Explore "A Surgeon in Khaki" by Arthur Anderson Martin on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
FROM THE MARNE TO THE AISNE.
At 7 a.m. our Field Ambulance was ready to march. Breakfast was over, and we stood by awaiting orders. While waiting, some of us strolled back towards the bridge which we had crossed the previous night. It was now empty of men and vehicles. The ashes of the bivouac fires and the lopped branches of trees were all the tokens left of the passage of a German and a British Army Corps. The Marne is a deep stream with a slow current, and is a popular boating river. Two or three boating-club sheds lay pleasantly situated on the banks of the stream, bowered in foliage and trees. Up and down the river the scene was exceedingly beautiful. It was curious, when standing on the bridge, to think that in the previous forty-eight hours the tide of war had rolled over this lovely valley; that artillery had plastered the landscape with shrapnel and high explosives, and that riflemen had lined the banks where to stand exposed for one minute meant instant death; that many hundreds of men had died and many hundreds had been wounded and crippled for life. The ambulance lorries climbing out of the valley to the rear with the loads of wounded men were the aftermath of the glitter and panoply of war, and of the deadly struggle in the now peaceful valley.