Chapter X: Missy on the Aisne

We left Serches at 5 p.m. and retraced our road for about two miles till we reached the ancient Château-farm of Mont de Soissons. This historic farm was our headquarters during September and till the date we left in October 1914, and it was during this eventful period that all the great stirring events “on the Aisne” took place. “On the Aisne,” how much of tragedy and pathos, of great deeds, of gallant deaths, stubborn fighting, and indomitable courage are associated with those words?

On the night after our arrival at Mont de Soissons, the ambulance officers were sitting about eleven o’clock round a table in the old dining-room of the Château, when an urgent order arrived from headquarters to send doctors, stretcher-bearers, and ambulance waggons with equipment to Missy. The orders were for the ambulances to get to Missy in the dark, pick up the wounded, and at all costs to come out again in the dark. To get to Missy, which was situated on the far side of the Aisne, we would have to cross the river, and,—reading between the lines of this definite order to get in under cover of darkness and get out again in the dark,—one could see that our night ride was to be a somewhat perilous one.