A SKI RUNNER AND AMBULANCE DRIVER IN FRANCE

The Editor has received the following account of his experiences in France from Dabney Horton '15. Mr. Horton went to Europe in the winter of 1915-16 as a volunteer in the newly organized ski-section of the ambulance work which was to operate in the Vosges Mountains. While in college Mr. Horton distinguished himself as one of the most daring ski runners in the Outing Club. He writes from the School of Military Aviation, near Versailles:

"I have been in a ski-ambulance section, an ambulance section, and now I am a private soldier in the Foreign Legion, preparing to learn to fly an aeroplane de chasse. I shall stick down the things which I myself shall always remember, and they may be interesting to you. lam writing in our barracks a few kilometers from Versailles, and the two chief things to distract me are an excited wrangle in French, English, and Roumanian, and a plague of flies.

"As you already know, I spent a couple of months in the Vosges, supposedly engaged in dragging wounded men on skis, but the reality was quite different. There was no fighting in our part of the Vosges at that time. Gerardmer, an ante bellum winter resort, will place it on the map. I, and the chef desection, were the only Americans, among a bunch of thirty Norwegians. You may well believe that I spent most of my time in learning to ski, for the Norwegians excelled me as much as I excelled the greenest freshman. We had the use of some admirable jumps built by the Skiing Club of France, and I, personally, had the instruction of a clever teacher. There used to be in the college library a year-book of the British Ski Association, and in this was an article by Vivian Caulfield, an Englishman who joined our section, I recognized his name at once, and at once became his pupil. I believe he taught me how to jump as I could never have learned at home. This is the sum total of my experiences as a skier.

"When the snow left, I joined an ambulance section, Section 5, financed by Harjes, of Morgan Harjes, Paris. I reached the section when it was near Verdun, just at the wind-up of a long stretch of the hardest kind of work. I had two weeks of this before the section went into 'repos.' We worked under the usual trying winter weather, sleeping in wet clothes, lack of drinking water, lack of time to repair cars, lack of sleep, and of everything except patience. We were camped between two French batteries and an aviation depot. My first day in the section was the occasion of a raid by ten Taubes. It was a clear morning, and the Taubes appeared simultaneously from every angle of the horizon. It is a peculiarly optimistic feeling to hunker down in a trench and gaze directly overhead at a black midge in the sky, which issues a charge of seven bombs. Anything over a mile high seems directly over-head. The bombs fall quite audibly, as the vanes on their tails buzz like humming-birds, and then, a sound like a trunk falling from the tenth story to the cellar. All of these bombs did nothing but cut up a clothes line full of soldier's linen and shatter a few houses in the village, which were already so shattered that the very streets were invisible. After every buzzing bomb had been released and the ten black dots had turned toward the Boche lines, a few French aeroplanes sallied forth and bravely circled over-head, as if to show that our natural protectors were at least present, even if not doing much.

"This is about the only interest I found in the ambulance section. Soon after we went into a long dreary period of dolce far niente, repairing cars and doing hospital evacuation work.

"June and July and half of August, I spent in Paris, where I had a great many friends. It is really in Paris that one gets the spirit of the French people. Of course, I did not live at the Regina, and spend all my days between the Cafe de la Paix, the Chateau Bar, and Henri's. I lived in an ordinary pension near the Observatoire, and my amusements were chiefly the exhibitions of war cartoons and the Foire de Clignancourt, also called the Foire de Chiffon, and popularly, the Foire des Puces. Also, I was working, and working with Frenchmen in a French establishment.

"To realize what this war means to France, one must know the people, sleep in a stuffy railroad station with a hundred permissionaires, talk to those whose men are all at the front, read the letters which the soldiers send back, see the wounded men in the hospitals, all these things make the war a personal matter. There are nearly fifty thousand Americans who are engaged in this war. Many of them are soldiers of fortune, but many are also over here because, like myself, they have lost friends here, and have living friends in France whose hospitality is worth justifying.

"Just now I am doing my best to qualify as a pilot of a fighting plane. In a few months, with luck, I shall be at the front. I understand you've had a few arguments in the college about militarism and the rest. As for me, since I have so many dear friends in France, I cannot stay over here as an embusque.

"I could tell war stories by the dozen. These are part of all wars and vary only with the point of view. The only things worth telling are those which show the spirit of the people, and you will see this in the bookstalls on the Quai Voltaire, the little dingy boxes with the writing, 'Fermé pour cause de la mobilisation,' you will find it in the recruiting offices, where men try to avoid their ineligibility tests, in the tram cars, run by women whose husbands are at the front, and even in the brasseries in the smallest village, frequented only by old men who talk of the time the Bavarians burned the Chateau in the Franco-Prussian war. The spirit of the people is that of "Gallieni of Paris"-'jus qua 'bout.'"