Personal Letters of a Driver at the Front

June 17, 1915 (excerpt)

On the other side of the hill on our right extended the famous Bois-le-Prêtre; but it is no longer a wood --- it is just a wilderness with a few brown stumps sticking up. "Would you like to go into the Bois?" I was asked. I felt I had been in as much danger as I was likely to get into, so I said yes, and we turned to the left and mounted a steep hill and entered it. Here the birds were singing and all was green and beautiful (it was a part where the artillery had not been) but one could see trench after trench deserted. Here was an officers' cemetery, a terribly sad sight, six hundred officers' graves. Close by were also the graves of eighteen hundred soldiers.

The little cemetery was quite impressive on the side of this lovely green hill with the great trees all around and the little plain wood crosses at each grave. As we waited a broken-down horse appeared with a cart-load of what looked like old clothes --- "Les Morts." I had never seen a dead body until that moment. It was a horrible awakening --- eight stiff, semi-detached, armless, trunkless, headless bodies, --- all men like ourselves with people loving them, --- somewhere, ---all gone this way, --- because of --- what? I don't know, do you? A grave had been dug two metres deep, large enough to hold sixteen, and then we were asked to group ourselves around the car to be taken "pour souvenir." I managed to do it. I stood there by those dead men and tried to look as if it were a natural thing to do. I felt like being sick. Then one by one they were lowered into the grave, and when they were all laid out the identification started to take place --- the good boots were taken off --- and if a coat was not too bloody or torn it was kept --- "Surely we must be going said. "No, no! not before we have shown you the dead in the fosse there." "Good God," I cried, "I can't do that now"; and I did n't. We returned to Pont-à-Mousson for lunch at twelve o'clock and I felt a very different person --- and wondered how I could have felt faint the week before on merely seeing the photographs of wounded in our Neuilly Hospital; --- one becomes "habitué," they tell me. I was then officially handed over the car I am to drive, and I began looking over all the parts, as we have to do everything for ourselves here.

From: With the American Field Ambulance in France:  Personal Letters of a Driver at the Front (1916)

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