Part 3 (1/2)
A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a small, beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of rubber boots, and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into the room.
”Two wounded have arrived,” said the lady. ”You are to help these messieurs get out the stretchers.”
The porter looked out of the door at the tail-light of the ambulance, glowing red behind its curtain of rain.
”Mon Dieu, what a deluge!” he exclaimed, and followed us forth. With an ”Easy there,” and ”Lift now,” we soon had both of our clients out of the ambulance and indoors. They lay on the floor of the odd, stiff, little room, strange intruders of its primness; the first, a big, heavy, stolid, young peasant with enormous, flat feet, and the second a small, nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang and bright, uneasy eyes. The mud-stained blue of the uniforms seemed very strange, indeed, beside the Victorian furniture upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush. A middle-aged servant--a big-boned, docile-looking kind of creature, probably the porter's wife--entered, followed by two other women, the last two wearing the same cut of prim black waist and skirt, and the same pattern of white wristlets and collar. We then carried the two soldiers upstairs to a back room, where the old servant had filled a kind of enamel dishpan with soapy water. Very gently and deftly the beefy old porter and his wife took off the fouled, blood-stained uniforms of the two fighting men, and washed their bodies, while she who had opened the door stood by and superintended all. The feverish, bright-eyed fellow seemed to be getting weaker, but the big peasant conversed with the old woman in a low, steady tone, and told her that there had been a big action.
When Oiler and I came downstairs, two little gla.s.ses of sherry and a plate of biscuits were hospitably waiting for us. There was something distinctly English in the atmosphere of the room and in the demeanor of the two prim ladies who stood by. It roused my curiosity. Finally one of them said:--
”Are you English, gentlemen?”
”No,” we replied; ”Americans.”
”I thought you might be English,” she replied in that language, which she spoke very clearly and fluently. ”Both of us have been many years in England. We are French Protestant deaconesses, and this is our home. It is not a hospital. But when the call for more accommodations for the wounded came in, we got ready our two best rooms. The soldiers upstairs are our first visitors.”
The old porter came uneasily down the stair. ”Mademoiselle Pierre says that the doctor must come at once,” he murmured, ”the little fellow (le pet.i.t) is not doing well.”
We thanked the ladies gratefully for the refreshment, for we were cold and soaked to the skin. Then we went out again to the ambulance and the rain. A faint pallor of dawn was just beginning. Later in the morning, I saw a copy of the ”Matin” attached to a kiosk; it said something about ”Grande Victoire.”
Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of Paris, bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La Chapelle. For three days and nights the Americans and all the other ambulance squads drove continuously. It was a terrible phase of the conflict to see, but he who neither sees nor understands it cannot realize the soul of the war. Later, at the trenches, I saw phases of the war that were spiritual, heroic, and close to the divine, but this phase was, in its essence, profoundly animal.
Chapter III
The Great Swathe of the Lines
The time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region whence came the wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself, share the life of the French soldier. Late one evening in October, I arrived in Nancy and went to a hotel I had known well before the war. An old porter, a man of sixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray hair, and a florid face almost devoid of expression, carried up my luggage, and as I looked at him, standing in the doorway, a simple figure in his striped black and yellow vest and white ap.r.o.n, I wondered just what effect the war had had on him. Through the open window of the room, seen over the dark silhouette of the roofs of Nancy, shone the glowing red sky and rolling smoke of the vast munition works at Pompey and Frouard.
”You were not here when I came to the hotel two years ago,” said I.
”No,” he answered; ”I have been here only since November, 1914.”
”You are a Frenchman? There was a Swiss here, then.”
”Yes, indeed, I am Francais, monsieur. The Swiss is now a waiter in a cafe of the Place Stanislas. It is something new to me to be a hotel porter.”
”Tiens. What did you do?”
”I drove a coal team, monsieur.”
”How, then, did you happen to come here?”
”I used to deliver coal to the hotel. One day I heard that the Swiss had gone to the cafe to take the place of a garcon whose cla.s.s had just been called out. I was getting sick of carrying the heavy sacks of coal, and being always out of doors, so I applied for the porter's job.”
”You are satisfied with the change.”
”Oh, yes, indeed, monsieur.”
”I suppose you have kinsmen at the front.”