While the United States remained out of the war, a number of young Americans wanted to support the Allied cause and venture close to the front. Many volunteered as ambulance drivers, some for the American Ambulance Field Service, which was founded in April 1915 to aid the French army. More than 2,000 Americans would volunteer for the service, including William Seabrook, a graduate of Newberry College in South Carolina who had worked in journalism and advertising. Seabrook described his section’s actions in Champagne.
ON SATURDAY, May 27, Section 8 received its baptism of fire.
Three cars were called to St. Hilaire, our evacuation post eight kilometres from Mourmelon and about two and a half kilometres behind the first-line trenches. Dodge, Seabrook, and Shattuck drove, and with them went Iasigi, Davison, and Section-Chief Mason.
St. Hilaire, a village which has changed hands several times and now finds itself in front of the French batteries in easy sight and range of the German guns on the slopes opposite, is what the poilus call a “mauvais coin.”
It is a mass of ruins, but evidently was once a charming spot, and the approach by the road from Mourmelon is still beautiful, though the fields on both sides of the route are scarred with bomb-craters and honeycombed with abandoned trenches. For practically the entire distance the road is protected from German observation by a screen formed of pine limbs and small pine saplings strung on wires and rising well over the top of the tallest auto truck.
This road is in easy distance for the German artillery, but there is only one point which they have been shelling during the past month, to wit, the abandoned farm of St. Hilaire, three kilometres back from the village and now nothing more than an abandoned mass of crumbled masonry. However, no shells fell as we passed the farm, and in another five minutes we turned a curve and caught our first sight of a French village totally destroyed by heavy-artillery fire. The approach is through a grove, over a lovely little stream with a picturesque mill at the left, and one emerges rather sharply from the trees into full view of the town. To one who had never before seen the effect of heavy high-explosive shells the scene was appalling. Some among us had seen big floods, fires, tornados and railroad wrecks, but there is no form of devastation on earth that can compare to a town deliberately and completely wrecked by continuous artillery fire. On one side of the street the houses were blown into shapeless masses; the stone was not only scattered, but often crumbled into dust; the iron was tortured into fantastic shapes; the woodwork was ashes; on the opposite side were wrecks of houses with one wall or one triangular corner standing; others had holes blown through them big enough for a two-horse team to drive in, yet still upright; here and there a single house had escaped destruction, but served only to emphasize the devastation around it; the roof of the church is gone, one half of the nave and entire transept is crushed in, and the tower is tottering; it was as if the huge hand of some demon from the clouds had lifted the entire village to unthinkable heights and in wanton rage dashed it back to earth.
These impressions crowded on us in the instant that we were traversing the village to reach the entrance to the trenches and bombproof shelters in which the evacuation poste is located. The entrance is immediately beside the road, emerging from the village behind a half-destroyed house that furnishes shelter from Bosche binoculars if not from their big guns. The sergeant on duty was standing in the road at the entrance to his dugout, smoking a pipe, and half a dozen of his stretcher-bearers were sitting around under the trees. There had been little if any firing that morning.
They told us they had several “blessés” (even the Americans and English call them that in France) to be transported back to the hospital near Mourmelon, and we made ready to load them into Dodge’s car.
While we were still talking a German shell, and then another, and still another, screamed high over our heads and exploded somewhere in the woods behind St. Hilaire. In another instant the French batteries located a few hundred yards behind us opened up a terrific bombardment, while more German guns joined in the duel.
The fire was not directed at St. Hilaire. The enemy was firing just over our heads to the woods 300 and 400 yards behind us, “feeling” for the batteries they knew were masked among the trees.
“They are not firing at us,” explained the sergeant, “but a shell timed a fraction of a second early, or fired a fraction of a centimetre lower, might land here by accident, so we had better get our blessés loaded and away.”
The few more minutes we remained, however, were ample to furnish experiences we shall never forget. Scarcely had the sergeant ceased speaking when a German shell fell far short of its mark and short of us, too, in the field beyond St. Hilaire; another broke to the right a hundred yards or so above our heads, and a third and fourth broke so close that the fragments sprayed the road where we were standing. One of our party picked up a jagged piece still sizzling hot from the explosion. Then the Bosche gunners readjusted their range, and the shells began to break again, as they intended, in the woods behind.
Descriptions of how one feels under shell fire are always inadequate and malapropos, because every man feels differently. Close observation of the men of our section on this and subsequent occasions seems to show that they are alike in only one respect—they all hold their ground. For instance, there is one of us, a man of unquestioned courage, who “ducks” his head and shoulders every time a shell screams over his head; it seems to be an involuntary muscular reaction. Another becomes garrulous, laughing loud and keeping up a rapid fire of jokes, possibly like the negro who whistles as he traverses a graveyard. Another man in the section turns quite pale, yet keeps his hand and voice as steady and his eye as clear as one of Napoleon’s grenadiers.
It may possibly all be summed up in the comment often made in other wars that a man who is not afraid of a big shell is simply a fool, and that courage consists not in foolhardy nonchalance, but in standing your ground and doing your duty.
The noise of an artillery duel has been described by thousands of writers, yet it comes as a surprise to each man who hears it for the first time. The crashing reports of the French soixante-quinze, the roar of the bigger guns, the sharp crack of the small shells, and the muffled boom of the exploding bombs—all these can easily be reproduced in the imagination, by simply multiplying the din of any practice cannonading you may have happened to hear at close range in time of peace. But what nobody can describe is the shrieking and screaming of the shells as they fly through the air over your head before bursting. It cannot be described, because there is no sound with which it can be compared. It is a sound which has no place in things human—a shrieking, crescendo scream from the shells that are arriving—the last diminishing wail of a lost soul from the shells as they depart—all mingled at times in an ear-splitting, high-keyed symphony of hell in which the bursting bombs and rumbling guns furnish the deep bass tones.
Well, after all, they weren’t firing directly at us, and we all got back to Mourmelon.
From Diary of Section VIII (1917)