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Early the next morning a number of motor-ambulances arrived with their loads of wounded men. A camp, a mile or two from the station, had been bombed and fifty men had been killed and many more wounded. One of the "cases" brought into the theatre had been hit on the forehead. The bomb-fragment had not penetrated the skull, but had passed along its surface.
At least a thousand motor-ambulances, mobilized from all over the region of Paris, were now on hand to carry away the human wreckage of the great offensive. Ignorant of the ghastly army at its doors, Paris slept. The rain continued to fall heavily. "Eh la, comrade." A soldier in the late thirties, with a pale, refined face, hailed me from his stretcher. "You speak French?" I nodded.
A number of motor-ambulances were sent to Russia by some generous people in England the other day. They were inspected by Royalty before being despatched, and arrived in the care of Mr. . When their engines were examined it was found that they were tied together with bits of copper-wire, and even with string. None of them could be made to go, and they were returned to England.
That shelter is called the Aid Post. From it the horizontal form goes to the Advanced Dressing Station, where more attention is given to it; and thence to the Field Ambulance proper, where the case is really diagnosed and provisionally classed. By this time motor-ambulances have been much used; and the stream, which was a trickle at the Aid Post, has grown wider.
Sometimes it was motor-ambulances strung all along a level; or supply; or those eternal big guns coming round corners with trees chained on their long backs to puzzle aeroplanes, and their leafy, big-shell limbers snorting behind them. In the rare breathing-spaces men with rollers and road metal attacked the road. In peace the roads of France, thanks to the motor, were none too good.
Something far down the road caught Michael's eye, some moving line of brown wagons. As they came nearer he saw that they were the motor-ambulances of the Red Cross, moving slowly along the ruts and holes which the traffic had worn, so that the occupants should suffer as little jolting as was possible.
He withdrew from the crowd. Somewhere near at hand, there was a recruiting office. He remembered to have seen a large guiding sign outside St. Martin's Church. He would go there!... He had to wait until the procession of motor-ambulances had passed by, and then he crossed the street and went to find the recruiting office. "I'm excited," he said to himself. "I'm full of emotion. That's what I am.
But I cannot remember giving a thought to the fact, so absorbing to the unaccustomed eye were all the accumulating signs of the actual battle-line; the endless rows of motor-lorries, either coming back from, or going up to the front, now with food, now with ammunition, reserve trenches to right and left of the road; a "dump" or food-station, whence carts filled from the heavy lorries go actually up to the trenches, lines of artillery wagons, parks of ammunition, or motor-ambulances, long lines of picketed horses, motor-cyclists dashing past.
There was the long fleet of motor-ambulances as a reminder of the ultimate business of all those young men in khaki whom I had seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shouldering their way down the Strand.
On the road I always meet officers riding along, military cars flying along, army couriers spluttering along on motor-cycles, heavy motor transports groaning up hill, or thundering down, and now and then a long train of motor-ambulances.
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