flagstoned flooring underneath the Gothic entrance arch, I opened my right eye for a painful survey of the interior.

The walls, grey with age, appeared yellow in the light of the candles and lanterns that were used for illumination. Blankets, and bits of canvas and carpet had been tacked over the apertures where once stained glass windows and huge oaken doors had been. These precautions were necessary to prevent the lights from shining outside the building and betraying our location to the hospital-loving eyes of German bombing 'planes whose motors we could hear even at that minute, humming in the black sky above us.

Our American wounded were lying on stretchers all over the floor. Near the door, where I entered, a number of pews had been pushed to one side and on these our walking wounded were seated. They were smoking cigarettes and talking and passing observations on every fresh case that came through the door. They all seemed to be looking at me.

My appearance must have been sufficient to have shocked them. I was hatless and my hair was matted with blood. The red-stained bandage around my forehead and extending down over my left cheek did not hide the rest of my face, which was unwashed, and consequently red with fresh blood.

On my left side I was completely bare from the shoulder to the waist with the exception of the strips of white-cloth about my arm and shoulder. My chest was splashed with red from the two body wounds. Such was my entrance. I must have looked somewhat grewsome because I happened to catch an involuntary shudder as it passed over the face of one of my observers among the walking wounded and I heard him remark to the man next to him:

"My God, look what they're bringing in."

Hartzell placed me on a stretcher on the floor and went for water, which I sorely needed. I heard some one stop beside my stretcher and bend over me, while a kindly voice said:

"Would you like a cigarette, old man?"

"Yes," I replied. He lighted one in his own lips and placed it in my mouth. I wanted to know my benefactor. I asked him for his name and organisation.

"I am not a soldier," he said; "I am a non-combatant, the same as you. My name is Slater and I'm from the Y. M. C. A."

That cigarette tasted mighty good. If you who read this are one of those whose contributions to the Y. M. C. A. made that distribution possible, I wish to herewith express to you my gratefulness and the gratefulness of the other men who enjoyed your generosity that night.

In front of what had been the altar in the church, there had been erected a rudely constructed operation table. The table was surrounded with tall candelabrum of brass and gilded wood. These ornate accessories had been removed from the altar for the purpose of providing better light for the surgeons who busied themselves about the table in their long gowns of white – stained with red.

I was placed on that table for an examination and I heard a peculiar conversation going on about me. One doctor said, "We haven't any more of it." Then another doctor said, "But I thought we had plenty." The first voice replied, "Yes, but we didn't expect so many wounded. We have used up all we had." Then the second voice said, "Well, we certainly need it now. I don't know what we're going to do without it."

From their further conversation I learned that the subject under discussion was anti-tetanus serum – the all-important inoculation that prevents lockjaw and is also an antidote for the germs of gas gangrene. You may be sure I became more than mildly interested in the absence of this valuable boon, but there was nothing I could say that would help the case, so I remained quiet. In several minutes my composure was rewarded. I heard hurried footsteps across the flagstoned flooring and a minute later felt a steel needle penetrating my abdomen. Then a cheery voice said:

"It's all right, now, we've got plenty of it. We've got just piles of it. The Red Cross just shot it out from Paris in limousines."

After the injection Hartzell informed me that the doctors could do nothing for me at that place and that I was to be moved further to the rear. He said ambulances were scarce but he had found a place for me in a returning ammunition truck. I was carried out of the church and somewhere in the outer darkness was lifted up into the body of the truck and laid down on some straw in the bottom. There were some fifteen or twenty other men lying there beside me.

The jolting in this springless vehicle was severe, but its severity was relieved in some of our cases by the quieting injections we had received. The effects of these narcotics had worn off in some of the men and they suffered the worse for it. One of them continually called out to the truck driver to go slower and make less jolting. To each request the driver responded that he was going as slow as he could. As the jolting continued the man with the complaining nerves finally yelled out a new request. He said:

"Well, if you can't make it easier by going slow, then for God's sake throw her into high and go as fast as you can. Let's get it over as quick as we can."

Lying on my back in the truck with a raincoat as a pillow, I began to wonder where we were bound for. I opened my eye once and looked up toward the roof of the leafy tunnel which covered the road. Soon we passed out from beneath the trees bordering the roadside and I could see the sky above. The moon was out and there were lots of stars. They gave one something to think about. After all, how insignificant was one little life.

In this mood, something in the jolting of the camion brought to my mind the metre and words of George Amicks' wistful verses, "The Camion Caravan," and I repeat it from memory:

 
"Winding down through sleeping town
Pale stars of early dawn;
Like ancient knight with squire by side,
Driver and helper now we ride —
The camion caravan.
 
