CHAPTER VI

A LETTER HOME

Zaidos, who was still on sick list and walked with a cane, was nevertheless put to work, in order to familiarize him with the position of the trenches. For two weeks the English had been expecting an attack, and the inaction was telling on the nerves of the officers.

The men are only kept under fire for four days. At the end of that time, they are sent back a few miles in shifts to the nearest village where they find quarters, and rest from the nerve-racking, soul-shaking clamor of guns and buzz of bullets. The trenches were wonderful.

Zaidos and Velo, the Red Cross badges on their arms giving them free pa.s.sage, soon explored every inch until they were perfectly familiar with them all. Zaidos drew a sketch of the plan to send to the fellows in school.

First of all, and nearest the opposing force, is the line of the small trenches for the snipers or sharp-shooters. These men, facing certain death in their little shelters, are picked shots, and keep up a steady, hara.s.sing fire at anything showing over the tops of the enemy's trenches or, failing that, at anything that looks like the crew of a rapid-fire gun. These, of course, they guess at from the line of fire as the guns are placed in the first line of trenches in little pits of their own. On his map Zaidos marked the positions of the guns with an A.

Behind the snipers are the barbed wire entanglements, a nightmare of tumbled wires piled high in cruel confusion. Close behind this are the observation trenches. There was no firing from these small trenches; they were simply what the name implied: look-outs. Leaving these, and pa.s.sing down the zig-zag connecting trench, the first line trench was reached. This was fifty yards from the wire entanglements, and along here the rapid-fire guns were set.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Trench layout diagram]

When Zaidos and Velo made their first visit through the trenches, they were puzzled to see that the guns were all set at an angle, so that the line of fire intersected, usually just over the barbed wire entanglements.

Zaidos asked about it.

"We protect our guns in that way," explained the young Lieutenant who accompanied them. "With the fire coming at an angle, it is difficult for the enemy to get the exact position of our guns, and they are unable to follow the line of our fire with their own fire, and so cripple us. On the other hand, you notice that all trenches are either battlement shape or zig-zag."

"I wondered why," said Zaidos.

"Well, that is so a shot from the enemy, no matter what the angle, striking in a trench, will simply go a few feet, and plow into the bank of earth ahead of it. Formerly, a single shot, raking the length of a portion of a trench, would cost hundreds of men. Now it seldom means a loss of more than six or eight."

It was fifty yards between the entanglements and the first line trench, and in the two hundred yards between that and the second line trench, there was quite a little underground settlement.

The bomb-proof shelter was a regular cellar with sheets of steel over it, and earth over that. It was dark, and the dirt walls and floor gave out a damp and mouldy smell. The men had made crude provisions for comfort. Narrow benches were about the walls, a door from some wrecked building had been brought with much labor, and converted into a table, around which the men sat and played cards.

But Zaidos was most interested in the First Aid Station. He felt that much of his time might be spent here in this strange dug-out.

It was a strange mixture of the latest thing in surgical science and the crudeness of the caveman.

The walls were simply scooped out. They might have been dug with a gigantic spoon, so rough they were and so rounding. The floor had been packed, or trodden hard, and in the middle of the small s.p.a.ce was a rude operating table. Beside it, however, on enameled, collapsible iron stands, looking as though they might have been just carried out of some perfectly appointed hospital, were rows of delicate instruments.

There had been no firing for some time, and the place was empty. The surgeon and his a.s.sistant sat reading a month-old copy of a London paper. They scanned the columns eagerly, and laughed heartily at the jokes. For London gallantly jests, even in war time.

The lieutenant introduced Zaidos and Velo to the doctors, and explained their presence.

"Well, me lad," said the older man, cordially taking note of Zaidos'

sunny smile and fearless eyes, "I'm thinkin' that we need such as you.

We can't hope those fellows over there beyond will keep still much longer, and we will have the deuce of a time to hold our position, I believe. Of course we will do it, but it will mean a lot of work for us in here, worse luck!

"You want to familiarize yourself with every turn of the place. A lost moment may mean a lost life, perhaps yours, perhaps the man you are trying to help. You may have to leave the connecting trench you are running along and take to the top of the ground. If a sh.e.l.l falls ahead of you, you will find your path stopped up. Have you ever been under fire?"

"I don't know just what you would call it," said Zaidos laughingly, and proceeded to tell the doctor how they happened to be in their present position.

"Well, well, well!" said the doctor. "You ought to do! First drowned, and then shot at, and submarined. It does seem as though you ought to be able to keep your head, with only a few simple bullets and gas bombs flying around."

He got to his feet stiffly, for living underground makes men rheumatic, and put down his paper.

