Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 209, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1917 — American Boy Tells Efforts to Save Wounded Under Fire [ARTICLE]

American Boy Tells Efforts to Save Wounded Under Fire

The following letter \yas written by Robert Redfield, Jr., a University of Chicago student, who went to France to serve in the ambulance corps and who is in the section awarded the Croix de Guerre. The letter was written to his family: “I know there is certainly no w r ay that in writing I can give you any idea of the experiences I have passed through and the things I have seen. I might just as w-ell confine my remarks to ‘I am well and hope you are the same.’

“At present I am writing on a hardwood table under an electric desk lamp. lam within a few hundred yards of the German trenches, and hell is loose above me. But here it is perfectly quiet; I am three stories below ground in a sort of catacomb. Here I wait till my car is needed. The air is fresh but somewhat damp; the place is dark, cluttered with stretchers; brancardlers pass in and out. Must Forget All Feeling. "Across the table sits an officer at a telephone switchboard. Every little while —perhaps once every five minutes —men come in by the communication trenches, bearing silent, dirty, bloody lumps. They are carried under acetylene lights in a small room In the second cellar and the surgeons slit the filthy .woolen and begin their work. “l am surprised at the excellent control I have over my nerves. This afternoon I opened a box of sardines, carefully spread the fish on a hunk of bread, and ate the light lunch with relish while the priest heard confession from a torn and crushed ghastly thing beneath which the red patch grew and gfew In spite of the lint bandages. I know it sounds lyartless, but one has to develop the faculty of giving opiates to one’s sympathetic reactions. "It is only afterwards that I remember these horrors and shudder — a man with face torn away; a shameful animal thing out of which came a slight, indescribable sound; a man suffering from shell shock, mind gone, every muscle of his body crawling, crawling. But enough of that. Work In Hell of Noise. “Well, If I am ‘on deck’ and they have a load of wounded ready. I emerge from the quiet cavern Ipto a world where the sky is shattered, split, sundered by report after report. 'HfiTearth shakes and quivers. Airplanesabove, 75’s below, German artillery over the hill, mitrailleuse, whining shrapnel, the shriek of shells passing above—a hell of noises. “Somehow Eqmes and I start the engine; we receive our freight of wounded; we are off, at first through

the narrow, cluttered streets of a place where a town once was. Then we dip into a stretch of road marked on our maps ‘unavoidably dangerous.’ It is about three-quarters of a mile long. Up the valley we can see the German positions. “You can imagine that we don’t stop to pick wild flowers on this place. Bang, bang, whine, crash everywhere. In spite of the souls In agony behind us, in spite of piteous ‘doucements’ and ‘pas si vltes,’ we tear madly down this stretch with every ounce of power the car has. Once safe around the corner we go slowly, until we deliver our load the hospital. Shells Hit Three Cars. “Three of our cars have been hit by eclats; two put temporarily out of commission. One car hit a new shellhole two nights ago and tipped over. The driver deft the car to find a telephone, and when he returned he found a shell bad passed through the driver’s seat “I have no hatred of the Germans. Somehow lam beyond that. Even when they came down in airplanes on our hospital the other night and with bombs killed and wounded 14, including nurses, I could not summon hatred —only horror, and wonder. "On one trip down from the Poste de Secours I carried a half dozen French doctors of importance and one wounded man, a ‘couche’ of considerable interest. He was a Prussian first lieutenant the highest officer taken in the recent attack. After lying in the trenches for a day he was brought in with the remaining French wounded. When we unloaded him I addressed him in German: ‘Guten morgen, Herr Lieutenant, wie befinden Sie si ch?’ He answered in German, bdt I soon discovered that he spoke excellent Engglish. I bad only admiration for him; he had such magnificent control over himself.

Victim Betrays No Pain. “He lay there on his stretcher, on the ground, In the center of a ring of questioning Frenchmen. One leg was badly torn; his face, with thin, straight nose, thin, colorless lips and wide, intellectual eyes, betrayed no pain or any emotion. As he answered the questioners in his beautiful, flawless French, he took off his round shellrimmed glasses, and with a piece of rag cleaned them with meticulous care, settling them baric on his ears. It was quite a sight. “I am ‘en repos’ now for two days. Then I shall have two days of the safe and easy work of evacuation; then two more of repose. This is good, after 48 hours’ duty at the Poste da Secours.”