Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 235, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1917 — Letters From a French Ambulance Driver at Front. [ARTICLE]

Letters From a French Ambulance Driver at Front.

(Written by Alfred Thompson. September 21, 1917. We are back “in repos” now, out of reach again of the German guns and pretty safe from the miserable, and at the front, continuous bomb raids. We spent four days very near the front doing nothing but just waiting to go “en repos.” While, there I visited the trenches and certainly spent several very interesting hours there. We entered the trenches at the fourth line and walked what seemed to be miles in a never ending bewildering maze of trenches. The trenches branch off continually in every direction, hundreds of them, aIL named like streets,- and they turn and twist like a great snake. Seldom can you see more than fifteen or twenty feet ahead of you on account of a turn. We finally came to the front lines, great deep trenches six or seven feet deep, more in places, reinforced by sand bags, wire grating and so forth. Some of the trenches have board walks in their bottoms; in others we plodded through clay mud. We visited the very deep dugouts that go way down into the earth and are dark all the time, except for a little candle light. In some we found officers, poring

over a map; in others, bunches of men, sleeping or just lying around. The lieutenant that had us in tow was mighty decent to us, showed us everything, explained everything and gave us a taste of some fiery liquor that I suppose they give to the men before they go over the top. We saw machine guns ready to shoot, trench torpedo guns, hand grenades, in short, everything. We went up to several listening posts, only thirty or forty yards from the ’Boche trenches, and could hear the Boche moving around over there. It was very quiet there, no fighting at all for a long time, and the only noises were the screaming shriek now and then of the French 75’s as they passed over our heads and their explosion in the Boche lines a few seconds later.- We peeked out over the parapet and could see the Boche trenches only thirty yards away, but it did not give me half the thrill a l )omb raid does. I was interested, lowever, in “No Man’s Land.” It is the most utterly desolate looking ilace imaginable. A perfectly amazing mass of terrible barb-wire entanglements, a few blackened stubs of trees and here and there a taller one, all completely stripped of every branch and leaf, shattered and torn with shells. It is indeed a desolate sight. “No Man’s Land,” a fitting name, for no man moves there or could hope to move until the artilery had cut and blown that maze of wire to little bits.

The night before we left we had another bomb said that ruined my night’s sleep and made me spend all too long a time in a stuffy little abris, that is a safe shelter from fragments of exploding bombs, but would offer little or no resistance to a direct hit. They make you feel very safe, however, as a direct hit is very unlikely. I saw one bomb light not far away before I sought shelter and the flash and the crash of the explosion that followed added the spur to my movements. Later I went to sed after I thought it was over but onother plane came. I stayed in bed, nevertheless, while he was drop-

ping his bombs but then he let loose with his machine gun, and as it was directly over me, I could stand it no k onger, jumped out of bed and beat* it to the abris. When I finally got to bed, I did not even take off my shoes, as I expected to have to get up, but no more planes appeared, and I slept in all my clothes. While at the front, bomb raids are one of the necessary evils hnd must be endured as such, but they lose all thier flavor when the come every night, and come they do, every single clear night.