1915 - American Roland Speers- serving France in the American
Volunteer Ambulance Corps
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| Roland Root Speers |
(16 October 1895 – 29 November 1970)
We have now been moved to the far-away front. The work and
accommodations here are the best yet, not like those in the little village
where we were in “repose.” There the rats galloped up and down and around our
beds, until we were forced to turn our flashlights on at intervals and bombard
them with shoes and cakes of soap. I never saw such big rats.
The only apparent danger here is from gas, and all the
schoolchildren as well as grandfathers carry gas masks slung over their
shoulders.
The horror, the intensity and gravity of trench warfare is
impossible to absorb from books or letters. I realized this when I got here.
Things that impressed me were the ever-whispered conversations and the air of
alertness and expectancy as if the nerves were being strained to catch the
slightest sound. There seemed to be a deathly stillness. Both the men and dogs
seemed to be bundles of nerves. I stooped to pat a dog in one of the dugouts
that was unaware of my intention, and as soon as my hand touched him, he
retired as though a hot iron had seared him.
It is the terrific explosions that wreck the nerves.
Still—in my idle moments—I can conjure up to memory those deep,
dark caves where men crouch like animals; where breeding, manners, home, and
the niceties of life seem ages away. I can see the stacked rifles; the
well-placed machine guns, the reservoirs of wicked grenades placed so the poilus [a French soldier] can reach them as they come up out of their
foul-aired caves—and always, I see the utter desolation, the withered
vegetation, and the horrible churned and rechurned chaos of “No Man’s Land.”
Forgotten Voices of WWI