"Just pay attention," he said in a crisp, business-like way. "When you serve wounded men, remember two things. Work deliberately, yet with the greatest speed. Many a man has died from one little twist given in getting him on his stretcher. Forget the fight, forget everything for the time but that the torn body is in your hands. Do you know anything at all about lifting a man?"

"I do," said Zaidos. "I'm a Boy Scout. Besides, we learned all that at school."

"Good!" said the doctor. "All you have to do is to remember what you know, when the necessity of using your information arrives. When you have your man on the stretcher, get here as soon as ever you can.

Don't wait for anyone; private and General alike must stand aside for the Red Cross. Wonder if you could stop a cut artery?"

"Yes, sir," replied Zaidos.

"How?" said the doctor, reaching out his arm. Zaidos took it and demonstrated the thing and the doctor gave a grunt of satisfaction.

"When you get your man here, lay him down on one of the benches or on the floor or anywhere else that you see a place for him. Don't wait, for we will attend to him after that."

"Yes, sir," said Zaidos. He foresaw lively times.

"Good morning," said the doctor, sitting down and taking up his precious paper. The boys went out, feeling as though they had been dismissed from cla.s.s.

The large cook house was very close to the First Aid Station, and was equipped with wonderful field stoves and great kettles and pots. A number of cooks were in charge, and the boiling soup smelled good enough to eat!

Three zig-zag trenches led from the cook house and First Aid Station to the second line of trenches.

Here was a repet.i.tion of the first line trench, machine guns and all.

Back of it stretched a line of snipers' trenches, and behind them another barbed wire entanglement. A tunnel led under this; several of them in fact, and large enough to permit the pa.s.sage of a number of men at the same time. This was arranged in case the line was pushed back by the advancing enemy.

When Zaidos had arrived at this point in his drawing, his paper gave out, and he was obliged to write the rest on the back of the sheet.

"You will see, fellows," he wrote, "just how the second trench is laid out by looking at the first. Back of the barbed wire and the observation trenches come a lot of connecting trenches again. These are not laid out in exactly the same direction as the first group, of course, but are generally the same. Instead of a shelter for thirty men, there is a shelter for one hundred thirty men. The cook house is much larger, and the First Aid Station is really a sort of hospital, where the men can be placed until they are taken back to the regular field hospital which is back of the third trench, four hundred yards away. This makes the hospital proper pretty safe.

"The shelter for men in the third position holds three hundred men easily and the hospital is quite complete.

"You never saw such courageous fellows as these are. Just think, you chaps, kicking as you do over there about the feed and the beds and the barracks, what it is like to live underground against the bare earth!

"The men are never able to undress to sleep. Once in two weeks each man has a bath, which he has to take in _two minutes_. He is then given a complete set of new underwear. The men spend four days in the trenches, almost always under fire night and day. There has been no firing since we struck the place, but there is going to be a bad time soon, they say. And then the noise is perfectly deafening, they tell me.

"When the men have been four days in the trenches under fire, they are sent back in squads to the nearest village for four days to rest and get their nerves back in shape.

"I was talking to a jolly young Englishman this morning, and he told me about the place he stayed in the village. He has just come back.

"He was quartered in a cellar, where they were perfectly safe from Zeppelin bombs or stray sh.e.l.ls, but it was dark and damp and cold.

When he went to sleep at night the rats ran all over him, and he and all the other fellows had to wrap their coats around their faces to keep the rats from running over the bare skin. Some rats, eh?

"A lot of chaps go to pieces with rheumatism, and have to be sent way back to the stationary hospitals in the cities.

"This Englishman I was talking to was over in France last Christmas, and he told me all about the time they had. Seems queer, but I think it is so. He said almost every fellow in the outer trench had some sort of a Christmas box with fruit-cake and candles, and 'sweets' as he calls candies. There they were, wishing each other a merry Christmas, and shaking hands, and laughing, and the snipers' guns popping away at the Germans a few feet away from them. Pretty soon a white flag went up in the enemies' trench, and they ran one up, too, and stuck up their heads to see what was what. They didn't know if it was a ruse or not; but there was a group of Germans sitting on the edge of their trench with their legs down inside ready to jump; and they were calling 'Merry Christmas, Englishmen!' as jolly as you please.

"Well, that was all our fellows needed, and they got out of their holes and advanced. But one of their officers went first, a young fellow who was pretty homesick on account of the day, and he went up to a big German officer, and they agreed that there should be a truce for the day, and shook hands on it. So the men came across and met, and tried to talk to each other and learned some words from each other. The Germans had Christmas boxes, too, and they swapped their funny pink frosted cakes for the English fruit-cake, and gave each other cigarette cases and knives for souvenirs.