 
"In between the rows of trees
Glare of the mid-day sun;
Creeping along the highway wide,
Slowly in long defile, we ride —
The camion caravan.
 
 
"Homeward to remorque and rest,
Pale stars of early night;
Through stillness of the eventide,
Back through the winding town we ride —
The camion caravan."
 

Sometime during the dark hours of the early morning we stopped in the courtyard of a hospital and I was taken into another examination room illuminated with painfully brilliant lights. I was placed on a table for an examination, which seemed rather hurried, and then the table was rolled away some distance down a corridor. I never understood that move until some weeks later when a Lieutenant medical officer told me that it was he who had examined me at that place.

"You're looking pretty fit, now," he said, "but that night when I saw you I ticketed you for the dead pile. You didn't look like you could live till morning."

His statement gave me some satisfaction. There is always joy in fooling the doctor.

Hartzell, who still accompanied me, apparently rescued me from the "dead pile" and we started on another motor trip, this time on a stretcher in a large, easier-riding ambulance. In this I arrived shortly after dawn at the United States Military Base Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris.

There were more hurried examinations and soon I was rolled down a corridor on a wheeled table, into an elevator that started upward. Then the wheeled table raced down another long corridor and I began to feel that my journeyings were endless. We stopped finally in a room where I distinctly caught the odour of ether. Some one began removing my boots and clothes. As that some one worked he talked to me.

"I know you, Mr. Gibbons," he said. "I'm from Chicago also. I am Sergeant Stephen Hayes. I used to go to Hyde Park High School. We're going to fix you up right away."

I learned from Hayes that I was lying in a room adjoining the operating chamber and was being prepared for the operating table. Some information concerning the extent of my injuries and the purpose of the operation would have been comforting and would have relieved the sensation of utter helpless childishness that I was experiencing.

I knew I was about to go under the influence of the anesthetic and that something was going to be done to me. I had every confidence that whatever was done would be for the best but it was perfectly natural that I should be curious about it. Was the operation to be a serious one or a minor one? Would they have to remove my eye? Would they have to operate on my skull? How about the arm? Would there be an amputation? How about the other eye? Would I ever see again? It must be remembered that in spite of all the examinations I had not been informed and consequently had no knowledge concerning the extent of my injuries. The only information I had received had been included in vague remarks intended as soothing, such as "You're all right, old man." "You'll pull through fine." "You're coming along nicely." But all of it had seemed too professionally optimistic to satisfy me and my doubts still remained.

They were relieved, however, by the pressure of a hand and the sound of a voice. In the words spoken and in the pressure of the hand, there was hardly anything different from similar hand pressures and similar spoken phrases that had come to me during the night, yet there was everything different. This voice and this hand carried supreme confidence. I could believe in both of them. I felt the hand pressure on my right shoulder and the mild kindly voice said:

"Son, I am going to operate on you. I have examined you and you are all right. You are going to come through fine. Don't worry about anything."

"Thank you, very much," I said, "I like your voice. It sounds like my father's. Will you tell me your name?"

"I am Major Powers," the kindly voice said. "Now just take it easy, and I will talk to you again in a couple of hours when you feel better."

The speaker, as I learned later, was Major Charles Powers, of Denver, Colorado, one of the best-known and best-loved surgeons in the West. A man far advanced in his profession and well advanced in his years, a man whose life has not been one of continual health, a man who, upon America's entry of the war, sacrificed the safety of the beneficial air rarity of his native Denver to answer the country's call, to go to France at great personal risk to his health – a risk only appreciated by those who know him well. It was Major Powers who operated upon the compound fracture in my skull that morning.

My mental note-taking continued as the anesthetist worked over me with the ether. As I began breathing the fumes I remember that my senses were keenly making observations on every sensation I experienced. The thought even went through my mind that it would be rather an unusual thing to report completely the impressions of coma. This suggestion became a determination and I became keyed up to everything going on about me.

The conversation of the young doctor who was administering the anesthetic interested me unusually. He was very busy and business-like and although I considered myself an important and most interested party in the entire proceedings, his conversation ignored me entirely. He not only did not talk to me, but he was not even talking about me. As he continued to apply the ether, he kept up a running fire of entirely extraneous remarks with some other person near the table. I did not appreciate then, as I do now, that I was only one of very, very many that he had anesthetised that morning and the night before, but at the time his seeming lack of all interest in me as me, piqued me considerably.

"Are you feeling my pulse?" I said. I could not feel his hand on either of my wrists, but I asked the question principally to inject myself into the conversation in some way or other, preferably in some way that would call him to account, as I had by this time aroused within me a keen and healthy dislike for this busy little worker whom I could not see but who stood over me and carried on conversations with other people to my utter and complete exclusion. And all the time he was engaged in feeding me the fumes that I knew would soon steal away my senses.

"Now, never you mind about your pulse," he replied somewhat peevishly. "I'm taking care of this." It seemed to me from the tone of his voice that he implied I was talking about something that was none of my business and I had the distinct conviction that if the proceedings were anybody's business, they certainly were mine.

"You will pardon me for manifesting a mild interest in what you are doing to me," I said, "but you see I know that something is going to be done to my right eye and inasmuch as that is the only eye I've got on that side, I can't help being concerned."

"Now, you just forget it and take deep breaths, and say, Charlie, did you see that case over in Ward 62? That was a wonderful case. The bullet hit the man in the head and they took the lead out of his stomach. He's got the bullet on the table beside him now. Talk about bullet eaters – believe me, those Marines sure are."

I hurled myself back into the conversation.

"I'll take deep breaths if you'll loosen the straps over my chest," I said, getting madder each minute. "How can I take a full breath when you've got my lungs strapped down?"

"Well, how's that?" responded the conversational anesthetist, as he loosened one of the straps. "Now, take one breath of fresh air – one deep, long breath, now."

I turned my head to one side to escape the fumes from the stifling towel over my face and made a frenzied gulp for fresh air. As I did so, one large drop of ether fell on the table right in front of my nose and the deep long breath I got had very little air in it. I felt I had been tricked.

"You're pretty cute, old timer, aren't you?" I remarked to the anesthetist for the purpose of letting him know that I was on to his game, but either he didn't hear me, or he was too interested in telling Charlie about his hopes and ambitions to be sent to the front with a medical unit that worked under range of the guns. He returned to a consideration of me with the following remark:

"All right, he's under now; where's the next one?"

"The hell I am," I responded hastily, as visions of knives and saws and gimlets and brain chisels went through my mind. I had no intention or desire of being conscious when the carpenters and plumbers started to work on me.

I was completely ignored and the table started moving. We rolled across the floor and there commenced a clicking under the back of my head, not unlike the sound made when the barber lowers or elevates the head-rest on his chair. The table rolled seemingly a long distance down a long corridor and then came to the top of a slanting runway.

As I started riding the table down the runway I began to see that I was descending an inclined tube which seemed to be filled with yellow vapour. Some distance down, the table slowed up and we came to a stop in front of a circular bulkhead in the tunnel.

There was a door in the centre of the bulkhead and in the centre of the door there was a small wicket window which opened and two grotesquely smiling eyes peered out at me. Those eyes inspected me from head to foot and then, apparently satisfied, they twinkled and the wicket closed with a snap. Then the door opened and out stepped a quaint and curious figure with gnarled limbs and arms and a peculiar misshapen head, completely covered with a short growth of black hair.

I laughed outright, laughed hilariously. I recognised the man. The last time I had seen him was when he stepped out of a gas tank on the 18th floor of an office building in Chicago where I was reclining at the time in a dentist chair. He was the little gas demon who walked with me through the Elysian fields the last time I had a tooth pulled.

"Well you poor little son-of-a-gun," I said, by way of greeting. "What are you doing way over here in France? I haven't seen you for almost two years, since that day back in Chicago."

The gas demon rolled his head from one side to the other and smiled, but I can't remember what he said. My mental note-taking concluded about there because the next memory I have is of complete darkness, and lying on my back in a cramped position while a horse trampled on my left arm.

"Back off of there," I shouted, but the animal's hoofs didn't move. The only effect my shouting had was to bring a soft hand into my right one, and a sweet voice close beside me.

"You're all right, now," said the sweet voice, "just try to take a little nap and you'll feel better."

Then I knew it was all over, that is, the operation was over, or something was over. Anyhow my mind was working and I was in a position where I wanted to know things again. I recall now, with a smile, that the first things that passed through my mind were the threadbare bromides so often quoted "Where am I?" I recall feeling the urge to say something at least original, so I enquired:

"What place is this, and will you please tell me what day and time it is?"

"This is the Military Base Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine just on the outskirts of Paris, and it is about eleven o'clock in the morning and to-day is Friday, June the seventh."

Then I went back to sleep with an etherised taste in my mouth like a motorman's glove.