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Jack, the M.O. went off to tend the latter, and was himself badly hit in the body; another stretcher-bearer was hit trying to get to him, and for a short time he had to be left. A few minutes later the enemy's fire slackened; the M.O. was carried away, and, though he lived to reach the Ambulance, died there in the evening.
Minute after minute passes and the sound does not come. Then for the first time we note that the silence of the whole region is not comparative, but absolute. Have we become stone deaf? See; here comes a stretcher-bearer, and there a surgeon! Good heavens! a chaplain! The battle was indeed at an end. And this was, O so long ago!
Then, if another whistle had not sounded, he would thank his host and proceed on his way. Often would come the cry of "Stretcher-bearer," and the M.O. would hurry up the steep slope to some one who had been hit. Mac lost his sergeant, a real fine fellow, one morning, while he was serving out rations. The whole regiment was grieved.
"A" Company won the long-distance bomb-throwing, tug-of-war, relay and stretcher-bearer races, "C" the accurate bomb-throwing, ¼-mile, sack and three-legged races. Brigade Headquarters came to watch, bringing their band with them, and the General gave away the prizes at the end of the day. The weather was good and we all spent a very pleasant afternoon.
Four stretcher-bearers came down the hill at last, carrying two stretchers. Klitzing was first placed on one of them. "Where is he to go?" asked the foremost stretcher-bearer. Rademacher considered a moment, and then answered: "Up yonder, right on the brow of the hill, there's a farm, manor-house, or something of the sort. Take him there. On my responsibility."
Think of the Putney Peashooters' ladies meeting those of the Shoreditch Snipers at a small and early, and counting up the bag: five Saxons and a stretcher-bearer against four prisoners and a carrier pigeon. One might almost wind up with England versus Scotland, the winner to play Australia on a percentage basis.
It sounds incredible, but we got a wounded man, still alive, eight days after the attack. It was reported to me that some one was heard calling from No Man's Land for a stretcher-bearer, but I suspected a German trap, for I did not think it possible that any man could be out there alive when it was more than a week after the battle and there had been no men missing since.
She unlocked the gate, and let Vogt and the stretcher-bearers in. "Where is the other?" she then asked; and the soldier answered: "He will soon follow." The woman nodded silently. She locked the gate behind them, and then turned towards a wing of the building. The stretcher-bearer, walking close behind her, whispered: "This one won't be a burden to you long. The end must soon come."
As a class we find it hard to penetrate the surface of the men that surface which we can almost see thrust out at us like a shield, in the suddenly assumed rigidity of men as they salute us. We are in an unchristian position, in the sense that we are in a position which Christ would not have occupied. He, I am sure, would have been a regimental stretcher-bearer, truly among and of the men.
M. Henri Bordeaux, himself an eye-witness, to whose admirable and moving book on The Last Days of Fort Vaux, I am indebted for the preceding details, to some extent answers the question by quoting a letter, addressed by his mother to the stretcher-bearer, Roger Vamier, decorated in 1915 by General Joffre himself.
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