Then on to Houdrement――Stevenson riding with me and Hanna following in his car. Reaching there, we walked up the side of a steep hill to the dressing station and inquired for any wounded that might be there. I was caked with mud from head to foot. A French officer smiled at my appearance. I saluted and he extended his hand. The French officers were usually quite as polite to us as if we were officers ourselves.
We found some wounded who would otherwise have been kept there until darkness had set in. After that our Section covered the run to Fort Houdremont in daylight with regularity; and in spite of the fact that the road was exposed to view, most of us found the daylight run much less nerve-racking than in the night.
“Do the boche fire on ambulances?” I have sometimes been asked.
The days and nights went on, but still the attack did not take place, but the artillery duels were growing in intensity every night.
If there was any belief that preparations for the attack were not known, this belief was dispelled when the Germans erected a sign over their trenches reading――
“WE WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU ON THE FIFTEENTH”――but the fifteenth passed by and――the attack did not take place. We were getting very tired――we were becoming conscious that we had nerves――the driving became more hazardous and terrifying with the increased activity of the artillery.
Early on the evening of August seventeenth, I was off duty and was standing talking to some of the fellows, enjoying an after supper pipe and watching the anti-aircraft guns popping at a German aeroplane when Stevenson walked up. He said a telephone message had just come in informing him that Stockwell had broken the front spring of his car out at Fort Houdremont. I was to take a new spring out and Pearl was to go along to help make the repairs.
William Pearl was our volunteer mechanician and had been with the Section for some time. Before that he had been a Rhodes scholar. After the war he would practice law.
Pearl and I started off and we had not gone far when it began to rain――it frequently rained at Verdun. We stopped to slip our rubber ponchos over our heads. Perhaps that brief delay was the cause of what happened shortly after. A matter of seconds sometimes changes destiny when at the front. I recall that on one occasion I slowed down my car for a few seconds, just long enough to light a cigarette, and as I paused a shell struck on the road, not far in front of me. I am sure but for the lighting of that cigarette, the shell would have scored a direct hit. Yet some people say that cigarettes are an unmixed evil!