Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
This flurry during the afternoon is an outcome of his disappearance. The German guns caught a train of ammunition camions and smashed things up pretty badly. Many tricks like that pulled off will make us mighty short of ammunition in this sector. Then Heinie can come over the top and do with us just as he pleases.
Oh, it is a steady stream of men and supplies, indeed, that goes across the narrow sea to France! Motor trucks they were calling them camions, after the French fashion, because it was a shorter and a simpler word fairly swarmed in the streets. Guns rolled ponderously along. It was not military pomp we saw. Indeed, I saw little enough of that in France.
Military motors, and huge camions and ambulances were tearing up and down, over the gray-satin surface of asphalt which used to be sacred to private autos and gay little taxis bound for theatres and operas and balls.
It appears that the Germans systematically bombard the roads at night, hoping to destroy the camions bringing up the food for the city, fresh munitions and men. We slept that night at Bar-le-Duc, and next morning saw the various ambulances and hospitals which the Service de Sante had particularly requested me to visit.
Men in the American khaki, from generals to striplings, were there by the hundred; endless streams of young women in the uniform of the Red Cross, the Y.M.C.A., the Salvation Army; British and American nurses; members of the fashionable oeuvres artlessly watching this novel phase of Paris; the beautiful violet uniform of Le Bien-Etre du Blesse; girls with worn faces and relaxed bodies fresh from the front, hundreds of them, arriving daily in camions and cars, thanking heaven for the sudden cessation of work, sleeping heaven knew where.
For half an hour there was a rush up the hill boys bringing me back my books, coming to shake hands and present me with little souvenirs, and bring the news that the camions were coming which meant that the 118th were going right into action again. When a regiment starts in such a hurry that it must take a direct line, and cannot bother with railroads, the boys know what that means.
Now, the way to the capital was silent and empty, save for gray military motors and lumbering army camions. The cheap bowling alleys and jerry-built restaurants of the suburbs seemed under a spell of sleep. There were no men anywhere, except the very old, and boys of the "class" of next year. Women swept out the gloomy shops: women drove omnibuses: women hawked the morning papers.
So, well wrapped up in our big coats, against the chill of four o'clock, we went to the little square in front of the church, from which they were to start, and where the long line of grey cannon, grey ammunition, camions, grey commissary wagons were ready, and the men, sac au dos, already climbing into place one mounted on each team of four horses, three on each gun-carriage, facing the horses, with three behind, with their backs to the team.
The colored woman appeared soon after with a tray which, when he had performed a meager toilet, he attacked with a pleasant zest. "The city's just burning right up," she informed him, standing in the middle of the floor; "the boats on the river caught fire and their camions banged into Canal Street." She had a pale even color, a straight delicate nose and sensitive lips.
The youthful drivers of these camions are alert, intent, but a hard day's work on the docks by no means suffices to dampen the spirits of the passengers, who whistle ragtime airs as they bump over the cobbles.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking