Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 233, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1917 — Extracts From Letter of A French Ambulance Driver. [ARTICLE]

Extracts From Letter of A French Ambulance Driver.

(By Alfred Thompson.)

September 12, 1917. We are back again in our old place, after four days near the front and do not know how long we will be here. We only did evacuation work there. It was very interesting j there; time did not lag at all. The cars went on duty twenty-four hours at a time, then the same amount off. We worked from a little triage hospital to different hospitals further back.—A Ford section was bringing the wounded in from the front postes, assisted at busy times by a Fiat section and an English section. There was another section who was helping us. We sat around the hospital watching them sort out and care for the wounded until our turn would come to roll, then we would take the wounded and the papers to some other hospital further back.

There was one big room where all the “blesses,” wounded were brought - and laid out on the floor on their bloody stretchers. Every one of them got a big shot of anti-tetanus toxin and to judge from the noises, it is not pleasant stuff to take. It forms a big knot under the skin wlych takes days to go down. They all get it in the stomach, for some reason. They also had an operating room there where they perform operations which cannot wait. A doctor told me they do not use anaesthetics except for serious operations. I know they do not use cocaine or morphine to deaden the pain of the wounded lying around, because it is too expensive, I suppose.

In this hospital they sort out the gas cases and send them up about three hundred yards to the big hospital where we were quartered, and there they are treated. Then they sort out the very badly wounded and send them to one hospital, the less badly wounded to another, etc. Only the most serious, who cannot be moved, stay there. Sometimes the room will be filled to overflowing with the blesses, and at others almost empty. It was piti_fullowatch the gassed cases, choking, gasping, coughing up great clots of blood and almost blind. Others had a foot or leg just blown off or an arm, while a gfeat many had head and face wounds. You soon get used to the ghastly sights so that nothing affects you. If you did not, you could not stand it. / Most of the work is done at night by the light of acetylene torches. Germans brought in received the same or even better treatment than the French. Some of the Germans do not even know that U. S. has declared war and those who do, say it will make no difference as Germany will win, anyway. You hear from different prisoners very different stories of the way things are going ni Germany. One will say that even the soldiers’ rations are cut down and that the people at home are starving, whereas another will say there is plenty of food and they can fight for twenty years. They all seem glad to be prisoners, though, after they have been reassured that they are not to be killed. Evidently the government spreads the report that the French behead their prisoners, as several asked when they would be beheaded. Lots of times the cars smelled with gas after a gassed blesse had been brought in. It is a new kind of gas the Germans use now, not the old chlorine any more but a gas which does not seem quite so* deadly, although very unpleasant. I smelled it time and again and it has a sickish sweet smell. A little of it makes eyes and nose run and more of it affects the lungs and stotnach. Often it does not act strongly for twentyfour hours unless you get a lot of it. The Germans shoot it over in shells and bombs that they call tear shells, becaus? the eyes water so. We watched the burial squad at work. They brought out fifty dead Frenchmen clothed in the same clothes they were wounded in, on stretchers. They wrapped each up in a white canvas cloth and affixed a number to it. When all was done, they put them in a lot of carts and carried them up to the cemetery, a few hundred feet away and laid them out in a long row while the _.priest said a few words. It was a grotesque sight, the long row of white forms. Then they just dump them in the graves and cover them up. They do not even have coffins. Some of them can have a coffin if

their relatives pay for it, or if the man is a big officer, but the common ones get no boxes. The priests there are wonderful men One in particulai-, was the finest looking man I had ever seen and he had a croix de guerre, won for some brave act. He goes around the hospital, cheering the blesses, receiving confessions and administering the last rites. A Fiat ambulance came in from the front just before we left that had been struck by some flying pieces of shell. It was badly shot up and one of the blesses in it had been killed, but the driver escaped by a miracle, and the car looked live a sieve. Another car, a Ford, was struck but none was in it at the time. Two other cars, a Fiat and Ford, were there at the hospital. The Fiat was completely wrecked arid the Ford badlyriddled with pieces from a gas shell explosion. Before we left most of us walked into the big town, twenty minutes walk, and spent a couple of hours walking around and picking up souvenirs. The town has been under shell fire for almost three years and they still drop an occasional shell into it Several men were killed there the day before by a shell which

came through the roof of their shelter and exploded. You can have no idea of the wreckage of that town. Some streets were simply leveled and not a wall left standing for blocks and blocks. There is hardly a house in town which is not sadly demolished, but curiously enough, we did' find one that had withstood all that terrific shelling and was practically untouched. Of course, there are no civilians left there and the soldiers and officers there live underground, as there is still some danger of shell fire and there are no houses fit for habitation. We wandered around, exploring the shattered houses, churches, etc., for a couple of hours. The streets were deserted save for some soldiers here and there and not many of those. Most of them, I suppose, were underground. We looked at the cathedral sadly wrecked, and walked around the inside, which was still beautiful, in spite of the wreckage. I would not have missed seeing the town for a good deal. We have seen plenty of shelled villages; all the villages near there are more or less flattened out, but I wanted to see the city itself. • ‘ >