The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me by White, William Allen, 1868-1944

Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in St. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his English on us. He found that we had been to Verdun. And he asked, "Have you heard the news from the big base hospital?" We had not. Then he told us that the night before the German airmen had come to the hospital early in the night and had dropped their eggs--incendiary bombs. An hour later they came and dropped some high explosives. They came again at midnight and because there were no anti-aircraft guns near by--the allies until those August and September German raids never had dreamed that hospitals would be raided--they came again swooping low and turned their machine guns on the doctors and the nurses in the compound who were taking the wounded out of the burning building. Then toward morning they came and dropped handbills which declared, "If you don't want your hospitals bombed, move them back further from the front!"

The Germans were not acting in the heat of passion. They were fighting scientifically, even if barbarously. For every mile a hospital is moved back of the line makes it that much harder to stop gangrene in the wounded. And by checking gangrene we are saving a great majority of our wounded to return to battle.

Nine doctors and fifteen nurses and many wounded were killed that night at Vlaincourt. "And the French officer de liason between the French army and the American ambulance, what of him?" we asked.

"He slept in the hospital and was killed by a bomb," answered the Frenchman.

So our serious faced French lieutenant knew all too well why "It is absolutely forbidden to laugh" in war!

CHAPTER III

IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR