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diff --git a/44225-0.txt b/44225-0.txt index 292ef8b..790f9f6 100644 --- a/44225-0.txt +++ b/44225-0.txt @@ -1,36 +1,4 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Glory of The Coming, by Irvin S. Cobb - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org - - -Title: The Glory of The Coming - What Mine Eyes have seen of Americans in Action in this - Year Of Grace and Allied Endeavor - -Author: Irvin S. Cobb - -Release Date: November 18, 2013 [EBook #44225] -Last Updated: March 11, 2018 - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF THE COMING *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger - - - - - - +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44225 *** THE GLORY OF THE COMING @@ -10359,358 +10327,4 @@ an extinct species back home. 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Cobb </title> @@ -38,43 +39,7 @@ The Glory of the Coming, by Irvin S. Cobb </style> </head> <body> - - -<pre> - -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Glory of The Coming, by Irvin S. Cobb - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org - - -Title: The Glory of The Coming -What Mine Eyes have seen of Americans in Action in this -Year Of Grace and Allied Endeavor - -Author: Irvin S. Cobb - -Release Date: November 18, 2013 [EBook #44225] -Last Updated: March 11, 2018 - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF THE COMING *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger - - - - - -</pre> +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44225 ***</div> <div style="height: 8em;"> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> @@ -11665,378 +11630,6 @@ an extinct species back home. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> </div> - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Glory of The Coming, by Irvin S. Cobb - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF THE COMING *** - -***** This file should be named 44225-h.htm or 44225-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: -http://www.gutenberg.org/4/4/2/2/44225/ - -Produced by David Widger - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, -set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to -copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to -protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project -Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you -charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. 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-The Glory of the Coming, by Irvin S. Cobb
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Glory of The Coming, by Irvin S. Cobb
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Title: The Glory of The Coming
-What Mine Eyes have seen of Americans in Action in this
-Year Of Grace and Allied Endeavor
-
-Author: Irvin S. Cobb
-
-Release Date: November 18, 2013 [EBook #44225]
-Last Updated: March 11, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF THE COMING ***
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-Produced by David Widger
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-</pre>
-
-<div style="height: 8em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h1>
-THE GLORY OF THE COMING
-</h1>
-<h4>
-What Mine Eyes Have Seen Of Americans In Action In This Year Of Grace And
-Allied Endeavor
-</h4>
-<h2>
-By Irvin S. Cobb
-</h2>
-<p>
-<br />
-</p>
-<h5>
-George H. Doran Company
-</h5>
-<h4>
-1918
-</h4>
-<p>
-<br />
-</p>
-<blockquote>
-<p>
-“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is
-trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath
-loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, His Truth is
-marching on.” <br /> <br /> —Battle Hymn of the Republic
-</p>
-</blockquote>
-<p>
-<br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /> <br />
-</p>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>his book is made up of articles written abroad in the spring and summer
-of 1918 and cabled or mailed back for publication at home. For convenience
-in arrangement, a few of these papers have been broken up into sectional
-subdivisions with new chapter headings inserted; otherwise the matter is
-here presented practically in its original form.
-</p>
-<p>
-It has been given to the writer to behold widely dissimilar aspects of the
-Great War. As a neutral observer, hailing from a neutral country, I was a
-witness, in Belgium, in northern France, in Germany and in England, to
-some of its first stages. That was back in 1914 when I was for awhile with
-the British, then for a period with the Belgian forces afield, then for a
-much longer period with the German armies and finally with the British
-again. I was of like mind then with all my professional brethren serving
-publications in non-belligerent countries, excepting one or two or three
-of a more discerning vision than the rest. Behind the perfection of the
-German fighting machine I did not see the hideous malignant brutality
-which was there.
-</p>
-<p>
-In the first half of this present year, as a partisan on the side of my
-country and its federated associates, I visited England and for a space of
-months travelled about over France, with two incursions into that small
-corner of Flanders which at this time remained in the hands of the Allies.
-</p>
-<p>
-I have seen the Glory of the Coming. I have watched the American
-Expeditionary Force grow from a small thing into a mighty thing—the
-mightiest thing, I veritably believe, that since conscious time began, has
-been undertaken by a free people entering upon a war on foreign shores
-with nothing personally to gain except a principle, with nothing to
-maintain except honour, with nothing to keep except their national
-self-respect. In this war our only spoils out of the victory will be the
-establishment of the rights of other peoples to rule themselves, our only
-territorial enlargements will be the graves where our fallen dead sleep on
-alien soil, our only tangible reward for all that we are giving in blood
-and treasure and effort and self-denial, will be the knowledge that in a
-world crisis, when the liberties of the world were imperilled, we, as a
-world-power and as perhaps the most conspicuous example in the world, of a
-democracy, did our duty by ourselves, by our republican neighbours
-overseas and by our children and their children and their children's
-children.
-</p>
-<p>
-No longer ago than last March, it was a small thing we had done, as viewed
-in the light of our then visible performances in France and an even
-smaller thing as viewed in the light of what our public men, many of them,
-and our newspapers, some of them, had promised on our behalf nearly a year
-earlier when we came into the war. At the beginning there was an army to
-be created; there was a navy to be built up; there was a continent to be
-crossed and an ocean to be traversed if we meant to link up all the States
-of our Union with all our plans; there was a military establishment to be
-started from the grass roots; there were ninety millions of us to be set
-from the ways of peace into the ways of war. But because some of our
-politicians professed to believe that by virtue of our resources, our
-energy and our so-called business efficiency we could do the impossible in
-an impossibly brief time, and more especially because, among the masses of
-Continental Europe there was a tendency to look upon us as a race of
-miracle-workers living in a magic-land and accomplishing unutterable
-wonders at will, and finally because these same masses accepted the words
-of our self-appointed, self-anointed prophets as they might accept
-Gospel-writ, a profound disappointment over the seeming failure of America
-to produce her legions on European soil, followed hard upon the exaltation
-which had prevailed among our Allies immediately after we broke with the
-common enemy of mankind. In France I know this to have been true; in other
-countries I have reason to believe it was true. As month after month
-passed until nearly a twelvemonth had gone by and still the armed millions
-from America did not materialise, I think it only natural and inevitable
-that, behind their hands and under their breaths, the Poilus called our
-soldiers “Boy Scouts” and spoke of our effort as “The Second Children's
-Crusade.” For thanks be to a few men among us who worked with their mouths
-rather than with their hands, the French populace had been led to expect
-so very much of us in so short a space of time and yet there now was
-presented before their eyes, so very little as the tangible proofs of our
-voiced determination to offer all that we had and all that we were, in the
-fight for decency and for humanity.
-</p>
-<p>
-Do you remember when, on or about the beginning of the last week of March,
-General Pershing offered to the Allied command the available mobile
-strength of the army under him, for service to aid the British, the
-French, the Belgians and the Portuguese in stemming the great German
-offensive which had been launched on the twenty-first day of that month?
-Pershing made the offer in all good faith and in all good faith it was
-accepted. But at that moment all he could spare out of the trenches and
-send across France from the East to the West to go into the line in
-threatened Picardy was one division of considerably less than forty
-thousand men; a puny handful as they measure fighting forces these times;
-and that division was stayed in part on French rations, equipped in part
-with borrowed French ordnance and provided in large part with French
-munitions. Without French aid it probably could not have gone forward at
-all; without French aid it could not have maintained itself after it had
-taken over the Normandy sectors to which Foch assigned it. It was not the
-fault of our military leaders abroad, perhaps it was not the fault of our
-people at home that, fifty weeks after entering the war, we were able to
-render only so small a share of immediate help in this most critical
-juncture of the entire war. But it was the fault of those who had boasted,
-those who had bragged, those who had preached at home what they did not
-practice, that the French people were beginning to think—and to
-whisper—that the United States had failed to live up to its pledges.
-These people had no way of knowing what we were accomplishing over here;
-they must judge by what they might see for themselves over there.
-</p>
-<p>
-The great awakening came, though, before the first of June. Over-night, it
-almost seemed, our army began to function as an army. The sea became alive
-with our transports, the land became alive with our troops. Instead of two
-hundred and some odd thousands of men on French soil, we had half a
-million, then a million, then a million and a half. No longer were our
-forces without tanks of American manufacture, without machine-guns of
-American manufacture, without a proper and adequate equipment of heavy
-guns of American manufacture. There was even hope that our aeroplane
-production, up until then the most ghastly and pitiable failure of all,
-might by autumn, begin to measure up, in some degree at least, to the
-sanguine press-notices of the year before—1917. We who in France
-could see the growth of this thing came to feel that perhaps all of our
-dollar-a-year commercial giants were not being grossly overpaid and we
-came proudly to realise that our country now was responding with all its
-strength to the responsibilities it had assumed. The Yanks were no longer
-on the way; they were here—here in number sufficient to enable us to
-lend a strong and ever-strengthening hand in the turning-back of the enemy
-and in bringing closer the certainty of a complete triumph over him. It
-was the Glory of the Coming. Moreover it should not be forgotten in the
-reckoning-up of causes and results that the lodging of the allied command
-in the hands of one captain—the most powerful single factor in
-inspiring victory—was brought about largely through American
-insistence upon the election of a single leader and a unified leadership
-for all the forces of the confederated nations in the field of the western
-theatre of the war.
-</p>
-<p>
-I sometimes think the most splendid thing I have seen in this war was not
-some individual act of heroism, or devotion, or resolution—glorious
-though it may have been. I sometimes think the most splendid thing I have
-seen was the making-over of nations, literally before my eyes, in the
-fiery furnace of this war. I have seen little Belgium wearing the marks of
-her transcendent sacrifice and her unutterable suffering, as the Redeemer
-of Man wore the nail-marks of His Crucifixion; I have seen Britain
-transformed from the fat, contented, slothful, old grandmother of the
-nations, sitting by the chimney-piece and feeding herself torpid on her
-plenty, into the militant Britain of yore that has put so many millions of
-her sons into khaki and so many of the ladies of Germany into mourning; I
-have seen France become an incomparably glorious model, before all the
-world for all time, of the heights to which a free people may rise in
-defence of national pledges, national integrity and national existence;
-and I have seen my own country taking her proper place, in the most
-desperate emergency that ever confronted civilisation, as a people united,
-determined, valiant and steadfast—the spirit of the New World
-binding herself with steel grapples to the best that is in the Old World
-and inevitably taking the first steps in the long-delayed campaign of
-understanding and conciliation and renewed affection with our kinspeople
-and our brethren of the British Isles who speak the same mother-tongue
-which we speak and with whom we are joint inheritors of Runnymede and
-Agincourt.
-</p>
-<p>
-As I write these lines, victory appears to be very near. Seemingly, it is
-coming one year sooner than we, who were in France and Belgium in the
-first months of 1918, thought it would come. And speaking for my
-fellow-American correspondents as well as for myself, I make so bold as to
-say that all of us are devoutly hopeful that our leaders will make it a
-complete, not a conditional victory. For surely those who are without
-mercy themselves cannot appreciate and do not deserve mercy from others.
-To our way of thinking, the vanquished must be made to drink the cup of
-defeat to its bitterest lees, not because of any vengeful desire on our
-part to inflict unnecessary punishment and humiliation upon him, but
-because he who had no other argument than force, can be cured of his
-madness only by force. We who have seen what he has wrought by the work of
-his hands among his helpless victims in other lands believe this with all
-our hearts.
-</p>
-<p>
-I. S. C.
-</p>
-<p>
-New York, November, 1918.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-<b>CONTENTS</b>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. “ALL AMURIKIN—OUT TO THEM
-WIRES” </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE
-</a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. ACES UP! </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X. HAPPY LANDINGS </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI. TRENCH ESSENCE </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII. BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII. LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV. THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV. WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI. CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII. YOUNG BLACK JOE </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII. “LET'S GO!” </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX. WAR AS IT ISN'T </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX. THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI. PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII. THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW </a>
-</p>
-<p class="toc">
-<a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV. FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK </a>
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER I. WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">B</span>ECAUSE she was camouflaged with streaky marks and mottlings into the
-likeness of a painted Jezebel of the seas, because she rode high out of
-the water, and wallowed as she rode, because during all those days of our
-crossing she hugged up close to our ship, splashing through the foam of
-our wake as though craving the comfort of our company, we called her
-things no self-respecting ship should have to bear. But when that night,
-we stood on the afterdeck of our ship, we running away as fast as our
-kicking screw would take us, and saw her going down, taking American
-soldier boys to death with her in alien waters, we drank toasts standing
-up to the poor old <i>Tuscania</i>.
-</p>
-<p>
-I was one of those who were in at the death of the <i>Tuscania</i>. Her
-sinking was the climax of the most memorable voyage I ever expect to take.
-Five days have elapsed since she was torpedoed, and even though these
-words are being cabled across from London to the home side of the ocean,
-at least three weeks more must elapse before they can see printer's ink.
-So to some this will seem an old story; but the memory of what happened
-that night off the Irish coast is going to abide with me while I live. It
-was one of those big moments in a man's life that stick in a man's brain
-as long as he has a brain to think with.
-</p>
-<p>
-Transatlantic journeys these days aren't what they used to be before
-America went into the war. Ours began to be different even before our ship
-pulled out from port. It is forbidden me now to tell her name, and anyhow
-her name doesn't in the least matter, but she was a big ship with a famous
-skipper, and in peacetimes her sailing would have made some small stir.
-There would have been crowds of relations and friends at the pier bidding
-farewell to departing travellers; and steamer baskets and steamer boxes
-would have been coming aboard in streams. Beforehand there would have been
-a pleasant and mildly exciting bustle, and as we drew away from the dock
-and headed out into midstream and down the river for our long hike
-overseas, the pierhead would have been alive with waving handkerchiefs,
-and all our decks would have been fringed with voyagers shouting back
-farewells to those they had left behind them. Instead we slipped away
-almost as if we had done something wrong. There was no waving of hands and
-handkerchiefs, no good-byes on the gang-planks, no rush to get back on
-land when the shore bell sounded. To reach the dock we passed through
-trochas of barbed-wire entanglements, past sentries standing with fixed
-bayonets at entryways. When we got inside the pier our people bade us
-farewell at a guarded gate. None but travellers whose passports read
-straight were allowed beyond that point. So alone and unescorted each one
-of us went soberly up the side of the ship, and then sundry hours later
-our journey began, as the ship, like a big grey ghost, slid away from
-land, as quietly as might be, into the congenial grey fog which instantly
-swallowed her up and left her in a little grey world of sea mist that was
-all her own. After this fashion, then, we started.
-</p>
-<p>
-As for the first legs of the trip they were much like the first legs of
-almost any sea trip except that we travelled in a convoy with sundry other
-ships, with warcraft to guard us on our way. Our ship was quite full of
-soldiers—officers in the first cabin, and the steerage packed with
-khakied troopers—ninety per cent of whom had never smelled bilge
-water before they embarked upon their great adventure overseas. There were
-fewer civilians than one formerly might have found on a ship bound for
-Europe. In these times only those civilians who have urgent business in
-foreign climes venture to go abroad.
-</p>
-<p>
-I sat at the purser's table. His table was fairly typical of the ship's
-personnel. With me there sat, of course, the purser, likewise two Canadian
-officers, two members of a British Commission returning from America, and
-an Irish brewer. There were not very many women on our passenger list. Of
-these women half a dozen or so were professional nurses, and two were
-pretty Canadian girls bound for England to be married on arrival there to
-young Canadian officers. There were only three children on board, and they
-were travelling with their parents in the second class.
-</p>
-<p>
-Except for a touch of seriousness about the daily lifeboat drill, and
-except that regimental discipline went forward, with the troops drilling
-on the open deck spaces when the weather and the sea permitted, there was
-at first nothing about this voyage to distinguish it from any other
-midwinter voyage. Strangers got acquainted one with another and swapped
-views on politics, religion, symptoms and Germans; flirtations started and
-ripened furiously; concerts were organized and took place, proving to be
-what concerts at sea usually are. Twice a day the regimental band played,
-and once a day, up on the bridge, the second officer took the sun,
-squinting into his sextant with the deep absorption with which in happier
-times a certain type of tourist was wont to stare through an enlarging
-device at a certain type of Parisian photograph. At night, though, we were
-in a darkened ship, a gliding black shape upon black waters, with heavy
-shades over all the portholes and thick draperies over all the doors, and
-only dim lights burning in the passageways and cross halls, so that every
-odd corner on deck or within was as dark as a coal pocket. It took some
-time to get used to being in the state in which Moses was when the light
-went out; but then, we had time to get used to it, believe me! Ocean
-travel is slower these days, for obvious reasons. Personally, I retired
-from the ship's society during three days of the first week of the trip. I
-missed only two meals, missing them, I may add, shortly after having eaten
-them; but at the same time I felt safer in my berth than up on deck—not
-happier, particularly, but safer. The man who first said that you can't
-eat your cake and have it too had such cases as mine in mind, I am sure of
-that. I can't and I don't—at least not when I am taking an ocean
-voyage. I have been seasick on many waters, and I have never learned to
-care for the sensation yet.
-</p>
-<p>
-When I emerged from semiretirement it was to learn that we had reached the
-so-called danger zone. The escort of warcraft for our transport had been
-augmented. Under orders the military men wore their life jackets, and
-during all their waking hours they went about with cork flaps hugging them
-about their necks fore and aft, so that they rather suggested Chinese
-malefactors with their heads incased in punishment casques. By request the
-civilian passengers were expected to carry their life preservers with them
-wherever they went; but some of them forgot the injunction. I know I did
-frequently. Also, a good many of them turned in at night with most of
-their outer clothing on their bodies; but I followed the old Southern
-custom and took most of mine off before going to bed.
-</p>
-<p>
-Our captain no longer came to the saloon for his meals. He lived upon the
-bridge—ate there and, I think, slept there too—what sleeping
-he did. Standing there all muffled in his oilskins he looked even more of
-a squatty and unheroic figure than he had in his naval blue presiding at
-the head of the table; but by repute we knew him for a man who had gone
-through one torpedoing with great credit to himself and through numbers of
-narrow escapes, and we valued him accordingly and put our faith in him. It
-was faith well placed, as shall presently transpire.
-</p>
-<p>
-I should not say that there was much fear aboard; at least if there was it
-did not manifest itself in the manner or the voice or the behaviour of a
-single passenger seen by me; but there was a sort of nagging, persistent
-sense of uneasiness betraying itself in various small ways. For one thing,
-all of us made more jokes about submarines, mines and other perils of the
-deep than was natural. There was something a little forced, artificial,
-about this gaiety—the laughs came from the lips, but not from points
-farther south.
-</p>
-<p>
-We knew by hearsay that the <i>Tuscania</i> was a troopship bearing some
-of our soldiers over to do their share of the job of again making this
-world a fit place for human beings to live in. There was something
-pathetic in the fashion after which she so persistently and constantly
-strove to stick as closely under our stem as safety and the big waves
-would permit. It was as though her skipper placed all reliance in our
-skipper, looking to him to lead his ship out of peril should peril befall.
-Therefore, we of our little group watched her from our afterdecks, with
-her sharp nose forever half or wholly buried in the creaming white smother
-we kicked up behind us.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was a crisp bright February day when we neared the coasts of the
-British Empire. At two o'clock in the afternoon we passed, some hundreds
-of yards to starboard, a round, dark, bobbing object which some observers
-thought was a floating mine. Others thought it might be the head and
-shoulders of a human body held upright in a life ring. Whatever it was,
-our ship gave it a wide berth, sheering off from the object in a sharp
-swing. Almost at the same moment upon our other bow, at a distance of not
-more than one hundred yards from the crooked course we were then pursuing,
-there appeared out through one of the swells a lifeboat, oarless,
-abandoned, empty, except for what looked like a woman's cloak lying across
-the thwarts. Rising and falling to the swing of the sea it drifted down
-alongside of us so that we could look almost straight down into it. We did
-not stop to investigate but kept going, zigzagging as we went, and that
-old painted-up copy cat of a <i>Tuscania</i> came zigzagging behind us. A
-good many persons decided to tie on their life preservers.
-</p>
-<p>
-Winter twilight was drawing on when we sighted land—Northern Ireland
-it was. The wind was going down with the sun and the sharp crests of the
-waves were dulling off, and blunt oily rollers began to splash with greasy
-sounds against our plates. Far away somewhere we saw the revolving light
-of a lighthouse winking across the face of the waters like a drunken eye.
-That little beam coming and going gave me a feeling of security. I was one
-of a party of six who went below to the stateroom of a member of the group
-for a farewell card game.
-</p>
-<p>
-Perhaps an hour later, as we sat there each intently engaged upon the
-favoured indoor American sport of trying to better two pairs, we heard
-against our side of the ship a queer knocking sound rapidly repeated—a
-sound that somehow suggested a boy dragging a stick along a picket fence.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I suppose that's a torpedo rapping for admission,” said one of us,
-looking up from his cards and listening with a cheerful grin on his face.
-</p>
-<p>
-I think it was not more than five minutes after that when an American
-officer opened the stateroom door and poked his head in.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Better come along, you fellows,” he said; “but come quietly so as not to
-give alarm or frighten any of the women. Something has happened. It's the
-<i>Tuscania</i>—she's in trouble!”
- </p>
-<p>
-Up we got and hurried aft down the decks, each one taking with him his
-cork jacket and adjusting it over his shoulders as he went. We came to the
-edge of the promenade deck aft. There were not many persons there, as well
-as we could tell in the thick darkness through which we felt our way, and
-not many more came afterward—in all I should say not more than
-seventy-five.
-</p>
-<p>
-All the rest were in ignorance of what had occurred—a good many were
-at dinner. Accounts of the disaster which I have read since my arrival in
-London said that the torpedo from the U-boat thudded into the vitals of
-the <i>Tuscania</i>, disarranged her engines, and left her in utter
-darkness for a while until her crew could switch on the auxiliary dynamo.
-I think this must have been a mistake, for at the moment of our reaching
-the deck of our ship the <i>Tuscania</i> was lighted up all over. Her
-illumination seemed especially brilliant, but that, I suppose, was largely
-because we had become accustomed to seeing our fellow transports as dark
-bulks at night. I should say she was not more than a mile from us, almost
-due aft and a trifle to the left. But the distance between us visibly
-increased each passing moment, for we were running away from her as fast
-as our engines could drive us. We could feel our ship throb under our feet
-as she picked up speed. It made us feel like cowards. Near at hand a ship
-was in distress, a ship laden with a precious freightage of American
-soldier boys, and here were we legging it like a frightened rabbit,
-weaving in and out on sharp tacks.
-</p>
-<p>
-We knew, of course, that we were under orders to get safely away if we
-could in case one of those sea adders, the submarines, should attack our
-convoy. We knew that guardian destroyers would even now be hurrying to the
-rescue, and we knew land was not many miles, away; but all the same, I
-think I never felt such an object of shame as I felt that first moment
-when the realisation dawned on me that we were fleeing from a stricken
-vessel instead of hastening back to give what succour we could.
-</p>
-<p>
-As I stood there in the darkness, with silent, indistinct shapes all about
-me, it came upon me with almost the shock of a physical blow that the rows
-of lights I saw yonder through the murk were all slanting slightly
-downward toward what would be the bow of the disabled steamer. These
-oblique lines of light told the story. The <i>Tuscania</i> had been struck
-forward and was settling by the head.
-</p>
-<p>
-Suddenly a little subdued “Ah! Ah!” burst like a chorus from us all A red
-rocket—a rocket as red as blood—sprang up high into the air
-above those rows of lights. It hung aloft for a moment, then burst into a
-score of red balls, which fell, dimming out as they descended. After a bit
-two more rockets followed in rapid succession. I always thought a rocket
-to be a beautiful thing. Probably this belief is a heritage from that time
-in my boyhood when first I saw Fourth-of-July fireworks. But never again
-will a red rocket fired at night be to me anything except a reminder of
-the most pitiable, the most heart-racking thing I have ever seen—that
-poor appeal for help from the sinking <i>Tuscania</i> flaming against that
-foreign sky.
-</p>
-<p>
-There was silence among us as we watched. None of us, I take it, had words
-within him to express what he felt; so we said nothing at all, but just
-stared out across the Waters until our eyeballs ached in their sockets. So
-quiet were we that I jumped when right at my elbow a low, steady voice
-spoke. Turning my head I could make out that the speaker was one of the
-younger American officers.
-</p>
-<p>
-“If what I heard before we sailed is true,” he said, “my brother is in the
-outfit on that boat yonder. Well, if they get him it will only add a
-little more interest to the debt I already owe those damned Germans.”
- </p>
-<p>
-That was all he said, and to it I made no answer, for there was no answer
-to be made.
-</p>
-<p>
-Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, then twenty-five. Now instead of many
-small lights we could make out only a few faint pin pricks of light
-against the blackness to mark the spot where the foundering vessel must
-be. Presently we could distinguish but one speck of light. Alongside this
-one special gleam a red glow suddenly appeared—not a rocket this
-time, but a flare, undoubtedly. Together the two lights—the steady
-white one and the spreading red one—descended and together were
-extinguished. Without being told we knew, all of us—landsmen and
-seamen alike—what we had seen. We had seen the last of that poor
-ship, stung to death by a Hunnish sea-asp.
-</p>
-<p>
-Still silent, we went below. Those of us who had not yet dined went and
-dined. Very solemnly, like men performing a rite, we ordered wine and we
-drank to the <i>Tuscania</i> and her British crew and her living cargo of
-American soldiers.
-</p>
-<p>
-Next morning, after a night during which perilous things happened about us
-that may not be described here and now, we came out of our perils and into
-safety at an English port, and there it was that we heard what made us ask
-God to bless that valorous, vigilant little pot-bellied skipper of ours,
-may he live forever! We were told that the torpedo which pierced the <i>Tuscania</i>
-was meant for us, that the U-boat rising unseen in the twilight fired it
-at us, and that our captain up on the bridge saw it coming when it was yet
-some way off, and swinging the ship hard over to one side, dodged the
-flittering devil-thing by a margin that can be measured literally in
-inches. The call was a close one. The torpedo, it was said, actually
-grazed the plates of our vessel—it was that we heard as we sat at
-cards—and passing aft struck the bow of the <i>Tuscania</i> as she
-swung along not two hundred yards behind us. We heard, too, that twice
-within the next hour torpedoes were fired at us, and again a fourth one
-early in the hours of the morning. Each time chance or poor aim or sharp
-seamanship or a combination of all three saved us. We were lucky. For of
-the twelve ships in our transport two, including the <i>Tuscania</i>, were
-destroyed and two others, making four in all, were damaged by torpedoes
-before morning.
-</p>
-<p>
-Next day, in London, I read that not a man aboard the <i>Tuscania</i>,
-whether sailor or soldier, showed weakness or fright. I read how those
-Yankee boys, many of them at sea for the first time in their lives, stood
-in ranks waiting for rescue or for death while the ship listed and yawed
-and settled under them; how the British sang “God Save the King,” and the
-Americans sang to the same good Allied air, “My Country, 'Tis of Thee;”
- and how at last, descending over the side, some of them to be drowned but
-more of them to be saved, those American lads of ours sang what before
-then had been a meaningless, trivial jingle, but which is destined
-forevermore, I think, to mean a great deal to Americans. Perry said: “We
-have met the enemy, and they are ours.” Lawrence said: “Don't give up the
-ship!” Farragut said: “Damn the torpedoes, go ahead.” Dewey said: “You may
-fire, Gridley, when you are ready.” Our history is full of splendid sea
-slogans, but I think there can never be a more splendid one that we
-Americans will cherish than the first line, which is also the title of the
-song now suddenly freighted with a meaning and a message to American
-hearts, which our boys sang that black February night in the Irish Sea
-when two hundred of them, first fruits of our national sacrifice in this
-war, went over the sides of the <i>Tuscania</i> to death: “Where do we go
-from here, boys; where do we go from here?”
- </p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER II. “ALL AMURIKIN—OUT TO THEM WIRES”
- </h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>E was curled up in a moist-mud cozy corner. His curved back fitted into a
-depression in the clay. His feet rested comfortably in an ankle-deep
-solution, very puttylike in its consistency, and compounded of the rains
-of heaven and the alluvials of France. His face was incredibly dirty, and
-the same might have been said for his hands. He had big buck teeth and
-sandy hair and a nice round inquisitive blue eye. His rifle, in good
-order, was balanced across his hunched knees. One end of a cigarette was
-pasted fast to his lower lip; the other end spilled tiny sparks down the
-front of his blouse.
-</p>
-<p>
-Offhand you would figure his age to be halfpast nineteen. Just round the
-corner from him a machine gun at intervals spoke in stuttering accents. At
-more frequent intervals from somewhere up or down the line a rifle whanged
-where an ambitious amateur Yankee sniper tried for a professional and
-doubtlessly a bored German sniper across the way; or where the German
-tried back.
-</p>
-<p>
-The youth in the cozy corner paid small heed. He was supposed to be
-getting his baptism of fire. In reality he was reading a two-months-old
-copy of a certain daily paper printed in a certain small city in a certain
-Middle Western state—to wit, the sovereign state of Ohio. He
-belonged to a volunteer regiment, and in a larger sense to the Rainbow
-Division. This was his first day in the front-line trenches and already he
-was as much at home there as though he had been cradled to the lullaby of
-those big guns grunting away in the distance. For a fact he was at home—reading
-home news out of the home paper and, as one might say, not caring a single
-dern whatsoever.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Say, Tobe,” he called in the husky half voice which is the prescribed and
-conventional conversational tone on the forward edges of No Man's Land;
-“Tobe, lissen!”
- </p>
-<p>
-His mate, leaning against the slanted side of the trench ten feet away,
-blowing little smoke wisps up toward the pale-blue sky above him, half
-turned his head to answer.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, what?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Whatter you know about this? It says here the New York Yanks is liable to
-buy Ty Cobb off of Detroit. Say, what'll them Detroits do without old Ty
-in there bustin' the fast ones on the nose, huh?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“With all the money they'll get for that guy they should worry!”
- </p>
-<p>
-The emphatic ker-blim of a rifle a hundred yards off furnished a vocal
-exclamation point to further accent the comment.
-</p>
-<p>
-The reader shifted himself slightly in his scooped niche and turned over
-to another page. He was just the average kid private, but to me he was as
-typical as type can be. I figured him as a somewhat primitive, highly
-elemental creature, adaptable and simple-minded; appallingly green yet at
-this present trade, capable though of becoming amazingly competent at it
-if given experience and a chance; temperamentally gaited to do heroic
-things without any of the theatricalism of planned heroics—in short
-and in fine, the incarnated youthful spirit of the youthful land which
-bore him.
-</p>
-<p>
-I came upon him with his cigarette and his favourite daily and his
-mud-boltered feet at the tail end of a trip along the front line of a
-segment of a sector held by our troops, and before I made his acquaintance
-sundry things befel. I had been in trenches before, but they were German
-trenches along the Aisne in the fall of the first year of this war
-business, and these trenches of our own people were quite different from
-those of 1914. French minds had devised them, with their queer twists, and
-windings, which seem so crazy and yet are so sanely ordained; and French
-hands had dug them out of the chalky soil and shored them up with timbers,
-but now Americans had taken them over and, in common with all things that
-Americans take over, they had become as much and as thoroughly American as
-though they had been Subway diggings in New York City, which indeed they
-rather resembled; or excavations for the foundations of the new Carnegie
-Library in Gallipolis. 'Tis a way our folks have. It may be a good way or
-a bad way—since I came over here I think the French neither
-understand it nor care deeply for it—but all the same it is our way.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the beginning we quit a wrecked town that was a regimental
-headquarters. Its present population was all military, French and
-American. The villagers who had once lived there were gone to the last one
-of them, and had been gone for years probably. But more than by the
-shattered stone walls, or by the breached and empty church with its spire
-shorn away, or by the tiled roofs which were roofs no longer but sieves
-and colanders, its altered character was set forth and proved by the
-absence of any manure heaps against the house fronts. In this part of the
-world communal prosperity is measured, I think, by the size and richness
-of the manure heap. It is kept alongside the homes and daily it is turned
-over with spades and tormented with pitchforks, against the time when it
-is carried forth to be spread upon the tiny farm a mile or so away. The
-rank ammoniacal smell of the precious fertilizer which keeps the land rich
-is the surest information to the nose of the approaching traveller that
-thrifty folk abide in the hamlet he is about entering.
-</p>
-<p>
-But this town smelled only of dust and decay and the peculiar odour of
-rough-cast plastering which has been churned by wheels and hoofs and feet
-into a fine white silt like powdered pumice, coating everything and
-everybody in sight when the weather is dry, and when the weather is wet
-turning into a slick and slimy paste underfoot.
-</p>
-<p>
-We came out of a colonel's billet in a narrowshouldered old two-story
-house, my companion and I; and crossing the little square we passed
-through what once upon a time had been the front wall of the principal
-building in the place. The front wall still stood and the doorway was
-unscarred, but both were like parts of stage settings, for beyond them was
-nothing at all save nothingness—messed-about heaps of crumbled
-masonry and broken shards of tiling. From the inner side one might look
-through the doorway, as though it had been a frame for a picture, and see
-a fine scape beyond of marshland and winding road and mounting hills with
-pine trees growing in isolated groups like the dumpings in a gentleman's
-park.
-</p>
-<p>
-In what had been the garden behind the principal house the colonel's
-automobile was waiting. We climbed into it and rode for upward of a mile
-along a seamed and rutted highway that wound up and over the abbreviated
-mountain of which we held one side and the Germans the other. For the
-preceding three days there had been a faint smell of spring in the air;
-now there was a taste of it. One might say that spring no longer was
-coming but had actually come. The rushes which grew in low places were
-showing green near their roots and the switchy limbs of the pollard
-willows bore successions of tiny green buds along their lengths. Also many
-birds were about. There were flocks of big corbie crows in their prim
-notarial black. Piebald French magpies were flickering along ahead of us,
-always in pairs, and numbers of a small starlinglike bird, very much like
-our field lark in look and habit, whose throat is yellowish and tawny
-without and lined with pure gold within, were singing their mating songs.
-Bursts of amorous pipings came from every side, and as the male birds
-mounted in the air their breast feathers shone in the clear soft afternoon
-sunshine like patches of burnished copper.
-</p>
-<p>
-Undoubtedly spring was at hand—the spring which elsewhere, in the
-more favoured parts of this planet, meant reawakening life and fecundity,
-but which here meant only opportunity for renewed offensives and for more
-massacres, more suffering, more wastings of life and wealth and of all the
-manifold gifts of Nature. The constant sound of guns on ahead of us
-somewhere made one think of a half-dormant giant grunting as he roused.
-Indeed it was what it seemed—War emerging from his hibernation and
-waking up to kill again. But little more than a year before it had been
-their war; now it was our war too, and the realisation of this difference
-invested the whole thing for us with a deeper meaning. No longer were we
-onlookers but part proprietors in the grimmest, ghastliest proceeding that
-ever was since conscious time began.
-</p>
-<p>
-We whizzed along the road for the better part of a mile, part of the time
-through dips, the contour of which kept us hidden from spying eyes in the
-hostile observation pits across the ridge to the eastward, and part of the
-time upon the backbone of this Vosges foothill. These latter places were
-shielded on their dangerous side by screens of marsh grasses woven in huge
-sheets ten feet high and swinging between tall poles set at six-yard
-intervals. There were rips and tears in these rude valances to show where
-chance shots from German guns had registered during the preceding few days
-of desultory artillery fire.
-</p>
-<p>
-On the way we passed one full company of French infantry coming out of the
-front line for rest, and one contingent of our own soldiers. The Frenchmen
-were hampered, as French foot soldiers on the move always are, by enormous
-burdens draped upon them, back, flank and front; and under the dirt and
-dust their faces wore weary drawn lines. Laden like sumpter mules, they
-went by us at the heavy plodding gait of their kind, which is so different
-from the swaggering, swinging route step of the Yankee, and so different
-from the brisk clip at which the Britisher travels, even in heavy-marching
-order, but which all the same eats up the furlongs mighty fast.
-</p>
-<p>
-The Americans were grouped on a little green breast of sod. At the peak of
-the small rounded elevation was a smaller terrace like a nipple, and from
-this rose one of those stone shrines so common in this corner of Europe—a
-stone base with a rusted iron cross bearing a figure of the Christ above
-it. There were a dozen or more of our boys lying or squatted here resting.
-</p>
-<p>
-We came to a battalion headquarters, which seemed rather a high-sounding
-name for a collection of thatched dugouts under a bank. Here leaving the
-car we were turned over to a young intelligence officer, who agreed to
-pilot us through certain front-line defences, which our people only two
-days before had taken over from the French. But before we started each of
-us put on his iron helmet, which, next only to the derby hat of commerce,
-is the homeliest and the most uncomfortable design ever fashioned for wear
-in connection with the human head; and each one of us hung upon his
-breast, like a palmer's packet, his gas mask, inclosed in its square
-canvas case.
-</p>
-<p>
-Single file then the three of us proceeded along a footpath that was dry
-where the sun had reached it and slimy with mud where it had lain in
-shadow, until we passed under an arbour of withered boughs and found
-ourselves in the mouth of the communication trench. It was wide enough in
-some places for two men to pass each other by scrouging, and in other
-places so narrow that a full-sized man bearing his accoutrements could
-barely wriggle his way through. Its sides were formed sometimes of shored
-planking set on end, but more often of withes cunningly wattled together.
-It is wonderful what a smooth fabric a French peasant can make with no
-material save bundles of pliant twigs and no tools save his two hands.
-Countless miles of trenches are lined with this osier work. Some of it has
-been there for years, but except where a shell strikes it stays put.
-</p>
-<p>
-In depth the trench ranged from eight feet to less than six. In the deeper
-places we marched at ease, but in the shallow ones we went forward at a
-crouch, for if we had stood erect here our heads would have made fair
-targets for the enemy, who nowhere was more than a mile distant, and who
-generally was very much closer. Sometimes we trod on “duck boards” as the
-Americans call them, or “bath mats” in the Britisher's vernacular, laid
-end to end. A duck board is fabricated by putting down two scantlings
-parallel and eighteen inches apart and effecting a permanent union between
-them by means of many cross strips of wood securely nailed on, with narrow
-spaces between the strips so that the foothold is securer upon these
-corrugations than it would be on an uninterrupted expanse. It somewhat
-resembles the runway by which ducks advance from their duck pond up a
-steep bank; hence one of its names. It looks rather less the other thing
-for which it is named.
-</p>
-<p>
-The duck board makes the going easier in miry places but it is a
-treacherous friend. Where it is not firmly imbedded fore and aft in the
-mud the far end of it has an unpleasant habit, when you tread with all
-your weight on the near end, of rising up and grievously smiting you as
-you pitch forward on your face. Likewise when you are in a hurry it dearly
-loves to teeter and slip and slosh round. However, to date no substitute
-for it has been found. Probably enough duck boards are in use on all the
-Fronts, in trenches and out of them, to make a board walk clear across our
-own continent. Beyond Ypres, where the British and Belgians are, I saw
-miles and miles of them the other day.
-</p>
-<p>
-Here in Eastern France we sometimes footed it along these duck boards, but
-more often we dragged our feet in mud—sticky, clinging, affectionate
-yellowish-grey mud—which came up to the latchets of our boots and
-made each rod of progress a succession of violent struggles. It was
-through this muck, along the narrow twistywise passage, that food and
-munitions must be carried up to the front lines and the wounded must be
-carried back. Traversing it, men, as we saw, speedily became mired to the
-hair roots, and wearied beyond description. Now then, magnify and multiply
-by ten the conditions as we found them on this day after nearly a week of
-fair weather and you begin to have a faint and shadowy conception of
-trench conditions in the height of the rainy season in midwinter, when
-strong men grow so tired that they drop down and drown in the semiliquid
-streams.
-</p>
-<p>
-The duck board is hard on human shins and human patience but it saves life
-and it saves time, which in war very frequently is more valuable than
-lives. It was the duck board, as much as the rifle and the big gun, which
-enabled the Canadians to win at Passchendaele last November. With its aid
-they laid a wooden pathway to victory across one of the most hideous
-loblollies in the flooded quagmires of Flanders. Somebody will yet write a
-tribute to the duck board, which now gets only curses and abuse.
-</p>
-<p>
-We had come almost to the cross trench, meeting few soldiers on the way,
-when a sudden commotion overhead made us squat low and crane our necks.
-Almost above us a boche aëroplane was circling about droning like all the
-bees in the world. As we looked the antiaircraft guns, concealed all about
-us, began firing at it. Downy dainty pompons of smoke burst out in the
-heavens below it and above it and all about it.
-</p>
-<p>
-As it fled back, seemingly uninjured, out of the danger zone I was
-reminded of the last time before this when I had seen such a sight from
-just such a vantage place. But then the scene had been the plateau before
-Laon in the fall of 1914, and then the sky spy had been a Frenchman and
-then the guns which chased him away had been German guns and for companion
-I had a German Staff-officer.
-</p>
-<p>
-We went on, and round the next turn encountered half a dozen youngsters in
-khaki, faced with mud stripings, who barely had paused in whatever they
-were doing to watch the brief aerial bombardment. New as they were to this
-game they already were accustomed to the sight of air fighting. Half a
-dozen times a day or oftener merely by turning their faces upward they
-might see the hostile raider being harried back to its hangar by defending
-cannon or by French planes or by both at once. Later that same day we were
-to see a German plane stricken in its flight by a well-placed shot from an
-American battery. We saw how on the instant, like a duck shot on the wing,
-it changed from a living, sentient, perfectly controlled mechanism into a
-dishevelled, wounded thing, and how it went swirling in crazy disorganised
-spirals down inside its own lines.
-</p>
-<p>
-For the trip through the cross trenches which marked the forward angle of
-our defences we were joined by a second chaperon in the person of an
-infantry captain—a man of German birth and German name, born in
-Cologne and brought to America as a child, who at the age of forty-three
-had given up a paying business and left a family to volunteer for this
-business, and who in all respects was just as good an American as you or
-I, reader, can ever hope to be. It was his company that held the trenches
-for the time, and he volunteered to let us see what they were doing.
-</p>
-<p>
-The physical things he showed us are by now old stories to Americans.
-Reading descriptions of them would be stale business for people at home
-who read magazines—the little dirt burrows roofed with withes and
-leaves, where machine guns' crews squatted behind guns whose muzzles aimed
-out across the debatable territory; the observation posts, where the lads
-on duty grumbled at the narrow range of vision provided by the periscopes
-and much preferred to risk their lives peeping over the parapets; the tiny
-rifle pits, each harbouring a couple of youngsters; the gun steps, or
-scarps, on which men squatted to do sniper work and to try for hostile
-snipers across the way; the niches in the trench sides, where hand
-grenades—French and British models—lay in handy reach in case
-of a surprise attack; the stacks of rifle and machine-gun cartridges in
-their appointed places all along the inner sides of the low dirt parapets;
-the burrows, like the overgrown nests of bank martins, into which tired
-men might crawl to steal a bit of rest; the panels of thickly meshed
-barbed wire on light but strong metal frames so disposed that they might
-with instantaneous dispatch be thrust into place to block the way of
-invading raiders following along behind retreating defenders; the wire
-snares for the foes' feet, which might be dropped in the narrow footway
-after the retiring force had passed; and all the rest of the paraphernalia
-of trench warfare which the last three years and a half have produced.
-</p>
-<p>
-Anyhow it was not these things that interested us; rather was it the
-bearing of our men, accustoming themselves to new duties in new
-surroundings; facing greater responsibilities than any of them perhaps had
-ever faced before in his days, amid an environment fraught with acute
-personal peril. And studying them I was prouder than ever of the land that
-bore them and sundry millions of others like unto them.
-</p>
-<p>
-We halted at a spot where the trench was broken in somewhat and where the
-fresh new clods upon the dirt shelf halfway up it were all stained a
-strange, poisonous green colour. The afternoon before a shell had dropped
-there, killing one American and wounding four others. It was the fumes of
-the explosive which had corroded the earth to make it bear so curious a
-tint. This company then had had its first fatality under fire; its men had
-undergone the shock of seeing one of their comrades converted into a
-mangled fragment of a man, but they bore themselves as though they had
-been veterans.
-</p>
-<p>
-In but one thing did they betray themselves as green hands, and this was
-in a common desire to expose themselves unnecessarily. As we went along
-their captain was constantly chiding them for poking their tin-hatted
-heads over the top, in the hope of spying out the German sharpshooters who
-continually shot in their direction from the coverts of a pine thicket,
-when they might have seen just as well through cunningly devised peepholes
-in the rifle pits.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I know you aren't afraid,” he said to two especially daring youngsters,
-“but the man who gets himself killed in this war without a reason for it
-is not a hero; he's just a plain damned fool, remember that.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Passing the spot where the soft damp loam was harried and the crumbs of it
-all dyed that diabolical greenish hue, I thought of a tale I had heard
-only the day before from a young Englishman who, having won his captaincy
-by two years of hard service, had then promptly secured a tranfer to the
-flying corps, where, as he innocently put it, “there was a chance o'
-having a bit of real fun,” and who now wore the single wing of an observer
-upon the left breast of his tunic. I had asked him what was the most
-dramatic thing he personally had witnessed in this war, thinking to hear
-some tales of air craftsmanship. He considered for a moment with his brow
-puckered in a conscientious effort to remember, and then he said:
-</p>
-<p>
-“I think perhaps 'twas something that happened last spring, just before I
-got out of the infantry into this bally outfit. My company had been in the
-trenches two days and nights, and had been rather knocked about. Really
-the place we were in was quite a bit exposed, you know, and after we had
-had rather an unhappy time of it we got orders to pull out. Just as the
-order reached us along came a whiz-bang and burst. It killed one of my
-chaps dead, and half a minute later another shell dropped in the same
-place and covered him under tons and tons of earth, all except his right
-hand, which stuck out of the dirt. Quite a decent sort he was too—a
-good fighter and cheerful and all that sort of thing; very well liked, he
-was. There was no time to dig him out even if we had been able to carry
-his body away with us; we had to leave him right there. So as the first
-man passed by where he was buried he bent over and took the dead hand in
-his hand and shook it and said 'Goodbye, old one!' like that. All the men
-followed the example. Each one of us, officers included, shook the dead
-hand and said good-bye to the dead man; and this was the last we ever saw
-of him, or of that rotten old trench, either.”
- </p>
-<p>
-As nonchalantly as though he had been a paid postman going through a quiet
-street a volunteer mail distributor came along putting letters, papers and
-small mail parcels from the States into soiled eager hands. Each man,
-taking over what was given him, would promptly hunker down in some
-convenient cranny to read the news from home; news which was months old
-already. I saw one, a broad-faced, pale-haired youth, reading a Slavic
-paper; and another, a corporal, reading one that was printed in Italian.
-The other papers I noted were all printed in English.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was from a begrimed and bespattered youngster who had got a paper
-printed in English that I heard the news about Ty Cobb; and when you
-appraised the character of the boy and his comrades a mud-lined hole in
-the ground in Eastern France, where a machine gun stammered round the
-corner and the snipers sniped away to the right of him and the left of
-him, seemed a perfectly natural place for the discussion of great tidings
-in baseball. If he had undertaken to discourse upon war or Germans I
-should have felt disappointed in him, because on his part it would not
-have been natural; and if he was anything at all he was natural.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the end of perhaps a mile of windings about in torturous going we,
-following after our guides, turned into a shallower side trench which
-debouched off the main workings. Going almost upon all fours for about
-sixty or seventy yards we found ourselves in a blind ending. Here was a
-tiny ambuscade roofed over with sod and camouflaged on its one side with
-dead herbage, wherein two soldiers crouched. By a husky whisper floating
-back to us over the shoulder of the captain we learned that this was the
-most advanced of our listening posts. Having told us this he extended an
-invitation, which I accepted; and as he flattened back against the earth
-making himself small I wriggled past him and crawled into place to join
-its two silent occupants.
-</p>
-<p>
-One of them nudging me in the side raised a finger and aimed it through a
-tiny peephole in the screening of dead bough and grasses. I looked where
-he pointed and this was what I saw:
-</p>
-<p>
-At the level of my eyes the earth ran away at a gentle slope for a bit and
-then just as it reached a thicket of scrub pines, possibly two hundred
-feet away, rose sharply. Directly in front of me was our own tangle of
-rusted barbed wire. On beyond it, perhaps a hundred and sixty feet
-distant, where the rise began, was a second line of wire, and that was
-German wire, as I guessed without being told. In between, the soil was all
-harrowed and upturned into great cusps as though many swine had been
-rooting there for mast. A few straggly bushes still adhered to the sides
-of the shell holes, and the patches of grass upon the tortured sward
-displayed a greenish tinge where the saps of spring were beginning to rise
-from the roots.
-</p>
-<p>
-Not far away and almost directly in front of me one of those
-yellow-breasted starling birds was trying his song with considerable
-success.
-</p>
-<p>
-“How far away are they?” I inquired in the softest possible of whispers of
-the nearer-most of the hole's tenants.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Right there in those little trees,” he answered. “I ain't never been able
-to see any of them—they're purty smart about keepin' themselves out
-of sight—but there's times, 'specially toward night, when we kin
-hear 'em plain enough talking amongst themselves and movin' round over
-there. It's quiet as a graveyard now, but for a while this mornin' one of
-their sharpshooters got busy right over there in front of where you're
-lookin' now.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Involuntarily I drew my head down into my shoulders. The youth alongside
-laughed a noiseless laugh.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Oh, you needn't worry,” he said in my ear; “there ain't a chancet for him
-to see us; we're too well hid. At that, I think he must've suspected that
-this here lump of dirt was a shelter for our folks because twicet this
-mornin' he took a shot this way. One of his bullets lodged somewhere in
-the sods over your head but the other one hit that bush there. See where
-it cut the little twig off.”
- </p>
-<p>
-I peered where he indicated and made out a ragged stump almost within
-arm's reach of me, where a willow sprout had been shorn away. The sap was
-oozing from the top like blood from a fresh wound. My instructor went on:
-</p>
-<p>
-“But after the second shot he quit. One of our fellers back behind us a
-piece took a crack at him and either he got him or else the Heinie found
-things gettin' too warm for him and pulled his freight back into them deep
-woods further up the hill. So it's been nice and quiet ever since.”
- </p>
-<p>
-The captain wormed into the burrow, filling it until it would hold no
-more.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Is this your first close-up peep at No Man's Land?” he inquired in as
-small a voice as his vocal cords could make.
-</p>
-<p>
-Before I could answer the private put in:
-</p>
-<p>
-“It might a-been No Man's Land oncet, cap'n, but frum now on it's goin' to
-be all Amurikin clear out to them furtherest wires yonder.”
- </p>
-<p>
-So that was how and when I found the title for this chapter. Everything
-considered I think it makes a very good title, too. I only wish I had the
-power to put as much of the manifest spirit of our soldiers into what I
-have here written as is compassed in the caption I have borrowed.
-</p>
-<p>
-What happened thereafter was largely personal so far as it related to my
-companion and me, but highly interesting from our viewpoint. We had
-emerged from the front-line trench on our way back. In order to avoid a
-particularly nasty bit of footing in the nearermost end of the
-communication work we climbed out of the trench and took a short cut
-across a stretch of long-abandoned meadowland. We thought we were well out
-of sight of the Germans, who at that point were probably half a mile away.
-</p>
-<p>
-A cup of land formed a natural shield from any eyes except eyes in an
-aëroplane—so we thought—and besides there were no aëroplanes
-about. Once over the edge of the trench and down into the depression we
-felt quite safe; anyway the firing that was going on seemed very far away.
-We slowed up our gait. From dragging our feet through the mire we were
-dripping wet with sweat, so I hauled off my coat. This necessitated a
-readjustment of belt and gasmask straps. Accordingly all three of us—the
-young intelligence officer, my comrade and I—took advantage of the
-halt to smoke. The two others lit cigarettes but I preferred something
-stronger.
-</p>
-<p>
-I was trying to light a practical cigar with a property match—which
-is a very common performance on the part of my countrymen in this part of
-the world—when a noise like the end of everything—a nasty,
-whiplike crash—sounded at the right of us, and simultaneously a
-German shell struck within a hundred feet of us, right on the rim of the
-little hollow in which we had stopped, throwing a yellow geyser of earth
-away up into the air and peppering our feet and legs with bits of gravel.
-</p>
-<p>
-So then we came on away from there. I chucked away my box of matches,
-which were French and therefore futile, and I must have mislaid my cigar,
-which was American and therefore priceless, for I have never seen it
-since. Anyway I had for the time lost the desire for tobacco. There are
-times when one cares to smoke and times when one does not care to smoke.
-As we scuttled for the shelter of the trench four more shells fell in
-rapid succession and burst within a short distance of where the first one
-had gone off, and each time we felt the earth shake under our feet and out
-of the tails of our eyes saw the soil rising in a column to spread out
-mushroom fashion and descend in pattering showers.
-</p>
-<p>
-So, using the trench as an avenue, we continued to go away from there; and
-as we went guns continued to bay behind us. An hour later, back at
-battalion headquarters, we learned that the enemy dropped seventy shells—five-inch
-shells—in the area that we had traversed. But unless one of them
-destroyed the cigar I left behind me it was all clear waste of powder and
-shrapnel, as I am pleased to be able to report.
-</p>
-<p>
-That night just after dusk forty-five of our boys, with twice as many
-Frenchmen, went over the top at the very point we had visited, and next
-morning, true enough, and for quite a while after that, No Man's Land was
-“All Amurikin clear out to them furtherest wires.”
- </p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER III. HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE surroundings were as French as French could be, but the supper tasted
-of home. We sat at table, two of us being correspondents and the rest of
-us staff officers of a regiment of the Rainbow Division; and the orderlies
-brought us Hamburger steak richly perfumed with onion, and good hot soda
-biscuit, and canned tomatoes cooked with cracker crumbs and New Orleans
-molasses, and coffee, and fried potatoes; and to end up with there were
-genuine old-fashioned doughnuts—“fried holes,” the Far Westerners
-call them.
-</p>
-<p>
-The mingled aromas of these rose like familiar incense from strange
-altars, for the room wherein all of us, stout and willing trenchermen, sat
-and supped was the chief room of what once upon a time, before the war
-came along and cracked down upon the land, had been some prosperous
-burgher's home on the main street of a drowsy village cuddled up in a
-sweet and fertile valley under the shoulders of the Vosges Mountains.
-</p>
-<p>
-From a niche in the corner a plaster saint, finished off in glaring
-Easter-egg colours, regarded us with one of his painted eyes, the other
-being gone. The stove had been carried away, either by the owner when he
-fled, away back in 1914, or by the invading Hun before he retreated to his
-present lines a few miles distant; but a segment of forgotten stovepipe
-protruded like a waterspout gone dry, from its hole above the mantelpiece.
-On the plastered wall of battered, broken blue cast, behind the seat where
-the colonel ruled the board, hung a family portrait of an elderly
-gentleman with placid features but fierce and indomitable whiskers. The
-picture was skewed at such an angle the whiskers appeared to be growing
-out into space sidewise. Generations of feet had worn grooves in the broad
-boards of the floor, which these times was never free of mud stains, no
-matter how often the orderlies might rid up the place. So far and so much
-the setting was French.
-</p>
-<p>
-But stained trench coats of American workmanship dangled from pegs set in
-the plastering, each limply suggestive in its bulges and its curves of the
-shape of the man who wore it through most of his waking hours. The
-mantelshelf was burdened with gas masks and saucepan hats of pressed
-steel. A small trestle that was shoved up under one of the two grimed
-front windows bore a litter of American newspapers and American magazines.
-As for the doughnuts, they were very crisp and spicy, as good Yankee
-doughnuts should be. I had finished my second one and was reaching for my
-third one when, without warning, a very creditable and realistic imitation
-of the crack o' doom transpired. Seemingly from within fifty yards of the
-building which sheltered us Gabriel's trumpet sounded forth in an
-ear-cracking, earth-racking,' hair-lifting blare calculated to raise goose
-flesh on iron statuary. The dishes danced upon the table; the coffee
-slopped out of the cups; and the stovepipe over the chimneypiece slobbered
-down a trickle of ancient soot that was, with age, turned brown and caky.
-Beneath our feet we could feel the old house rocking.
-</p>
-<p>
-Through the valley and across to the foothill beyond, the obscenity of
-sound went ringing and screeching, vilely profaning the calm that had
-descended upon the country with the going-down of the sun.
-</p>
-<p>
-As its last blasphemous echoes came back to us in a diminishing cadence
-one of our hosts, a major, leaned forward with a cheerful smile on his
-face and remarked as he glanced at the dial of his wrist watch: “There she
-goes—right on the minute!”
- </p>
-<p>
-Sure enough, there she went. Right and left, before us and behind us, from
-the north of us and from the south of us, and from the east and the west
-of us, big guns and small ones, field pieces, howitzers, mortars and light
-batteries, both French and American but mostly French, joined in, like the
-wind, the wood and the brass of an orchestra obeying the baton of the
-leader. The coffee could not stay in the dancing cups at all. The
-venerable house was beset by an ague which ran up its shaken sides from
-the foundation stones to the roof rafters, where the loosened tiles
-clicked together like chattering teeth, and back down again to the
-foundations.
-</p>
-<p>
-The thing which we had travelled upward of a hundred miles in one of Uncle
-Sam's automobiles to witness and afterward to write about was starting.
-The overture was on; the show would follow. And it was high time we
-claimed our reserved seats in the front row.
-</p>
-<p>
-I use the word “show” advisedly, because in the glossary of phrases born
-out of this war anything in the nature of a thrust or a blow delivered
-against the enemy is a show. A great offensive on a wide front is a big
-show; a raid by night into hostile territory is a little show; a feint by
-infantry, undertaken with intent to deceive the other side at a given
-point while the real attack is being launched at a second given point, and
-accompanied by much vain banging of gunpowder and much squibbing-off of
-rockets and flares and star shells is a “Chinese show”—to quote the
-cant or trade name; I think the English first used the term, but our
-fellows have been borrowing ever since the first contingent came over last
-year.
-</p>
-<p>
-This particular show to which we had been bidden as special guests was to
-be a foray by night over the tops preceded by artillery preparation. Now
-such things as these happen every night or every day somewhere on the
-Western Front; times are when they happen in different sectors at the rate
-of half a dozen within the twenty-four hours. In the dispatches each one
-means a line or so of type; in the field it means a few prisoners, a few
-fresh graves, a few yards of trench work blasted away, a few brier patches
-of barbed wire to be repatched; in the minds of most readers of the daily
-papers it means nothing but the tiresome reiteration of a phrase that is
-tiresome and staled. But to us it meant something. It was our boys who
-were going in and going over; and our guns were to be partners in the
-prior enterprise of blazing the way for them.
-</p>
-<p>
-No matter how much one may read of the cost of war operations in dollars
-and in time and in labour, I am sure one does not really begin to
-appreciate the staggering expenditure of all three that is requisite to
-accomplish even the smallest of aggressive movements until one has
-opportunity, as we now had, to see with one's own eyes what necessarily
-had to be done by way of preliminary.
-</p>
-<p>
-Take for instance the present case. The raid in hand was to be no great
-shakes of a raid. Forty-five Americans and three times their number of
-Frenchmen would participate in it. Within twenty minutes, if all went well—and
-it did—they would have returned from their excursion into hostile
-territory, with prisoners perhaps, or else with notes and letters taken
-from the bodies of dead enemies which might serve to give the Intelligence
-Department a correct appraisal of the character and numbers of the troops
-opposing us in this sector. In the vast general scheme of the campaign now
-about renewing itself it would be no more than an inconsequential pin
-prick in the foe's side—a thing to be done and mentioned briefly in
-the dispatches, and then forgotten.
-</p>
-<p>
-But mark you how great and how costly the artillery accompaniment must be.
-More than a hundred guns, ranging in calibre from a nine-inch bore down to
-a three-inch bore, would join in the preparation and in the barrage fire.
-More than ten thousand rounds of ammunition would be fired, this not
-taking into account the supplies for the forty-three machine guns and for
-the batteries of trench mortars which were to cooperate. Many a great
-battle of our Civil War had been fought out with the expenditure on both
-sides of one-tenth or one-twentieth part the gross weight of metal that
-would be directed at the boche beyond the ridge. The cost for munitions
-alone, excluding every other item of a score of items, might run to a
-quarter of a million dollars; might conceivably run considerably beyond
-that figure. And the toil performed and the pains taken beforehand to
-insure success—wowie!
-</p>
-<p>
-For days past the French had been bringing up pieces and massing them here
-for the purpose of this one little stab at the Hun's armoured flank. As we
-travelled hither we had seen the motor-drawn guns labouring along the wide
-high roads; had seen the ammunition trucks crawling forward in long lines;
-had seen at every tiny village behind the Front the gun crews resting in
-bad streets named for good saints. By the same token, on the following
-day, which was Sunday, we were to see the same thing repeated, except that
-then the procession would be headed the other way—going back to
-repeat the same wearisome proceeding elsewhere.
-</p>
-<p>
-Days, too, had been spent in planning the raid; in mapping out and
-plotting out the especial spot chosen for attack; in coordinating all the
-arms of the service which would be employed; in planning signals for the
-show and drilling its actors. And now all this preparation requisite and
-essential to the carrying out of the undertaking had been completed; and
-all the guns had been planted in their appointed places and craftily
-hidden; and all the shells had been brought up—thousands of tons of
-them—and properly bestowed; and the little handful of men who were
-to have a direct hand in the performance of the main job, for which all
-the jest would be purely preliminary, had been chosen and sent forward to
-ordained stations, there to await the word. And so up we got from table
-and went out across a threshold, which quaked like a living thing as we
-crossed it, to see the spectacular side of the show.
-</p>
-<p>
-Inside the house the air had been churned up and down by the detonations.
-Outside literally it was being rent into fine bits. One had the feeling
-that the atmosphere was all shredded up fine, so that instead of lying in
-layers upon the earth it floated in tom and dishevelled strips; one had
-the feeling that the upper ether must be full of holes and voids and the
-rushing together of whipped and eddying wind currents. This may sound
-incoherent, but I find in my vocabulary no better terninology to convey a
-sense of the impression that possessed me as I stepped forth into the
-open.
-</p>
-<p>
-We had known in advance that there were guns in great number disposed
-about the surrounding terrain. Walking about under military guidance in
-the afternoon we had seen sundry batteries ensconced under banks, in
-thickets and behind low natural parapets where the earth ridged up; and
-had noted how cunningly they had been concealed from aëroplanes scouting
-above and from the range of field glasses in the German workings on
-beyond.
-</p>
-<p>
-But we had no notion until then that there were so many guns near by or
-that some of them were so dose to the village where we had stopped to eat.
-We must almost have stepped on some of them without once suspecting their
-presence. The ability of the French so well to hide a group of five big
-pieces, each with a carriage as large as a two-ton truck and each with a
-snout projecting two or three yards beyond it, and with a limber
-projecting out behind it, shows what advances the gentle arts of ambuscade
-and camouflage have made since this war began. Seen upon the open road a
-big cannon painted as it is from muzzle to breach with splotchings of
-yellows and browns and ochres seems, for its size, the most conspicuous
-thing in the world. But once bedded down in its nest, with its gullet
-resting upon the ring back of earth that has been thrown up for it, and a
-miracle of protective colouration instantaneously is achieved. Its whole
-fabric seems to melt into and become a part of the soil and the withered
-herbage and the dirt-coloured sandbags which encompass it abaft, alongside
-and before. It is the difference between a mottled snake crawling across a
-brick sidewalk and the same snake coiled and motionless amid dried leaves
-and boulders in the woods. Nature always has protected her wild creatures
-thus; it took the greatest of wars for mankind to learn a lesson that is
-as old as creation is.
-</p>
-<p>
-Standing there in the square of the wrecked village we could sense that in
-all manner of previously unsuspected coverts within the immediate vicinity
-guns were at work—guns which ranged from the French seventy-fives to
-big nine-inch howitzers. As yet twilight had not sufficiently advanced for
-us to see the flash of the firing, and of course' nowadays there is mighty
-little smoke to mark the single discharge of a single gun; but we could
-tell what went on by the testimony of a most vast tumult.
-</p>
-<p>
-We were ringed about by detonations; by jars which impacted against the
-earth like blows of a mighty sledge on a yet mightier smithy; by demoniac
-screechings which tore the tortured welkin into still finer bits; by
-fierce clangings of metal; by thudding echoes floating back from where the
-charges had burst; by the more distant voices of certain German guns
-replying to our 'salvo as our gunners dedicated the dusk to all this
-unloosened hellishness and offered up to the evening star their sulphurous
-benedictions. It was Thor, Vulcan, Tubal Cain, Bertha Krupp and the
-Bethlehem Steel Works all going at full blast together; it was a thousand
-Walpurgis Nights rolled into one, with Dante's Inferno out-Infernoed on
-the side. And yet by a curious phenomenon we who stood there with this
-hand-made, man-made demonism unleashed and prevalent about us could hear
-plainly enough what a man five feet away who spoke in a fairly loud voice
-might be saying.
-</p>
-<p>
-“You think this is brisk, eh?” asked our friend, the major. “Well, it's
-only the starter; the ball has just opened.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He tucked his thumbs into the girth harnessings of his Sam Browne and
-spraddled his legs wide apart.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Wait,” he promised; “just wait until all the guns get into action in
-twenty minutes or half an hour from now. Then you'll really hear
-something. Take it from me, you will. And in the meantime we might go
-along with these fellows yonder, don't you think so?”
- </p>
-<p>
-Through the deepening twilight we followed a party of French infantrymen
-up a gentle slope to the crest of a little hill behind the shattered town,
-where the cemetery was. In this light the horizon-blue uniforms took on
-the colour tone of the uniforms worn by the Confederates in our Civil War,
-but their painted metal helmets looked like polished turtle shells. They
-slouched along, as the poilu loves to slouch along when not fully
-accoutred, their hands in their breeches pockets and their halfreefed
-putties flapping upon their shanks. We trailed them, and some of our
-soldiers, officers and enlisted men, trailed us.
-</p>
-<p>
-Half an hour later I was to witness a curious and yet, I think, a
-characteristic thing. Most of the American privates grew tired of the
-spectacle that was spread out before them and slipped away to their
-billets to go to bed—this, too, in spite of the fact that scarcely
-one of them had ever witnessed cannonading on so extensive a scale or
-indeed on any scale before. Nevertheless, the bombardment speedily became
-to them a commonplace and rather tedious affair.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Come on, you fellows,” I heard one tall stripling say to a couple of his
-mates. “Me for the hay. If the Heinies would only slam a few big ones back
-in this direction there might be some fun, but as it is, there's nothin'
-doin' round here for me.”
- </p>
-<p>
-But the Frenchmen, all intent and alert, stayed until the show ended. Yet
-a thing like this was an old story to them, for they were veterans at the
-game whereat our men still were the greenest of novices. I suppose there
-was an element of theatricalism in the sight and in the fury of sound
-which appealed to the Gallic sense of drama that was in them. Be the cause
-what it was, the thing occurred just as I am telling it.
-</p>
-<p>
-We mounted the hill and rounded the stone wall of the burying ground. The
-village in the hollow below had been quite battered out of its original
-contours, but strangely enough the cemetery, through the years of
-intermittent fighting and shell firing that had waged about it, was almost
-unscathed. It was a populous place, the cemetery was, as we had noted
-earlier in the day. Originally it had contained only the graves of the
-inhabitants, but now these were outnumbered twenty to one by mounds
-covering French soldiers who had fallen in action or had died of wounds or
-natural causes in this immediate vicinity. The same is true of hundreds of
-other graveyards in this country; is probably true of most of France's
-cemeteries.
-</p>
-<p>
-I have seen places where the wooden crosses made hedge rows, line behind
-line for miles on a stretch, and so thick-set were the markers that,
-viewed from the distance, they conveyed the impression of paling fences.
-</p>
-<p>
-France has become a land of these wooden crosses and these six-foot
-mounds. It is part of the toll—a small part of the toll—she
-has paid for the right of freedom and in the fight to make this world once
-more a fit place for decent beings to abide in.
-</p>
-<p>
-On the knoll behind the cemetery we came to a halt. Night was creeping
-down from the foothills, making the earth black where before it had faded
-to a common grey; but overhead the sky still showed in the last faint
-traces of the afterglow, with the blue of an unflawed turquoise against
-which the stars stood out like crumbs of pure gold. The broken and
-snaggled roof lines of the clumped houses of the town were vanishing; the
-mountain beyond seemed creeping up nearer and nearer to us. More plainly
-than before we could mark out the positions of the nearmost batteries for
-now at each discharge of a gun a darting jab of red flame shot forth.
-Where all the guns of a battery were being served and fired in rapid
-succession the blazes ran together like hemstitches, making one think of a
-fiery needle plying in and out of a breadth of black velvet. Farther away
-the flashes were blurred into broader and paler flares so that on three
-sides of us the horizon was circled with constantly rising, constantly
-dying glows like heat lightning on a summer night.
-</p>
-<p>
-The points where shells fell and burst were marked for us with red
-geysers, which uprose straight instead of slanting out at a slightly
-upward tilted angle, as did the spoutings from the mouths of the guns. As
-nearly as we might tell the enemy fire was comparatively light. Only we
-could see upon the far flanks of the little mountain in front of us a
-distant flickering illumination, which showed that his counter batteries
-were busy. On every hand white signal rockets rose frequently, and
-occasionally flares hung burning halfway up the walls of the sky.
-</p>
-<p>
-Of a sudden all hell broke loose directly behind us. I use the term
-without desire to be profane and in a conscientious effort to give some
-notion of a physical occurrence. At any rate it seemed to us that all hell
-let loose. What really happened was that two guns of a French battery of
-nine-inch heavies, from their post directly in our rear and not more than
-an eighth of a mile distant from us, had fired simultaneously, and their
-shells had travelled directly over our heads, aiming for an unseen
-objective miles forward.
-</p>
-<p>
-Then, and every time thereafter that one of the nine-inchers spewed its
-bellyful of high explosive forth, the sound of it dominated and
-overmastered all other sounds. First there was the crash—a crash so
-great that our inadequate tongue yields neither adjective nor noun fitly
-to comprehend it, the trouble being that the language has not kept step
-with the developments of artillery in this war. Our dictionary is going to
-need an overhauling when this job of licking Germany is finished.
-</p>
-<p>
-Well, first off there was the crash that was like the great granddaddy of
-all the crashes in the world, making one feel that its vocal force must
-have folded up the heavens like a scroll. Then, as a part of it, would
-come the note of the projectile rushing through the ripped ether above us,
-and this might be likened to a long freight train travelling on an
-invisible aërial right of way at a speed a thousand times greater than any
-freight train ever has or ever will attain. Then there would float back a
-tremendous banshee wail, and finally, just before the roar of the shell's
-explosion, a whine as though a lost puppy of the size of ten elephants
-were wandering through the skies, complaining in a homesick key as it went—the
-whole transaction taking place in an infinitesimal part of the time which
-has here been required for me to set down my own auricular impressions of
-it, and incidentally creating an infinitely more vivid impression than
-possible can be suggested by my lame and inadequate metaphors.
-</p>
-<p>
-Comparatively, there was a hush in the clamour and clangour succeeding
-this happening—not that the firing in any way abated, for rather was
-it augmented now—but only that it seemed so to me; and in the lull,
-away off on our left, I could for the first time make out the whirring,
-ripping sound of a machine gun or a row of machine guns.
-</p>
-<p>
-The major consulted the luminous face of his wrist watch.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I thought so,” he vouchsafed. “It's time for the barrage to start and for
-the boys to go over the top. Now we ought to see some real fireworks
-that'll make what has gone on up to now seem puny and trifling and no
-account.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Which, all things considered, was an underestimation of what ensued hard
-on the heels of his announcement. Personally I shall not attempt to
-describe it; the size of the task leaves me abashed and mortified. But if
-the reader in the goodness of his heart and abundance of his patience will
-re-read what already I have written in an effort to tell him what I had
-heard and had seen and had felt, and will multiply it by five, adding,
-say, fifty per cent of the sum total for good measure, he will have, I
-trust, a measure of comprehension of the ensemble. But he must do the
-work; my founts are dry.
-</p>
-<p>
-Furthermore, he must imagine the augmented hullabaloo—which should
-be pronounced hella-baloo—going on for twenty-five minutes at such
-rate that no longer might one distinguish separate reports—save only
-when the devil's fast freight aforementioned passed over our heads—but
-all were mingled and fused into one composite, continuous, screeching,
-whining, wailing, splitting chorus.
-</p>
-<p>
-Twenty-five minutes thus, and then a green rocket went up from near the
-forward post of command where those directly in charge of the operation
-watched, and before it had descended in a spatter of emerald sparks which
-dimmed out and died as they neared the earth the firing from our batteries
-began to lessen in volume and in rapidity. Within those twenty-five
-minutes the real object of the operation had taken place. Either the
-raiders had gone over the top or they had been driven back in; either they
-had accomplished their design of penetrating the enemy's second line of
-defences or they had failed. In any event the movement, all carefully
-timed and all mathematically worked out, was as good as over. To learn
-better at firsthand exactly what results had been obtained we returned to
-the village and passed through it and picking our way in the inky darkness
-went along a road toward the post of command.
-</p>
-<p>
-The road, though, was deserted, and after a bit we retraced the way back
-to the building where we had supped and made ourselves comfortable in the
-room of the colonel of the regiment holding the line at this particular
-point. An orderly brought us the last of the doughnuts to nibble on, and
-upon the ancient hearthstone we took turns at cracking French hazelnuts
-with a hammer while at intervals the building jarred to the thumpings of
-such guns as continued to fire.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nearly an hour passed, and then in came the colonel and with him a French
-liaison officer, both of them with tired lines about their mouths. They
-had been under a strain, as their looks showed, and they flung themselves
-down on adjacent cots with little sighs of relief and told us the news. In
-a way the raid had been a success; in another way it had not. All the men
-who went over the top had returned again after penetrating up to the
-German secondary trenches. Several of the Frenchmen had been wounded, not
-seriously. None of the Americans had anything worse than barbed-wire cuts
-and bruised shins to show for his experience.
-</p>
-<p>
-Returning, the raiders reported that our fire had completely obliterated
-the hostile front trench and had ripped its protecting wire jungle into
-broken ends. Likewise it had completely abolished such boches as had
-tarried too long in the enemy's forward pits and posts. Of these
-unfortunates only dismembered trunks had been found, with one exception.
-This exception was a body lying in a shell hole, and not badly mangled but
-completely nude. By some freak the shell which killed the German had
-stripped him stark naked down to his boots.
-</p>
-<p>
-But the total of prisoners taken was zero, and likewise it was cipher.
-Forewarned by the preparatory volleying of the big guns playing on his
-counter batteries, the wily German, following his recently adopted custom,
-had, before the barrage began, drawn in his defending forces from the
-first line, leaving behind only a few, who fell victims to the first few
-direct hits scored by our side; and therein the raid had failed.
-</p>
-<p>
-In the next sector on our right, where a daylight raid had been undertaken
-two hours before ours got under way, the raiders had suffered a few
-casualties but had brought back two wounded captives; and in another
-sector, on our left, yet a third raid had produced four prisoners. I saw
-the unhappy four the following day on their way back to a laager under
-guard. One of them was a middle-aged, sickly-looking man, and the
-remaining three were weedy, half-grown, bewildered boys; very different
-looking, all of them, from the prime sinewy material which formed the
-great armies I had seen pouring through Belgium in the late summer of
-1914.
-</p>
-<p>
-All four of them, moreover, were wall-eyed with apprehension, and flinchy
-and altogether most miserable looking. Not even a night of fair treatment
-and a decent breakfast had served to cure them of a delusion that
-Americans would take prisoners alive only for the pleasure of putting them
-to death at leisure afterward. What struck me as even more significant of
-the change in the personnel of the Kaiser's present army—conceding
-that these specimens might be accepted as average samples of the mass—was
-that not one of them wore an Iron Cross on his blouse. From personal
-observations in the first year of the war I had made up my mind that the
-decoration of the Iron Cross in the German Army was like vaccination in
-our own country, being, as one might say, compulsory. Here, though, was
-evidence either that the War Lord was running out of metal or that his
-system had slipped a cog. Likewise it was to develop later that the
-prisoners I saw wore paper underclothing.
-</p>
-<p>
-But I am getting ahead of my story. The colonel, lying back on his cot
-with his head on a canvas pillow and his muddied legs crossed, said at the
-conclusion of his account:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, we failed to bag any live game, but anyhow our boys behaved
-splendidly. They went over the top cheering and they came back in singing.
-You'd never have guessed they were green hands at this game or that this
-was the first time they had ever crossed No Man's Land.”
- </p>
-<p>
-To the truth of a part of what he said I could testify personally, for
-late that afternoon I had seen the squad marching forward to the spot
-where they were to line up for the sally later. They had been like
-schoolboys on a lark. If any one of them was afraid he refused to betray
-it; if any one of them was nervous at the prospect before him he hid his
-nervousness splendidly well. Only, from them as they passed us, they
-radiated a great pride in having been chosen for the job, and a great
-confidence in its outcome, and a great joy that to them thus early in
-their soldiering had come the coveted chance to show the stuff that was in
-them. And while they passed, our friend the major, standing alongside
-watching them go by, had said with all the fervency of a man uttering a
-prayer:
-</p>
-<p>
-“By Jove, aren't they bully! No officer could ask for finer men than that
-for his outfit. But they're leaving oodles of disappointment behind them
-at that.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“How's that?” I asked.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I'll tell you how,” he said: “Yesterday when the scheme for this thing
-was completed we were told that forty-five men out of our regiment were to
-be allowed to take part in tonight's doings. That meant fifteen men out of
-each battalion. So yesterday evening at parade I broke the glad tidings to
-my battalion and called for volunteers, first warning the men as a matter
-of routine that the work would be highly dangerous and no man need feel
-called upon to offer himself. Do you want to know how many men out of that
-battalion volunteered? Every single solitary last dog-goned one of them,
-that's all! They came at me like one man. So to save as much heartburning
-as possible I left the choice of fifteen out of nearly a thousand to the
-top sergeants of the companies. And in all your life you never saw fifteen
-fellows so tickled as the fifteen who were selected, and you never saw
-nine hundred and odd so downhearted as the lot who failed to get on the
-list.
-</p>
-<p>
-“That wasn't all of it, either,” he went on. ''Naturally there were some
-men who had been off on detail of one sort or another and hadn't been at
-parade. When they came last night and found out what had happened in their
-absence—well, they simply raised merry blue hell, that's all. They
-figured somehow they'd been cheated. As a result I may say that my rest
-was somewhat broken. Every few minutes, all night long, some boy would
-break into my room, and in the doorway salute and say, in a broken-hearted
-way: 'Now look here, major, this ain't square. I got as much right to go
-over the top as any feller in this regiment has, and just because I
-happened to be away this evenin' here I am chiselled out of my chance to
-go along. Can't you please, sir, ask the adjutant or somebody to let me in
-on this?'
-</p>
-<p>
-“That substantially was what every one of them said. And when I turned
-them down some of 'em went away crying like babies.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He glanced away across the blue hill. “I guess maybe I did a little crying
-myself.”
- </p>
-<p>
-I thought about what the major had said and what the colonel had said and
-what I myself had seen after I had climbed some shaky stairs to be bedded
-down for the night on a pallet of blankets upon the floor of a room where
-several tired-out officers already snored away, oblivious of the
-reverberations of the shelling from our guns and from the enemy's, which
-went on until nearly daybreak.
-</p>
-<p>
-In the morning I got insight into another phase of the enlisted Yank's
-understanding. We came downstairs to breakfast—to a Sunday morning
-breakfast. For the moment a Sabbath calm hung over the wrecked town and
-over the country roundabout; all was as peaceful as a Quaker meeting. Red,
-the colonel's orderly, stood in the doorway picking his teeth. Red is six
-feet two inches tall, and disproportionately narrow. He is a member of a
-regiment recruited in the Middle West, but he hails from the Panhandle of
-Texas, and betrays the fact every time he opens his mouth. At the moment
-of our approach he was addressing an unseen and presumably a sympathetic
-listener beyond the threshold:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Me, I'm, plum' outdone with these here French people,” I heard him drawl.
-“Here we've been camped amongst 'em fer goin' on four months and they
-ain't learnt English yet. You'd think they'd want to know how to talk to
-people in a reg'lar honest-to-God language—but no, seein' seemin'ly
-not a-tall. I'd be ashamed to be so ignorunt and show it. Course oncet in
-a while you do run acrost one of 'em that's picked up a word here and
-there; but that's about all.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Now frinstance you take that nice-lookin' little woman with the black
-eyes and the shiny teeth that runs that there little store in this here
-last town we stayed a spell in before we come on up here. I never could
-remember the name of that there town—it was so outlandish soundin'—but
-you remember the woman, don't you? Well, there's a case in p'int. She was
-bright enough lookin' but she was like all the rest—it seemed like
-she jest couldn't or jest wouldn't pick up enough reg'lar words to help
-her git around. Ef I went in her place and asked her fer sardines she'd
-know what I meant right off and hand 'em over, but ef I wanted some cheese
-she didn't have no idea whut I was talkin' about. Don't it jest beat all!”
- </p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER IV. ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E left Paris at an early hour of March 25, which was the morning of the
-fourth day of perhaps the greatest battle in the history of this or any
-other war, and of the third day of the bombardment of Paris by the
-long-range steel monster which already had become famous as the latest
-creation of the Essen workshops.
-</p>
-<p>
-There were three of us and no more—Raymond Carroll, Martin Green and
-I. To each of the three the present excursion was in the nature of a
-reunion. For more than six years we held down adjoining desks in the city
-room of a New York evening newspaper. Since we parted, Carroll and I to
-take other berths and Green to bide where he was, this had been the first
-time we had met on the same assignment.
-</p>
-<p>
-I counted myself lucky to be in their company, for two better newspaper
-men never walked in shoe leather. Carroll among reporters is what Elihu
-Root is among corporation lawyers. There are plenty of men in the
-journalistic craft who know why certain facts pertinent to the proper
-telling of a tale in print may not be secured; he, better than almost any
-man I ever ran across in this business, knows how these facts may be had,
-regardless of intervening obstacles. In his own peculiar way, which is a
-calm, quiet, detached way, Green is just as effective. When it comes to
-figuring where unshirted Hades is going to break loose next and getting
-first upon the spot he is a regular Nathan Bedford Forrest. His North
-American sanity, which is his by birth, and his South of Ireland wit,
-which is his by inheritance, give strength and savour to what he writes
-once he has assembled the details in that card index of a mind of his.
-</p>
-<p>
-We left Paris, heading north by east in the direction whence came in dim
-reverberations the never-ending sound of the big guns firing in the
-biggest of all big engagements. Through the courtesy of friends who are
-members of the French Government we bore special passes admitting us to
-the Soissons area. Later we were to learn that we were the only
-individuals not actively concerned in military operations who at
-particularly momentous time had been thus favoured, all other such passes
-having been cancelled; and by the same lucky token we are, I believe, the
-only three newspaper men of any nationality whatsoever who may lay claim
-to having witnessed at first-hand any part of the close-up fighting in the
-most critical period and at one of the most critical spots along the crest
-of the culminating German offensive of this present year of grace and
-gunpowder, 1918.
-</p>
-<p>
-Indeed, so far as the available information goes, I think we were the only
-practitioners of the writing trade who actually got to the actual Front in
-the first week of the push. Whether any of our calling have got there in
-the succeeding weeks, I doubt. These times the war correspondent, so
-called, does not often enjoy such opportunities. After the army has dug
-itself in is another matter; then, within limitations, he may go pretty
-much where he pleases to go. But when the shove is on he stays behind,
-safely at the rear with the rest of the camp followers, and compiles his
-dispatches from the official communications, fatting them out with details
-out of the accounts of eyewitnesses and occasionally of participants.
-</p>
-<p>
-For the three of us, though, was to be vouchsafed the chance which comes
-but once in the modern newspaperman's life, and sometimes not then. By a
-combination of rare luck and yet more rare luck we not only got to the
-Front but we got clear through it. As I write these lines I figuratively
-pat myself on the back at the thought of having seen what I never expected
-to see when I landed on French soil less than a month ago. At the same
-time it behooves me to disclaim for the members of our party that any
-special sagacity on our part figured in the transaction. Good fortune came
-flitting along and perched on our shoulders, that's all.
-</p>
-<p>
-If our passes had shared the common fate of those other passes in being
-annulled, if any one charged with authority had seen fit to halt us, if
-any one of a half dozen other things had or had not befallen us—we
-never should have gone where we did go.
-</p>
-<p>
-Except that we three were the only passengers on the train who did hot
-wear French uniforms, and except that the train ran very slowly, nothing
-happened on the journey to distinguish it from any other wartime journey
-on a railroad where always there is to be heard the distant booming of the
-guns mingling with the clickety-clank of the car wheels, and where always
-the sight of all manner of military activities is to be viewed from the
-car windows.
-</p>
-<p>
-In a deep cut we halted. When we had waited there for perhaps twenty
-minutes a kindly officer volunteered the information in broken English
-that the station at Soissons was being shelled and that if we intended to
-enter the town it behooved us to walk in. So we took up our traps and
-walked.
-</p>
-<p>
-Through old trenches where long-abandoned German defences once had run in
-zigzags across the flanks of the hills we laboured up to the top, to find
-the road along the crest cumbered and in places almost clogged with
-marching troops on their way back to rest billets, and with civilians
-fleeing southward from Soissons or from evacuated villages within the zone
-of active hostilities. We seemingly were the only civilians going in; all
-those we met on that three-mile hike were coming out. To me the spectacle
-was strikingly and pathetically reminiscent of Belgium in mid-August of
-1914—old men trudging stolidly ahead with loads upon their bent
-backs; women, young and old, dragging carts or pushing shabby baby
-carriages that were piled high with their meagre belongings; grave-faced
-children trotting along at their elders' skirts; wearied soldiers falling
-out of the line to add to their already heavy burdens as they relieved
-some half-exhausted member of the exodus of an unwieldy pack. Over the
-lamentable procession hung a fog of gritty chalk particles that had been
-winnowed up by the plodding feet. Viewed through the cloaking dust the
-figures drifted past us like the unreal shapes of a dream. I saw one
-middle-aged sergeant, his whiskers powdered white and his face above the
-whiskers masked in a sweaty white paste like a circus clown's, who, for
-all that he was in heavy marching order, had a grimed mite of a baby
-snuggled up to the breast of his stained tunic, with its little feet
-dangling in the crisscross of his leather gear and its bobbing head on his
-shoulder. He carried the baby with one hand and with the other hand he
-dragged his rifle; and he looked down smiling at the bedraggled little
-mother who travelled alongside him shoving before her a barrow in which
-another child sat on a pillion of bed clothes.
-</p>
-<p>
-I saw two infantrymen slide down a steep embankment to give aid to an old
-woman who struggled with a bundle almost as large as herself, and then,
-having accomplished the job, running with their accoutrements slapping
-against their legs to catch up with their company. I saw scores of sights
-such as this, and I did not hear one word of complaint uttered, nor did I
-look into one face that expressed aught save courage and patience. And
-seeing these things, multiplied over and over again, I said to myself
-then, as I say to myself now, that I do not believe Almighty God in His
-infinite mercy, designed that such people as these should ever be
-conquered.
-</p>
-<p>
-Only one person spoke to us. A captain, grinning at us as he plodded by at
-the head of his company, said with a rearward flirt of his thumb over his
-shoulders: “No good, no good! much boom-boom!”
- </p>
-<p>
-Much boom-boom was emphatically right. Over the clustered tops of the city
-the hostile shells were cracking, and frequently to our ears there came
-along with the smashing notes of the explosives the clatter of tumbling
-walls and smashing tiles. Drawing nearer we divined that the cannonading
-was directed mainly at the railroad station, so skirting to the left of
-the district under fire we made our way through almost deserted side
-streets to the centre of the town.
-</p>
-<p>
-Hardly a house or a wall along our route but bore marks of punishment.
-Some were fallen into heaps of ruins; some merely were pecked-and scarred,
-with corners bitten out of the walls and chimneys broken into fantastic
-designs. Indeed we found out later that only one structure in Soissons had
-escaped damage in the shelling which went on intermittently in the earlier
-years of the war and which the Germans, with a sort of futile, savage
-fury, had lately renewed from their lines twelve miles away to the
-northward.
-</p>
-<p>
-This sort of thing appears to be a favourite trick with our enemies. A
-village or a town may be abandoned by all save a few helpless citizens,
-living, God only knows how, in the litter of their homes; the place may be
-of absolutely no military value to the Allies; possibly no troop? are
-quartered there and no batteries or wagon trains are stationed within
-miles of it; but all the same when the frenzy of their madness descends
-upon them the Huns will level and loose their batteries upon the spot and
-make of the hideous hash which it has become a still more hideous hash. It
-is as though in sheer wantonness they kicked a corpse.
-</p>
-<p>
-We skirted the sides of the wonderful old cathedral, which since 1914 has
-stood for the most part in ruins, with its beautiful stained windows—which
-never can be replaced, since the art of making such glass as this has been
-lost—lying underfoot in broken splinters of many colours. Just off
-the main square we secured quarters in a typical French inn of the second
-class, a small place with a grandiloquent name. Mainly the shops and
-houses in the neighbourhood were closed and their owners gone away, but
-the proprietor of the little hotel and his family and his help still
-abided under their belaboured roof. Plainly their motto was “Business as
-Usual.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Their only guests were a few American Red Cross workers, both men and
-women; a few American officers of the transport service; and a few French
-officers. But that day at noon, so we were told, the whole staff turned in
-and cooked and served, free of charge, a plentiful hot meal to two hundred
-refugees, who staggered in afoot from districts now overrun by the
-advancing Germans. These poor folk were all departed when we arrived;
-French camions and American motor trucks had carried them away to
-temporary asylums beyond the limit of the shelling, and for us there was
-abundant accommodation—seats at the common dining table, chambers on
-the second floor, and standing room in the deep wine cellars down below if
-we cared to occupy them when the bombardment became heavier or when
-hostile aëoplanes circled over to drop down bombs. The members of the
-ménage, as we learned later, slept regularly down among the casks and wine
-bottles, because nearly every night for a week past enemy airmen had been
-circling about doing what hurt they could to the town and its remaining
-inhabitants.
-</p>
-<p>
-From the single shattered window of the bedroom to which I was assigned I
-could look out and down across the narrow roadway upon a smaller house
-which had caught the full force of a big shell. The thing must have
-happened within a day or two, for the splintered woodwork and caved-in
-masonry had not yet begun to wear the weathered, crumbly look that comes
-to débris after a few weeks of exposure in this rainy climate, and there
-was a fresh powdering of dust upon the mass of wreckage before the door.
-Curiously enough the explosive which had reduced the interior of the
-building to a jumble of ruination left most of the roof rafters intact,
-and to them still adhered tiles in a sort of ordered pattern, with gaps
-between the red squares, so that the effect might be likened to a kind of
-lacy architectural lingerie.
-</p>
-<p>
-Any moment similar destruction might be visited upon the hotel opposite,
-but, despite the constant and the imminent danger, the big-bodied,
-broad-faced proprietor and his trim small wife were seemingly as tranquil
-as though they lived where the roar of guns was never heard. The man who
-looks upon the French as an excitable race has only to come here now, to
-this land, to learn his error and to realise that beneath their surface
-emotionalism they have splendid reserve forces of resolution and
-fortitude. By my way of reasoning, it is with these people not merely a
-case of getting used to a thing—it is something more than that,
-something deeper than that. It is a pure, clean courage cast in the matrix
-of a patient heroism which buoys them up to carry on the ordinary
-undertakings of life amid conditions abnormal and disordered to the point
-of being almost intolerable when endured for weeks and months and years on
-end.
-</p>
-<p>
-Having established ourselves, we set about the task of securing the
-coveted transportation up to the vicinity of the planes of contact between
-the Allies and the enemy. The shelling had somewhat abated since our
-arrival, so we made so bold as to trudge across town to the railroad
-station, encountering but few persons on the way. In the immediate
-neighbourhood of the station the evidences of recent strafing were thicker
-even than in other parts of the old city. Where an hour before a shell had
-blown two loitering French soldiers to bits, a shattered stone gateway and
-a wide hole in the ground and a great smearing of moist red stains upon
-the upheaved earth spelled the tale of what had happened plainly enough. A
-withered old man was doing his feeble best to patch together the split and
-sundered planks of the gate; the bodies, what was left of them, had been
-removed by a burial squad.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the railroad terminal there was pressing need for everything that went
-on wheels, and of a certainty there was nothing in the nature of a
-self-propelled vehicle available for the use of three men who came bearing
-no order that would give them the right to commandeer government
-equipment. So our next hope, and seemingly our last one, lay in the
-French. At a certain place we found numbers of kindly and sympathetic
-officers with staff markings on their collars, who professed to be glad to
-see us, at the same time expressing a polite surprise that a trio of
-unannounced American newspaper men should have dropped in upon them,
-seemingly out of the shell-harassed skies above.
-</p>
-<p>
-But when we suggested we would appreciate the loan of an automobile and
-with the automobile an officer to escort us up to the battle front they
-lifted eyebrows, shoulder blades and arms toward heaven, all in the same
-movement signifying chagrin and regret. What we asked was quite
-impossible, considering the exigencies and emergencies of the moment. The
-most formidable engagement that ever had been or perhaps ever would be was
-in midblast. Every available bit of motive power was required; every
-available man was required.
-</p>
-<p>
-Besides, the roads, as doubtless we knew, were blocked with reënforcements
-hurrying up to support the hard-pressed British north of the Aisne. Any
-other time, yes. But now—no, and once again, no. We were quite free
-to stay on in Soissons if we cared for a place temporarily so unhealthy.
-We might have free access to any of the maps or records on hand. We might
-visit any of the hospitals or rest camps in the immediate vicinity. But
-further than that our new friends could not go. They added, by way of
-advice, that our best course would be to return straightway to Paris and
-come again when the crisis had passed and the sector to the north had
-somewhat quieted.
-</p>
-<p>
-There being nothing else to do, we took a walk to think things over. The
-walk ended at our stopping place just as the German guns north of us
-beyond the river resumed their afternoon serenade. More refugees were
-coming into the town in a long dismal procession from Chauny and Ham and
-Noyon and scores of smaller places. Some of them had been on the road for
-twenty-four hours, some for as long as forty-eight hours. They had rested
-a while in wrecked and empty villages during the preceding night, then had
-risen at daybreak and resumed their heart-breaking pilgrimage, with no
-goal in sight and no destination in view, and only knowing that what might
-lie ahead of them could never by any chance be half so bad as what the
-Germans were creating behind them.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the beginning of this war, in Belgium and again in Northern France, not
-many miles from where we then were, I had seen on the edges of the vortex
-of battle and destruction many such eddying, aimless streams of human
-flotsam and jetsam of war; but to one who knew the facts of their case the
-present plight of these poor wanderers had a special appeal. For this was
-the second time they had been dispossessed from their small holdings, the
-second time they had fled in huddles like frightened sheep before the path
-of the grey invader, the second time all that they owned had been swept
-away and smashed up and wasted beyond repairing.
-</p>
-<p>
-Driven out of their homes in the first four weeks of the war, back in
-1914, at the time of the great onslaught against Paris, they had been kept
-away from these homes for more than two years, all during the German
-occupation of their territory. After the great victory of the Allies over
-von Hindenburg in the Aisne country they had returned, tramping back in
-pairs and groups to the sites of their homesteads, filled with the
-tenacious impulse of the French peasant and the French villager to reroot
-himself in his native soil; had returned to find that before the Germans
-retreated beyond the Chemin des Dames they, in accordance with orders from
-the all-highest command, sawed down the fruit trees in the little orchards
-and burned the houses that had sheltered them, and tore up the vines and
-shovelled dung into the drinking wells.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nevertheless, the repatriates had set to, working like beavers to restore
-a sorry semblance of the simple frugal communal system under which they
-and their fathers before them had existed since the Napoleonic wars. And
-now, just when they were beginning to patch together the broken ends of
-their lives, when with aid from the French Government and aid from
-Americans they had cleared and planted their devastated fields and had
-built new habitations for themselves out of the ruins of the old ones,
-again the enemy had come down upon them like a ravening wolf on a fold;
-and again they had run away, deserting all they could not carry in their
-arms or upon their backs, and knowing full well in the light of past
-experience that the Germans either would garner the work of their hands or
-else would make an utter end of it.
-</p>
-<p>
-At a corner just above the hotel we came upon a mother and her family of
-nine. She was less than forty years old herself; her husband was a soldier
-at the Front. She wore wooden sabots on her feet, and upon her body a
-tattered, sleazy black frock. Her eldest child was fifteen years old, her
-youngest less than six months. For the ten of them to travel a distance of
-twelve miles had taken the better part of two days and two nights. The
-woman had contrived a sling of an old bed sheet, which passed over one of
-her shoulders and under the other; and in this hammock contrivance she had
-carried the youngest child against her bosom, with her bodice open at the
-breast so the baby might suckle while she pushed a crippled perambulator
-containing the two next youngest bairns. The rest of the brood had walked
-all the way. They were wearied beyond description; they were incredibly
-dirty and famishing for want of proper sustenance, but not a single one of
-the small wretches who was old enough to speak the word failed to murmur “<i>Merci,
-merci</i>,” when the neighbours brought them bowls of hot soup and gave
-them sups of warm milk and put big slices of bread smeared with jam into
-their dirty, clawlike little hands.
-</p>
-<p>
-Having wolfed down the food they squatted, all of them, against a house
-front to wait for the camion which would take them to a refuge in a Red
-Cross station a dozen miles away. They had to wait a good while, since all
-the available wagons were engaged in performing similar merciful offices
-for earlier arrivals. The children curled up in little heaps like kittens
-and went to sleep, but the mother sat on a stone doorstep with her babe
-against her bare flesh, over her heart, to keep it warm, and stared ahead
-of her with eyes which expressed nothing save a dumb, numbed resignation.
-</p>
-<p>
-An old priest in a black robe came along and he stopped, being minded, I
-think, to utter some message of comfort to this wife of a soldier of
-France, and in her way, I say, as valorous a soldier as her husband could
-be, did he wear twenty decorations for bravery. But either the priest
-could find no words to say or the words choked in his throat. Above her
-drooped head he made with his hand the sign of the cross in the air and
-went away. And as I stood looking on I did in my heart what any man with
-blood in his veins would have done had he been there in my stead—I
-consigned to the uttermost depths of perdition the soul of the Brute of
-Prussia whose diseased ambition brought to pass this thing and a million
-things like unto it.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER V. SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>AD we waited that night for Opportunity to knock at our door I am
-inclined to think we might be waiting yet. We went out and we set a trap
-for Opportunity, and we caught her. No matter how or whence, the chance we
-coveted for a lift to the battle came to us before the night was many
-hours old. But before the design assumed shape we were to meet as blithe a
-young Britisher as ever I have seen, in the person of one Captain Pepper,
-a red-cheeked Yorkshireman in his early twenties, a fit and proper type of
-the men England has sent out to officer her forces overseas.
-</p>
-<p>
-One of our Red Cross ambulances, while scouting out toward Noyon that
-afternoon, picked him up as he trudged up the road alone, with a fresh
-machine-gun wound through the palm of his right hand and his cap on the
-back of his head. His wound had been tied up at a casualty-dressing
-station and he had set out then to walk a distance of twenty-odd
-kilometres to Soissons, where he was told he might find a hospital to
-shelter him.
-</p>
-<p>
-He dined with us, along with the ambulance driver who brought him in; and
-afterward he insisted on sitting a while with us, though he had been
-fighting, day and night almost continuously since the beginning of the
-battle and plainly was far spent from fatigue and lack of sleep. So far as
-I might judge, though, he did not have a nerve in his body. Gesturing with
-his swathed hand he told us not what he himself had done—somehow he
-managed in his self-effacing way to steer away from the personal note in
-his recital—but mainly about the stupendous tragedy in which he had
-played his part. Considering him as he sat there on a broken sofa with his
-long legs outstretched before a wood fire, one could not doubt that it had
-been a creditable part.
-</p>
-<p>
-We gathered that in the second day of the fighting, as the English fell
-back before overwhelming odds but fighting for every inch, he became
-separated from his company. Next morning he found himself without a
-command in the heels of the orderly retreat and had offered himself for
-service to the first superior officer he met. Thereupon he was put in
-charge of a mixed detachment of two hundred men—gathered up anyhow
-and anywhere—and with his motley outfit had been told off to hold a
-strip of woods somewhere south of Chauny. Under him, he said, were
-stragglers cut off from half a dozen battered line regiments, and along
-with these, cooks, wagon drivers, engineers, officers' servants and
-stretcher bearers. In front of the squad, beyond the woods, was a strip of
-marsh, and this natural barrier gave them an advantage which, plus pluck,
-enabled them to beat off not one but several oncoming waves of Germans.
-</p>
-<p>
-“We had machine guns, luckily enough,” he said; “and, my word, but we gave
-the beggars a proper drubbing! We piled them up in heaps along the edges
-of that bally old bog. Everywhere along the Front—where we were and
-everywhere else, too, from what I can hear—they have outnumbered us
-four or five to one, but I'm quite sure we've killed or wounded ten of
-them for every man of ours that has been laid out since this show started
-four days ago.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, that's all, except that this morning about ten o'clock I was hit
-and had to quit and come away, because you see I wouldn't be much use with
-one hand out of commission and bleeding all over the shop—would I
-now? I'm sorry to have to leave the chaps—they were a sporting lot;
-but since I had to stop a bullet I'm glad I've got a nice clean cushy
-wound. I shall be glad to get a taste of Blighty too; I'm a bit fagged, as
-you might say.”
- </p>
-<p>
-His head nodded forward on his chest when he got this far, and his limbs
-relaxed.
-</p>
-<p>
-He protested, though, against being bundled off to bed, saying he was
-quite comfortable and that his hand scarcely pained him at all, but the
-man who had brought him took him away. As for Carroll and Green and me, we
-slept that night, what sleeping we did, with our clothes on us, ready to
-rise and hunt the wine cellar if anything of a violently unpleasant nature
-occurred over our heads. During the hours before daylight there was a
-spirited spell of banging and crashing somewhere in the town, and not so
-far away either, if one might judge by the volume of the tumult, which
-rattled the empty casement frame alongside my bed and made the ancient
-house to rock and creak; but when dawn came the gables above us were still
-intact and we were enjoying our beauty sleep in the calm which succeeded
-the gust of shelling or of bombing or whatever it was.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER VI. THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>MMEDIATELY after breakfast, in accordance with a plan already formulated,
-we quietly took possession of one of those small American-made cars, the
-existence of which has been responsible for the addition of an eighth joke
-to the original seven jokes in the world. We didn't know it then, but for
-us the real adventure was just starting. There were four of us in the
-flivver—the driver, a young American in uniform, whose duties were
-of such a nature that he travelled on a roving commission and need
-necessarily report to none concerning his daily movements; and for
-passengers, our own three selves. For warrant to fare abroad we had a
-small American flag painted on the glass wind shield, one extra tire, and
-an order authorising us to borrow gasoline—simply these and nothing
-more. Very unostentatiously we rode out of Soissons, steering a
-northwesterly course. We might not know exactly where we were going or
-when we should be back, but we were on our way.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the same time, be it here said, there was method of a sort in our
-scheme of things, for we were aiming, as closely as we might, at the point
-where approximately the main French command jointed on to the right wing
-of the British, we figuring that at the junction place, where the
-overlapping and intermingled areas of control met, and more especially in
-a confused period when one army was falling back and the other bringing up
-its reserves, we stood a better chance in our credential-less and
-unaccredited state of wriggling on up from the back lines to the Front
-than would elsewhere be possible.
-</p>
-<p>
-We reckoned the prospect after this fashion: If the French find us
-traversing the forbidden lands they may take it for granted that the
-British permitted us to pass. If we fall under the eyes of British
-guardians of the trail they are equally likely to assume that the French
-let us through. And so it turned out; which I claim is added proof that
-the standing luck of the American newspaper reporter on a difficult
-assignment is not to be discounted.
-</p>
-<p>
-In stock we had one trump card, and only one, and we played it many a time
-during that somewhat crowded day. All of us were in khaki with tin helmets
-upon our heads and gas masks swung over our shoulders. The heavy trench
-coats in which we were bundled prevented betrayal to the casual eye of the
-fact that none of us wore badges denoting rank, upon our collars or
-shoulder straps. Outfitted thus we might have been major generals or we
-might have been second lieutenants of the American Expeditionary Forces.
-Who, on a cursory scrutiny of us, was to say?
-</p>
-<p>
-So we decided among ourselves that ours must be a rôle suggestive of great
-personal importance and urgent business. Did any wayside sentinel, whether
-British or French, move out upon the crown of the road as though he meant
-to halt us, one of us, with an authoritative arm, would wave him clear of
-our path and we would go flitting imperiously by as though the
-officiousness of underlings roused in us only a passing annoyance. It
-proved a good trick. It may never work again in this war, but I bear
-witness that it has worked once.
-</p>
-<p>
-In the very first leg of this expedition good old Madame Bonneaventure
-stood our friend. The River Aisne skirts the city of Soissons. At the far
-side of the bridge, spanning the stream, which bridge we must cross, stood
-a French noncom, charged, as we knew, with the duty of examining the
-passes of those outbound. If we disregarded his summons to halt,
-complications of a painful nature would undoubtedly ensue. But as the car
-slowed up, all of us with our fingers figuratively crossed, he either
-recognised the driver as one who passed him often or was impressed by our
-bogusly impressive mien, or possibly accepted the painted flag on Tin
-Lizzie's weather-beaten countenance as warrant of our authenticity.
-</p>
-<p>
-As he waved to us to proceed and then came to a salute, we, returning the
-salute in due form, were uttering three silent but nonetheless vehement
-cheers. I think we also shook hands. We were past the first and by long
-side the most formidable barrier. The farther we proceeded toward the
-battle the greater would be our chances of proceeding, it being generally
-assumed that no one gets very deeply into the district of active
-hostilities unless he has a proper errand there and has proved it to the
-satisfaction of the highway warders behind.
-</p>
-<p>
-Through several villages that were reduced by shell fire to litter heaps
-and tenanted only by detachments of French soldiers we passed. Next we
-skirted up the sides of a steep hill and rounded the crest to where,
-spread out before our eyes, was a glorious panorama of the terrain below
-and beyond.
-</p>
-<p>
-We drew in our breaths. Each one of us had seen something of the panoply
-of warfare in the making, but nothing in my own experience since Belgium
-in 1914 had equalled this. All the world appeared to have put on cartridge
-belts and gone to war. As far as the eye could reach, away off yonder to
-where sky line and earth line met behind the dust screen, cavalry,
-artillery, infantry, supply trains, munition trains, and all imaginable
-branches of the portable machinery of an army were in sight and in motion.
-Their masses hid the earth with a shifting pattern as though a vast
-blue-grey carpet were magically weaving itself. Overhead, singly, in pairs
-and in formations, like flights of wild fowl, the scout planes, the
-observation planes and the battle planes went winging. They were like
-silver gulls escorting limitless schools of porpoise through placid
-waters.
-</p>
-<p>
-Usually there is a seemingly interminable confusion in the vision of a
-great force upon the forward go. To the lay eye it appears that the whole
-movement has got itself inextricably snarled. This line travels one
-course, that line goes in exactly the opposite direction, a third one is
-bisecting the first two at cross angles. But here one great compelling
-influence was sending all the units forward along a common current. The
-heavy vehicles held to the roads which threaded the plain; the infantry
-took short cuts across lots, as it were; the cavalry traversed the fields
-and penetrated the occasional thickets; the sky craft trod the alleys of
-the air—but they all headed toward the same unseen goal. There was
-no doubt about it—France was hurrying up a most splendid army to
-reenforce the hard-pressed defenders of French soil, where the Hun pushed
-against the line of the inward-bending and battered but yet unbroken
-British battalions.
-</p>
-<p>
-We coasted down off the heights into the plateau, and now as we came in
-among them we had opportunity for appraising the temper of those men
-hurrying on their forward march to the killing pits. Who says France is
-war wearied or that her sons are tired of fighting? No suggestion was
-there here of dumb oxen driven to slaughter. Why, these men were like
-bridegrooms bound for the marriage feast. They sang as they marched or as
-they rode. Usually what they sang was a snatch of some rollicking chanson,
-and through the dirt masks they grinned into our faces as we went
-slithering by.
-</p>
-<p>
-There were hails and friendly gestures for us. It might be a boy private
-with a sprig of early spring wild flowers jauntily stuck in his cap who
-waved at us. It might be a cook balancing himself on the tailboard of a
-travelling field kitchen who raised a sweaty visage from his steaming soup
-caldron and made friendly circles in the air with a dripping iron
-instrument that was too big for a spoon and too small for a spade; or it
-might be a gunner on a bouncing ammunition truck with enough of potential
-death and disaster bestowed under his sprawled legs to blow him and,
-incidentally, us into ten million smithereens if ever it went off.
-</p>
-<p>
-Kilometre after kilometre we skihooted through the press, and it was a
-comic thing to see how a plodding regiment would swing over or a battery
-would bounce and jolt off the fairway into the edges of the ditch at the
-insistent toot-toot of our penny whistle of a horn to let us by. It made
-one think of whales making room in a narrow tideway for an impudent black
-minnow to pass. And always there was the drone of the questing aëroplanes
-overhead and the thunderous roaring of the guns in front. We overtook one
-train of supply trucks with the markings of the U. S. A. and manned by
-dusty lads in the khaki fustian of Yankeeland—evidence that at least
-one arm of our service would have a hand in the epochal task confronting
-our allies. All the rest of it was French.
-</p>
-<p>
-For us there was no halt until we reached Blérencourt. Now this place was
-a place having a particular interest for us, since it was at Blérencourt
-that the organisation known as the American Fund for French Wounded, which
-is headed by Miss Anne Morgan and which has for its field personnel
-American women exclusively, had during the past nine months centred its
-principal activities.
-</p>
-<p>
-In the outskirts of the town, now evacuated of almost all its civilian
-residents, stand the massive stone gateways and the dried moat of the
-magnificent château of Blérencourt, which was destroyed by the peasants in
-the time of the Terror and never rebuilt. What remains constitutes one of
-the most picturesque physical reminders of the French Revolution that is
-to be found in the country to-day. We rode under the arched stone portals—and
-lo, it was almost as though we had come into the midst of a smart
-real-estate development somewhere on Long Island within easy communicating
-distance of New York City.
-</p>
-<p>
-French francs, provided by the state, and American dollars, donated by the
-folks back home, had been used under American supervision to construct a
-model colony upon the exact site of the ancient castle of some vanished
-noble family of the old régime. There was a model barracks, a model
-dormitory, a model schoolhouse, two model cottages and an office building
-that was a model among models—all built of planking, all glistening
-and smart with fresh paint, all with neat doorsteps in front of them and
-trim flower plots and vegetable gardens about them. There was a chicken
-house and a chicken run, dotted with the shapes of plump fowls. There was
-a storeroom piled high with clothing and food sent over from America to
-the A. F. F. W. for distribution among destitute natives of the devastated
-districts, of which this, until a year ago, had been the centre.
-</p>
-<p>
-These incongruously modern structures snuggled right up under the
-venerable walls of the battlements. Indeed several of the buildings were
-cunningly built into the ruins, so that on one side the composite edifice
-would show a withered stone face, with patches of furze growing in the
-chinks of the crumbled masonry like moles on the forehead of a withered
-crone, and on the other would present a view of a smart cottage with a
-varnished shingle roof and a painted front door which apparently had just
-arrived from some planing mill in the States. Underneath the floor was a
-cellar four hundred years old, but the curtains in the window had
-seemingly been cut and stitched only yesterday. Somehow, though, the
-blended effect was immensely effective. It made me think of
-Home-dale-on-the-Sound grafted upon a background of Louis the Grand; and
-for a fact that was exactly what it was.
-</p>
-<p>
-This creation, representing as it did nine months of hard work on the part
-of devoted American women, had been closed only the day before. It stayed
-in operation until it seemed probable that the German legions might
-penetrate this far south in their effort to ford the River Oise. The
-little pupils of the kindergarten had been sent away in trucks, the main
-dormitory had been turned into a temporary resting place for refugees, and
-the American ranges in the kitchen had done valiant service in the cooking
-of hot meals for exhausted women and children tramping in from the north
-and west. Before the managers and teachers left at dusk of the preceding
-evening two crippled French soldiers, specially detailed for work here by
-the government, had been assigned to place vessels of kerosene in each
-building, with instructions to fire the oil at the first signs of
-approaching Germans.
-</p>
-<p>
-The cans of inflammables were still in their places when we arrived and
-the maimed watchmen, one of them a one-armed man and the other a
-one-legged, had camped all night on the premises ready on warning to apply
-the torch and destroy this frontier outpost of American charity and
-American efficiency. But in the forenoon word was come that the enemy had
-been brought to bay seven miles away and that he might not break through
-the British-French line. He did break through, but that is another story.
-So Mrs. Dike, of New York, and Miss Blagden, of Philadelphia, two of Miss
-Morgan's assistants, had motored in from below, filled with thanksgiving
-that the patient work of their hands and their hearts would almost
-certainly be spared.
-</p>
-<p>
-While Mrs. Dike, with tears in her eyes, was telling us of the things that
-had been accomplished here and while the troopers poured in unceasing
-streams along the main road beyond the gateway, a handful of belated
-refugees crept in under the weathered armorial bearings on the keystonp of
-the archway, to be fed and cared for and then sent along in the first
-empty truck that came by going toward Soissons.
-</p>
-<p>
-In this group of newcomers was an elderly little man in a worn high hat
-and a long frock coat with facings of white dust upon its shiny seams, who
-looked as though he might be the mayor of some inconsequential village. He
-carried two bulging valises and a huge umbrella. With him was his wife,
-and she had in one hand a cage housing two frightened canaries and under
-the other arm a fat grey tabby cat which blinked its slitted eyes
-contentedly.
-</p>
-<p>
-The most pitiable figure of them all to my way of thinking was an old
-woman—yes, a very old woman—she must have been all of eighty.
-Alongside one of the buildings I came upon her sitting in a huddle of her
-most treasured possessions. She was bent forward, with her gnarled hands
-folded in the lap of her dress, which was silk and shiny, for naturally
-when she fled from her home she had put on her back the best that she
-owned. Under the cope of a queer little old black bonnet with faded purple
-cloth flowers upon it her scanty hair lay in thin neat folds, as white and
-as soft as silk floss. Her feet in stiff, new, black shoes showed beneath
-her broad skirts. Her face, caving in about the mouth where her teeth were
-gone and all crosshatched with wrinkles, was a sweet, kindly, most gentle
-old face—the kind of face that we like to think our dead-and-gone
-grandmothers must have had.
-</p>
-<p>
-She sat there ever so patiently in the soft sunlight, waiting for the
-truck which would carry her away to some strange place among stranger
-folk. When I drew near to her, wishing with all my heart that I knew
-enough of her tongue to express to her some of the thoughts I was
-thinking, she looked up at me and smiled a friendly little smile, and then
-raising her hands in a gesture of resignation dropped them again in her
-lap. But it was only with her lips that she smiled, for all the time her
-chin was quivering and her faded old blue eyes were brimming with a sorrow
-that was past telling in words.
-</p>
-<p>
-She still sat there as we got into our car and drove off toward the
-battle. Looking back, the last thing I saw before we rounded the corner of
-the wall was her small black shape vivid in the sunshine. And I told
-myself that if I were an artist seeking to put upon canvas an image that
-would typify and sum up the spirit of embattled France to-day I would not
-paint a picture of a wounded boy soldier; nor yet one of a winged angel
-form bearing a naked sword; nor yet one of the full-throated cock of
-France, crowing his proud defiance. I would paint a picture of that brave
-little old withered woman, with the lips that smiled and the chin that
-quivered the while she smiled.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER VII. AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HEN the last preceding chapter of mine ended I had reached a point in the
-narrative where our little party of four, travelling in our own little tin
-flivverette, were just leaving Blérincourt, being bound still farther west
-and aiming, if our abiding luck held out, to reach the front of the Front—which,
-I may add, we did.
-</p>
-<p>
-To be exact we were leaving not one Blérincourt but three. First,
-Blérincourt, the town, with its huddle of villagers' homes, housing at
-this moment only French troopers and exhausted refugees; second,
-Blérincourt, the castle, a mouldering relic of a great house, testifying
-by its massive empty walls and its tottering ruin of a gateway to the fury
-which laid hold on the peasants of these parts in the days of the Terror;
-and, third, Blérincourt, the model colony of model cottages, which for us
-held the most personal interest, since it was here the American women of
-the American Fund for French Wounded had during the previous nine months
-centred their activities relating to the repopulating of districts in the
-Aisne country, now for the second time evacuated and given over again to
-the savage malice of the boche.
-</p>
-<p>
-Behind us as we swung into the main highway lay this grouped composition
-of the wrecked château, the tiny old houses of weathered grey stone and
-the little frame domiciles, smart and glistening with fresh paint and
-fresh varnishing. Before us, within a space of time and distance to be
-spanned by not more than half an hour of steady riding, was somewhere the
-problematical doorway through which we hoped to pass into the forward
-lines of that battle which the historians of the future, I dare say, will
-call merely the Great Battle, knowing their readers require no added
-phraseology to distinguish it from the lesser engagements of this war—or
-in fact of any war.
-</p>
-<p>
-We did not ask our way of any whom we met, either of those going ahead of
-us or those coming back in counter streams. To begin with, we deemed it
-inexpedient to halt long enough to give to any person in authority a
-chance for questioning the validity of our present mission, since, as I
-already have explained, we carried no passes qualifying us to traverse
-this area; and besides there was no need to ask. The route was marked for
-us by signs and sounds without number, plainer than any mileposts could
-have been: By the columns of Frenchmen hurrying up to reenforce the
-decimated British who until now, at odds of one to five, had borne the
-buffets of the tremendous German onslaught; by the never-ending,
-never-slackening roar of the heavy guns; by the cloud of dust and powder,
-forming a wall against two sides of the horizon, which mounted upward to
-mingle its hazes with the hazes of the soft spring afternoon; by the thin
-trickling lines of light casualty cases, “walking wounded,” in the
-vernacular of the Medical Corps—meaning by that men who, having had
-first-aid bandages applied to their hurts at forward casualty stations,
-were tramping rearward to find accommodations for themselves at field
-hospitals miles away.
-</p>
-<p>
-At once we were in a maze of traffic to be likened to the conditions
-commonly prevalent on lower Fifth Avenue in the height of the
-Christmas-shopping season, but with two distinctions: Here on this
-chalk-white highroad the movement, nearly all of it, was in one direction;
-and instead of omnibuses, delivery vans, carriages and private
-automobiles, this vast caravansary was made up of soldiers afoot, soldiers
-mounted and soldiers riding; of batteries, horse drawn and motor drawn; of
-pontoon bridges in segments; of wagon trains, baggage trains, provision
-trains and munition trains; of field telephone, field telegraph and field
-wireless outfits upon wheels; of all the transportable impedimenta and all
-the myriad items of movable machinery pertaining to the largest army that
-has crossed a corner of France since the days of the first great invasion
-more than three and a half years before.
-</p>
-<p>
-There were ambulances past counting; there were big covered camions in
-numbers sufficient to fit out a thousand circuses; there were horses and
-donkeys and mules of all the known sizes and colours; there were so many
-human shapes in uniforms of horizon blue that the eye grew weary and the
-brain rebelled at the task of trying, even approximately, to compute
-estimates of the total strength of the man power here focussed.
-</p>
-<p>
-Through all this, weaving in and out, our impudent little black bug of a
-car scuttled along, with its puny horn honking a constant and insolent
-demand for clear passage. At a faster gait than anything in sight except
-the cruising aëroplanes above, we progressed upon our way, with none to
-halt us and none to turn us back. Where the dust hung especially thick at
-a crossroads set in the midst of the wide plain we almost struck three
-pedestrians who seemingly did not heed our hooted warning or take notice
-of it until we were right upon them. As they jumped nimbly for the ditch
-we could see that all these had staff markings at their throats, and that
-one, the eldest of the three, a stoutish gentleman with a short grizzled
-beard, wore three stars in a triangle upon his collar. Tin Lizzie had
-almost achieved the distinction for herself of having run down a major
-general of France.
-</p>
-<p>
-We did not stop, though, to offer apologies or explanations. With rare
-sagacity our driver threw her wide open and darted into the fog, to take
-temporary shelter behind a huge supply wagon, which vehicle we followed
-for a while after the fashion of a new-foaled colt trailing its dam.
-</p>
-<p>
-Proofs began to multiply that we were nearing the zone of live combat.
-Until now the only British soldiers we had seen were slightly wounded men
-bound afoot for the rear. All at once we found ourselves passing half a
-company of khaki-clad Britishers who travelled across a field over a
-course parallel to the one we were taking and who disappeared in a hazel
-copse beyond. Rifle firing could be heard somewhere on the far side of the
-thicket. At a barked command from an officer who clattered up on horseback
-a battery of those doughty little seventy-fives, which the French cherish
-so highly, and with such just cause, was leaving the road and taking
-station in a green meadow where the timid little wild flowers of a mild
-March showed purple and yellow in the rutted and trampled grass.
-</p>
-<p>
-With marvellous haste the thing was accomplished almost instantly. The
-first gun of the five squatted in the field with its nozzle slanting
-toward the northwest, and behind it its four companions stood, all with
-their short noses pointing at precisely the same angle, like bird dogs on
-a back stand. Suddenly they did what well-broken bird dogs never do—they
-barked, one after the other. Almost before the whining whistle of the
-shells had died away the gunners were moving their pieces to a point
-closer up behind a screen of poplars and sending a second yelping salvo of
-shots toward an unseen target.
-</p>
-<p>
-We became aware that the component units of the army were now quitting the
-roadway to take positions in the back lines. Indeed those back lines
-formed themselves while we watched. One battery after another swung off to
-the right or to the left and came into alignment, so that soon we rode
-between double rows of halted guns. With our canes we could have touched
-the artillerymen piling heaps of projectiles in convenient hollows in the
-earth close up to the edges of the road. Big covered wains discharged
-dusty infantrymen, who, pausing only long enough to unbuckle their packs
-from their shoulders and throw them under the hoods of the wagons, went at
-a shambling half-trot through the meadow. Cavalrymen, not dismounted, as
-they had mainly been during these dragging winter months of warfare that
-was stationary and static, but with their booted feet once more in their
-stirrups, cantered off, bound presumably for the thin woodlands which
-rimmed the plateau where the terrain broke away to the banks of the River
-Oise.
-</p>
-<p>
-Here again at last was war in the open, as different from battle in the
-trenches as football is from trap shooting. The action of it was spread
-out before one's eyes, not masked in mud ambuscades. Each instant our eyes
-beheld some new and stirring picture, standing out by reason of its swift
-vigour from the vaster panorama of which it was a part. What I had seen of
-battle formations in the preceding three weeks had made me think mainly of
-subway diggin's or of construction work for a new railroad or of
-engineering operations in connection with a dam, say, or a dike. What I
-saw now most vividly suggested old-time battle pictures by Meissonier or
-Détaillé. War, for the moment at least, had gone back to the aspect which
-marked it before both sides dug themselves in to play the game of
-counterblasting with artillery and nibbling the foe's toes with raids and
-small forays.
-</p>
-<p>
-Of another thing we were likewise aware, and the realisation of the fact
-cheered us mightily. Among the blue uniforms of the French the greenish
-buff of the British showed in patches of contrasting colour that steadily
-increased in size and frequency. By rare good luck we had entered the
-advanced positions at the identical place for which, blindly, we had been
-seeking—the place where the most westerly sector of the French left
-wing touched the most easterly sector of the British right wing; and
-better than that, the place where the French strength hurrying up to
-reënforce and if need be replace decimated divisions of their allies was
-joined on to and fused in with the retiring British Army, which, during
-the preceding three days, had sustained the main force of the German
-offensive. It was here if anywhere that we could count with the best
-prospects of success upon boring straight through to the Front, the reason
-being that the French might assume the British had given us passage and
-the British might assume the French had let us by.
-</p>
-<p>
-There were perhaps three more miles of brisk travelling for us, during
-which I am sure that I saw more than ever I have seen in any three miles
-that ever I traversed in my life; and at the end of that stretch we could
-tell that we had well-nigh outrun the forward crest of the French ground
-swell and had come into the narrower backwash of the British retreat. A
-retreat of sorts it may have been, but a rout it most assuredly was not.
-We saw companies reduced to the strength of ten or twelve or twenty men
-under command of noncommissioned officers or possibly of a single
-lieutenant. We saw individual privates and we saw privates in squads of
-two or three or half a dozen men, who in the terrific fighting had become
-separated from a command, which possibly had been scattered but which it
-was more likely had been practically wiped out. Such men were not
-stragglers, nor were they malingerers; they were survivors, atoms flung
-backward out of the raging inferno which had swallowed up whole regiments
-and whole brigades.
-</p>
-<p>
-And we took note that every single man of these broken and decimated
-detachments was in good humour, though dog tired; and that every single
-one of them had kept his accoutrements and his rifle; and that every
-single one of them, whether moving under orders or acting upon his own
-initiative, was intent upon just two things and two things only—to
-get back into the maelstrom from which temporarily he had been spewed
-forth, and pump more lead into the living tidal wave of grey coats. Some
-that we overtook were singing, and singing lustily too. Than this no man
-could ask to see a finer spectacle of fortitude, of pluck and of
-discipline, and I am sure that in his heart each one of us, while having
-no doubt of the outcome of the fiery test, prayed that our own soldiers,
-when their time of trial by battle came, might under reverses and under
-punishment acquit themselves as well as had these British veterans,
-Yorkshire and Bedfordshire and Canada, who came trudging along behind us,
-swallowing our dust. What impressed us as most significant of all was that
-only once that day did we see a scrap of personal equipment that had been
-cast aside. This was a cartridge belt of English make, with its pouches
-empty and its tough leather tom almost in two, lying like a broken-backed
-brown snake in a ditch.
-</p>
-<p>
-Already from wounded English soldiers and from exhausted English hospital
-workers whom we had seen back in Soissons we comprehended a measure of
-appreciation of what these battered fragments of the forces had been
-called upon to endure during four days and five nights. We knew as surely
-as though we had stopped to take down the story of each one of the
-wearied, cheerful, resolute chaps, that they had their fill of killing the
-enemy and of seeing their mates about them blown to bits by high
-explosives or mowed down by rifle fire. I recalled what a bedraggled young
-surgeon, a Highlander by his accent, had said the night before:
-</p>
-<p>
-“I crave never to pass through this experience again. I have seen so much
-of death since this battle started that I have in me now contempt not only
-for death but for life too. I thought last year on the Somme I saw real
-fighting. Man, it was but child's play to what I saw the day before
-yesterday!
-</p>
-<p>
-“From the casualty dressing post where I was on duty I could see the
-fighting spread out before me like a cinema show. For our shelter—we
-were in a concrete dugout—was in the side of a hill with a wide
-sweep of lowland below and beyond us, and it was here in this valley that
-the Germans came at our people. Between jobs in the operating theatre—and
-God knows we had enough of them—I would slip out for a breath of
-air, and then I could watch through my glasses what went on.
-</p>
-<p>
-“In wave after wave the Germans came on, marching close together in
-numbers incredible. They were like ants; they were like flies; like
-swarming grasshoppers. At first they tried a frontal attack against our
-trenches, but even the Germans, driven on as they must have been like
-cattle to the slaughter, couldn't stand what they got there. Within two
-hours they charged three times! Each time they fell back again, and each
-time they left their dead lying so thickly behind that finally the ground
-seemed as though it were covered with a grey carpet.
-</p>
-<p>
-“That happened in the first day of their drive against our part of the
-line, which was the third line back, the two front lines having already
-been taken by them. So on the next day, which was the day before
-yesterday, they worked their way round to the south a bit and tried a
-flanking advance. Then it was I saw this, just as I'm telling it to you. I
-saw them caught by our machine-gun fire and piled up, heap on heap, until
-there was a windrow of them before the British trenches that must have
-been six feet high.
-</p>
-<p>
-“They went back, but they came again and again, and they kept on coming.
-They climbed right over that wall of their own dead—I myself watched
-them scrambling up among the bodies—and they slid down on the other
-side and ran right into the wire entanglements, where those of them that
-were killed hung in the wires like garments drying on a line. They died
-there in such numbers that they fairly clogged the wires. And still they
-kept on coming.
-</p>
-<p>
-“When our line began to bend in, farther away to the west, we got orders
-to evacuate the station; and the men in the trenches where I had seen the
-fighting got orders—what were left of them—to fall back too.
-They were Scotchmen, these laddies, and they were fairly mad with the
-fighting. They didn't want to go, and they refused to go. I'm told by
-reliable witnesses that their officers had almost to use force against
-them—not to make them keep on fighting but to make them quit
-fighting.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He looked into the coals of the wood fire and shivered.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Man, it's not war any more; it's just plain slaughter. Mark my word—there'll
-never be another war such as this one has been or another battle such as
-the one that still goes on yonder. 'Tis not in flesh and blood to endure
-its repetition once the hate has been cooled by a taste of peace.”
- </p>
-<p>
-The men about us for the most part must have taken part as actors in
-scenes such as the young surgeon had described as an onlooker. But about
-them there was no sign of reluctance or of surcease. We realised as
-thoroughly as though we had been eyewitnesses to their conduct that they
-had carried on like brave men; and without being told we realised, too,
-that they were made of the stuff which keeps carrying on as long as there
-is life left in it. They were of the breed of the bulldog, and clean
-strain, at that.
-</p>
-<p>
-Frenchmen grew fewer in number along the route we travelled; Britishers
-became more and more numerous. Where byways crossed the highroad and in
-wrecked villages the British already had posted military policemen to
-guide the traffic and point out the proper directions to bodies of men
-passing through. Those men stood in midroad giving their orders as calmly
-and as crisply as though they had been bobbies on the Strand. Even this
-emergency John Bull's military system did not disintegrate. As long as the
-organism lasted the organisation would last too. Nowhere was there any
-suggestion of confusion or conflict of will. I am prone to think that in
-the years to come the chief outstanding fact about the great spring
-offensive of 1918 will be not the way the Germans came forward but the way
-in which the British fell back.
-</p>
-<p>
-Until now we had seen only British foot soldiers, and once or twice
-officers in motor cars or on horseback; but soon we came upon a battery of
-British light artillery. It was jolting across muddy pasture among the
-stumps of apple trees which the Germans with malignant thoroughness had
-felled before their big retreat of twelve months before. The place had
-been an orchard once. Now it was merely so much waste land, dedicated to
-uselessness by efficiency and kultur. The trees, as we could see, had not
-been blown down by shell fire or hewn down with axes. They had been neatly
-and painstakingly sawed through, clear down to the earth. Some of the
-butts measured a foot and a half across, and to have bolls of this size,
-fruit trees in this country must have attained great age.
-</p>
-<p>
-The battery took position and went into immediate action behind a covert
-of willows and scrub at the far side of the ruined orchard. At the moment
-we did not know that the thicket was a screen along the southern bank of
-the Oise. At the left of where the guns were speaking was a group of empty
-and shattered cottages stretching along a single narrow street that ran
-almost due north and south. Coming opposite the foot of this street we
-glimpsed at the other end of it a glint of running water, and in the same
-instant, perhaps two or three miles away farther on across the river, we
-made out the twin spires of the cathedral of Noyon, for which, as we know,
-the contending armies had striven for forty-eight hours, and which the
-evening before had fallen into the enemy's hands. Literally we were at the
-front of the Front.
-</p>
-<p>
-East of the clustered houses of the city a green hill rose above the tree
-tops. Across the flanks of this hill we saw grey-blue clumps moving. At
-that distance the sight was suggestive of a crawling mass of larvæ. Over
-it puffs of smoke, white for shrapnel and black for explosives, were
-bursting. We were too far away to observe the effect of this shelling, but
-knew that the crawling grey blanket meant Germans advancing in force down
-into the valley of the river, and we knew, too, that they were being
-punished by Allied guns as they came on to take up their new position.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER VIII. A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">C</span>URIOUSLY enough there was at this moment and at this place no return fire
-from the enemy. From this we deduced that the infantry in their impetuous
-onrush had so far outtravelled the heavy and more cumbersome arms of their
-service that the artillery had not caught up yet. However, a little later
-projectiles from hostile field pieces began to drop on our side of the
-stream.
-</p>
-<p>
-Halfway of the length of the street our car halted. It did not seem the
-part of wisdom for the four of us to go ahead in a group, so I walked the
-rest of the way to spy out the land.
-</p>
-<p>
-Behind the shattered stone and plaster houses French soldiers were
-squatted or lying. In the hope of finding some one who could speak the
-only language I knew I continued on until I came to the last two houses in
-the row. They overhung the riverbank. Beyond them were two bridges
-spanning the little river, one an old steel bridge with a concrete
-roadbed, and the other a sagging wooden structure, evidently built by
-soldier hands.
-</p>
-<p>
-The mouth of the military bridge was stopped with a makeshift barricade
-thrown together any which way. The backbone of the barrier was formed of
-two tree trunks, but they were half hidden from sight beneath a
-miscellaneous riffle of upturned motor lorries, wheelbarrows and clustered
-household furniture, including many mattresses that plainly had been
-filched from the villagers' abandoned homes. Midway of the main bridge a
-handful of French engineers were pottering away, rather leisurely, I
-thought, at some job or other. Two Tommies were standing behind one of the
-farthermost buildings of the hamlet—a building which in happier days
-had been a café. Now it was a broken shell, foul inside with a litter of
-wreckage. The men wore the insignia of the Royal Lancers.
-</p>
-<p>
-As I approached them they saluted, evidently mistaking me, in my trench
-coat and uniform cap, for an American officer. That an American officer
-should be in this place, so far away from any American troops, did not
-seem to surprise them in the least.
-</p>
-<p>
-“What town is this?” was my first question.
-</p>
-<p>
-“It's called Pontoise, sir,” answered one of them, giving to the name a
-literal rendition very different from the French fashion of pronouncing
-this word.
-</p>
-<p>
-“What's going on out yonder on the bridge?” I inquired next.
-</p>
-<p>
-“The Frenchmen is minin' it to blow it up, sir. They mined it once already
-but the charge didn't explode, sir. Now they're goin' to give it another
-try. They'll be letting off the charge pretty soon, sir, I think—as
-soon as a few of their men and a few of ours who're over on the other bank
-in them bushes 'ave fallen back to this side 'ere.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“How close are the Germans?” I asked.
-</p>
-<p>
-I figured they must be uncomfortably close. They were.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Come along with me, sir, if you don't mind,” quoth my informant.
-</p>
-<p>
-Quite in the most casual way he led me out from behind the shelter of the
-ruined café. As we quitted its protection I could see over a broken garden
-wall the British battery down below at the left, firing as fast as the
-gunners could serve the pieces. Of all the men in sight these
-shirt-sleeved artillerymen were the only ones who seemed to have any
-urgent business in hand.
-</p>
-<p>
-Together we advanced to the barricade, which at the spot where we halted
-came up to our middles. Across the top of it my guide extended a soiled
-hand.
-</p>
-<p>
-“The beggars are right there, sir, in them bushes; about a 'undred and
-fifty yards away, sir, or two 'undred at the most,” he said with the
-manner of a hired guide. “You carn't see them now, sir, but a bit ago I
-'ad a peep at a couple of 'em movin' about. The reason they ain't firin'
-over 'ere is because they don't want us to locate 'em, I think, sir.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Oh!” I said, like that. “Oh!”
- </p>
-<p>
-By mutual but unspoken consent we then retired to our former position. The
-imperturbable Tommy fell back in good order, but I think possibly I may
-have hurried somewhat. I always was a fairly brisk walker, anyhow.
-</p>
-<p>
-Inside the breached building my companions joined me, and while the shells
-from the battery and from the other batteries farther away went racketing
-over us toward Noyon we held a consultation of war. Any desire on the part
-of any one to stay and see what might happen after the bridge had been
-blown up was effectually squelched by the sudden appearance of two British
-officers coming through the village toward us. Did they choose to
-interrogate us regarding our mission in this parlous vicinity there might
-be embarrassment in the situation for us. So we went away from there.
-</p>
-<p>
-As we departed from the place a certain thing impressed itself upon my
-consciousness. The men about me—the two Tommies certainly, the two
-officers presumably, and probably the Frenchmen—had but newly
-emerged from hard fighting. Of a surety they would very shortly be engaged
-in more hard fighting, striving to prevent the on-moving Germans from
-crossing the river. Over their head shells from their own guns were
-racking the air. Shells from hostile batteries were beginning to splatter
-down just beyond. This then was merely an interval, an interlude between
-acts of a most dire and tremendous tragedy.
-</p>
-<p>
-And yet so firmly had the chance of death and the habit of war become a
-part of their daily and their hourly existence that in this brief resting
-spell they behaved exactly as men engaged in some wearing but peaceful
-labour might behave during a nooning in a harvest field. No one in sight
-was crouching in a posture of defence, with his rifle gripped in nervous
-hands and his face set and intent. Here were being exemplified none of the
-histrionic principles of applied heroics as we see them on the stage.
-</p>
-<p>
-The Frenchmen were sprawled at ease behind the walls, their limbs relaxed,
-their faces betokening only a great weariness. One or two actually were
-asleep with their heads pillowed on their arms. Those who spoke did so in
-level, unexcited tones. They might have been discussing the veriest
-commonplaces of life. For all I knew to the contrary, they were discussing
-commonplaces. The two British privates leaned upon their rifles, with
-their tired legs sagging under them and with cigarette ends in their
-mouths. One of the officers was lighting a pipe as we drove past him. One
-of the Frenchmen was gnawing at a knuckle of bread.
-</p>
-<p>
-Indeed there was nothing about the scene, except a knowledge of the
-immediate proximity of German skirmishers, which would serve to invest it
-with one-tenth of the drama that marked a hundred other sights we had that
-day witnessed. Later, though, we learned we had blundered by chance upon
-the very spot where the hinge of the greatest battle of history next day
-turned.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was south of Noyon at the Pontoise ford and at other fords above and
-below Pontoise that the Germans designed to cross the river in their
-onslaught southward against the defences of Paris. But there they failed,
-thanks be to British desperation and French determination; and it was
-then, according to what students of strategy among the Allies say, that
-the hosts of the War Lord altered the plan of their campaign and faced
-about to the westward in their effort to take Amiens and sunder the line
-of communication between Paris and Calais—an effort which still is
-being made as I sit here in Paris writing these pages for the mail.
-</p>
-<p>
-The day's journey was not over by any manner of means, but so far as I
-personally was concerned its culminating moment passed when I walked out
-on the bridge timbers with that matter-of-fact young Royal Lancer. What
-followed thereafter was in the nature of a series of anticlimaxes, and yet
-we saw a bookful before we rode back to Soissons for a second night under
-bombardment in that sorely beset and beleaguered old city. Before heading
-back we cruised for ten kilometres beyond Noyon, going west by south
-toward Compiègne.
-</p>
-<p>
-On this side jaunt we mostly skirted the river, which on our bank was
-comparatively calm but which upon the farther bank was being contended for
-at the bayonet's point by British and French against Germans. The sound of
-the cannonading never ceased for a moment, and as dusk came on the
-northern horizon was lit up with flickering waves of a sullen dull red
-radiance. The nearer we came to Compiègne the more numerous were the
-British, not in squads and detachments and bits of companies but in
-regiments and brigades which preserved their formations even though some
-of them had been reduced to skeletons of their former proportions. In the
-fields alongside the way the artillerymen were throwing up earthen banks
-for the guns; the infantrymen were making low sod walls behind which they
-would sleep that night and fight on the morrow. From every hand came the
-smell of brewing tea, for, battle or no battle, the Tommy would have his
-national beverage. The troop horses were being properly bestowed in the
-shaggly thickets, and camp fires threw off pungent smells of wood burning.
-For the first time in a long time the campaign was outdoors, under the
-skies.
-</p>
-<p>
-I saw one fagged trooper squatting at the roadside, with a minute scrap of
-looking-glass balanced before him in the twigs of a bare bush, while he
-painfully but painstakingly was shaving himself in cold ditch water. He
-had fought or marched all day, I imagine; his chances of being sent to
-eternity in piecemeal before another sunset were exceedingly good; but he
-would go, tidied and with scraped jowls, to whatever fate might await him.
-And that, except for one other small thing, was the most typically English
-thing I witnessed in the shank of this memorable evening.
-</p>
-<p>
-The other incident occurred after we had faced about for our return. In a
-maze of byroads we got off our course. A lone soldier of the Bedfordshires—a
-man near forty, I should say at an offhand guess—was tramping along.
-Our driver halted our car and hailed him. He straightened his weary back
-and came smartly to a salute.
-</p>
-<p>
-“We've lost our way,” explained one of us.
-</p>
-<p>
-He smiled at us whimsically.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I'm afraid I can't help you, sirs,” he said in the tones of an educated
-man. “I've lost my own way no less than six times to-day. I may add that
-I'm rather a stranger in these parts myself.”
- </p>
-<p>
-When we got to Blérincourt with an hour of daylight and another hour of
-twilight yet ahead of us we turned north toward Chauny, which the Germans
-now held and which the Allies were bombarding furiously. We had come to a
-crossroads just back of a small village, when with a low spiteful hiss of
-escaping air one of our rear tires went flat. We stopped to replace the
-damaged tube with a better one. Behind us, a quarter of a mile or so away,
-a British baggage train was making bivouac for the night. Just in front of
-us a British battery was firing over the housetops of the empty village
-toward Chauny.
-</p>
-<p>
-We had the car jacked up and the old tire off the rim and the new one half
-on when—bang! the heavens and the world seemed to come together all
-about us. What happened was that a big shell of high explosives, fired
-from an enemy mortar miles away, had dropped within seventy, sixty yards
-of us in a field; what seemed to happen was that a great plug was pulled
-out of the air with a smiting and a crashing and a rending. The earth
-quivered as though it had taken a death wound. Our wind shield cracked
-across under the force of the concussion. Gravel and bits of clay
-descended about us in a pattering shower.
-</p>
-<p>
-Speaking for myself, I may say that one of the most noticeable physical
-effects of having a nine shell exploding in one's immediate vicinity is a
-curious sinking sensation at the pit of the stomach, complicated with a
-dryness of the mouth and sudden chill in the feet.
-</p>
-<p>
-Two more shells dropped within a hundred yards of us before we got that
-tire pumped up and departed. Even so, I believe the world's record for
-pumping up tires was broken on this occasion. I am in position to speak
-with authority on this detail, because I was doing the pumping.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER IX. ACES UP!
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>NSIDE the German lines at the start of the war I met Ingold, then the
-first ace of the German aërial outfit; only the Germans did not call them
-aces in those days of the beginnings of things. The party to which I was
-attached spent the better part of a day as guests of Herr Hauptmann Ingold
-and his mates. Later we heard of his death in action aloft.
-</p>
-<p>
-Coming over for this present excursion I crossed on the same steamer with
-Bishop of Canada—a major of His Britannic Majesty's forces at
-twenty-two, and at twenty-three the bearer of the Victoria Cross and of
-every other honour almost that King George bestows for valour and
-distinguished service, which means dangerous service. I have forgotten how
-many boche machines this young man had, to date, accounted for. Whether
-the number was forty-seven or fifty-seven I am not sure. I doubt if Bishop
-himself knew the exact figure.
-</p>
-<p>
-At Paris, after my arrival, and at various places along the Front I have
-swapped talk and smoking tobacco with sundry more or less well-known
-members of the Lafayette Escadrille and with unattached aviators of repute
-and proved ability. From each of these men and from all of them—Belgians,
-Italians, Americans, Britishers and Frenchmen—I brought away an
-impression of the light-hearted gallantry, the modesty and the exceeding
-great competency which appear to be the outstanding characteristics of
-those who do their fighting—and, in a great many instances, their
-dying—in the air. It was almost as though the souls of these men had
-been made cleaner and as though their spirits had been made to burn with a
-whiter flame by reason of the purer element in which they carried on the
-bulk of their appointed share in this war business. You somehow felt that
-when they left the earth they shook off from their feet a good part of the
-dirt of the earth. I do not mean to imply that they had become superhuman,
-but that they had acquired, along with their training for a special and
-particularised calling, some touch of the romanticism that attached to the
-ancient and dutiful profession of knight-errantry.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nor is this hard to understand. For a fact the flying men are to-day the
-knights-errant of the armies. To them are destined opportunities for
-individual achievement and for individual initiative and very often for
-individual sacrifice such as are denied the masses of performers in this
-war, which in so many respects is a clandestine war and which in nearly
-all respects is an anonymous war. I think sometimes that, more even than
-the abject stupidity of the enterprise, it is the entire taking-away of
-the drama—the colour of theatricalism, the pomp and the
-circumstance, the fuss and the feathers—that will make war an
-exceedingly unpopular institution for future generations, as it has been
-an exceedingly unprofitable if a highly necessary one for this present
-generation. When the planet has been purged of militarism, the parent sin
-of the whole sinful and monstrous thing, I am convinced that the sordid,
-physically filthy drabness that now envelops the machinery of it will be
-as potent an agency as the spreading of the doctrine of democracy in
-curing civilised mankind of any desire to make war for war's sake rather
-than for freedom and justice.
-</p>
-<p>
-One has only to see it at first hand in this fourth year of conflict to
-realise how completely war has been translated out of its former elements.
-It is no longer an exciting outdoor sport for fox-chasing gentlemen in
-bright-red coats; no longer a seasonal diversion for crosscountry riders
-in buckskin breeches. It is a trade for expert accountants, for
-civil-engineering sharps, for rule of thumb, for pick and shovel and the
-land surveyor's instruments. As the outward romance of it has vanished
-away, in the same proportion the amount of manual labour necessary to
-accomplish any desired object has increased until it is nearly all work
-and mighty little play—a combination which makes Jack a dull boy and
-makes war a far duller game than it used to be. Of course the chances for
-heroic achievements, for the development and the exercise of the traits of
-courage and steadfastness and disciplined energy, are as frequent as ever
-they were, but generally speaking the picturesqueness with which mankind
-always has loved to invest its more heroic virtues has been obliterated—flattened
-under the steam roller.
-</p>
-<p>
-To the average soldier is denied the prospect of ever meeting face to face
-the foe with whom he contends. For every man who with set jaw climbs the
-top to sink his teeth, figuratively or actually, in the embodied enemy,
-there are a dozen who toil and moil far back behind in manual labours of
-the most exacting and exhausting forms imaginable. A night raid is a
-variety of sublimated burglary, better adapted to the temperament of the
-prowler and the poacher than to the upstanding soldier man's instincts. If
-there be fear of gas he adds to the verisimilitude of the imitation by
-hiding his face behind a mask as though he were a footpad. If a battle be
-a massacre, which generally it is, then intermittent fighting is merely
-organised and systematised assassination.
-</p>
-<p>
-By stealth, by trick and device, by artificial expedients smacking of the
-allied schools of the housebreaker and the highwayman, things are
-accomplished that once upon a bygone time eventuated from brawn, plus
-powder, plus chilled steel. Trench work means setting a man to dig in the
-mud a hole that may become his grave, and frequently does. He spends his
-days in a shallow crevice in the earth and his nights in a somewhat deeper
-one, called a dug-out. He combines in his customary life the habits of the
-boring grub and the habits of the blind worm, with a touch of the mine
-mule thrown in.
-</p>
-<p>
-Once in a while he stings like a puff-adder, but not often. The
-infantryman plies a spade a week for every hour that he pumps a rifle. The
-cavalryman is more apt to be driving a truck or tramping long roads than
-riding a horse. The artilleryman sets up his pieces miles behind the line
-and fires at the indirect target of an invisible foe, without the poor
-satisfaction of being able to tell, with his eyes, whether he scored a hit
-or a miss. A sum in arithmetic is his guide and a telephone operator is
-his mentor. Mayhap some day a hostile shell descends out of a clear sky
-upon his battery; and then the men are mess and the guns are scrap and
-that is all there is to that small chapter of the great tale of the war.
-</p>
-<p>
-The bomber who spends months learning how to cast the grenade may never
-get a chance to cast one except in practice. A man fights for his flag but
-doesn't see it when the action starts, for then it is furled. The
-regimental band plays him off to church service but not into the battle.
-When the battle begins the bandmen have exchanged their horns for the
-handles of a litter, becoming stretcher bearers. The general wears no
-epaulets. He wears a worried look brought on by dealing o' nights with
-strategic problems out of a book. The modern thin red line is a thing done
-in bookkeeper's ink on a ruled form. So it goes. The bubble reputation is
-won, not at the cannon's mouth, but across a desk top in a shell-proof fox
-den far from where the cannon are. The gallant six hundred do not ride
-into the jaws of death. Numbering many times six hundred, they advance
-afoot, creeping at a pallbearer's pace behind a barrage fire. So it keeps
-on going.
-</p>
-<p>
-In only one wing of the service, and that the newest of all the wings, is
-there to be found a likeness to the chivalry and the showiness of these
-other times. The aviator is the one exception to a common rule. To him
-falls the great adventure. He goes jousting in the blue lists of the sky,
-helmeted and corseleted like a crusader of old. His lance is a spitting
-machine gun. His steed is a twentieth-century Pegasus, with wings of fine
-linen and guts of tried steel. Thousands of envying eyes follow him as he
-steers his single course to wage his single combat, and if he takes his
-death up there it is a clean, quick, merciful death high above the muck
-and more and jets of noxious laboratory fumes where the rest take theirs.
-</p>
-<p>
-Even the surroundings of the birdman's nest are physically nore attractive
-than the habitat of his brother at arms who bides below. I can think of
-nothing homelier in outline or colour than the shelters—sometimes of
-planking, sometimes of corrugated iron, sometimes of earth—in which
-the soldiers hide here in France. The field hospital is apt to be a
-distressingly plain structure of unpainted boards with sandbags banked
-against it.
-</p>
-<p>
-I have seen a general's headquarters in an underground tunnel that was
-like an overgrown badger's nest, with nothing outwardly to distinguish it
-from a similar row of tunnels except that it had a lettered sign over its
-damp and dripping mouth.
-</p>
-<p>
-Tents, which have a certain picturesque quality when grouped, are rarely
-seen here in this closely settled Europe, where nearly always there are
-enough roofed and walled buildings to provide billets for the troops,
-however numerous. Instead of tents there are occasionally jumbles of
-makeshift barracks, and more often haphazard colonies of sheds serving as
-garages or as supply depots or as offices or as what not. War, which in
-itself is so ugly a thing, seems to possess the facility of making ugly
-its accessories before and after the fact.
-</p>
-<p>
-But the quarters of the flying machines, through their vastness and
-isolation, acquire a certain quality of catching the eye that is entirely
-lacking for the rest of the picture—the big hangars in the
-background, suggesting by their shape and number the pitched encampment of
-a three-ring circus; the flappy canvas shields at the open side of the
-dromes, which being streaked and daubed with paint camouflage, enhance the
-carnival suggestion by looking, at a distance, like side-show banners; the
-caravans of trucks drawn up in lines; and in fine weather the flying craft
-resting in the landing field, all slick and groomed and polished, like a
-landed proprietor's blooded stock, giving off flashes from aluminum and
-varnish and steel and deft cabinetwork in answer to the caresses of the
-sunshine.
-</p>
-<p>
-Right here I am reminded that the temperamental differences of the Allied
-nations are shown most aptly, I think, in the fashion in which the
-aviators decorate their gorgeous pets.
-</p>
-<p>
-Upon its planes, of course, each bears the distinguishing mark of the
-country to which it belongs, but the bodies are the property, so to speak,
-of the individual flyers, to be treated according to the fancy of the
-individual.
-</p>
-<p>
-Thus it befalls that an Italian machine generally carries a picture of a
-flower upon its sides. It is characteristic of the race that a French
-machine usually wears either a valorous, sonorous name or the name of a
-woman—perhaps the name of the aviator's sweetheart, or that of his
-mother or his sister possibly. But your average British airman is apt to
-christen his machine Old Bill or Gaby or Our Little Nipper or The
-Walloping Window Blind—I have seen all of these cheery titles
-emblazoned upon splendid big aircraft in a British hangar—and just
-let it go at that.
-</p>
-<p>
-I reckon the German, taking his morning hate along with his morning
-chicory, never will understand how it is the Britisher and the Yankee can
-make war and make jokes about it and be good sportsmen all at the same
-time. The German is very sentimental—I myself have heard him with
-tears in his voice singing his songs of the home place and the Christmas
-tree and the Rhine maiden as he marched past a burning orphan asylum in
-Belgium; but his sense of humour, if ever he really owned such a thing,
-was long ago smothered to death by the poisoned chemical processes of his
-own military machine. The man who was so bad that he was scared of himself
-must have been the original exemplar of the frightfulness doctrine. Anyhow
-he was born in Prussia—I'm sure of that much anyway.
-</p>
-<p>
-But I am getting away from my subject—have been getting away from it
-for quite a spell, I fear; because in the first place I started out to
-tell about a meeting and a trip and a dinner and a song and divers other
-things. The affair dated from a certain spring noontime when two of us,
-writers by trade, were temporarily marooned for the day at the press
-headquarters of the American Expeditionary Force because we couldn't
-anywhere get hold of an automobile to take us for a scouting jaunt along
-the American sector. All of a sudden a big biplane came sailing into
-sight, glittering like a silver flying fish. It landed in a meadow behind
-the town and two persons, muffled in greatcoats, decanted themselves out
-of it and tramped across the half-flooded field toward us. When they drew
-near we perceived them to be two very young, very ruddy gentlemen, and
-both unmistakably English. My companion, it seemed, knew one of them, so
-there were introductions.
-</p>
-<p>
-“What brings you over this way?” inquired my friend.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, you see,” said his acquaintance, “we were a bit thirsty—Bert
-and I—and we heard you had very good beer at the French officers'
-club here. So we just ran over for half an hour or so to get a drop of
-drink and then toddle along back again. Not a bad idea, eh, what?”
- </p>
-<p>
-The speaker, I noted, wore the twin crowns of a captain on the shoulder
-straps of his overcoat. His age I should have put at twenty-one or
-thereabout, and his complexion was the complexion of a very new, very
-healthy cherub.
-</p>
-<p>
-We showed the way toward beer and lunch, the latter being table d'hôte but
-good. En route my confrère was moved to ask more questions.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Anything new happening at the squadron since I was over that way?” he
-inquired.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Quiet enough to be a bore—weather hasn't suited for our sort these
-last few evenings,” stated the taller one. “We got fed up on doin' nothin'
-at all, so night before last a squad started across the border to give
-Fritzie a taste of life. But just after we started the squadron commander
-decided the weather was too thickish and he signed us back—all but
-the Young-un, who claims he didn't see the flare and kept on goin' all by
-his little self.” He favoured us with a tremendous wink.
-</p>
-<p>
-“It seemed a rotten shame, really it did, to waste the whole evenin'.”
- This was the Young-un, he of the pink cheeks, speaking. “So I just jogged
-across the jolly old Rhine until I come to a town, and I dropped my pills
-there and came back. Nice quiet trip it was—lonely rather, and not a
-bit excitin'.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Upon me a light dawned. I had heard of these bombing squadrons of the
-British outfits of young but seasoned flying men, who, now that reprisal
-in kind had been forced upon England and France by the continued German
-policy of aërial attacks on unprotected and unarmed cities, made journeys
-from French soil by sky line to enemy districts, there to spatter down
-retaliatory bombs upon such towns as Mainz, Stuttgart, Coblenz, Mannheim,
-Treves and Metz.
-</p>
-<p>
-The which sounded simple enough in the bald telling, but entailed for each
-separate pair of flyers on each separate excursion enough of thrill,
-suspense and danger to last the average man through all his various
-reincarnations upon this earth. It meant a flight by darkness at sixty or
-seventy miles an hour, the pilot at the wheel and the observer at the
-guardian machine gun, above the tangled skeins of friendly trenches; and a
-little farther on above and past the hostile lines, beset for every rod of
-the way, both going and coming, by peril of attack from antiaircraft gun
-and from speedier, more agile German flyers, since the bombing airship is
-heavier and slower than scout planes commonly are. It meant finding the
-objective point of attack and loosing the explosive shells hanging like
-ripe plums from lever hooks in the frame of the engine body; and this done
-it meant winging back again—provided they got back—in time for
-late dinner at the home hangars.
-</p>
-<p>
-Personally I craved to see more of men engaged upon such employment.
-Through lunch I studied the two present specimens of a new and special
-type of human being. Except that Bert was big and the Young-un was short,
-and except that the Young-un spoke of dropping pills when he meant to tell
-of spilling potential destruction upon the supply depots and railroad
-terminals of Germany, whereas Bert affectionately referred to his machine
-as The Red Hen and called the same process laying an egg or two, there was
-no great distinction to be drawn between them. Both made mention of the
-most incredibly daring things in the most commonplace and casual way
-imaginable; both had the inquisitive nose and the incurious eye of their
-breed; both professed a tremendous interest in things not one-thousandth
-part so interesting as what they themselves did; and both used the word
-“extraordinary” to express their convictions upon subjects not in the
-least extraordinary, but failed to use it when the topic dealt with their
-own duties and deserved to excess the adjectival treatment. In short, they
-were just two well-bred English boys.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER X. HAPPY LANDINGS
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>UT of the luncheon sprang an invitation, and out of the invitation was
-born a trip. On a day when the atmosphere was better fitted for
-automobiling in closed cars than for bombings we headed away from our
-billets, travelling in what I shall call a general direction, there being
-four of us besides the sergeant who drove. Things were stirring along the
-Front. Miles away we could hear the battery heavies thundering and
-drumming, and once in a lull we detected the hammering staccato of a
-machine gun tacking down the loose edges of a fight that will never be
-recorded in history, with the earnestness and briskness of a man laying a
-carpet in a hurry.
-</p>
-<p>
-The Romans taught the French how to plan highroads, and the French never
-forgot the lesson. The particular road we travelled ran kilometre on
-kilometre straight as a lance up the hills and down again across the
-valleys, and only turned out to round the shoulders of a little mountain
-or when it flanked the shore line of one of the small brawling French
-rivers. The tall poplars in pairs, always in pairs, which edged it were
-like lean old gossips bending in toward the centre the better to exchange
-whispered scandal about the neighbours. Mainly the road pierced through
-fields, with infrequent villages to be passed and once a canal to be
-skirted; but also there were forests where wild boar were reputed to
-reside and where, as we know, the pheasant throve in numbers undreamed of
-in the ante-bellum days before all the powder in Europe was needed to kill
-off men, and while yet some of it might be spared for killing off birds.
-</p>
-<p>
-Regarding the mountains a rule was prevalent. If one flank of a mountain
-was wooded we might be reasonably sure that the farther side would present
-a patchwork pattern of tiny farms, square sometimes, but more often oblong
-in shape, each plastered against the steep conformation and each so nearly
-perpendicular that we wondered how anybody except a retired paper hanger
-ever dared try to cultivate it. Let a husbandman's foot slip up there and
-he would be committing trespass in the plot of the next man below.
-</p>
-<p>
-I shall not tell how far we rode, or whither, but dusk found us in a place
-which, atmospherically speaking, was very far removed from the French
-foothills, but geographically perhaps not so far. So far as its local
-colour was concerned the place in point more nearly than anything else I
-call to mind resembled the interior of a Greek-letter society's chapter
-house set amid somewhat primitive surroundings. In the centre of the low
-wide common room, mounted on a concrete box, was a big openwork basket of
-wrought iron. In this brazier burned fagots of wood, and the smoke went up
-a metal pipe which widened out to funnel shape at the bottom, four feet
-above the floor.
-</p>
-<p>
-Such a device has three advantages over the ordinary fireplace: Folks may
-sit upon four sides of it, toasting their shins by direct contact with the
-heat, instead of upon only one, as is the case when your chimney goes up
-through the wall of your house. There were illustrations cut from papers
-upon the walls; there were sporting prints and London dailies on the
-chairs and trestles; there was a phonograph, which performed wheezily, as
-though it had asthma, and a piano, which by authority was mute until after
-dinner; there were sundry guitars and mandolins disposed in corners; there
-were sofa pillows upon the settees, plainly the handiwork of some fellow's
-best girl; there were clumsy, schoolboy decorative touches all about;
-there were glasses and bottles on tables; there were English non-coms, who
-in their gravity and promptness might have been club servants, bringing in
-more bottles and fresh glasses; and there were frolicking, boisterous
-groups and knots and clusters of youths who, except that they wore the
-khaki of junior officers of His Majesty's service instead of the ramping
-patterns affected by your average undergraduates, were for all the world
-just such a collection of resident inmates as you would find playing the
-goat and the colt and the skylark in any college fraternity hall on any
-pleasant evening anywhere among the English-speaking peoples.
-</p>
-<p>
-For guests of honour there were our four, and for hosts there were sixty
-or seventy members of Night Bombing Squadron Number ——.
-</p>
-<p>
-It so happened that this particular group of picked and sifted young
-daredevils represented every main division of the empire's domain. As we
-were told, there were present Englishmen, Cornishmen, Welshmen, Scots and
-Irishmen; also Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, an Afrikander or
-two, and a dark youngster from India; as well as recruits gathered in from
-lesser lands and lesser colonies where the Union Jack floats in the seven
-seas that girdle this globe.
-</p>
-<p>
-The ranking officer—a major by title, and he not yet twenty-four
-years old—bore the name of a Highland clan, the mere mention of
-which set me to thinking of whanging claymores and skirling pipes. His
-next in command was the nephew and namesake of a famous Home Ruler, and
-this one spoke with the soft-cultured brogue of the Dublin collegian. We
-were introduced to a flyer bred and reared in Japan, who had hurried to
-the mother isle as soon as he reached the volunteering age—a shy,
-quiet lad with a downy upper lip, who promptly effaced himself; and to a
-young Tasmanian of Celtic antecedents, who, curiously enough, spoke with
-an English accent richer and more pronounced than any native Englishman in
-the company used.
-</p>
-<p>
-I took pains to ascertain the average age of the personnel of the
-squadron. I am giving no information to the enemy that he already does not
-know—to his cost—when I state it to be twenty-two and a half
-years. With perfect gravity veteran airmen of twenty-three or so will tell
-you that when a fellow reaches twenty-five he's getting rather a bit too
-old for the game—good enough for instructing green hands and all
-that sort of thing, perhaps, but generally past the age when he may be
-counted upon for effective work against the Hun aloft. And the wondrous
-part of it is that it is true as Gospel. 'Tis a man's game, if ever there
-was a man's game in this world; and it's boys with the peach-down of
-adolescence on their cheeks that play it best.
-</p>
-<p>
-Well, we had dinner; and a very good dinner it was, served in the mess
-hall adjoining, with fowls and a noble green salad, and good
-honest-to-cow's butter on the table. But before we had dinner a thing
-befell which to me was as simply dramatic as anything possibly could be.
-What was more, it came at a moment made and fit for dramatics, being as
-deftly insinuated by chance into the proper spot as though a skilled
-playmaster had contrived it for the climax of his second act.
-</p>
-<p>
-Glasses had been charged all round, and we were standing to drink the
-toast of the British aviator when, almost together, two small things
-happened: The electric lights flickered out, leaving us in the half glow
-of the crackling flames in the brazier, its tints bringing out here a
-ruddy young face and there a buckle of brass or a button of bronze but
-leaving all the rest of the picture in flickering shadows; right on top.
-of this a servant entered, saluted and handed to the squadron commander a
-slip of paper bearing a bulletin just received by telephone from the
-headquarters of a sister squadron in a near-by sector. The young major
-first read it through silently and then read it aloud:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Eight machines of squadron ——— made a day-light raid
-this afternoon. The operation was successfully carried out.” A little
-pause. “Three of the machines failed to return.”
- </p>
-<p>
-That was all. Three of the machines failed to return—six men, mates
-to these youngsters assembled here and friends to some of them, had gone
-down in the wreckage of their aircraft, probably to death or to what was
-hardly less terrible than death—to captivity in a German prison
-camp.
-</p>
-<p>
-Well, it was all in the day's work. No one spoke, nor in my hearing did
-any one afterward refer to it. But the glasses came up with a jerk, and at
-that, as though on a signal from a stage manager, the lights flipped on,
-and then together we drank the airman's toast, which is:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Happy landings!”
- </p>
-<p>
-I do not profess to speak for the others, but for myself I know I drank to
-the memory of those six blithe boys—riders in the three machines
-that failed to return—and to a happy landing for them in the
-eternity to which they had been hurried long before their time.
-</p>
-<p>
-The best part of the dinner came after the dinner was over, which was as a
-dinner party should be. We flanked ourselves on the four sides of the
-fire, and tobacco smoke rose in volume as an incense to good fellowship,
-and there were stories told and limericks offered without number. And if a
-story was new we all laughed at it, and if it was old we laughed just the
-same. Presently a protesting lad was dragooned for service at the piano.
-The official troubadour, a youth who seemed to be all legs and elbows,
-likewise detached himself from the background. Instead of taking station
-alongside the piano he climbed gravely up on top of it and perched there
-above our heads, with his legs dangling down below the keys. Touching on
-this, the Young-un, who sat alongside of me, made explanation:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Old Bob likes to sit on the old jingle box when he sings, you know. He
-says that then he can feel the music going up through him and it makes him
-sing. He'll stay up there singing like a bloomin' bullfinch till some one
-drags him down. He seems to sort of get drunk on singin'—really he
-does. Extraordinary fancy, isn't it?”
- </p>
-<p>
-I should have been the last to drag Old Bob down. For, employing a
-wonderful East Ender whine, Old Bob sang a gorgeous Cockney ballad dealing
-with the woeful case of a simple country maiden, and her smyle it was
-sublyme, but she met among others the village squire, and the rest of it
-may not be printed in a volume having a family circulation; but anyway it
-was a theme replete with incident and abounding in detail, with a hundred
-verses more or less and a chorus after every verse, for which said chorus
-we all joined in mightily.
-</p>
-<p>
-From this beginning Old Bob, beating time with both hands, ranged far
-afield into his repertoire. Under cover of his singing I did my level best
-to draw out the Young-un—who it seemed was the Young-un more by
-reason of his size and boyish complexion than by reason of his age, since
-he was senior to half his outfit—to draw him out with particular
-reference to his experiences since the time, a year before, when he quit
-the line, being then a full captain, to take a berth as observer in the
-service of the air.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was hard sledding, though. He was just as inarticulate and just as
-diffident as the average English gentleman is apt to be when he speaks in
-the hated terms of shop talk of his own share in any dangerous or unusual
-enterprise. Besides, our points of view were so different. He wanted to
-hear about the latest music-hall shows in London; he asked about the life
-in London with a touch in his voice of what I interpreted as homesickness.
-Whereas I wanted to know the sensations of a youth who flirts with death
-as a part of his daily vocation. Finally I got him under way, after this
-wise: “Oh, we just go over the line, you know, and drop our pills and come
-back. Occasionally a chap doesn't get back. And that's about all there is
-to tell about it.... Rummiest thing that has happened since I came into
-the squadron happened the other night. The boche came over to raid us, and
-when the alarm was given every one popped out of his bed and made for the
-dugout. All but Big Bill over yonder. Big Bill tumbled out half dressed
-and more than half asleep. It was a fine moonlight night and the boche was
-sailing about overhead bombing us like a good one, and Big Bill, who's a
-size to make a good target, couldn't find the entrance to either of the
-dugouts. So he ran for the woods just beyond here at the edge of the
-flying field, and no sooner had he got into the woods than a wild boar
-came charging at him and chased him out again into the open where the
-bombs were droppin'. Almost got him, too—the wild boar, I mean. The
-bombs didn't fall anywhere near him. Extraordinary, wasn't it, havin' a
-wild boar turn up like that just when he was particularly anxious not to
-meet any wild boar, not being dressed for it, as you might say? He was in
-a towerin' rage when the boche went away and we came out of the dugouts
-and only laughed at him instead of sympathisin' with him.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He puffed at his pipe.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Fritz gets peevish and comes about to throw things at us quite
-frequently. You see, this camp isn't in a very good place. We took it over
-from the French and it stands out in the open instead of being in the edge
-of the forest where it should be. Makes it rather uncomfy for us sometimes—Fritzie
-does.”
- </p>
-<p>
-All of which rather prepared me for what occurred perhaps five minutes
-later when for the second time that night the electric lights winked out.
-</p>
-<p>
-Old Bob ceased from his carolling, and the mess president, a little sandy
-Scotchman, spoke up:
-</p>
-<p>
-“It may be that the boche is coming to call on us—the men douse the
-lights if we get a warning; or it may be that the battery has failed. At
-any rate I vote' we have in some candles and carry on. This is too fine an
-evening to be spoiled before it's half over, eh?”
- </p>
-<p>
-A failed battery it must have been, for no boche bombers came. So upon the
-candles being fetched in, Old Bob resumed at the point where he had left
-off. He sang straight through to midnight, nearly, never minding the story
-telling and the limerick matching and the laughter and the horse play
-going on below him, and rarely repeating a song except by request of the
-audience. If his accompanist at the piano knew the air, all very well and
-good; if not, 'Old Bob sang it without the music.
-</p>
-<p>
-They didn't in the least want us to leave when the time came for us to
-leave, vowing that the fun was only just starting and that it would be
-getting better toward daylight. But ahead of us we had a long ride,
-without lights, over pitchy-dark roads, so we got into our car and
-departed. First, though, we must promise to come back again very soon, and
-must join them in a nightcap glass, they toasting us with their airmen's
-toast, which seemed so well to match in with their buoyant spirits.
-</p>
-<p>
-When next I passed by that road the hangars were empty of life and the
-barracks had been tom down. The great offensive had started the week
-before, and on the third day of it, as we learned from other sources, our
-friends of Night Bombing Squadron Number ——, obeying an order,
-had climbed by pairs into their big planes and had gone winging away to do
-their share in the air fighting where the fighting lines were locked fast.
-</p>
-<p>
-There was need just then for every available British aëroplane—the
-more need because each day showed a steadily mounting list of lost
-machines and lost airmen. I doubt whether many of those blithesome lads
-came out of that hell alive, and doubt very much, too, whether I shall
-ever see any of them again.
-</p>
-<p>
-So always I shall think of them as I saw them last—their number
-being sixty or so and the average age twenty-two and a half—grouped
-at the doorway of their quarters, with the candlelight and the firelight
-shining behind them, and their glasses raised, wishing to us “Happy
-landings!”
- </p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XI. TRENCH ESSENCE
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HEN our soldiers arrive on foreign soil, almost invariably, so it has
-seemed to me watching them, they come ashore with serious faces and for
-the most part in silence. Their eyes are busy, but their tongues are
-taking vacation. For the time being they have lost that tremendous
-high-powered exuberance which marks them at home, in the camps and the
-cantonments, and which we think is as much a part of the organism of the
-optimistic American youth as his hands and his legs are.
-</p>
-<p>
-I noticed this thing on the day our ship landed at an English port. We
-came under convoy in a fleet made up almost entirely of transports bearing
-troops—American volunteers, Canadian volunteers, and aliens
-recruited on American soil for service with the Allies. A Canadian
-battalion, newly organised, marched off its ship and out upon the same
-pier on which the soldiers who had crossed on the vessel upon which I was
-a passenger were disembarking. The Canadians behaved like schoolboys on a
-holiday.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was not what the most consistent defender of the climate of Great
-Britain would call good holidaying weather either. A while that day it
-snowed, and a while it rained, and all the while a shrewish wind scolded
-shrilly in the wireless rig and rampaged along the damp and drafty decks.
-Nevertheless, the Canadians were not to be daunted by the inhospitable
-attitude of the elements.
-</p>
-<p>
-One in three of them, about, carried a pennant bearing the name of his
-home town or his home province, or else he carried a little flag mounted
-on a walking stick. Nine out of ten, about, were whooping. They cheered
-for the ship they were leaving; they cheered for the sister ship that had
-borne us overseas along with them; they cheered to feel once more the
-solid earth beneath their feet; they cheered just to be cheerful, and,
-cheering so, they traversed the dock and took possession of the train that
-stood on a waterside track waiting to bear them to a rest camp. I imagine
-they were still cheering when they got there.
-</p>
-<p>
-Now if you knew the types we had aboard our packet you might have been
-justified in advance for figuring that our outfit would be giving those
-joyous Canadian youngsters some spirited competition in the matter of
-making noises. We carried a full regiment of a Western division, largely
-made up, as to officers and as to men, of national guardsmen from the
-states of Colorado, Wyoming and Washington. They were cow-punchers, ranch
-hands, lumbermen, fruit growers, miners—outdoor men generally.
-Eighty men in the ranks, so I had learned during the voyage, were
-full-blooded Indians off of Northwestern reservations. We had men along
-who had won prizes for bronco-busting and bull-dogging at Frontier Day
-celebrations in Cheyenne and in California; also men who had travelled
-with the Wild West shows as champion ropers and experts at rough-riding.
-Never before, I am sure, had one vessel at one time borne in her decks so
-many wind-tanned, bow-legged, hawk-faced, wiry Western Americans as this
-vessel had borne.
-</p>
-<p>
-But did one hear the lone-wolf howl as our fellows went filing down the
-gang-planks? Did one catch the exultant, shrill yip-yip-yip of the
-round-up or the far-carrying war yell of the Cheyenne buck? One most
-emphatically did not. If those three thousand and odd fellows had all been
-pallbearers officiating at the putting away of a dear departed friend they
-could not have deported themselves more soberly. Nobody carried a flag,
-unless you would except the colour bearers, who bore their colours furled
-about the staffs and protected inside of tarpaulin holsterings. Nobody
-waved a broad-brimmed hat either in salute to the Old World or in farewell
-to the ocean. Barring the snapped commands of the officers, the clinking
-in unison of hobbed and heavy boot soles, the shuffle of moving bodies,
-the creak of leather girthings put under strain, and occasionally the
-sharp clink and clatter of metal as some dangling side arm struck against
-a guard rail or some man shifted his piece, the march-off was accomplished
-without any noise whatsoever. It was interesting—and significant,
-too, I think—to spy upon those intent, set faces and those eager,
-steady eyes as the files went by and so away, bound, by successive stages
-of progress, with halts between at sessioning billets and at training
-barracks, for the battle fronts beyond the channel.
-</p>
-<p>
-As between the Canadian and the United States soldiers I interpreted this
-striking difference in demeanour at the disembarking hour somewhat after
-this fashion: To a good many of the Dominion lads, no doubt, the thing was
-in the nature of a home-coming, for they had been born in England. A great
-many more of them could not be more than one generation removed from
-English birth. Anyhow and in either event, they as thoroughly belonged to
-and were as entirely part and parcel of the Empire as the islanders who
-greeted them upon the piers. One way or another they had always lived on
-British soil and under the shadow of the Union Jack. They were not
-strangers; neither were they aliens, even though they had come a far way;
-they were joint inheritors with native Englishmen of the glory that is
-England's. The men they would presently fight beside were their own blood
-kin. Quite naturally therefore and quite properly they commemorated the
-advent into the parent land according to the manner of the Anglo-Saxon
-when he strives to cover up, under a mien of boisterous enthusiasm,
-emotions of a purer sentiment. I could conceive some of them as laughing
-very loudly because inside of themselves they wanted to cry; as straining
-their vocal cords the better to ease the twitch-ings at their heart
-cockles.
-</p>
-<p>
-But the Americans, even if they wore names bespeaking British ancestry—which
-I should say at an offhand guess at least seventy-five per cent of them
-did—were not moved by any such feelings. Such ties as might link
-their natures to the breed from which they remotely sprang were the
-thinnest of ties, only to be revealed in times of stress through the
-exhibition of certain characteristics shared by them in common with their
-very distant English and Scotch and Irish and Welsh kinsmen. For England
-as England they had no affectionate yearnings. England wasn't their
-mother; she was merely their great-great-grandmother, with whom their
-beloved Uncle Sam had had at least two serious misunderstandings. To all
-intents and purposes this was a strange land—certainly its physical
-characteristics had an alien look to them—and to it they had come as
-strangers.
-</p>
-<p>
-I fancy, though, the chief reasons for their quiet seriousness went down
-to causes even deeper than this one. I believe that somehow the importance
-of the task to which they had dedicated themselves and the sense of the
-responsibility intrusted to them as armed representatives of their own
-country's honour were brought to a focal point of realisation in the minds
-of these American lads by the putting of foot on European soil. The
-training they had undergone, the distances they had travelled, the sea
-they had crossed—most of them, I gathered, had never smelt salt
-water before in their lives—the sight of this foreign city with its
-foreign aspect—all these things had chemically combined to produce
-among them a complete appreciation of the size of the job ahead of them;
-and the result made them dumb and sedate, and likewise it rendered them
-aloof to surface sensations, leaving them insulated by a sort of
-noncommittal pose not commonly found among young Americans in the mass—or
-among older Americans in the mass for that matter.
-</p>
-<p>
-Perhaps a psychologist might prove me wrong in these amateur deductions of
-mine. For proof to bolster up my diagnosis I can only add that on three
-subsequent occasions, when I saw American troops ferrying ashore at French
-ports, they behaved in identically this same fashion, becoming for a
-period to be measured by hours practically inarticulate and incredibly
-earnest. Correspondents who chanced to be with me these three several
-times were impressed as I had been by the phenomenon.
-</p>
-<p>
-But the condition does not last; you may be very sure of that. If there
-exists a more adaptable creature than the American soldier he has not yet
-been tagged, classified and marked Exhibit A for identification. Once the
-newly arrived Yank has lost his sea legs and regained his shore ones; once
-the solemnity and incidentally the novelty of the ceremony of his entrance
-into Europe has worn away; once he has learned how to think of dollars and
-cents in terms of francs and centimes and how to speak a few words in
-barbarous French—he reverts to type. His native irreverence for
-things that are stately and traditional rises up within him, renewed and
-sharpened; and from that moment forward he goes into this business of
-making war against the Hun with an impudent grin upon his face, and in his
-soul an incurable cheerfulness that neither discomfort nor danger can
-alloy, and a joke forever on his lips. That is the real essence of the
-trenches—the humour that is being secreted there with the grimmest
-and ghastliest of all possible tragedies for a background.
-</p>
-<p>
-I wouldn't call it exactly a new type of humour, because always humour has
-needed the contrast of dismalness and suffering to set it off effectively,
-but personally I am of the opinion that it is a kind of humour that is
-going to affect our literature and our mode of living generally after the
-war is ended.
-</p>
-<p>
-Bairnsfather, the English sketch artist, did not invent the particular
-phase of whimsicality—the essentially distinctive variety of
-seriocomic absurdity—which has made the world laugh at his pictures
-of Old Bill and Bert and Alf. He did a more wonderful thing: he had the
-wit and the genius to catch an illusive atmosphere which existed in the
-trenches before he got there and to put it down in black on white without
-losing any part of its savoury qualities. In slightly different words he
-practically told me this when I ran across him up near the Front the other
-day while he was setting about his new assignment of depicting the humour
-of the American soldier as already he had depicted that of the British
-Tommy. He had, he said, made one discovery already—that there was a
-tremendous difference between the two schools.
-</p>
-<p>
-This is quite true, and if some talented Frenchman—it will take a
-Frenchman, of course—succeeds in making sketches that will reflect
-the wartime humour of the French soldier as cleverly as Bairnsfather has
-succeeded at the same job with the British high private for his model it
-will no doubt be found that the poilu's brand of humour is as
-distinctively his own as the American soldier's is or the English
-soldier's is.
-</p>
-<p>
-There is an indefinable something, yet something structurally French, I
-think, in the fact that when Captain Hamilton Fish—called Ham Fish
-for short—arrived in France a few weeks before this was written the
-French soldiers with whom his command was brigaded immediately
-rechristened him Le Capitaine Jambon Poisson, and under this new
-Gallicised name he is to-day one of the best-known personages among the
-French in the country.
-</p>
-<p>
-Likewise there is a certain African individuality, or rather an
-Afro-American individuality, in the story now being circulated through the
-expeditionary forces, of the private in one of our negro regiments who
-bragged at his company mess of having taken out a life-insurance policy
-for the full amount allowed a member of the Army, under the present
-governmental plan.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Whut you wan' do dat fur?” demanded a comrade. “You ain't married an' you
-ain't got no fambly. Who you goin' leave all dat money to ef you gits
-killed?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I ain't aimin' to git killed,” stated the first darky. “Dat's de very
-reason I taken out all dat insho'ence.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“How come you ain't liable to git killed jes' de same ez ary one of de
-rest of us is?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“W'y, you pore ign'ant fool, does you s'pose w'en Gin'el Pershing finds
-out he's got a ten-thousand-dollar nigger in dis man's Army dat he's gwine
-take any chances on losin' all dat money by sendin' me up to de Front whar
-de trouble is? Naw suh-ree, he ain't!”
- </p>
-<p>
-From a commingling of memories of recent events there stands out a thing
-of which I was an eye-and-ear-witness back in April, when the first of our
-divisions to go into the line of the great battle moved up and across
-France from a quieter area over in Lorraine, where it had been holding a
-sector during the early part of the spring. Each correspondent was
-assigned to a separate regiment for the period of the advance, being
-quartered in the headquarters mess of his particular regiment and
-permitted to accompany its columns as it moved forward toward the Picardy
-Front. That is to say, he was permitted to accompany its columns, but it
-devolved upon him to furnish his own motive power. Baggage trains and
-supply trains had been pared to the quick in order to expedite fast
-marching; no provision for transporting outsiders had been made, nor would
-any such provision have been permitted. A colonel was lucky if he had an
-automobile to himself and his adjutant; generally he had to carry a French
-liaison officer or two along with him in addition to his personal
-equipment.
-</p>
-<p>
-I had been added to the personnel of an infantry regiment, which meant I
-could not steal an occasional ride while moving from one billet to another
-on the jolting limber of a field gun. Such boons were vouchsafed only to
-those more fortunate writers who belonged for the time being to the
-artillery wing. One day I walked. I was lucky in that I did not have to
-carry my bedding roll and my haversack; these a kindly disposed ambulance
-driver smuggled into his wagon, rules and regulations to the contrary
-notwithstanding.
-</p>
-<p>
-Another day the philanthropic lieutenant colonel rode his saddle horse and
-turned over to me his side car, the same being a sort of combination of
-tin bathtub and individual bootblack stand, hitched onto a three-wheeled
-motor cycle. What with impedimenta and all, rather overflowed its
-accommodations, but from the bottoms of my blistered feet to the topmost
-lock of my wind-tossed hair I was grateful to the donor as we went
-scudding along, the steersman and I, at twenty-five miles an hour.
-</p>
-<p>
-On a third day I hired a venerable mare and an ancient two-wheeled covered
-cart, with a yet more ancient Norman farmer to drive the outfit, and under
-the vast poke-bonnet hood of the creaking vehicle the twain of us
-journeyed without stopping, from early breakfast time until nearly sunset
-time. The old man did not know a word of English, but mile after mile as
-we plodded along, now overtaking the troops who had started their hike at
-dawn, and now being overtaken by them as the antique mare lost power in
-her ponderous but rheumatic legs, he conversed at me—not with me,
-but steadily at me—in his provincial patois, which was the same as
-Attic Greek to me, or even more so, inasmuch as the only French I have is
-restaurant French, which begins with the hors d'oeuvres and ends just
-south of the fromages among the standard desserts.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nevertheless, I deemed it the part of politeness to show interest by
-making a response from time to time when he was pausing to take a fresh
-breath. So about once in so often I would murmur “Yes,” with the rising
-inflection, or “No,” or “Is that so?” or “Can such things really be?” as
-the spirit moved me. And always he seemed perfectly satisfied with my
-observations, which he could not hear—I should have stated before
-now that among other things he was stone-deaf—and wouldn't have been
-able to understand even if he had heard them. And then he would go right
-on talking some more. From his standpoint, I am convinced, it was a most
-enjoyable journey and a highly instructive one besides.
-</p>
-<p>
-Along toward sunset we ambled with the utmost possible deliberation into
-our destination. It was like the average small town of Northwestern France
-in certain regards. At a little distance it seemed to be all gable ends
-jumbled together haphazard and anyhow, as is the way of village
-architecture in this corner of the world; and following an almost
-universal pattern the houses scraped sides with one another in a double
-file along the twisting main street, only swinging back to form a sort of
-irregular square in the centre.
-</p>
-<p>
-Here, in the heart of things communal, the grey church reared its bulk
-above all lesser structures, with the school and the town hall facing it,
-flanked one side by the town pump and the town shrine and the other side
-by a public pond, where the horses and the cows watered, and grave, plump
-little French children played along the muddy brink. But this place had an
-air of antiquity which showed it antedated most of its fellows even in a
-land where everything goes back into bygone centuries.
-</p>
-<p>
-Indeed, the guidebook in peace days, when people used guidebooks, gave it
-upward of a page of fine print—not so much for what it now was, but
-for what once upon a time it had been. Julius Cæsar had founded it and
-named it—and certain of the ruins of the original battlement still
-stood in massy but shapeless clumps, while other parts had been utilised
-to form the back ends of houses and barns and cowsheds. One of the first
-of those pitiable caravans of innocents that swelled the ranks of the
-Children's Crusade had been recruited here; and through the ages this
-town, inconsequential as it had become in these latter times, gave to
-France and to the world a great chronicler, a great churchman and at least
-one great warrior.
-</p>
-<p>
-What a transformation the mere coming of our troops had made! In the
-public pond a squad of supply-trainsmen were sluicing down four huge motor
-trucks that stood hub deep in the yellow water—“bathing the
-elephants” our fellows called this job. Over rutted paving stones that
-once upon a time had bruised the bare feet of captured Frankish warriors
-Missouri mules were yanking along the baggage wagons, and their dangling
-trace chains clinked against the cobbles just as the fetters on the ankles
-of the prisoners must have clinked away back yonder.
-</p>
-<p>
-In a courtyard where Roman soldiers may have played at knucklebones a
-portable army range sent up a cloud of pungent wood smoke from its
-abbreviated stack, and with the smell of the fire was mingled a satisfying
-odour of soldier-grub stewing. Plainly there would be something with
-onions in it—probably “Mulligan”—for supper this night.
-</p>
-<p>
-Under a moss-hung wall against which, according to tradition, Peter the
-Hermit stood with the cross in his hand calling the crusaders to march
-with him to deliver the sepulchre of the Saviour out of the impious hands
-of the heathen, a line of tired Yankee lads were sprawled upon the scanty
-grass doing nothing at all except resting. There were wooden signs
-lettered in English—“Regimental Headquarters,” and “Hospital,” and
-“Intelligence Offices”—fastened to stone door lintels which time had
-seamed and scored with deep lines like the wrinkles in an old dame's face.
-Khaki-clad figures were to be seen wherever you looked.
-</p>
-<p>
-Up the twisting and hilly street toiled a company belonging to my
-particular regiment, and as they came into the billeting place and I new
-the march was over, the wearied and burdened boys started singing the
-Doughboys' Song, which with divers variations is always sung in any
-infantry outfit that has a skeleton formation of old Regular Army men for
-its core, as this outfit had, and which to the extent of the first verse
-runs like this:
-</p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-Here come the doughboys
-With dirt behind their ears!
-Here come the doughboys—
-Their pay is in arrears.
-The cavalree, artilleree, and the lousy engineers—
-They couldn't lick the doughboys
-In a hundred thousand years.
-</pre>
-<p>
-To the swinging lilt of the air the column angled past where my cart was
-halted; and as it passed, the official minstrel of the company was moved
-to deliver himself of another verse, evidently of his own composition and
-dealing in a commemorative fashion with recent sentimental experiences. As
-I caught the lines and set them down in my notebook they were:
-</p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-Here go the doughboys—
-Good-bye, you little dears!
-Here go the doughboys—
-The girls is all in tears!
-The june ferns and the gossongs
-And the jolly old mong peres—
-Well, they wont fur git the doughboys
-For at least a hundred years!
-</pre>
-<p>
-The troubadour with his mates rounded the outjutting corner of the church
-beyond the shrine, and I became aware of a highly muddied youngster who
-sat in a cottage doorway with his legs extending out across the curbing,
-engaged in literary labours. From the facts that he balanced a
-leather-backed book upon one knee and held a stub of a pencil poised above
-a fair clean page I deduced that he was posting his diary to date. Lots of
-the American privates keep war diaries—except when they forget to,
-which is oftener than not.
-</p>
-<p>
-Three months before, or possibly six, the boy in the doorway would have
-been a strange figure in a strange setting. About him was scarce an
-object, save for the shifting figures of his own kind, to suggest the
-place whence he hailed. The broom that leaned against the wall alongside
-him was the only new thing in view. It was made of a sheaf of willow twigs
-bound about a staff. The stone well curb ten feet away was covered with
-the slow lichen growth of centuries. The house behind him, to judge by the
-thickness of its thatched and wattled roof and by the erosions in its
-three-foot walls of stone, had been standing for hundreds of years before
-the great-granddaddies of his generation fought the Indians for a right to
-a home site in the wilderness beyond the Alleghanies.
-</p>
-<p>
-But now he was most thoroughly at home—and looked it. He spoke,
-addressing a companion stretched out upon the earth across the narrow way,
-and his voice carried the flat, slightly nasal accent of the midwestern
-corn-lands:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Say, Murf, what's the name of this blamed town, anyhow?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Search me. Maybe they ain't never named it. I know you can't buy a decent
-cigarette in it, 'cause I've tried. The 'Y' ain't opened up yet and the
-local shops've got nothin' that a white man'd smoke, not if he never
-smoked again. What difference does the name make, anyway? All these towns
-are just alike, ain't they?”
- </p>
-<p>
-With the sophisticated eyes of a potential citizen of, say, Weeping
-Willow, Nebraska, the first speaker considered the wonderfully quaint and
-picturesque vista of weathered, slant-ended cottages stretching away down
-the hill, and then, as he moistened the tip of his pencil with the tip of
-his tongue:
-</p>
-<p>
-“You shore said a mouthful—they're all just alike, only some's
-funnier-lookin' than others. I wonder why they don't paint up and use a
-little whitewash once in a while. Take that little house yonder now!” He
-pointed his pencil toward a thatched cottage over whose crooked lines and
-mottled colours a painter would rave. “If you was to put a decent shingle
-roof on her and paint her white, with green trimmin's round the doors and
-winders, she wouldn't be half bad to look at. Now, would she? No
-cigarettes, huh? Nor nothin'!” Inspiration came to him as out of the skies
-and he grinned at his own conceit. “Tell you what—I'll jest put it
-down as 'Nowhere in France' and let it go at that.”
- </p>
-<p>
-On the following day my friend, the lieutenant colonel, brought to the
-noonday mess a tale which I thought carried a distinct flavour of the
-Yankee trench essence. There was a captain in the regiment, a last year's
-graduate of the Academy, who wore the shiniest boots in all the land round
-about and the smartest Sam Browne belt, and who owned the most ornate pair
-of riding trousers, and by other signs and portents showed he had done his
-best to make the world safe for some sporting-goods emporium back in the
-States. This captain, it seemed, had approached a sergeant who was in
-charge of a squad engaged in policing the village street, which is army
-talk for tidying up with shovel and wheelbarrow.
-</p>
-<p>
-“See here, sergeant,” demanded the young captain, “why don't you keep your
-men moving properly?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I'm tryin' to, sir,” answered the sergeant.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, look at that man yonder,” said the captain, pointing toward a
-languid buck private who was leaning on his shovel. “I've been watching
-him and he hasn't moved an inch, except to scratch himself, for the last
-five minutes. Now go over there and stir him up! Shoot it into him good
-and proper! I want to hear what you say to him.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, saluting.
-</p>
-<p>
-With no suspicion of a grin upon his face he charged down upon the
-delinquent.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Here, you!” he shouted. “What do you mean, loafin' round here doin'
-nothin'? What do you think you are, anyhow—one of them dam' West
-Pointers?”
- </p>
-<p>
-Floyd Gibbons, who was subsequently so badly wounded, rode one day into a
-battery of heavy artillery on the Montdidier Front. A begrimed battery man
-hailed him from a covert of green sods and camouflage where a six-inch gun
-squatted: “You're with the Chicago <i>Tribune</i>, ain't you?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Yes,” answered Gibbons. “Why?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Well, I just thought I'd tell you that the fellows in this battery have
-got a favourite line of daily readin' matter of their own, these days.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“What do you call it?” inquired Gibbons. “We call it the Old Flannel
-Shirt,” answered the gunner. “Almost any time you can see a fellow round
-here goin' through his copy of it for hours on a stretch. He's always sure
-to find something interestin' too. We may not be what you'd call bookworms
-in this bunch, but we certainly are the champion little cootie-chasers of
-the United States Army.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Body vermin or wet clothes or bad billets or the chance of a sudden and a
-violent taking-off—no matter what it is—the American soldier
-may be counted upon to make a joke of it.
-</p>
-<p>
-This ability to distil a laugh out of what would cause many a civilian to
-swear or weep or quit in despair serves more objects than one in our
-expeditionary forces. For one thing it keeps the rank and file of the Army
-in cheerful mood to have the mass leavened by so many youths of an
-unquenchable spirit. For another, it provides a common ground for
-fraternising when Americans and Britishers are brigaded together or when
-they hold adjoining sectors; for the Britisher in this regard is
-constituted very much as the American is, except that his humour is apt to
-assume the form of underestimation of a thing, whereas the American's
-fancy customarily runs to gorgeous hyperbole and arrant exaggeration.
-</p>
-<p>
-In a certain Canadian battalion that has made a splendid record for itself—though
-for that matter you could say the same of every Canadian battalion that
-has crossed the sea since the war began—there is a young chap whom
-we will call Sergeant Fulton, because that is not his real name. This
-Sergeant Fulton comes from one of the states west of the Great Divide, and
-he elected on his own account and of his own accord to get into the
-fighting nearly two years before his country went to war. In addition to
-being a remarkably handsome and personable youth, Sergeant Fulton is
-probably the best rifle shot of his age in the Dominion forces. This gift
-of his, which is so valuable a gift in trench fighting, was made apparent
-to his superior officers immediately after he crossed the Canadian line in
-1915 to enlist, whereupon he very promptly was promoted from the ranks to
-be a non-com, and when his command got into action in France he was
-detailed for sniper duty.
-</p>
-<p>
-At that congenial employment the youngster has been distinguishing himself
-ever since. Into the rifle pits young Fulton took something besides his
-ability to hit whatever he shot at, and his marvellous eyesight—he
-took a most enormous distaste for the institution of royalty; and this,
-too, in spite of the fact that when he joined up he swore allegiance to
-His Gracious Majesty George the Fifth. His ideas of royalty seemingly were
-based upon things he read in school histories. His conception of the
-present occupant of the English throne was a person mentally gaited very
-much like Henry the Eighth or Richard the Third, except with a worse
-disposition than either of those historic characters had. Apparently he
-conceived of the incumbent as rising in the morning and putting on a gold
-crown and sending a batch of nobles to the Tower, after which he enacted a
-number of unjust laws and, unless he felt better toward evening, possibly
-had a few heads off.
-</p>
-<p>
-Acquaintance with his comrades at arms served to rid Sergeant Fulton of
-some of these beliefs, but despite broadening influences he has never
-ceased to wonder—generally doing his wondering in a loud clear voice—how
-any man who loved the breath of freedom in his nostrils found it endurable
-to live under a king when he might if he chose live under a President
-named Woodrow Wilson.
-</p>
-<p>
-One morning just at daybreak a Canadian captain—who, by the way,
-told me this tale—crawled into a shell hole near the German lines
-where Sergeant Fulton and two other expert riflemen had been lying all
-night, like big-game hunters at a water hole, waiting for dawn to bring
-them their chance. One of Fulton's mates was a Vancouver lad, the other a
-London Tommy—a typical East-ender, but a very smart sniper.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Cap,” whispered Fulton, from where he lay stretched on his belly in the
-herbage at the edge of the crater, “you've got here just in time. Ever
-since it began to get light a Fritzie has been digging over there in their
-front trench. I've had him spotted for half an hour. He has to squat down
-to dig; and that's telling on his back. Before long I figure he's going to
-straighten up to get the crick out of himself. When he does he'll show his
-head above the parapet, and that's when I'm going to part his hair in the
-middle with a bullet. Take a squint, Cap, through the periscope and you'll
-be able to locate him, dead easy. Then stay right there and you'll see the
-surprise party come off.”
- </p>
-<p>
-So the captain took a squint as informally requested. Sure enough, a
-hundred yards away, across the debatable territory, pocked with ragged
-shell pits and traversed by its two festering brown tangles of rusty
-barbed wire, he could see the flash of an uplifted shovel blade and see
-the brown clods flying over the lip of the enemy's parapet. He kept
-watching. Presently for just a tiny fraction of time the round cap of a
-German infantryman appeared above the earthen protection. The sergeant had
-guessed right, and the sergeant's gun spoke once. Once was enough—a
-greenhorn at this game would have known that much.
-</p>
-<p>
-For there was a shriek over there, and a pair of empty outstretched hands
-were to be seen for one instant, with the fingers clutching at nothing;
-and then they disappeared, as their owner collapsed into the hole he had
-been digging.
-</p>
-<p>
-Then, according to the captain, as the sergeant opened his rifle breach he
-turned toward the Cockney who crowded alongside him, and with a gratified
-grin on his face and a weight of sarcasm in his voice he said: “There goes
-another one, eh, bo, for King and Country?”
- </p>
-<p>
-The Londoner answered on the instant, taking the same tone in the reply
-that the American had taken in the taunt. “My word,” he said, “but Gawge
-will be pleased w'en 'e 'ears wot you done fur 'im!”
- </p>
-<p>
-Three of us made a long trip by automobile to pay a visit to a coloured
-regiment, both trip and visit being described elsewhere in these writings.
-The results more than repaid us for the time and trouble. One of the main
-compensations was First Class Private Cooksey, who, because he used to be
-an elevator attendant in a Harlem apartment house, gave his occupation in
-his enlistment blank as “indoor chauffeur.” It was to First Class Private
-Cooksey that the colonel of the regiment, seeing the expression on the
-other's face when a <i>Minenwerfer</i> from a German mortar fell near by
-on the day the command moved up to the Front, and made a hole in the earth
-deep enough and wide enough and long enough to hide the average smokehouse
-in—it was, I repeat, to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel
-put this question:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Cooksey, if one of those things drops right here alongside of us and goes
-off, are you going to stay by me?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Kurnal,” stated Private Cooksey with sincerity, “I ain't goin' tell you
-no lie. Ef one of them things busts clost to me I'll jest natch-elly be
-obliged to go away frum here. But please, suh, don't you set me down as no
-deserter. Jest put it in de books as 'absent without leave,' 'cause I'll
-be due back jest ez soon ez I kin git my brakes to work.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“But what if the enemy suddenly appears in force without any preliminary
-bombardment?” pressed the colonel. “What do you think you and the rest of
-the boys will do then?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Kurnal,” said Cooksey earnestly, “we may not stick by you but we'll shore
-render one service anyway: We'll spread de word all over France 'at de
-Germans is comin'!”
- </p>
-<p>
-Nevertheless, when the Germans did advance it is of record that neither
-First Class Private Cooksey nor any of his black and brown mates showed
-the white feather or the yellow streak or the turned back. Those to whom
-the test came stayed and fought, and it was the Germans who went away.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was a member of the Fifteenth who in all apparent seriousness suggested
-to his captain that it might be a good idea to cross the carrier pigeon
-with the poll parrot so that when a bird came back from the Front it would
-be able to talk its own message instead of bringing it along hitched to
-its shank.
-</p>
-<p>
-Speaking of carrier pigeons reminds me of a yam that may or may not be
-true—it sounds almost too good to be true—that is being
-related at the Front. The version most frequently told has it that a half
-company of a regiment in the Rainbow Division going forward early one
-morning in a heavy fog for a raid across No Man's Land carried along with
-the rest of the customary equipment a homing pigeon. The pigeon in its
-wicker cage swung on the arm of a private, who likewise was burdened with
-his rifle, his extra rounds of ammunition, his trenching tool, his pair of
-wire cutters, his steel helmet, his gas mask, his emergency ration and
-quite a number of other more or less cumbersome items.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was to be a surprise attack behind the cloak of the fog, so there was
-no artillery preparation beforehand nor barrage fire as the squads climbed
-over the top and advanced into the mist-hidden beyond. Behind, in the
-posts of observation and in the post of command—“P.O.” and “P.C.”
- these are called in the algebraic terminology of modern war—the
-colonel and his aids and his intelligence officers waited for the sound of
-firing, and when after some minutes the distant rattle of rifle fire came
-to their ears they began calculating how long reasonably it might be
-before word reached them by one or another medium of communication
-touching on the results of the foray. But the ground telephone remained
-mute, and no runner returned through the fog with tidings. The suspense
-tautened as time passed.
-</p>
-<p>
-Suddenly a pigeon sped into view flying close to the earth. With scores of
-pairs of eager eyes following it in its course the winged messenger
-circled until it located its portable cote just behind the colonel's
-position, and fluttering down it entered its familiar shelter.
-</p>
-<p>
-An athletic member of the staff hustled up the ladder. In half a minute he
-was tumbling down again, clutching in one hand the little scroll of paper
-that he had found fastened about the pigeon's leg. With fingers that
-trembled in anxiety the colonel unrolled the paper and read aloud what was
-written upon it.
-</p>
-<p>
-What he read, in the hurried chirography of a kid private, was the
-following succinct statement: “I'm tired of carrying this derned bird.” In
-London one night Don Martin, of the New York <i>Herald</i>, and I were
-crossing the Strand just above Trafalgar Square. In the murk of the
-unlighted street we bumped into a group of four uniformed figures. Looking
-close we made out that one was an American soldier, that one was a lanky
-Scot in kilts, slightly under the influence of something even more
-exhilarating than the music of the pipes, and that the remaining two were
-English privates. We gathered right away that an international discussion
-of some sort was under way. At the moment of our approach the American, a
-little dark fellow who spoke with an accent that betrayed his Italian
-nativity, had the floor, or rather he had the sidewalk. We halted in the
-half-darkness to listen.
-</p>
-<p>
-“It's lika thees,” expounded the Yanko-Italian, “w'en I say 'I should
-worry' it mean—it mean—why, it mean I shoulda not worry. You
-getta me, huh?”
- </p>
-<p>
-He glanced about him, plainly pleased with the very clear and
-comprehensive explanation of this expressive bit of Americanism, which had
-come to him in a sudden burst of inspiration.
-</p>
-<p>
-The others stared at him blankly. It was one of the Englishmen who broke
-the silence.
-</p>
-<p>
-“You 'ave nothin' to worry habout hat all, and so you say that you hare
-worryin'—his that hit?” he inquired. The American nodded. “Well,
-then, hall Hi can say his hit sounds like barmy Yankee nonsense to me.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Lusten here, laddie, to me,” put in the Scotchman. “If you've naught to
-worry about, why speak of it at all? That's whut I would be pleased to
-know.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Hoh, never mind,” spoke up the second Englishman; “let's go get hanother
-drink at the pub.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“You're too late,” stated his countryman in lachrymose tones. “While we've
-been chin-chinnin' 'ere the bloomin' pub 'as closed—it's arfter
-hours for a drink.”
- </p>
-<p>
-But the canny Scot already was feeling about with a huge paw in the back
-folds of his kilt. From some mysterious recess he slowly drew forth a flat
-flask.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Lads,” he stated happily, “in the language of our American friend here,
-we should worry, because as it happens, thanks to me own forethought, we
-ha' na need to concern ourselves wi' worryin' at all, d'ye ken? Ha' the
-furst nip, Yank!”
- </p>
-<p>
-This recital would not be complete did I fail to include in it a paragraph
-or so touching on the humorous proclivities of—guess who!—the
-commander of a German submarine, no less; a person who operated last
-winter mainly off the southernmost tip of Ireland with occasional
-incursions into the British Channel. This facetious Teuton was known to
-the crews of the British and American destroyers that did their best to
-sink him—and finally, it is believed, did sink him—as Kelly.
-Indeed in the derisive messages that this deep-sea joker used to send over
-the wireless to our stations he customarily signed himself by that name.
-</p>
-<p>
-One day shortly before Kelly's U-boat disappeared altogether a commander
-of an American destroyer was sending by radio to a French port a message
-giving what he believed to be the probable location of the pestiferous but
-cheerful foe. It must have been that the subject of his communication was
-listening in on the air waves and that he knew the code which the American
-was that day employing. For all at once he broke in with his own wireless,
-and this was what the astonished operator at the receiving station on
-shore got:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Your longitude is fine, your latitude is rotten. This place is getting
-too warm for me. I'm going to beat it. Good-bye. Kelly.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Shortly after the first division of our new National Army reached France a
-group of fifty men were sent from it as replacements in the ranks of an
-old National Guard regiment which had been over for some time and which
-had suffered casualties and losses. When the squad went forward to their
-new assignment the general commanding the brigade from which the chosen
-fifty had been drawn sent to the commander of the regiment for which they
-were bound a letter reading somewhat after this style:
-</p>
-<p>
-“There are not better men in our Army anywhere than the fifty I am giving
-you, in accordance with an order received by me from General Headquarters.
-Please see to it that no one in your regiment, whether officer or private,
-refers by word, look, deed or gesture to the circumstances under which
-these fifty men entered the service. Drafted men, regulars and volunteers
-are all on the same footing, and merely because my men came in with the
-draft and yours to a large extent came in a little earlier is no reason
-why any discrimination should be permitted in any quarter.”
- </p>
-<p>
-A few weeks after the transfer had been accomplished the brigadier met the
-colonel, and recalling to the latter the sense of the letter he had
-written inquired whether there had been any suggestion of superiority on
-the part of the former National Guardsmen toward the new arrivals.
-</p>
-<p>
-“General,” broke out the colonel, “do you know what those infernal cheeky
-scoundrels of yours have been doing ever since they joined? Well, I'm
-going to tell you. They've been walking to and fro in my regiment with
-their noses stuck up in the air, calling my boys 'draft-dodgers!”'
-</p>
-<p>
-It's the essence of the trenches. And it's that—plus the courage
-they bring and the enthusiasm they have—which is winning this war
-sooner than some of the croakers at home expect it to be won.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XII. BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>S I GO to and fro in the land I some-times wonder why the Germans keep
-a-picking on me. As heaven is my judge I tried to tell the truth about
-them and their armies when I was with them; but then, maybe that's the
-reason. At any rate I am here to testify that whenever I stop at a place
-in England or France either a battery of long-range guns shells it or else
-a hostile aëroplane happens along and bombs the town. The thing is more
-than a coincidence. It is getting to be a habit, an unhealthy habit at
-that. There must be method in it. And yet I have tried to bear myself in a
-modest and unostentatious way during this present trip. If in the reader's
-judgment the personal pronoun has occurred and recurred with considerable
-frequency in my writings I would say: Under the seemingly quaint but
-necessary rules of the censorship as conducted in these parts the only
-individual of American extraction at present connected in any way with war
-activities over here whom I may mention in my writings other than General
-Pershing is myself. Since the general to date has not figured to any
-extent in my personal experiences I am perforce driven to doing pieces
-largely about what I have seen and heard and felt.
-</p>
-<p>
-Particularly is this true of these bombings and shellings. I repeat that I
-cannot imagine why the boche should single out a quiet, simple, private
-citizen for such attentions. It does not seem fair that I should ever be
-their target while shining marks move about the landscape with the utmost
-impunity. The German has a name for being efficient too. More than once in
-my readings I have seen his name coupled with the word efficiency. Take
-brigadier generals for example. Almost any colonel of our Expeditionary
-Forces in France, and particularly a senior colonel whose name is well up
-in the list, will tell you in confidence there are a number of brigadiers
-over here who could easily be spared and who would never be missed. Yet a
-brigadier general may move about from place to place in his automobile in
-comparative safety. But just let me go to the railroad station to buy a
-ticket for somewhere and immediately the news is transmitted by a
-mysterious occult influence to the Kaiser and he tells the Crown Prince
-and the Crown Prince calls up von Hindenburg or somebody, and inside of
-fifteen minutes the hands, August and Heinie, are either loading up the
-long-rangers or getting the most dependable bombing Gotha out of the
-sheds.
-</p>
-<p>
-For nearly four weeks the raiders stayed away from London. I arrived in
-London sick with bronchitis and went to bed in a hotel. That night the
-Huns flew over the Channel and spattered down inflammables and explosives
-to their heart's content. One chunk of a shell fell in the street within a
-few yards of my bedroom window, gouging a hole in the roadway. A bomb made
-a mighty noise and did some superficial damage in a park close by. It was
-my first experience at being bombed from on high, and any other time I
-should have taken a lively interest in the proceedings; but I was too sick
-to get up and dress and too dopy from the potions I had taken to awaken
-thoroughly.
-</p>
-<p>
-But the next night, when I was convalescent, and the following night, when
-I was well along the road toward recovery and able, in fact, to sit up in
-bed and dodge, back came Mister Boche and repeated the original
-performance with variations.
-</p>
-<p>
-In order to get away from the London fogs, which weren't doing my still
-tender throat any good, I ran down to a certain peaceful little seaside
-resort on the east coast of England, reaching there in the gloaming. What
-did the enemy do but sprinkle bombs all about the neighbourhood within an
-hour after I got there? He went away at ten the same night, I the
-following morning at six-forty-five.
-</p>
-<p>
-A delayed train was all that kept me from reaching Paris coincidentally
-with the first raiders who had attacked Paris in a period of months. The
-raiders covered up their disappointment by murdering a few helpless
-non-belligerents and departed, to return the next evening when I was
-present. I was domiciled in Paris on that memorable Saturday when the
-great long-distance gun began its bombardment of the city from the forest
-of Saint-Gobain nearly seventy miles distant. The first shell descended
-within two hundred yards of where I stood at a window and I saw the smoke
-of its explosion and saw the cloud of dust and pulverized débris that
-rose; the jar of the crash shook the building. Throughout the following
-day, which was Palm Sunday—only we called it Bomb Sunday—the
-shelling continued. I was there, naturally.
-</p>
-<p>
-On Monday morning I started for Soissons. So the gunners of the
-long-distance gun playing on Paris took a vacation, which lasted until the
-day after my party returned from the north. We got into the Gare du Nord
-late one night; the big gun opened up again early the next morning. I am
-not exaggerating; merely reciting a sequence of facts.
-</p>
-<p>
-For nearly two years the Germans had left poor battered Soissons pretty
-much alone, though it was within easy reach of their howitzers; moreover,
-one of their speedy flying machines could reach Soissons from the German
-lines south of Laon within five minutes. But, as I say, they rather left
-it alone. Perhaps in their kindly sentimental way they were satisfied with
-their previous handiwork there. They had pretty well destroyed the
-magnificent old cathedral. It was not quite so utter a ruin as the
-cathedral at Arras is, or the cathedral at Rheims, or the Cloth Hall at
-Ypres, or the University at Louvain; nevertheless, I assume that from the
-Prussian point of view the job was a fairly complete one.
-</p>
-<p>
-The wonderful, venerable glass windows, which can never be replaced, had
-been shattered to the last one, and the lines of the splendid dome might
-now only be traced like the curves of tottering arches, swinging up and
-out like the ribs of a cadaver, and by a lacework of roofage where
-thousands of bickering ravens, those black devil birds of desolation, now
-fluttered and cawed, and befouled with their droppings the profaned
-sanctuary below. Altogether it was one of the most satisfactory monuments
-to Kultur to be found anywhere in Europe to-day.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nor had the community at large been slighted. Everybody knows how thorough
-are the armies of the anointed War Lord. Relics which dated back to the
-days of Clovis had been battered out of all hope of restoration; things of
-antiquity and of inestimable historic value lay shattered in wreckage.
-Furthermore, from time to time, in 1914 and 1915 and even in 1916, when no
-military advantage was to be derived from visiting renewed affliction upon
-the vicinity and when no victims, save old men and women and innocent
-children, were likely to be added to the grand total of the grander tally
-which Satan, as chief bookkeeper, is keeping for the Kaiser, the guns had
-blasted away at the ancient city, leveling a homestead here and decimating
-a family there.
-</p>
-<p>
-However, since the early part of 1916 they had somehow rather spared
-Soissons. But the train bearing us was halted within three miles of the
-station because, after keeping the peace for nearly two years, the enemy
-had picked upon that particular hour of that particular afternoon to renew
-his most insalubrious attentions per nine-inch mortars. Therefore we
-entered afoot, bearing our luggage, to the accompaniment of whistling
-projectiles and clattering chimney-pots and smashing walls.
-</p>
-<p>
-In Soissons we spent two nights. Both nights the Germans shelled the town
-and on the second night, in addition, bombed it from aëroplanes. It may
-have been fancy, but as we came away in a car borrowed from a kindly
-French staff officer it seemed to us that the firing behind us was
-lessening.
-</p>
-<p>
-From press headquarters near G. H. Q. of the Amex Forces we motored one
-day to Nancy for a good dinner at a locally famous café. Simultaneously
-with our advent the foe's airmen showed up and the <i>alerte</i> was
-sounded for a gas attack. As between the prospect of spending the evening
-in an <i>abri</i> and staying out in the open air upon the road we chose
-the latter, and so we turned tail and ran back to the comparative quiet of
-the front lines. A little later a cross-country journey necessitated our
-changing cars at Bar-le-Duc. The connecting train was hours behind its
-appointed minute, as is usual in these days of disordered time cards, and
-while we waited hostile airships appeared flying so high they looked like
-bright iridescent midges flitting in the sunshine. As they swung lower, to
-sow bombs about the place, antiaircraft guns opened on them and they
-departed.
-</p>
-<p>
-That same night our train, travelling with darkened carriages, was held up
-outside of Châlons, while enemy aircraft spewed bombs at the tracks ahead
-of us and at a troop convoy passing through. The wreckage was afire when
-we crawled by on a snail's schedule an hour or so later.
-</p>
-<p>
-Two of us went to pay a visit to a regimental mess in a sector held by our
-troops. The colonel's headquarters were in a small wrecked village close
-up to the frontier. This village had been pretty well smashed up in 1914
-and in 1915, but during the trench warfare that succeeded in this district
-no German shells had scored a direct hit within the communal confines. Yet
-the enemy that night, without prior warning and without known provocation,
-elected to break the tacit agreement for localised immunity. The
-bombardment began with a shock and a jar of impact shortly after we had
-retired to bed on pallets upon the floor in the top story of what once,
-upon a happier time, had been the home of a prominent citizen. It
-continued for three hours, and I will state that our rest was more or less
-interrupted. It slackened and ceased, though, as we departed in the
-morning after breakfast, and thereafter for a period of weeks during which
-we remained away all was tranquil and unconcussive there in that cluster
-of shattered stone cottages.
-</p>
-<p>
-Another time we made a two-day expedition to the zone round Verdun. The
-great spring offensive, off and away to the westward, was then in its
-second week and the Verdun area enjoyed comparative peace. Nevertheless,
-and to the contrary notwithstanding, seven big vociferous shells came
-pelting down upon an obscure hamlet well back behind the main defences
-within twenty minutes after we had stopped there. One burst in a courtyard
-outside a house where an American general was domiciled with his staff,
-and when we came in to pay our respects his aids still were gathering up
-fragments of the shell casing for souvenirs. The general said he couldn't
-imagine why the Him should have decided all of a sudden to pay him this
-compliment; but we knew why, or thought we knew: It was all a part of the
-German scheme to give us chronic cold feet.
-</p>
-<p>
-At least, we so diagnosed the thing privately.
-</p>
-<p>
-As a result of this sort of experience, continuing through a period of
-months, I feel that I have become an adept of sorts at figuring the
-sensations of a bombee. I flatter myself also that I have acquired some
-slight facility at appraising the psychology of towns and cities
-persistently and frequently under shell or aërial attack. In the main I
-believe it may be taken as an accepted fact that the inhabitants of a
-small place behave after rather a different fashion from the way in which
-the inhabitants of a great city may be counted upon to bear themselves.
-For example, there is a difference plainly to be distinguished, I think,
-between the people of London and the people of Paris; and a difference
-likewise between the people of Paris and the people of Nancy. Certainly I
-have witnessed a great number of sights that were humorous with the grim
-and perilous humour of wartimes, and by the same token I have witnessed a
-manifold number of others that were fraught with the very essence of
-tragedy.
-</p>
-<p>
-All France to-day is one vast heart-breaking tragedy that is compounded of
-a million lesser tragedies. You note that the door-opener at your
-favourite café in Paris uses his left hand only, and then you see that his
-right arm, with the hand cased in a tight glove, swings in stiff
-uselessness from his shoulder. It is an artificial arm; the real one was
-shot away. The barber who shaves you, the waiter who serves you, the
-chauffeur who drives you about in his taxicab moves with a limping awkward
-gait that betrays the fact of a false leg harnessed to a mutilated stump.
-</p>
-<p>
-In a sufficiently wide passage a couple coming toward you—a woman in
-nurse's garb and a splendid young boy soldier with decorations on his
-breast—bump into you, almost, it would seem, by intent. As mentally
-you start to execrate the careless pair for their inexcusable disregard of
-the common rights of pedestrians you see there is a deep, newly healed
-scar in the youth's temple and that his eyes stare straight ahead of him
-with an unwinking emptiness of expression, and that his fine young face is
-beginning to wear that look of blank, bleak resignation which is the mark
-of one who will walk for all the rest of his days on this earth in the
-black and utter void of blindness.
-</p>
-<p>
-Behind the battle lines you often see long lines of men whose ages are
-anywhere between forty and fifty—tired, dirty, bewhiskered men worn
-frazzle-thin by what they have undergone; men who should be at home with
-their wives and bairns instead of toiling through wet and cold and misery
-for endless leagues over sodden roads.
-</p>
-<p>
-Their backs are bent beneath great unwieldy burdens; their hands where
-they grip their rifles are blue from the chill; their sore and weary feet
-falter as they drag them, booted in stiff leather and bolstered with mud,
-from one cheerless billet to another. But they go on, uncomplainingly, as
-they have been going on uncomplainingly since the second year of this war,
-doing the thankless and unheroic labour at the back that the ranks at the
-front may be kept filled with those whom France has left of a suitable age
-for fighting.
-</p>
-<p>
-You see that the highways are kept in repair by boys of twelve or thirteen
-and by grandsires in their seventies and their eighties, and by crippled
-soldiers, who work from daylight until dusk upon the rock piles and the
-earth heaps; that the fields are being tilled—and how well they are
-being tilled!—by young women and old women; that the shops in the
-smaller towns are minded by children, whose heads sometimes scarcely come
-above the counters.
-</p>
-<p>
-You see where the tall shade trees along the roads and the small trees in
-the thickets are being shorn away in order that the furnaces and the
-hearthstones may not be altogether fireless, since the enemy holds most of
-the coal mines. I have come in one of the fine state forests upon a squad
-of American lumberjacks, big huskies from the logging camps of Northern
-Michigan, with their portable planing mill whining and their axes
-flashing, making the sawdust and the chips fly, in what once not long ago
-was a grove of splendid timber, where beeches and chestnuts, hundreds of
-years old, stood in close ranks; but which now is being turned into a
-wilderness of raw stumps and trodden earth and stacks of ugly planking.
-</p>
-<p>
-You see an old woman, as fleshless as a fagot, helping a dog to drag a
-heavy cart up a rocky street, the two of them together straining and
-panting against the leather breast yokes. For every kilometre that the foe
-advances you see the refugees fleeing from their desolated steadings;
-indeed, you may very accurately gauge the rate of his progress by their
-number.
-</p>
-<p>
-In one lonely little town in a territory as yet undefiled by actual
-hostilities I went one morning not long ago into a quaint
-thirteenth-century church. It was one of three churches in the place; and
-in point of membership, I think, the smallest of the three. But in the
-nave, upon a stone pillar, gnawed by time with furrows and runnels, I
-found a little framed placard containing the names, written in fine
-script, of those communicants who had died in service for their country in
-this war. The list plainly was incomplete. It included only those who had
-fallen up to the beginning of last year; the toll for 1917 and for 1918
-was yet to be added; and yet of the names of the dead out of this one
-small obscure interior parish there were an even one hundred. I dare say
-the poll of the whole commune would have shown at least three times as
-many. France has shown the world how to fight. Now it shows the world how
-to die.
-</p>
-<p>
-But of all the tragedies that multiply themselves so abundantly here in
-this bloodied land it sometimes seems to me there is none greater than the
-look of things that is implanted upon an unfortified town that has been
-subjected to frequent bombings. It is not so much the shattered, ragged
-ruins where bombs have scored direct downward hits that drive home the
-lesson of what this mode of reprisal, this type of punishment means;
-rather it is the echoing empty street, as yet undamaged, whence the
-dwellers all have fled—long stretches of streets, with the windows
-shuttered up and the shops locked and barred and the rank grass sprouting
-between the cobblestones, and the starveling tabby cats foraging like the
-gaunt ghosts of cats among forgotten ash barrels. And rather more than
-this it is the expression of those who through necessity or choice have
-stayed on.
-</p>
-<p>
-I am thinking particularly of Nancy—Nancy which for environment,
-setting and architecture is one of the most beautiful little cities in the
-world; a city whose ancient walls and massy gateways still stand; whose
-squares and parks were famous; and whose people once led prosperous,
-contented and peaceful lives. Its Place Stanislaus, on a miniature scale,
-is, I think, as lovely as any plaza in Europe. Since it is so lovely one
-is moved to wonder why the Germans have so far spared it from the
-ruination they shower down without abatement upon the devoted city. It is
-well-nigh deserted now, along with all the other parts of the town. Those
-who could conveniently get away have gone; the state in the early part of
-this year transported thousands of women and children on special trains to
-safer territory in the south of France. Those who remain have in their
-eyes the haunting terror of a persistent and an unceasing fearsomeness.
-</p>
-<p>
-To be in Nancy these times is to be in a stilled, half-deserted place of
-flinching and of danger, and of the death that comes by night, borne on
-whirring motors. I walked through its streets on a day following one of
-the frequent air raids and I had a conception of how these Old-World
-cities must have looked in the time of the plague. The citizens I passed
-were like people who dwelt beneath the shadow of an abiding pestilence, as
-indeed they did.
-</p>
-<p>
-To them a clear still night with the placid stars showing in the heavens
-meant a terrible threat. It meant that they would lie quaking in their
-houses for the signal that would send them to the cellars and the dugouts,
-while high explosives and gas bombs and inflammable bombs came raining
-down. They knew full well what it meant to stay above ground during the
-dread passover of the Huns' planes, when hospitals had been turned into
-shambles and supply depots into craters of raging fire. Yet there remained
-traces of the racial temperament that has upbuoyed the French and helped
-them to endure what was unendurable.
-</p>
-<p>
-A little waitress in a café said to three of us, with a smile: “Ah, but
-you should be in Nancy on a rainy night, for then the sound of snoring
-fills the place. We can sleep then—and how we do sleep!”
- </p>
-<p>
-In Nancy they pray before the high altars for bad weather and yet more bad
-weather. And so do they in many another town in France that is within easy
-striking distance of the enemy's batteries and airdromes.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XIII. LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>F all city dwellers I am sure the Londoner is the most orderly and the
-most capable of self-government, as he likewise is the most phlegmatic.
-Because of these common traits among the masses of the populace an air
-raid over London, considering its potential possibilities for destruction,
-is comparatively an unexciting episode everywhere in the metropolis, save
-and except only in those districts of the East End where the bulk of the
-foreign-born live. There, on the first wail of the shrieking sirens,
-before the warning “maroon” bombs go up or the barrage fire starts from
-protecting batteries in the suburbs and along the Thames, these frightened
-aliens, carrying their wives and children, flock pell-mell into the
-stations of the Underground. They spread out bedclothes on the platforms
-and camp in the Tube, which is the English name for what Americans call a
-subway, and sometimes refuse to budge until long after the danger has
-passed. At the height of the bombardment they pray and shriek, and the
-women often beat their breasts and tear at their hair in a very frenzy.
-</p>
-<p>
-This is true only of the emotional Rus-and Rumanians. The native
-Londoners'ed in the most leisurely fashion walk to the subterranean
-shelters. Indeed, the chief task of the police is to keep them from
-exposing themselves in the open in efforts to get a sight the enemy.
-People who live on the lower floors of stoutly built houses mainly bide
-where they are, their argument—and a very sane one it is—being
-that since the chances of a man's being killed in his home at such a time
-are no greater than of his roof being pierced by lightning during a
-thunderstorm he is almost as safe and very much more comfortable staying
-in his bed than he would be squatting for hours in a damp Cellar.
-</p>
-<p>
-No matter how intense the bombardment the busses keep on running, though
-they have few enough passengers. From one's window one may see the big
-double-deckers lumbering by like frightened elephants, empty of all but
-the drivers and the plucky women conductors, who invariably stick to their
-posts and carry on. The London bobby promenades at his usual deliberate
-pace no matter how thick the shrapnel from the defender guns may splash
-down about him in the darkened street; and the night postman calmly goes
-his rounds too.
-</p>
-<p>
-One night in London after the alarm had been sounded I invaded the series
-of walled caverns and wine vaults known as the Adelphi Arches, which are
-just off the Strand, near Charing Cross. Several hundred men, women and
-children had already taken refuge there. Near one of the entrances a young
-mother was singing her baby to sleep; a little farther on a group of
-Australian soldiers were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to open beer
-bottles with their finger nails; and at the mouth of a side basement
-opening off a layer cave half a dozen typical Londoner civilians, of the
-sort who wear flat caps instead of hats and woollen neckerchiefs instead
-of collars, were warmly discussing politics in high nasal notes. Nowhere
-was there evident any concern or distress, or even any considerable amount
-of irritation at our enforced inconvenience.
-</p>
-<p>
-Still, any man who figures that the Englishman is not stimulated to
-stouter resistance by these visitations from the German would be mistaken.
-Beneath the surface of his apparent indifference there is produced at each
-recurrent attack an enhanced current of hate ior the government that first
-inaugurated this system of barbaric warfare against unfortified
-communities. There is something so radically wrong in the Prussian
-propaganda it is inconceivable that any mind save a Prussian's mind could
-have conceived it. His imagination is on backward and he thinks hind part
-before. In the folly of his besetting madness he figures that he can
-subjugate a man by mangling that man's wife and baby to bits—the one
-thing that has always been potent to make a valiant fighter out of the
-veriest coward that lives.
-</p>
-<p>
-They may not waste their rage in vain and vulgar mouthings—that
-would be the German, not the English way—but one may be sure that
-the people of London will never forgive the Kaiser for the hideous things
-his agents, in accordance with his policy of frightfulness, have wrought
-among innocent noncombatants in their city and in their island. They are
-entering up the balance in the ledgers of their righteous indignation
-against the day of final reckoning.
-</p>
-<p>
-After I had seen personally some of the results of one of the nocturnal
-onslaughts I too could share in the feelings of those more directly
-affected, for I could realise that, given an opportunity now denied him by
-the mercy of distance and much intervening salt water, the Hun would be
-doing unto American cities what he had done to this English city; and I
-could picture the same unspeakable atrocities perpetrated upon New Haven
-or Asbury Park or Charleston as have been perpetrated upon London and
-Dover and Margate.
-</p>
-<p>
-There was an old clergyman of the Established Church who lived in a
-rectory not far from Covent Garden, a man near seventy, who probably had
-never wittingly done an evil thing or a cruel thing in all his correct and
-godly life. He came to have the name of the Raid Preacher, because at
-every aerial attack he went forth fearlessly from his home, making the
-tour of all the shelters in the neighbourhood. At each place he would
-cheer and quiet the crowds there assembled, telling them there was no real
-danger, reading to them comforting passages of the Scriptures and
-encouraging them to sing homely and familiar songs. He had been doing this
-from the time when the Zeppelins first invaded the London district. He had
-held funeral services over the bodies of hundreds of raid victims, so they
-told me. Regardless of the religious affiliations of the dead, or the lack
-of church ties, their families almost invariably asked him to conduct the
-burials.
-</p>
-<p>
-One night in the present year—I am forbidden to give the exact date
-or the exact place, though neither of them matters now—the raiders
-came. The old clergyman hurried to a cellar under a near-by business
-establishment, where a swarm of tenement dwellers of the quarter had
-congregated for safety. He was standing in their midst in the darkened
-place, bidding them to be of good and tranquil faith, when a two-hundred
-pound bomb of high explosives, sped from a Gotha eight thousand feet above
-and aimed by chance, came through the building, bringing the roof and the
-upper floors with it.
-</p>
-<p>
-A great many persons were killed or wounded.
-</p>
-<p>
-When the rescuers came almost the first body they brought out of the
-burning ruins was that of the Raid Preacher. They had found him, with torn
-flesh and broken bones, but with his face unmarred, lying on the floor.
-His thumbed leather Bible was under him, open at a certain page, and there
-was blood upon its leaves.
-</p>
-<p>
-Men who saw his funeral cortège told me of it with tears in their eyes.
-They said that people of all faiths walked in the rain behind the hearse,
-and that the biggest of all the funeral wreaths was a gift from a little
-colony of poor Jewish folk in the district, and that one whole section of
-the sorrowful procession was made up of cripples and convalescents—pale,
-lame, halt men and women and children who limped on crutches or marched
-with bandaged heads or with twisted trunks; and these were the injured
-survivors of previous raids, to whom the dead man had ministered in their
-time of suffering.
-</p>
-<p>
-In a hospital I saw a little girl who had been most terribly maimed by the
-same missile that killed the old rector. I am not going to dwell on the
-state of this child. When I think of her I have not the words to express
-the feelings that I have. But one of her hands was gone at the wrist, and
-the other hand was badly shattered; so she was just a wan little brutally
-abbreviated fragment of humanity, a living fraction, most grievously
-afflicted.
-</p>
-<p>
-There was the pitiable wraith of a smile on her poor little pinched
-commonplace face, and to her breast, with the bandaged stump of one arm
-and with her remaining hand that was swarthed in a clump of wrapping, she
-cuddled up a painted china doll which somebody had brought her; and she
-was singing to it. The sight, I take it, would have been very gracious in
-the eyes of His Imperial Majesty of Prussia—except, of course, that
-the little girl still lived; that naturally would be a drawback to his
-complete enjoyment of the spectacle.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XIV. THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HERE was mingled comedy and woe in the scenes at Paris on the memorable
-day when the great long-distance gun—which the Parisians promptly
-christened “Big Bertha” in tribute to the titular mistress the Krupp works
-where it was produced—first opened upon the city from seventy-odd
-miles away and thereby established, among other records, a precedent for
-distance and scope in artillery bombardments. Paris was in a fit mood for
-emotion. The people were on edge; their nerves tensed, for there had been
-an alarm the evening before. The raiding planes had been turned back at
-the suburbs and driven off by the barrage fire, but the populace mainly
-had flocked into the <i>abris</i> and the underground stations of the
-Métropolitain.
-</p>
-<p>
-At ten o'clock that night, after the danger was over, a funny thing
-occurred: The crew of a motor-drawn fire engine had fuddled themselves
-with wine, and for upward of half an hour the driver drove his red wagon
-at top speed up and down the Rue de Rivoli, past the Tuileries Gardens.
-With him he had four of his <i>confrères</i> in blue uniforms and brass
-helmets. These rode two on a side behind him, their helmets shining in the
-bright moonlight like pots of gold turned upside down; and as they rode
-the two on one side sounded the <i>alerte</i> signal on sirens, and the
-two on the other side sounded the “all clear” on bugles; and between
-blasts all four rocked in their places with joy over their little joke.
-</p>
-<p>
-In London the thing would have constituted a public scandal; in New York
-there would have been a newspaper hullabaloo over it. It was typical of
-Paris, I think, that the street crowds became infected with the spirit
-which filled the roistering firemen and cheered them as they went merrily
-racketing back and forth. Nor, so far as I could ascertain, were the
-firemen disciplined; at least there was no mention in print of the
-incident, though a great many persons, the writer included, witnessed it.
-</p>
-<p>
-At seven o'clock the following morning I was standing at the window of my
-bedchamber when something of a very violent and a highly startling nature
-went off just beyond the line of housetops and tree tops which hedged my
-horizon view to the northward. Another booming detonation, and yet
-another, followed in close succession. I figured to my own satisfaction
-that one of the enemy planes which were chased away the night before had
-taken advantage of the cloaking mists of the new day to slip back and pay
-his outrageous compliments to an unsuspecting municipality. Anyhow a
-fellow becomes accustomed to the sounds of loud noises in wartimes, and
-after a while ceases to concern himself greatly about their causes or even
-their effects unless the disturbances transpire in his immediate
-proximity. Life in wartime in a country where the war is consists largely
-in getting used to things that are abnormal and unusual. One takes as a
-matter of course occurrences that in peace would throw his entire scheme
-of existence out of gear. He is living, so to speak, in a world that is
-turned upside down, amid a jumble of acute and violent contradictions,
-both physical and metaphysical.
-</p>
-<p>
-With two companions I set out for a certain large hotel which had the
-reputation of being able to produce genuine North American breakfasts for
-North American appetites. In the main grillroom we had just finished
-compiling an order, which included fried whiting, ham and eggs, country
-style, and fried potatoes, when a fire-department truck went shrieking
-through the street outside, its whistle blasting away as though it had a
-scared banshee locked up in its brazen throat.
-</p>
-<p>
-There were not many persons in the room—to your average Frenchman
-his dinner is a holy rite, but his breakfast is a trifling incident—but
-most of these persons rose from their tables and straightway departed. The
-woman cashier hurried off with her hat on sidewise, which among women the
-world over is a thing betokening agitation.
-</p>
-<p>
-The head waiter approached us with our bill in his tremulous hand, and
-bowing, wished to know whether messieurs would be so good as to settle the
-account now. By his manner lie sought to indicate that such was the custom
-of the house. We told him firmly that we would pay after we had eaten and
-not a minute sooner. He gave a despairing gesture and vanished, leaving
-the slip upon the tablecloth. Somebody hastily deposited within our reach
-the food we had ordered and withdrew.
-</p>
-<p>
-Before we were half through eating a very short, very frightened-looking
-boy in buttons appeared at our elbows, pleading to know whether we were
-ready for our hats and canes. Since he appeared to be in some haste about
-it and since he was so small a small boy and so uneasy, we told him to
-bring them along. He did bring them along, practically instantaneously, in
-fact, and promptly was begone without waiting for a tip—an omission
-which up until this time had never marred the traditional ethics of
-hat-check boys either in France or anywhere else.
-</p>
-<p>
-Presently it dawned upon us that as far as appearances went we were
-entirely alone in the heart of a great city. So when we were through
-eating we left the amount of the breakfast bill upon a plate and ourselves
-departed from there. The lobby of the hotel and the office and the main
-hallway were entirely deserted, there being neither guests nor
-functionaries in sight. But through a grating in the floor came up a gush
-of hot air, licking our legs as we passed. This may have been the flow
-from a unit of the heating plant, or then again it may have been the hot
-and feverish breathing of the habitués of that hotel, 'scaping upward
-through a vent in the subcellar's roof.
-</p>
-<p>
-Outside, in the streets, the shopkeepers had put up their iron shutters.
-At intervals the plug-plug-blooie! of fresh explosions punctuated the
-hooting of fire engines racing with the alarm in adjacent quarters.
-Overhead, ranging and quartering the upper reaches of the sky, like
-pointer dogs in a sedge field, were scores of French aëroplanes searching,
-and searching vainly, for the unseen foeman.
-</p>
-<p>
-The thing was uncanny; it was daunting and smacked of witchcraft. Here
-were the projectiles dropping down, apparently from directly above, and
-they were bursting in various sections, to the accompaniments of
-clattering débris and shattering glass; and yet there was neither sight
-nor sound of the agencies responsible for the attack. All sorts of rumours
-spread, each to find hundreds of earnest advocates and as many more
-vociferous purveyors.
-</p>
-<p>
-One theory, often advanced and generally retailed, was that the Germans
-had produced a new type of aëroplane, with a noiseless motor, and capable
-of soaring at a height where it was invisible to the naked eye. Another
-possible solution for the enigma was that with the aid of spies and
-traitors the Germans had set up a gun fired by air compression upon a
-housetop in the environs and were bombarding the city from beneath the
-protection of a false roof. In the doorway of every <i>abri</i> the
-credulous and the incredulous held heated arguments, dodging back under
-shelter, like prairie dogs into their holes, at each recurring crash.
-</p>
-<p>
-Presently it dawned upon the hearkening groups that the missiles were
-falling at stated and ordained periods. Twenty minutes regularly
-intervened between smashes. Appreciation of this circumstance injected a
-new element of surmise into a terrific and most profoundly puzzling
-affair. This was a mystery that grew momentarily more mysterious.
-</p>
-<p>
-Business for the time being was pretty much suspended; anyhow nearly
-everybody appeared to be taking part in the debates. However, the taxicabs
-were still plying. A Parisian cabby may be trusted to take a chance on his
-life if there is a fare in sight and the prospect of a <i>pourboire</i> to
-follow. Two of us engaged a weather-beaten individual who apparently had
-no interest in the controversies raging about him or in the shelling
-either; and in his rig we drove to the scene of the first explosion,
-arriving there within a few minutes after the devilish cylinder fell.
-</p>
-<p>
-There had been loss of life here—no great amount as loss of life is
-measured these times in this country, but attended by conditions that made
-the disaster hideous and distressing. The blood of victims still trickled
-in runlets between the paving stones where we walked, and there were
-mangled bodies stretched on the floor of an improvised morgue across the
-way—mainly bodies of poor working women, and one, I heard, the body
-of a widow with half a dozen children, who now would be doubly orphaned,
-since their father was dead at the Front.
-</p>
-<p>
-Back again at my hotel after a forenoon packed with curious experiences, I
-found in my quarters a very badly scared chambermaid, trying to tidy a
-room with fingers that shook. In my best French, which I may state is the
-worst possible French, I was trying to explain to her that the bombardment
-had probably ended—and for a fact there had been a forty-minute lull
-in the new frightfulness—when one of the shells struck and went off
-among the trees and flowerbeds of a public breathing place not a hundred
-and fifty yards away. With a shriek the maid fell on her knees and buried
-her head, ostrich fashion, in a nest of sofa pillows.
-</p>
-<p>
-I stepped through my bedroom window upon a little balcony in time to see
-the dust cloud rise in a column and to follow with my eyes the frenzied
-whirlings of a great flock of wood pigeons flighting high into the air
-from their roosting perches in the park plot. The next instant I felt a
-violent tugging at the back breadth of the leather harness that I wore.
-Unwittingly, in her panic the maid had struck upon the only possible use
-to which a Sam Browne belt may be put—other than the ornamental, and
-that is a moot point among fanciers of the purely decorative in the matter
-of military gearing for the human form. By accident she had divined its
-one utilitarian purpose. She had risen and with both hands had laid hold
-upon the crosspiece of my main surcingle and was striving to drag me
-inside. I rather gathered from the tenor of her contemporaneous remarks,
-which she uttered at the top of her voice and into which she interjected
-the names of several saints, that she feared the sight of me in plain view
-on that stone ledge might incite the invisible marauder to added excesses.
-</p>
-<p>
-But I was the larger and stronger of the two, and my buckles held, and I
-had the advantage of an iron railing to cling to. After a short struggle
-my would-be rescuer lost. She turned loose of my kicking straps and breech
-bands, and making hurried reference to various names in the calendar of
-the canonised she fled from my presence. I heard her falling down the
-stairs to the floor below. The next day I had a new chambermaid; this one
-had tendered her resignation.
-</p>
-<p>
-Not until the middle of the afternoon was the proper explanation for the
-phenomenon forthcoming. It came then from the Ministry of War, in the bald
-and unembroidered laconics of a formal communiqué. At the first time of
-hearing it the announcement seemed so inconceivable, so manifestly
-impossible that official sanction was needed to make men believe Teuton
-ingenuity had found a way to upset all the previously accepted principles
-touching on gravity and friction; on arcs and orbits; on aims and
-directions; on projectiles and projectives; on the resisting tensility of
-steel bores and on the carrying power of gun charges—by producing a
-cannon with a ranging scope of somewhere between sixty and ninety miles.
-</p>
-<p>
-Days of bombardment followed—days which culminated on that
-never-to-be-forgotten Good Friday when malignant chance sped a shell to
-wreck one of the oldest churches in Paris and to kill seventy-five and
-wound ninety worshippers gathered beneath its roof.
-</p>
-<p>
-After the first flurry of uncertainty the populace for the most part grew
-tranquil; now that they knew the origin of the far-flung punishment there
-was measurably less dread of the consequences among the masses of the
-people. On days when the shells exploded futilely the daily press and the
-comedians in the music halls made jokes at the expense of Big Bertha; as,
-for example, on a day when a fragment of shell took the razor out of the
-hand of a man who was shaving himself, without doing him the slightest
-injury; and again when a whole shell wrecked a butcher shop and strewed
-the neighbourhood with kidneys and livers and rib ends of beef, but spared
-the butcher and his family. On days when the colossal piece scored a
-murderous coup for its masters and took innocent life, the papers printed
-the true death lists without attempt at concealment of the ravages of the
-monster. And on all the bombardment days, women went shopping in the Rue
-de la Paix; children played in the parks; the flower women of the
-Madeleine sold their wares to customers with the reverberations of the
-explosions booming in their ears; the crowds that sat sipping coloured
-drinks at small tables in front of the boulevard cafés on fair afternoons
-were almost as numerous as they had been before the persistent thing
-started; and unless the sound was very loud indeed the average promenader
-barely lifted his or her head at each recurring report. In America we look
-upon the French as an excitable race, but here they offered to the world a
-pattern for the practice of fortitude.
-</p>
-<p>
-A good many people departed from Paris to the southward. However, there
-was calmness under constant danger. Our own people, who were in Paris in
-numbers mounting up into the thousands, likewise set a fine example of
-sang-froid. On the evening of the opening day of the bombarding, when any
-one might have been pardoned for being a bit jumpy, an audience of
-enlisted men which packed the American Soldiers and Sailors' Club in the
-Rue Royale was gathered to hear a jazz band play Yankee tunes and
-afterward to hear an amateur speaker make an address. The cannon had
-suspended its annoying performances with the going down of the sun, but
-just as the speaker stood up by the piano the <i>alerte</i> for an air
-attack—which, by the way, proved to be a false alarm, after all—was
-heard outside.
-</p>
-<p>
-There was a little pause, and a rustling of bodies.
-</p>
-<p>
-Then the man, who was on his feet, spoke up. “I'll stay as long as any one
-else does,” he said. “Anyhow, I don't know which is likely to be the worse
-of two evils—my poor attempts at entertaining you inside or the
-boche's threatened performances outside.”
- </p>
-<p>
-A great yell of approval went up and not a single person left the building
-until after the chairman announced that the programme for the evening had
-reached its conclusion. I know this to be a fact because I was among those
-present.
-</p>
-<p>
-To be sure, the strain of the harassment got upon the nerves of some; that
-would be inevitable, human nature being what it is. Attendance at the
-theatres, especially for the matinées, fell off appreciably; this, though,
-being attributable, I think, more to fear of panic inside the buildings
-than to fear of what the missiles might do to the buildings themselves.
-And there was no record of any individual, whether man or woman, quitting
-a post of responsibility because of the personal peril to which all alike
-were exposed.
-</p>
-<p>
-Likewise on those days when the great gun functioned promptly at
-twenty-minute intervals one would see men sitting in drinking places with
-their eyes glued to the faces of their wrist watches while they waited for
-the next crash. For those whose nerves lay close to their skins this
-damnable regularity of it was the worst phase of the thing.
-</p>
-<p>
-There was something so characteristically and atrociously German,
-something so hellishly methodical in the tormenting certainty that each
-hour would be divided into three equal parts by three descending steel
-tubes of potential destruction.
-</p>
-<p>
-Big Bertha operated on a perfect schedule. She opened up daily at seven a.
-m. sharp; she quit at six-twenty p. m. It was as though the crew that
-tended her carried union cards. They were never tardy. Neither did they
-work overtime. But if the Prussians counted upon bedeviling the people
-into panic and distracting the industrial and social economies of Paris
-they missed their guess. They made some people desperately unhappy, no
-doubt, and they frightened some; but the true organism of the community
-remained serene and unimpaired.
-</p>
-<p>
-Some share of this, I figure might be attributed to the facts that in a
-city as great as Paris the chances of any one individual being killed were
-so greatly reduced that the very size of the town served to envelop its
-inhabitants with a sense of comparative immunity; the number of buildings,
-and their massiveness inspired a feeling of partial security. I know I
-felt safer than I have felt out in the open when the enemy's playful
-batteries were searching out the terrain round about. In a smaller city
-this condition probably would not have been manifest to the same degree.
-There almost everybody would be likely to know personally the latest
-victim or to be familiar with the latest scene of damage and this would
-serve doubtlessly to bring the apprehensive home to all households.
-Howsoever, be the underlying cause what it might, Paris weathered the
-brunt of the ordeal with splendid fortitude and an admirable coolness.
-</p>
-<p>
-Being frequently in Paris between visits to one or another sector of the
-front, I was able to keep a fairly accurate score in the ravages of the
-bombardment and to get a fairly average appraisal of the effects upon the
-Parisian temper. Likewise by reading translated extracts out of German
-newspapers I got impressions of another phase of the tragedy which almost
-was as vivid as though I had been an eye witness to events which I knew of
-only at second-hand from the published descriptions of them.
-</p>
-<p>
-I had the small advantage though on my side of being able to vizualise the
-setting in the Forest of St. Gobain, to the west of Laon for I was there
-once in German company. I could conjure up a presentiment of the scene
-there enacted on the day when Big Bertha's makers and masters sprang their
-well-guarded surprise, which so carefully and so secretly had been evolved
-during months of planning and constructing and experimentations. Behold
-then the vision: It is a fine spring morning. There is dew on the grass
-and there is song in the throats of the birds and young foliage is upon
-the trees. The great grey gun—it is nearly ninety feet long and
-according to inspired Teutonic chronicles resembles a vast metal crone—squats
-its misshapen mass upon a prepared concrete base in the edge of the woods,
-just on the timbered shoulder of a hill. Its long muzzle protrudes at an
-angle from the interlacing boughs of the thicket where it hides; at a very
-steep angle, too, since the charge it will fire must ascend twenty miles
-into the air in order to reach its objective. Behind it is a stenciling of
-white birdies and slender poplars flung up against the sky line; in front
-of it is a disused meadow where the newly minted coinage of a prodigal
-springtime—dandelions that are like gold coins and wild marguerites
-that are like silver ones—spangle the grass as though the profligate
-season had strewn its treasures broadcast there. The gunners make ready
-the monster for its dedication. They open its great navel and slide into
-its belly a steel shell nine inches thick and three feet long nearly and
-girthed with beltings of spun brass. The supreme moment is at hand.
-</p>
-<p>
-From a group of staff officers advances a small man, grown old beyond his
-time; this man wears the field uniform of a Prussian field marshal. He has
-a sword at his side and spurs on his booted feet and a spiked helmet upon
-his head. He has a withered arm which dangles abortively, foreshortened
-out of its proper length. His hair is almost snow-white and his moustache
-with its fiercely upturned and tufted ends is white. From between slitted
-lids imbedded in his skull behind unhealthy dropical pouches of flesh his
-brooding, morbid eyes show as two blue dots, like touches of pale light
-glinting on twin disks of shallow polished agate. He bears himself with a
-mien that either is imperial or imperious, depending upon one's point of
-view.
-</p>
-<p>
-While all about him bow almost in the manner of priests making obeisance
-before a shrine, he touches with one sacred finger the button of an
-electrical controller. The air is blasted and the earth rocks then to the
-loudest crash that ever issued from the mouth of a gun; for all its bulk
-and weight the cannon recoils on its carriage and shakes itself; the tree
-tops quiver in a palsy. The young grass is flattened as though by a sudden
-high wind blowing along the ground; the frightened birds flutter about and
-are mute.
-</p>
-<p>
-The bellowing echoes die away in a fainter and yet fainter cadence.
-The-Anointed-of-God turns up his good wrist to consider the face of the
-watch strapped thereon; his staff follow his royal example. One minute
-passes in a sort of sacerdotal silence. There is drama in the pause; a
-fine theatricalism in the interlude. Two minutes, two minutes and a half
-pass. This is one part of the picture; there is another part of it:
-</p>
-<p>
-Seventy miles away in a spot where a busy street opens out into a paved
-plaza all manner of common, ordinary work-a-day persons are busied about
-their puny affairs. In addition to being common and ordinary these folks
-do not believe in the divine right of kings; truly a high crime and
-misdemeanour. Moreover, they persist in the heretical practice of
-republicanism; they believe actually that all men were born free and
-equal; that all men have the grace and the authority within them to choose
-their own rulers; that all men have the right to live their own lives free
-from foreign dictation and alien despotism. But at this particular moment
-they are not concerned in the least with politics or policies. Their
-simple day is starting. A woman in a sidewalk kiosk is ranging morning
-papers on her narrow shelf. A half-grown girl in a small booth set in the
-middle of the square where the tracks of the tramway end, is selling
-street car tickets to working men in blouses and baggy corduroy trousers.
-Hucksters and barrow-men have established a small market along the curbing
-of the pavement. A waiter is mopping the metal tops of a row of little
-round tables under the glass markee of a café. Wains and wagons are
-passing with a rumble of wheels. Here there is no drama except the simple
-homely drama of applied industry.
-</p>
-<p>
-Three minutes pass: Far away to the north, where the woods are quiet again
-and the birds have mustered up courage to sing once more, The Regal One
-drops his arm and looks about him at his officers, nodding and smiling.
-Smiling, they nod back in chorus, like well-trained automatons. There is a
-murmur of interchanged congratulations. The effort upon which so much
-invaluable time and so much scientific thought have been expended, stands
-unique and accomplished. Unless all calculations have failed the nine-inch
-shell has reached its mark, has scored its bull's eye, has done its
-predestined job.
-</p>
-<p>
-It has; those calculations could not go wrong. Out of the kindly and
-smiling heavens, with no warning except the shriek of its clearing passage
-through the skies, the bolt descends in the busy square. The glass awning
-over the café front becomes a darting rain of sharp-edged javelins; the
-paving stones rise and spread in hurtling fragments from a smoking crater
-in the roadway. There are a few minutes of mad frenzy among those people
-assembled there. Then a measure of quiet succeeds to the tumult. The work
-of rescue starts. The woman who vended papers is a crushed mass under the
-wreckage of her kiosk; the girl who sold car tickets is dead and mangled
-beneath her flattened booth; the waiter who wiped the table-tops off lies
-among his tables now, the whole crown of his head sliced away by slivers
-of glass; here and there in the square are scattered small motionless
-clumps that resemble heaps of bloodied and torn rags. Wounded men and
-women are being carried away, groaning and screaming as they go. But in
-the edge of the woods at St. Gobain the Kaiser is climbing into his car to
-ride to his headquarters. It is his breakfast-time and past it and he has
-a fine appetite this morning. The picture is complete. The campaign for
-Kultur in the world has scored another triumph, the said score standing:
-Seven dead; fifteen injured.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XV. WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HERE was a transportload of newly made officers coming over for service
-here in France. There was on board one gentleman in uniform who bore
-himself, as the saying goes, with an air. By reason of that air and by
-reason of a certain intangible atmospheric something about him difficult
-to define in words he seemed intent upon establishing himself upon a plane
-far remote from and inaccessible to these fellow voyagers of his who were
-crossing the sea to serve in the line, or to act as interpreters, or to go
-on staffs, or to work with the Red Cross or the Y. M. C. A. or the K. of
-C. or what not. He had what is called the superior manner, if you get what
-I mean—and you should get what I mean, reader, if ever you had
-lived, as I have, for a period of years hard by and adjacent to that
-particular stretch of the eastern seaboard of North America where, as
-nowhere else along the Atlantic Ocean or in the interior, are to be found
-in numbers those favoured beings who acquire merit unutterable by
-belonging to, or by being distantly related to, or by being socially
-acquainted with, the families that have nothing but.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nevertheless, and to the contrary notwithstanding, divers of his brother
-travellers failed to keep their distance. Toward this distinguished
-gentleman they deported themselves with a familiarity and an offhandedness
-that must have been acutely distasteful to one unaccustomed to moving in a
-mixed and miscellaneous company.
-</p>
-<p>
-Accordingly he took steps on the second day out to put them in their
-proper places. A list was being circulated to get up a subscription for
-something or other, and almost the very first person to whom this list
-came in its rounds of the first cabin was the person in question. He took
-out a gold-mounted fountain pen from his pocket and in a fair round hand
-inscribed himself thus:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Bejones of Tuxedo”
- </p>
-<p>
-There were no initials—royalty hath not need for initials—but
-just the family name and the name of the town so fortunate as to number
-among its residents this notable—which names for good reasons I have
-purposely changed. Otherwise the impressive incident occurred as here
-narrated.
-</p>
-<p>
-But those others just naturally refused to be either abashed or abated.
-They must have been an irreverent, sacrilegious lot, by all accounts. The
-next man to whom the subscription was carried took note of the new fashion
-in signatures and then gravely wrote himself down as “Spirits of Niter”;
-and the next man called himself “Henri of Navarre”; and the third, it
-developed, was no other than “Cream of Tartar”; and the next was “Timon of
-Athens”; and the next “Mother of Vinegar”—and so on and so forth,
-while waves of ribald and raucous laughter shook the good ship from stem
-to stem.
-</p>
-<p>
-However, the derisive ones reckoned without their host. For them the
-superior mortal had a yet more formidable shot in the locker. On the
-following day he approached three of the least impressed of his temporary
-associates as they stood upon the promenade deck, and apropos of nothing
-that was being said or done at the moment he, speaking in a clear voice,
-delivered himself of the following crushing remark:
-</p>
-<p>
-“When I was born there were only two houses in the city of New York that
-had porte-cochères, and I—I was born in one of them.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Inconceivable though it may appear, the fact is to be recorded that even
-this disclosure failed to silence the tongues of ridicule aboard that
-packet boat. Rather did it enhance them, seeming but to spur the misguided
-vulgarians on and on to further evidences of disrespect. There are reasons
-for believing that Bejones of Tuxedo, who had been born in the drafty
-semipublicity of a porte-cochère, left the vessel upon its arrival with
-some passing sense of relief, though it should be stated that up until the
-moment of his debarkation he continued ever, while under the eye of the
-plebes and commoners about him, to bear himself after a mode and a port
-befitting the station to which Nature had called him. He vanished into the
-hinterland of France and was gone to take up his duties; but he left
-behind him, among those who had travelled hither in his company, a
-recollection which neither time nor vicissitude can efface. Presumably he
-is still in the service, unless it be that ere now the service has found
-out what was the matter with it.
-</p>
-<p>
-I have taken the little story concerning him as a text for this article,
-not because Bejones of Tuxedo is in any way typical of any group or
-subgroup of men in our new Army—indeed I am sure that he, like the
-blooming of the century plant, is a thing which happens only once in a
-hundred years, and not then unless all the conditions are salubrious. I
-have chosen the little tale to keynote my narrative for the reason that I
-believe it may serve in illustration; of a situation that has arisen in
-Europe, and especially in France, these last few months—a condition
-that does not affect our Army so much as it affects sundry side issues
-connected more or less indirectly with the presence on European soil of an
-army from the United States, like most of the nations having
-representative forms of government that have gone into this war, we went
-in as an amateur nation so far as knowledge of the actual business of
-modern warfare was concerned. Like them, we have had to learn the same
-hard lessons that they learned, in the same hard school of experience. Our
-national amateurishness beforehand was not altogether to our discredit;
-neither was it altogether to our credit. Nobody now denies that we should
-have been better prepared for eventualities than we were. On the other
-hand it was hardly to be expected that a peaceful commercial country such
-as ours—which until lately had been politically remote as it was
-geographically aloof upon its own hemisphere from the political
-storm-centres of the Old World, and in which there was no taint of the
-militarism that has been Germany's curse, and will yet be her undoing—should
-in times of peace greatly concern itself with any save the broad general
-details of the game of war, except as a heart-moving spectacle enacted
-upon the stage of another continent and viewed by us with sympathetic and
-sorrowing eyes across three or four thousand miles of salt water. Prior to
-our advent into it the war had no great appeal upon the popular conscience
-of the United States. Out of the fulness of our hearts and out of the
-abundance of our prosperity we gave our dollars, and gave and gave and
-kept on giving them for the succour of the victims of the world
-catastrophe; but a sense of the impending peril for our own institutions
-came home to but few among us. Here and there were individuals who scented
-the danger; but they were as prophets crying in the wilderness; the masses
-either could not oc would not see it. They would not make ready against
-the evil days ahead.
-</p>
-<p>
-So we went into this most highly specialised industry, which war has
-become, as amateurs mainly. Our Navy was no amateur navy, as very speedily
-developed, and before this year's fighting is over our enemy is going to
-realise that our Army is not an amateur army. We may have been greenhorns
-at the trade wherein Germans were experts by training and education; still
-we fancy ourselves as a reasonably adaptable breed. But if the truth is to
-be told it must be confessed that in certain of the Allied branches of the
-business we are yet behaving like amateurs. After more than a year of
-actual and potential participation in the conflict we even now are doing
-things and suffering things to be done which would make us the
-laughingstock of our allies if they had time or tempter for laughing. I am
-not speaking of the conduct of our operations in the field or in the camps
-or on the high seas. I am speaking with particular reference to what might
-be called some of the by-products.
-</p>
-<p>
-None of us is apt to forget, or cease to remember with pride, the flood of
-patriotic sacrifice that swept our country in the spring of 1917. No other
-self-governing people ever adopted a universal draft before their shores
-had been invaded and before any of their manhood had fallen in battle. No
-other self-governing people ever accepted the restrictions of a
-food-rationing scheme before any of the actual provisions concerning that
-food-rationing scheme had been embodied into the written laws. Other
-countries did it under compulsion, after their resources showed signs of
-exhaustion. We did it voluntarily; and it was all the more wonderful that
-we should have done it voluntarily when all about us was human provender
-in a prodigal fullness. There was plenty for our own tables.
-</p>
-<p>
-By self-imposed regulations we cut down our supplies so that our allies
-might be fed with the surplus thus made available. Outside of a few sorry
-creatures there was scarcely to be found in America an individual, great
-or small, who did not give, and give freely, of the work of his or her
-heart and hands to this or that phase of the mighty undertaking upon which
-our Government had embarked and to which our President, speaking for us
-all, had solemnly dedicated all that we were or had been or ever should
-be.
-</p>
-<p>
-All sorts of commissions, some useful and important beyond telling, some
-unutterably unuseful and incredibly unimportant, sprang into being. And to
-and fro in the land, in numbers amounting to a vast multitude, went the
-woman who wanted to do her part, without having the least idea of what
-that part would be or how she would go about doing it. She knew nothing of
-nursing; kitchen work, a vulgar thing, was abhorrent to her nature and to
-her manicured nails; she could not cook, neither could she sew or sweep—but
-she must do her part.
-</p>
-<p>
-She was not satisfied to stay on at home and by hard endeavour to fit
-herself for helping in the task confronting every rational and willing
-being between the two oceans. No, sir-ree, that would be too prosaic, too
-commonplace an employment for her. Besides, the working classes could
-attend to that job. She must do her part abroad—either in France
-within sound of the guns or in racked and desolated Belgium. Of course her
-intentions were good. The intentions of such persons are nearly always
-good, because they change them before they have a chance to go stale.
-</p>
-<p>
-I think the average woman of this type had a mental conception of herself
-wearing a wimple and a coif of purest white, in a frock that was all crisp
-blue linen and big pearl buttons, with one red cross blazing upon her
-sleeve and another on her cap, sitting at the side of a spotless bed in a
-model hospital that was fragrant with flowers, and ministering daintily to
-a splendid wounded hero with the face of a demigod and the figure of a
-model for an underwear ad. Preferably this youth would be a gallant
-aviator, and his wound would be in the head so that from time to time she
-might adjust the spotless bandage about his brow.
-</p>
-<p>
-I used to wish sometimes when I met such a lady that I might have drawn
-for her the picture of reality as I had seen it more times than once—tired,
-earnest, competent women who slept, what sleep they got, in lousy billets
-that were barren of the simplest comforts, sleeping with gas masks under
-their pillows, and who for ten or twelve or fifteen or eighteen hours on a
-stretch performed the most nauseating and the most necessary offices for
-poor suffering befouled men lying on blankets upon straw pallets in
-wrecked dirty houses or in half-ruined stables from which the dung had
-hurriedly been shoveled out in order to make room for suffering soldiers—stables
-that reeked with the smells of carbolic and iodoform and with much worse
-smells. It is an extreme case that I am describing, but then the picture
-is a true picture, whereas the idealistic fancy painted by the lady who
-just must do her part at the Front had no existence except in the movies
-or in her own imagination.
-</p>
-<p>
-It never occurred to her that there would be slop jars to be emptied or
-filthy bodies, alive with crawling vermin, to be cleansed. It never
-occurred to her that she would take up room aboard ship that might better
-be filled with horse collars or hardtack or insect powder; nor that while
-over here she would consume food that otherwise would stay the stomach of
-a fighting man or a working woman; nor that if ever she reached the battle
-zone she would encounter living conditions appallingly bare and primitive
-beyond anything she could conceive; nor that she could not care for
-herself, and was fitted neither by training nor instinct to help care for
-any one else.
-</p>
-<p>
-When I left America last winter a great flow of national sanity had
-already begun to rise above the remaining scourings of national hysteria;
-and the lady whose portrait I have tried in the foregoing paragraphs to
-sketch was not quite so numerous or so vociferous as she had been in those
-first few exalted weeks and months following our entrance into the war as
-a full partner in the greatest of enterprises. My surprise was all the
-greater therefore to find that she had beaten me across the water. She had
-pretty well disappeared at home.
-</p>
-<p>
-One typical example of this strange species crossed in the same ship with
-me. Heaven alone knows what political or social influence had availed to
-secure her passport for her. But she had it, and with it credentials from
-an organisation that should have known better. She was a woman of
-independent wealth seemingly, and her motives undoubtedly were of the
-best; but as somebody might have said: Good motives butter no parsnips,
-and hell is paved with buttered parsnips. Her notion was to drive a car at
-the Front—an ambulance or a motor truck or a general's automobile or
-something. She had owned cars, but she had never driven one, as she
-confessed; but that was a mere detail. She would learn how, some day after
-she got to Europe, and then somebody or other would provide her with a car
-and she would start driving it; such was her intention. Unaided she could
-no more have wrested a busted tire off of a rusted rim than she could have
-marcelled her own back hair; and so far as her knowledge of practical
-mechanics went, I am sure no reasonably prudent person would have trusted
-her with a nutpick; but she had the serene confidence of an inspired and
-magnificent ignorance.
-</p>
-<p>
-She had her uniform too. She had brought it with her and she wore it
-constantly. She said she designed it herself, but I think she fibbed
-there. No one but a Fifth Avenue mantuamaker of the sex which used to be
-the gentler sex before it got the vote could have thought up a vestment so
-ornate, so swagger and so complicated.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was replete with shoulder straps and abounding in pleats and gores and
-gussets and things. Just one touch was needed to make it a finished
-confection: By rights it should have buttoned up the back.
-</p>
-<p>
-The woman who had the cabin next to hers in confidence told a group of us
-that she had it from the stewardess that it took the lady a full hour each
-day to get herself properly harnessed into her caparisons. Still I must
-say the effect, visually speaking, was worthy of the effort; and besides,
-the woman who told us may have been exaggerating. She was a registered and
-qualified nurse who knew her trade and wore matter-of-fact garments and
-fiat-heeled, broad-soled shoes. She was not very exciting to look at, but
-she radiated efficiency. She knew exactly what she would do when she got
-over here and exactly how she would do it. We agreed among ourselves that
-if we were in quest of the ornamental we would search out the lady who
-meant to drive the car—provided there was any car; but that if
-anything serious ailed any of us we would rather have the services of one
-of the plain nursing sisterhood than a whole skating-rinkful of the other
-kind round.
-</p>
-<p>
-In the latter part of 1917 there landed in France a young woman hailing
-from a Far Western city whose family is well known on the Pacific Slope.
-She brought with her letters of introduction signed by imposing names and
-a comfortable sum of money, which had been subscribed partly out of her
-own pocket and partly out of the pockets of well-meaning persons in her
-home state whom she had succeeded in interesting in her particular scheme
-of wartime endeavour. She was very fair to see and her uniform, by all
-accounts, was very sweet to look upon, it being a horizon-blue in colour
-with much braiding upon the sleeves and collar. It has been my observation
-since coming over that when in doubt regarding their vocations and their
-intentions these unattached lady zealots go in very strongly for striking
-effects in the matter of habiliments. Along the boulevards and in the
-tearooms I have encountered a considerable number who appeared to have
-nothing to do except to wear their uniforms.
-</p>
-<p>
-However, this young person had no doubt whatever concerning her motives
-and her purposes. The whole thing was all mapped out in her head, as
-developed when she called upon a high official of our Expeditionary Forces
-at his headquarters in the southern part of France. She told him she had
-come hither for the express purpose of feeding our starving aviators. He
-might have told her that so long as there continued to be served fried
-potato chips free at the Crillon bar there was but little danger of any
-airman going hungry, in Paris at least. What he did tell her when he had
-rallied somewhat from the shock was that he saw no way to gratify her in
-her benevolent desire unless he could catch a few aviators and lock them
-up and starve them for two or three days, and he rather feared the young
-men might object to such treatment. As a matter of fact, I understand he
-so forgot himself as to laugh at the young woman.
-</p>
-<p>
-At any rate his attitude was so unsympathetic that he practically spoiled
-the whole v war for her, and she gave him a piece of her mind and went
-away. She had departed out of the country before I arrived in it, and I
-learned of her and her uniform and her mission and her disappointment at
-its unfulfillment by hearsay only; but I have no doubt, in view of some of
-the things I have myself seen, that the account which reached me was
-substantially correct. Along this line I am now prepared to believe almost
-anything.
-</p>
-<p>
-Here, on the other hand, is a case of which I have direct and first-hand
-knowledge. I encountered a group of young women attached to one of the
-larger American organisations engaged in systematised charities and
-mercies on this side of the water. Now, plainly these young women were
-inspired by the very highest ideals; that there was no discounting. They
-were full of the spirit of service and sacrifice. Mainly they were college
-graduates. Without exception they were well bred; almost without exception
-they were well educated.
-</p>
-<p>
-The particular tasks for which they had been detailed were to care for
-pauperised repatriates returning to France through Switzerland from areas
-of their country occupied by the enemy, and to aid these poor folks in
-reestablishing their home life and to give them lessons in domestic
-science. To the success of their ministrations there was just one
-drawback: They were dealing with peasants mostly—furtive, shy,
-secretive folks who under ordinary circumstances would be bitterly
-resentful of any outside interference by aliens with their mode of life,
-and who in these cases had been rendered doubly suspicious by reason of
-the misfortunes they had endured while under the thumb of the Germans.
-</p>
-<p>
-To understand them, to plumb diplomatically the underlying reasons for
-their prejudices, to get upon a basis of helpful sympathy with them, it
-was highly essential that those dealing with them not only should have
-infinite tact and finesse but should be able to fathom the meaning of a
-nod or a gesture, a sidelong glance of the eyes or the inflection of a
-muttered word. And yet of those zealous young women who had been assigned
-to this delicate task there was scarcely one in six who spoke any French
-at all. It inevitably followed that the bulk of their patient labours
-should go for naught; moreover, while they continued in this employment
-they were merely occupying space in an already crowded country and
-consuming food in an already needy country; the both of which—space
-and food—were needed for people who could accomplish effective
-things.
-</p>
-<p>
-An American woman who is reputed to be a dietetic specialist came over not
-long ago, backed by funds donated in the States. Her instructions were to
-establish cafeterias at some of the larger French munition works. Probably
-her chagrin was equalled only by her astonishment when she learned that
-for reasons which seemed to it good and sufficient—and which no
-doubt were—the French Government did not want any American-plan
-cafeterias established at any of its munition works. Apparently it had not
-seemed feasible and proper to the sponsors of the diet specialist to find
-out before dispatching her overseas whether the plan would be agreeable to
-the authorities here; or whether there already were eating places suitable
-to the desires of the working people at these munition plants; or how long
-it would take, given the most favourable conditions, to cure the workers
-of their tenacious instinct for eating the kind of midday meal they have
-been eating for some hundreds of years and accustom them and their palates
-and their stomachs to the Yankee quick lunch with its baked pork and
-beans, its buckwheat cakes with maple sirup and its four kinds of pie. In
-their zeal the promoters, it would seem, had entirely overlooked those
-essential details. It is just such omissions as this one that the fine
-frenzy of helping out in wartime appears to develop in a nation that is
-given to boasting of its business efficiency and that vaunts itself that
-it knows how to give generously without wasting foolishly.
-</p>
-<p>
-The field manager of an organisation that is doing a great deal for the
-comfort of our soldiers and the soldiers of our allies told me of one of
-his experiences. He had a sense of humour and he could laugh over it, but
-I think I noted a suggestion of resentment behind the laughter. He said
-that some months before lie set up and assumed charge of a plant well up
-toward the trenches in a sector that had been taken over by the American
-troops. It was a large and elaborate concern, as these concerns are rated
-in the field. The men were pleased with its accommodations and facilities,
-and the field manager was proud of it.
-</p>
-<p>
-One day there appeared a businesslike young woman who introduced herself
-as belonging to a kindred organisation that was charged with the work of
-decorating the interiors of such establishments as the one over which he
-presided. Somewhat puzzled, he showed her, first of all, his canteen. It
-was as most such places are: There were boxes of edibles upon counters, in
-open boxes, so that the soldier customers might appraise the wares before
-investing; upon the shelves there were soft drinks and smoking materials
-and all manner of small articles of wearing apparel; likewise baseballs
-and safety razors and soap, toilet kits and the rest of it. Altogether the
-manager and his two assistants were rather pleased with the arrangement.
-</p>
-<p>
-The newly arrived young woman swept the scene with a cold professional
-eye.
-</p>
-<p>
-“On the whole this will do fairly well,” she said with a certain
-briskness, in her tone. “Yes, I may say it will do very well indeed—with
-certain changes, certain touches.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“As for example, what, please?” inquired the superintendent.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well,” she said, “for one thing we must put up some bright curtains at
-the windows; and to lighten up the background I think we'll run a
-stenciled pattern in some cheerful colour round the walls at the top.”
- </p>
-<p>
-It was not for the manager to inquire how the decorator meant to get her
-curtains and her stencils and her wall paints up over a road that was
-being alternately gassed and shelled at nights and on which the traffic
-capacity was already taxed to the utmost by the business of bringing up
-supplies, munitions and rations from the base some fifteen miles in the
-rear. He merely bowed and awaited the lady's further commands. “And now,”
- she said, “where is the rest room?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“The rest room, did you say?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Certainly, the rest room—the recreation hall, the place where these
-poor men may go for privacy and innocent amusement?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Well, you see, thus close up near the Front we haven't been able to make
-provision for a regular rest room,” explained the manager. “Besides, in
-case of a withdrawal or an attack we might have to pull out in a hurry and
-leave behind everything that is not readily portable on wagons or trucks.
-The nearest approach that we have to a rest room is here at the rear.” He
-led the way to a room at the back. It contained such plenishings as one
-generally finds in improvised quarters in the field—that is to say,
-it contained a curious equipment made up partly of crude bits of furniture
-collected on the spot out of villagers' abandoned homes and partly of
-makeshift stools and tables coopered together from barrels and boxes and
-stray bits of planking. Also it contained at this time as many soldiers as
-could crowd into it. A phonograph was grinding out popular airs, and
-divers games of checkers and cards were in progress, each with its fringe
-of interested onlookers ringing in the players.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Oh, but this will never do—never!” stated the inspecting lady. “It
-is too bare, too cheerless! It lacks atmosphere. It lacks coziness; it
-lacks any appeal to the senses—in short it lacks everything! We must
-have some immediate improvements here by all means.”
- </p>
-<p>
-The man was beginning to lose his temper. By an effort he retained it.
-</p>
-<p>
-“The men seem fairly well satisfied; at least I have heard no complaint,”
- he said. “What would you suggest in the way of changes?”
- </p>
-<p>
-As she answered, the visitor ticked off the items of her mental inventory
-of essentials on her fingers.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, to begin with we must clear all this litter out of here,” she said.
-“Then we must install some really comfortable chairs and at least two or
-three roomy sofas and some simple couches where the men may lie down. I
-should also like to see a piano here. That, with the addition of some
-curtains at the windows and some simple treatment of the walls and a few
-appropriate pictures properly spaced and properly hung, will be different,
-I think.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Yes,” demurred the manager, “but admitting that we could get the things
-you have enumerated up here, another problem would arise: This room,
-which, as you see, is not large, would be so crowded with the furnishings
-that there would be room in it for very many less men than usually come
-here. There are probably fifty men in it now. If it were filled up with
-sofas and couches and a piano I doubt whether we could crowd twenty men
-inside of it.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Very well, then,” stated the lady decorator calmly, “you must admit only
-twenty men at a time.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Quite so; but how,” he demanded—“how am I going to select the
-twenty?”
- </p>
-<p>
-The young woman considered the question for a moment. Then a solution came
-to her.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I should select the twenty neatest ones,” she said.
-</p>
-<p>
-Whereupon the manager excused himself and went out to frame a dispatch to
-headquarters embodying an ultimatum, which ultimatum was that the lady
-decorator went away from there forthwith or his resignation must take
-effect, coincident with his immediate departure from his present post. The
-home office must have called the lady off, because when I saw him he was
-still in harness, and swinging a man-size job in a competent way.
-</p>
-<p>
-I would not have the reader believe that I am casting discredit upon
-either the patriotic impulses or the honest motives of the bulk of the lay
-workers who have journeyed to Europe, paying their own way and their own
-living expenses. Often they arrive, many of them, to strike hands with the
-military authorities in the task which faces our nation on Continental
-soil. There is room and a welcome in France, in Italy, in England and in
-Flanders for every civilian recruit who really knows how to do something
-helpful and who has the strength, the self-reliance and the hardihood to
-perform that particular function under difficult and complicated
-conditions, which nearly always are physically uncomfortable and which may
-become physically dangerous.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nor would I wish any one to assume that I am deprecating by inference or
-by frontal attack the very fine things that are being accomplished every
-day by fine American women and girls who answered the first call for
-trained helpers, to serve in hospitals or canteens or huts, in settlement
-work or at telephone exchanges. It will make any American thrill with
-pride to enter a ward where the American Red Cross is in charge, or where
-a medical unit from one of the great hospitals or one of our great
-universities back home has control. The French and the British are quick
-enough to speak in terms of highest praise of the achievements of American
-surgeons, American nurses and American ambulance drivers. They say, and
-with good reason for saying it, that our people have pluck and that they
-have skill and that they above all are amazingly resourceful.
-</p>
-<p>
-Personally I know of no smarter exhibition of native wit and courage that
-the war has produced than was shown by that group of Smith College girls
-who had been organising and directing colonisation work among the peasants
-in the reclaimed districts of Northern France and who were driven out by
-the great spring advance of the Germans. I met some of those young women.
-They were modest enough in describing their adventure. It was by gathering
-a shred of a story there and a scrap of an anecdote here that I was able
-to piece together a fairly accurate estimate of the self-imposed
-discipline, the clean-strained grit and the initiative which marked their
-conduct through three trying weeks.
-</p>
-<p>
-Perhaps it was a mistake in their instance, as in the instances of divers
-similar organisations, that the work of resettling the wasted lands above
-the Aisne and the Oise should have been undertaken at points that would be
-menaced in the event of a quick onslaught by the Prussian high command.
-The British, I understand, privately objected to the undertakings on the
-ground that the presence of American women In villages which might fall
-again into the foe's hands—and which as it turned out did fall again
-into his hands—entailed an added burden and an added responsibility
-upon the fighting forces. The British were right. Practically all of the
-repatriated peasants had to flee for the second time, abandoning their
-rebuilt homes and their newly sowed fields.
-</p>
-<p>
-On the heels of these, improvements which represented many thousands of
-American dollars and many months of painstaking labour on the part of
-devoted American women went up in flames. The torch was applied rather
-than that the little model houses and the tons of donated supplies on hand
-should go into hostile hands.
-</p>
-<p>
-Those Smith College girls did not run away, though, until the Germans were
-almost upon them. Up to the very last minute they stayed at their posts,
-feeding and housing not only refugees but many exhausted soldiers, British
-and French, who staggered in, spent and sped after alternately fighting
-and retreating through a period of days and nights. When finally they did
-come away each one of them came driving her own truck and bearing in it a
-load of worn-out and helpless natives. One girl brought out a troop of
-frightened dwarfs from a stranded travelling caravan. Another ministered
-day and night to a blind woman nearly ninety years old and a family of
-orphaned babies. The passengers of a third were four inmates of a little
-communal blind asylum that happened to be in the invader's path.
-</p>
-<p>
-On the way, in addition to tending their special charges, they cooked and
-served hundreds of meals for hungry soldiers and hungry civilians. They
-spent the nights in towns under shell fire, and when at length the German
-drive had been checked they assembled their forces in Beauvais. Thus and
-with characteristic adaptability some became drivers of ambulances and
-supply trucks plying along the lines of communication, and some opened a
-kitchen for the benefit of passing soldiers at the local railway station.
-If the faculty and the students and the alumnæ of Smith College did not
-hold a celebration when the true story of what happened in March and April
-reached them they were lacking in appreciation—that's all I have to
-say about it.
-</p>
-<p>
-Right here seems a good-enough place for me to slip in a few words of
-approbation for the work which another 'organisation has accomplished in
-France since we put our men into the field. Nobody asked me to speak in
-its favour because so far as I can find out it has no publicity
-department. I am referring to the Salvation Army—may it live forever
-for the service which, without price and without any boasting on the part
-of its personnel, it is rendering to our boys in France!
-</p>
-<p>
-A good many of us who hadn't enough religion, and a good many more of us
-who mayhap had too much religion, look rather contemptuously upon the
-methods of the Salvationists. Some have gone so far as to intimate that
-the Salvation Army was vulgar in its methods and lacking in dignity and
-even in reverence. Some have intimated that converting a sinner to the tap
-of a bass drum or the tinkle of a tambourine was an improper process
-altogether. Never again, though, shall I hear the blare of the cornet as
-it cuts into the chorus of hallelujah whoops where a ring of blue-bonneted
-women and blue-capped men stand exhorting on a city street corner under
-the gas lights, without recalling what some of their enrolled brethren—and
-sisters—have done and are doing in Europe.
-</p>
-<p>
-The American Salvation Army in France is small, but, believe me, it is
-powerfully busy! Its war delegation came over without any fanfare of the
-trumpets of publicity. It has no paid press agents here and no impressive
-headquarters. There are no well-known names, other than the names of its
-executive heads, on its rosters or on its advisory boards. None of its
-members is housed at an expensive hotel and none of them has handsome
-automobiles in which to travel about from place to place. No compaigns to
-raise nation-wide millions of dollars for the cost of its ministrations
-overseas were ever held at home. I imagine it is the pennies of the poor
-that mainly fill its war chest.
-</p>
-<p>
-I imagine, too, that sometimes its finances are an uncertain quantity.
-Incidentally I am assured that not one of its male workers here is of
-draft age unless he holds exemption papers to prove his physical unfitness
-for military service. The Salvationists are taking care to purge
-themselves of any suspicion that potential slackers have joined their
-ranks in order to avoid the possibility of having to perform duties in
-khaki.
-</p>
-<p>
-Among officers as well as among enlisted men one occasionally hears
-criticism—which may or may not be based on a fair judgment—for
-certain branches of certain activities of certain organisations. But I
-have yet to meet any soldier, whether a brigadier or a private, who, if he
-spoke at all of the Salvation Army, did not speak in terms of fervent
-gratitude for the aid that the Salvationists are rendering so
-unostentatiously and yet so very effectively. Let a sizable body of troops
-move from one station to another, and hard on its heels there came a squad
-of men and women of the Salvation Army. An army truck may bring them, or
-it may be they have a battered jitney to move them and their scanty
-outfits. Usually they do not ask for help from any one in reaching their
-destinations. They find lodgment in a wrecked shell of a house or in the
-corner of a barn. By main force and awkwardness they set up their
-equipment, and very soon the word has spread among the troopers that at
-such-and-such a place the Salvation Army is serving free hot drinks and
-free doughnuts and free pies. It specialises in doughnuts, the Salvation
-Army in the field does—the real old-fashioned homemade ones that
-taste of home to a homesick soldier boy.
-</p>
-<p>
-I did not see this, but one of my associates did. He saw it last winter in
-a dismal place on the Toul sector. A file of our troops were finishing a
-long hike through rain and snow over roads knee-deep in half-thawed icy
-slush. Cold and wet and miserable, they came tramping into a cheerless,
-half-empty town within sound and range of the German guns. They found a
-reception committee awaiting them there—in the person of two
-Salvation Army lassies and a Salvation Army captain. The women had a fire
-going in the dilapidated oven of a vanished villager's kitchen. One of
-them was rolling out the batter on a plank with an old wine bottle for a
-rolling pin and using the top of a tin can to cut the dough into circular
-strips. The other woman was cooking the doughnuts, and as fast as they
-were cooked the man served them out, spitting hot, to hungry wet boys
-clamouring about the door, and nobody was asked to pay a cent.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the risk of giving mortal affront to ultra-doctrinal practitioners of
-applied theology I am firmly committed to the belief that by the grace of
-God and the grease of doughnuts those three humble benefactors that day
-strengthened their right to a place in the Heavenly Kingdom.
-</p>
-<p>
-As I said a bit ago, there is in France room and to spare and the
-heartiest sort of welcome for competent, sincere lay workers, both men and
-women. But there is no room, and if truth be known, there is no welcome
-for any other sort. These people over here long ago passed out of the
-experimental period in the handling of industrial and special problems
-that have grown up out of war. They have entirely emerged from the amateur
-stage of endeavour and direction. If any man doubts the truth of this he
-has only to see, as I have seen, the thousands of women who have taken
-men's jobs in the cities in order that the men might go to the colours;
-has only to see the overalled women in the big munition plants; has only
-to see how the peasant women of France are labouring in the fields and how
-the girls of the British auxiliary legions—the members of the W. A.
-A. C. for a conspicuous example—are carrying their share of the
-burden; has only to see women of high degree and low, each doing her part
-sanely, systematically and unflinchingly—to appreciate that, though
-Britain and France can find employment for every pair of willing and able
-hands somewhere behind the lines, they have no use whatsoever for the
-unorganised applicant or for the purely ornamental variety of volunteer or
-yet for the mere notoriety seeker.
-</p>
-<p>
-I make so bold as to suggest that it is time we were taking the same
-lesson to heart; time to start the sifting process ourselves. I have seen
-in Paris a considerable number of American women who appeared to have no
-business here except to air their most becoming uniforms in public places
-and to tell in a vague broad way of the things they hope to do. The
-French, proverbially, are a polite race, and the French Government will
-endure a great deal of this kind of infliction rather than run the risk of
-engendering friction, even to the most minute extent, with the people or
-the administration of an Allied nation. But in wartime especially, too
-much patience becomes a dubious virtue, and if practiced for overlong may
-become a fault.
-</p>
-<p>
-As yet there has been no intimation from any official source that the
-French would rather our State Department did not issue quite so many
-passports to Americans who have no set and definite purpose in making the
-journey to these shores, but even a superficial knowledge of the French
-language and the most casual acquaintance with the French nature enable
-one to get at what the French people are thinking. I am sure that had the
-prevalent condition been reversed our papers would have voiced the popular
-protest at the imposition long before now. Some of these days, unless we
-apply the preventive measures on our own side of the Atlantic, the
-perfectly justifiable resentment of the hard-pressed French is going to
-find utterance; and then quite a number of well-intentioned but utterly <i>inutile</i>
-persons will be going back home with their feelings all harrowed up.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XVI. CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>LEASE do not think that because I have mainly dwelt thus far upon the
-women offenders that there are no American men in France who do not belong
-here, because that would be a wrong assumption. I merely have mentioned
-the women first because by reason of their military garbing—or what
-some of them fondly mistake for military garbing—they offer rather
-more conspicuous showing to the casual eye than the male civilian dress.
-</p>
-<p>
-The men are abundantly on hand though; make no mistake about that! Some of
-them come burdened with frock-coated dignity as members of special
-commissions or special delegations; in certain quarters there appears to
-be a somewhat hazy but very lively inclination to try to run our share of
-this war by commission. Some, I am sure, came for the same reason that the
-young man in the limerick went to the stranger's funeral—because
-they are fond of a ride. Some I think came in the hope of enjoying an
-exciting sort of junketing expedition, and some because they were all
-dressed up and had nowhere to go.
-</p>
-<p>
-As well as may be judged by one who has been away from home for going on
-five months now, the special-commission notion is being rather overdone.
-Individuals and groups of individuals bearing credentials from this
-fraternal organisation or that religious organisation or the other
-research society reach England on nearly every steamer that penetrates
-through the U-boat zone. Almost invariably these gentlemen carry letters
-of introduction testifying to their personal probity and their collective
-importance, which letters are signed by persons sitting in high places.
-</p>
-<p>
-It may be that the English are thereby deceived into believing that the
-visitors are entitled to special consideration—as indeed some of
-them are, and indeed some of them most distinctly are not. Or then again
-it may be that the English are not aware of a device very common among our
-men of affairs for getting rid of a bore who is intent on going somewhere
-to see somebody and craves to be properly vouched for upon his arrival. In
-certain circles this habit is called passing the buck. In others it is
-known as writing letters of introduction.
-</p>
-<p>
-At any rate the English take no chances on offending the right party, even
-at the risk of favouring the wrong one. When a half dozen Yankees appear
-at the Foreign Office laden with letters addressed “To Whom it May
-Concern” the Foreign Office immediately becomes concerned.
-</p>
-<p>
-How is a guileless Britisher intrenched behind a flat-top desk to know
-that the August and Imperial Order of Supreme Potentates whose chosen
-emissaries are now present desirous of having a look at the war, and
-afterward to approve of it in a report to the Grand Lodge at its next
-annual convention, if so be they do see fit to approve of it—how, I
-repeat, is he to know that the August and Imperial Order of Supreme
-Potentates has a membership largely composed of class-C bartenders? Not
-knowing, he acts in accordance with the best dictates of his ignorance.
-</p>
-<p>
-The commission or the delegation or the presentation, whatever it calls
-itself, is provided with White Passes all round. On the strength of these
-White Passes the investigators are at the public expense transferred
-across the Channel and housed temporarily at the American Visitors'
-Château. From there they are taken in automobiles and under escort of very
-bored officers on a kind of glorified Cook's tour behind the British
-Front. Thereafter they are turned over to the French Mission or to the
-American forces for similar treatment.
-</p>
-<p>
-As a result they accumulate an assortment of soft-boiled and yolkless
-impressions which they incubate into the spoken or the written word on the
-way back home, after they have held a meeting to decide whether they like
-the way the war is going on or whether they do not like the way the war is
-going on. Always there is the possibility that as a result of the
-dissemination of underdone and undigested misinformations which they have
-managed to acquire these persons, though actuated by the best intentions
-in the world, may do considerable harm in shaping public opinion in
-America. And likewise one may be very sure a lot of pestered British and
-French functionaries are left to wonder what sort of folks the masses of
-American citizenship must be if these are typical samples of the
-thought-moulding class.
-</p>
-<p>
-I am not exaggerating much when I touch on this particular phase of the
-topic now engaging me, for I have seen two delegations in Europe, of the
-variety I have sought briefly to describe in the lines immediately
-foregoing; and we are expecting more in on the next boat. There was no
-imaginable reason why those whom I saw should be in a country that is at
-war at such a time of crisis as this time is, but the main point was that
-they were here, eating three large rectangular meals a day apiece and
-taking up the valuable time of overworked military men who accompanied
-them while they week-ended at the war. How many more such delegations will
-sift through the State Department and seep by the passport bureau and
-journey hither during the latter half of 1918 unless the Administration at
-Washington shuts down on the game no man can with accuracy calculate.
-</p>
-<p>
-Away down in the south of France I ran into a gentleman of a clerical
-aspect who lost no time in telling me about himself. He was tall and
-slender like a wand, and of a willowy suppleness of figure, and he was
-terribly serious touching on his mission. He represented a religious
-denomination that has several hundreds of thousands of communicants in the
-United States. He had been dispatched across, he said, by the governing
-body of his church. His purpose, he explained, was to inquire into the
-bodily and spiritual well-being of his coreligionists who were on foreign
-service in the Army and the Navy, with a view subsequently to suggesting
-reforms for any existing evil in the military and naval systems when he
-reported back to the main board of his church.
-</p>
-<p>
-To an innocent bystander it appeared that this particular investigator had
-a considerable contract upon his hands. Scattered over land and sea on
-this hemisphere there must be a good many thousands of members of his
-faith who are wearing the khaki or the marine blue. It would be
-practically impossible, I figured, to recognise them in their uniforms for
-what, denominationally speaking, they were; and from what I had seen of
-our operations I doubted whether any commanding officer would be willing
-to suspend routine while the reverend tabulator went down the lines taking
-his census; besides, the latter process would invariably consume
-considerable time. I calculated offhand that if the war lasted three years
-longer it still would be over before he could complete his rounds of all
-the camps and all the ships and all the rest billets and bases and
-hospitals and lines of communication, and so on. So I ventured to ask him
-just how he meant to go about getting his compilations of testimony
-together.
-</p>
-<p>
-He told me blandly that as yet he had not fully worked out that detail of
-the task. For the time being he would content himself with a general
-survey of the situation and with securing material for a lecture which he
-thought of giving upon his return to America.
-</p>
-<p>
-I felt a strong inclination to speak to him after some such fashion as
-this:
-</p>
-<p>
-“My dear sir, if I were you I would not greatly concern myself regarding
-the physical and the moral states of individuals composing our
-Expeditionary Forces. That job is already being competently attended to by
-experts. So far as my own observations go the chaplains are all
-conscientious, hard-working men. There are a large number of excellent and
-experienced chaplains over here—enough, in fact, to go round. They
-are doing everything that is humanly possible to be done to keep the men
-happy and amused in their leisure hours and to help them to continue to be
-decent, cleanminded, normal human beings. Almost without exception, to the
-best of my knowledge and belief, the officers are practically lending
-their personal influence and using the power and the weight of discipline
-to accomplish the same desirable ends.
-</p>
-<p>
-“On the physical side our boys are in splendid condition. We may have
-bogged slightly down in some of the aspects of this undertaking, but there
-is plenty of healthful and nourishing food on hand for every American boy
-in foreign service. He is comfortably clothed and comfortably shod—his
-officers see to that; and he is housed in as comfortable a billet as it is
-possible to provide, the state of the country being what it is. While he
-is well and hearty he has his fill of victuals three times a day, and if
-he falls ill, is wounded or hurt he has as good medical attendance and as
-good nursing and as good hospital treatment as it is possible for our
-country to provide.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Touching on the other side of the proposition I would say this: In
-England, where there are powerfully few dry areas, and here in France,
-which is a country where everybody drinks wine, I have seen a great many
-thousands of our enlisted men—soldiers, sailors and marines,
-engineers and members of battalions. I have seen them in all sorts of
-surroundings and under all sorts of circumstances. I have seen perhaps
-twenty who were slightly under the influence of alcoholic stimulant. As a
-sinner would put it, they were slightly jingled—not disorderly, not
-staggering, you understand, but somewhat jingled. I have yet to see one in
-such a state as the strictest police-court magistrate would call a state
-of outright intoxication. That has been my experience. I may add that it
-has been the common experience of the men of my profession who have had
-similar opportunities for observing the conduct of our fellows.
-</p>
-<p>
-“It is true that the boys indulge in a good deal of miscellaneous cussing—which
-is deplorable, of course, and highly reprehensible. Still, in my humble
-opinion most of them use profanity as a matter of habit and not because
-there is any real lewdness or any real viciousness in their hearts. Mainly
-they cuss for the same reason that a parrot does. Anyhow, I could hardly
-blame a fellow sufferer for swearing occasionally, considering the kind of
-spring weather we have been having in these parts lately.
-</p>
-<p>
-“As for their morals, I am firmly committed to the belief, as a result of
-what I have seen and heard, that man for man our soldiers have a higher
-moral standard than the men of any army of any other nation engaged in
-this war; and when in this connection I speak of our soldiers I mean the
-soldiers of Canada as well as the soldiers of the United States. Any man
-who tells you the contrary is a liar, and the truth is not in him. This is
-not an offhand alibi; statistics compiled by our own surgeons form the
-truth of it; and any man who stands up anywhere on our continent and says
-that the soldiers who have come from our side of the Atlantic to help lick
-Germany are contracting habits of drunkenness or that they are being
-ruined by the spreading of sexual diseases among them utters a deliberate
-and a cruel slander against North American manhood which should entitle
-him to a suit of tar-and-feather underwear and a free ride on a rail out
-of any community.
-</p>
-<p>
-“There is absolutely nothing the matter with our boys except that they are
-average human beings, and it is going to take a long time to cure them of
-that. And please remember this—that, discipline being what it is and
-military restraint being what it is, it is very much harder for a man in
-the Army or the Navy to get drunk or to misconduct himself than it would
-be for him to indulge in such excesses were he out in civil life, as a
-free agent.”
- </p>
-<p>
-That in fact was what I wanted to pour into the ear of the ecclesiastical
-prober. But I did not. I saved it up to say it here, where it would enjoy
-a wider circulation. I left him engaged in generally surveying.
-</p>
-<p>
-Officers and men alike are invariably ready and willing to voice their
-gratitude and their everlasting appreciation of the help and comfort
-provided by those who are attached to lay organisations having for the
-time being a more or less military complexion; they are equally ready to
-score the incompetents who infrequently turn up in these auxiliary
-branches of the service. A man who is fighting Fritz is apt to have a
-short temper anyhow, and meddlesome busybodies who want to aid without
-knowing any of the rudiments make him see red and swear blue.
-</p>
-<p>
-A general of division told me that when he moved in with his command to
-the sector which he then was occupying he was tagged by an undoubtedly
-earnest but undeniably pestiferous person who wanted everything else
-suspended until his purposes in accompanying the expedition had been
-satisfied.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I was a fairly busy person along about then,” said the general. “We were
-within reach of the enemy's big guns and his aëroplanes were giving us
-considerable bother, and what with getting a sufficiency of dugouts and
-trench shelters provided for the troops and attending to about a million
-other things of more or less importance from a military standpoint I had
-mighty little time to spare for side issues; and my officers had less.
-</p>
-<p>
-“But the person I am speaking of kept after me constantly. His idea was
-that the men needed recreation and needed it forthwith. He was there to
-provide this recreation without delay, and he couldn't understand why
-there should be any delay in attending to his wishes.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Finally, to get rid of him, I gave orders that a noncommissioned officer
-and a squad of men should be taken away from whatever else they were doing
-and told off to aid our self-appointed amusement director in doing
-whatever it was he wanted done. It was the only way short of putting him
-under arrest that would relieve me of a common nuisance and leave my staff
-free to do their jobs.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, it seemed that the young man had brought along with him a tent and
-a moving-picture outfit and a supply of knockdown seats. Under his
-direction the detail of men set up the tent on an open site which he
-selected upon the very top of a little hill, where it stood out against
-the sky line like a target; which, in a way of speaking, was exactly what
-it was. Then he installed his moving-picture machine and ranged his chairs
-in rows and announced that that evening there would be a free show. I may
-add that I knew nothing of this at the time, and inasmuch as the
-recreation man was known to be acting by my authority with a free hand no
-officer felt called upon to interfere, I suppose.
-</p>
-<p>
-“The show started promptly on time, with a large and enthusiastic audience
-of enlisted men on hand and with the tent all lit up inside. In the midst
-of the darkness roundabout it must have loomed up like a lighthouse.
-Naturally there were immediate consequences.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Before the first reel was halfway unrolled a boche flying man came
-sailing over, with the notion of making us unhappy in our underground
-shelters if he could. He found a shining mark waiting for him, so dropped
-a bomb at that tent. Luckily the bomb missed the tent, but it struck
-alongside of it and the concussion blew the canvas flat. The men came out
-from under the flattened folds and stampeded for the dugouts, wrecking the
-moving-picture machine in their flight. And the next day we were shy one
-amusement director. He had gone away from there.”
- </p>
-<p>
-In the Army itself there are exceedingly few members of the Bejones of
-Tuxedo family, and this, I take it, is a striking evidence of the average
-high intelligence of the men who have been chosen to officer our forces,
-considering that we started at scratch to mould millions of civilians into
-soldiers and considering also how necessary it was at the outset to issue
-a great number of commissions overnight, as it were. Howsomever, now and
-again a curious ornithological specimen does bob up, wearing shoulder
-straps.
-</p>
-<p>
-A party of civilians, observers, were sent to France by a friendly power
-to have a look at our troops. When they reached General Headquarters they
-were being escorted by a beardless youth with the bars of a second
-lieutenant on his coat. He also wore two bracelets, one of gold and one of
-silver, on his right wrist. He also spoke with a fascinating lisp. He went
-straight to the office of the officer commanding the Intelligence Section.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Colonel,” he says, “I regard it as a great mistake to send me out here
-with this party. My work is really in Paris.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Well,” said the colonel, “you let Paris worry along without you as best
-it can while you toddle along and accompany these visiting gentlemen over
-such-and-such a sector. Oh, yes, there is one other thing: Kindly close
-the door behind you on your way out.”
- </p>
-<p>
-The braceleted one hid his petulance behind a salute, his jewelry
-meanwhile jingling pleasantly, and withdrew from the presence. For two
-days in an automobile he toured with his charge, at a safe distance behind
-the front lines. On the evening of the second day, when they reached the
-railroad station to await the train which would carry them back to Paris,
-he was heard to remark with a heartfelt but lispy sigh of relief: “Well,
-thank heaven for one thing anyhow—I have done my bit!”
- </p>
-<p>
-Without being in possession of the exact facts I nevertheless hazard the
-guess that this young person either has been sent or shortly will be going
-back to his native land. Weeding-out is one of the best things this Army
-of our does. It would be well, in my humble judgment, if folks at home
-followed the Army's example in this regard, but conducted the weed-ing-out
-process over there.
-</p>
-<p>
-For men and women who can be of real service, who can endure hardships
-without collapsing and without complaining, who can fend for themselves
-when emergencies arise, who are self-reliant, competent, well skilled in
-their vocations, there is need here in France in the Red Cross, in the Y.
-M. C. A., in the Y. M. H. A., in the K. of C., in the hospitals, in the
-telephone exchanges, the motor service, the ambulance service and in
-scores of other fields of departmental and allied activity. If these
-persons can speak a little French, so much the better.
-</p>
-<p>
-But for the camouflaged malingerer, for the potential slacker, for the
-patriotic but unqualified zealot, for the incompetent one who mistakes
-enthusiasm for ability, and for the futile commission member there is no
-room whatsoever. This job of knocking the mania out of Germania is a big
-job, and the closer one gets to it the bigger it appears. We can't make it
-absolutely a fool-proof war, but by a proper discrimination exercised at
-home we can reduce the number of Americans in Europe for whose presence
-here there appears to be no valid excuse whatsoever.
-</p>
-<p>
-P. S. I hope they read these few lines in Washington.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XVII. YOUNG BLACK JOE
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">Y</span>OU rode along a highroad that was built wide and ran straight, miles on,
-and through a birch forest that was very dense and yet somehow very
-orderly, as is the way with French highroads, and with French forests,
-too, and after a while you came to where the woods frazzled away from
-close-ranked white trunks into a fringing of lacy undergrowth, all giddy
-and all gaudy with wild flowers of many a colour.
-</p>
-<p>
-Here, in a narrow clearing that traversed the thickets at right angles to
-the course you had been following, there disclosed himself a high-garbed
-North American mule, a little bit under weight, so that his backbone stood
-out sharply like the ridgepole of a roof pitched steep, with hollows by
-his hip joints to catch the rain water in. Viewing him astern or on the
-quarter you discerned that his prevalent architecture, though mixed,
-inclined to the mansard type. Viewing him bow-on you observed that he wore
-a gas mask upon his high and narrow temples and that from beneath this
-adornment, which would be startling elsewhere but which at the Front is
-both commonplace and customary, he contemplated the immediate foreground
-with half-closed, indolent eyes and altogether was as much at home as
-though his chin rested upon the hickory top rider of a snake fence in his
-native Ozarks instead of resting, as it did, athwart the crosspiece of a
-low signpost reading: “Danger Beyond—All Cars Halt Here! Proceed
-Afoot!”
- </p>
-<p>
-You might be sure that never did any mule born in Missouri take his
-languid ease amid surroundings more unique for a mule to be in, inside or
-outside of that sovereign commonwealth. There was, to begin with, his gas
-mask, draped upon the spindled brow and ready, on warning, to be yanked
-down over the muzzle and latched fast beneath the throat; probably as a
-veteran mule he was used to that. But there were other things:
-High-velocity shells from a battery of six-inches somewhere in the woods
-to the west were going over his head at regular half-minute intervals,
-each in its passage making a sound as though everybody on earth in chorus
-had said “Whew-w-w-! “—like that. Merely by cocking an eyelid aloft
-he could have beheld, sundry thousands of feet up, three French combat
-planes hunting a German raider back to his own lines, the French motors
-humming steadily like honeybees but the German droning to a deeper note
-with sullen heavy rift tones breaking into its cadences, for all the world
-like one of those big noisy beetles that invade your bedchamber on a hot
-night. Merely by squinting straight ahead he could have seen at the
-farther edge of the little glade a triple row of white crosses, each set
-off by the wooden rosette device in red, white and blue with which the
-French, when given time, mark the graves of their fallen fighters. Merely
-by sniffing he could have caught from a mile distant the faint but
-unmistakable reek that hangs over battlefields when they are getting to be
-old battlefields but are not yet very old, and that nearly always
-distresses green work animals at the first time of taking it into their
-nostrils. None of these things he did though, but remained content and
-motionless save for his wagging ears and his switching tail and his uneasy
-lower lip. He was just standing there, letting the hot sunshine seep into
-him through all his pores.
-</p>
-<p>
-Otherwise, however, his more adjacent settings were in a manner of
-speaking conventional and according to mules. For he was attached by
-virtue of an improvised gear of wire ropes and worn leather breeching to a
-small fiat car that bestraddled a rusty railroad track; and at his head
-stood a ginger-coloured youth of twenty years or thereabouts. In our own
-land you somehow expect, when you find a mule engaged in industry, to find
-an American of African antecedents managing him. So the combination was in
-keeping with the popular conception. Only in this instance the attendant
-youth wore part of a uniform and had a steel shrapnel helmet clamped down
-upon his skull.
-</p>
-<p>
-Said youth caught a nod from a corporal of his own race who lounged
-against a broken wall, the wall being practically all that remained of
-what once had been the home of a crossings guard alongside a railroad that
-was a real railroad no longer; and at that he climbed nimbly on muleback.
-</p>
-<p>
-He gathered up the guiding strings, and this then was the starting signal
-he gave as he showed all his teeth—he seemed to have fifty teeth at
-least—in a gorgeous and friendly grin: “All abo'd fur the
-Fifty-nint' Street crosstown line!”
- </p>
-<p>
-By that you would have known, if you knew your New York at all, that this
-particular muleteer must hail from that nook of Li'l Ole Manhattan which
-since the days of the Yanko-Spanko war, when a certain group of black
-troopers did a certain valiant thing, has been called San Juan Hill, and
-that away off here where now he was, in the back edges of France, he had
-in his own mind at the moment a picture of West Fifty-ninth Street as it
-might look—and probably would—on this bright warm afternoon,
-stretching as a narrow band, biaswise, of the town from the Black Belt on
-the West Side with its abutting chop-suey parlours and its fragrant barber
-shops and its clubrooms for head and side waiters, on past Columbus Circle
-into the lighter coloured districts to the eastward; and likewise that
-since he did have the image in his mind he perhaps grinned his toothful
-grin to hide a pang of homesickness for the place where he belonged.
-</p>
-<p>
-I figured that I knew these things, who had journeyed by motor with two
-more for a hundred and eighty miles across country to pay a visit to the
-first sector in our front lines that had been taken over by a regiment of
-negro volunteers—?-now by reason of departmental classifyings known
-as the Three Hundred and Somethingth of the American Expeditionary Forces.
-Because New York was where I also belonged, and this genial postilion was
-of a breed made familiar to me long time ago in surroundings vastly
-dissimilar to these present ones.
-</p>
-<p>
-To the three of us word had come, no matter how, that negro troops of ours
-were in the line. No authoritative announcement to that effect having been
-forthcoming, we were at the first hearing of the news skeptical. To be
-sure the big movement overseas was at last definitely and audaciously
-under way; the current month's programme called for the landing on French
-soil of two hundred thousand Americans of fighting age and fighting
-dispositions, which contract, I might add, was carried out so thoroughly
-that not only the promised two hundred thousand but a good and heaping
-measure of nearly sixty thousand more on top of that arrived before the
-thirtieth. It is The Glory of the Coming all right, this great thing that
-has happened this summer over here, and I am glad that mine eyes have seen
-it. It is almost the finest thing that the eye of an American of this
-generation has yet seen or is likely to see before Germany herself is
-invaded.
-</p>
-<p>
-But even though the sea lanes were streaky with the wakes of our convoys
-and the disembarkation ports cluttered with our transports, we doubted
-that coloured troops were as yet facing the enemy across the barbed-wire
-boundaries that separate him from us. Possibly this was because we had
-grown accustomed to thinking of our negroes as members of labour
-battalions working along the lines of communication—unloading ships
-and putting up warehouses and building depots and felling trees in the
-forests of France, which seem doomed to fall either through shelling or by
-the axes of the timbering crews of the Allies.
-</p>
-<p>
-“You must be wrong,” we said to him who brought us the report. “You must
-have seen an unusually big lot of negroes going up to work in the lumber
-camps in the woods at the north.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“No such thing,” he said. “I tell you that we've got black soldiers on the
-job—at least two regiments of them. There's a draft regiment from
-somewhere down South, and another regiment from one of the Eastern States—one
-of the old National Guard outfits I think it is—about fifteen miles
-to the east of the first lot. Here, I can show you about where they are—if
-anybody's got a map handy.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Everybody had a map handy. A correspondent no more thinks of moving about
-without a map than he thinks of moving about without a gas mask and a
-white paper, which is a pass. He wouldn't dare move without the mask; he
-couldn't move far without the pass, and the next to these two the map is
-the most needful part of his travelling equipment.
-</p>
-<p>
-So that was how the quest started. As we came nearer to the somewhat
-indefinitely located spot for which we sought, the signs that we were on a
-true trail multiplied, in bits of evidence offered by supply-train drivers
-who told us they lately had met negro troopers on the march in
-considerable number. As a matter of fact there were then four black
-regiments instead of two taking up sector positions in our plan of
-defence. However, that fact was to develop later through a statement put
-forth with the approval of the censor at General Headquarters.
-</p>
-<p>
-After some seven hours of reasonably swift travel in a high-powered car we
-had left behind the more peaceful districts back of the debatable areas
-and were entering into the edges of a village that had been shot to bits
-in the great offensive of 1914, which afterward had been partially rebuilt
-and which lately had been abandoned again, after the great offensive of
-1918 started.
-</p>
-<p>
-Right here from somewhere in the impending clutter of nondescript
-ruination we heard many voices singing all together. The song was a
-strange enough song for these surroundings. Once before in my life and
-only once I have heard it, and that was five years ago on an island off
-the coast of Georgia. I don't think it ever had a name and the author of
-it had somehow got the Crucifixion and the Discovery of America confused
-in his mind.
-</p>
-<p>
-We halted the car behind the damaged wall of an abandoned garden, not
-wishing to come upon the unseen choristers until they had finished. Their
-voices rose with the true camp-meeting quaver, giving reverence to the
-lines:
-</p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-In Fo'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-one
-'Tuna den my Saviour's work begun.
-</pre>
-<p>
-And next the chorus, long-drawn-out and mournful:
-</p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-Oh, dey nailed my Saviour 'pen de cross,
-But he never spoke a mumblin' word.
-</pre>
-<p>
-I was explaining to my companions, both of them Northern-born, that
-mumbling in the language of the tidewater darky means complaining and not
-what it means with us, but they bade me hush while we hearkened to the
-next two verses, each of two lines, with the chorus repeated after the
-second line:
-</p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-In Fo'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-two
-My Lawd begin his work to do!
-
-In F o'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-three
-Dey nailed my Saviour on de gallows tree.
-</pre>
-<p>
-And back to the first verse—there were only three verses, it seemed—and
-through to the third, over and over again.
-</p>
-<p>
-An invisible choir leader broke in with a different song and the others
-caught it up. But this one we all knew—My Soul Bears Witness to de
-Lawd—so we started the machine and rode round from back of the wall.
-The singers, twenty or more of them, were lying at ease on the earth
-alongside a house in the bright, baking sunshine of a still young but very
-ardent summer. On beyond them everywhere the place swarmed with their
-fellows in khaki, some doing nothing at all and some doing the things that
-an American soldier, be he black or white, is apt to do when off duty in
-billets. Almost without exception they were big men, with broad shoulders
-and necks like bullocks, and their muscles bulged their sleeves almost to
-bursting. From the fact that nine out of ten were coal-black and from a
-certain intonation in their voices never found among up-country negroes, a
-man familiar with the dialects and the types of the Far South might know
-them for natives of the rice fields and the palmetto barrens of the coast.
-Lower Georgia and South Carolina—there was where they had come from
-plainly enough, with perhaps a sprinkling among them of Florida negroes.
-Our course, steered as it was by chance reckoning, had nevertheless been a
-true one.
-</p>
-<p>
-We had found the draft outfit first. By the same token, if our original
-informant had been right, another negro regiment—of volunteers this
-time—would be found some fifteen miles to the eastward and northward
-of where we were; and this latter unit was the one whose whereabouts we
-mainly desired to discover, since, if it turned out to be the regiment we
-thought it must be, its colonel would be a personal friend of all three of
-us and his adjutant would be a former copy reader who had served on the
-staff of the same evening newspaper years before, with two of us.
-</p>
-<p>
-We halted a while to pay our respects to the commander of these strapping
-big black men—a West Pointer, still in his thirties and inordinately
-proud of the outfit that was under him. He had cause to be. I used to
-think that sitting down was the natural gait of the tidewater darky; but
-here, as any one who looked might see, were soldiers who bore themselves
-as smartly, who were as snappy at the salute and as sharp set at the drill
-as any of their lighter-skinned fellow Americans in service anywhere. Most
-of the officers were Southern-born men, they having been purposely picked
-because of a belief that they would understand the negro temperament. That
-the choosing of Southern officers had been a sane choosing was proved
-already, I think, by what we saw as well as by things we heard that day.
-For example, one of the majors—a young Tennesseean—told us
-this tale, laughing while he told us:
-</p>
-<p>
-“We've abolished two of our sentry posts in this town. Right over yonder,
-beyond what's left of the village church, is what's left of the village
-cemetery. I'll take you to see it if you care to go, though it's not a
-very pleasant sight. For a year or more back in 1914 and 1915 shells used
-to fall in it pretty regularly and rip open the graves and scatter the
-bones of those poor folks who were buried there—you know the sort of
-thing you're likely to find in any of these little places that have been
-under heavy bombardment. Well, when we moved here a week and a half ago
-and got settled a delegation from the ranks waited on the C. O. They told
-him that they had come over here to fight the Germans and that they were
-willing to fight the Germans and anxious to start the job right away, but
-that, discipline or no discipline, war or no war, orders or no orders,
-they just naturally couldn't be made to hang round a cemetery after dark.
-</p>
-<p>
-“'Kernul, suh,' the spokesman said, 'ef you posts any of us cullud boys
-'longside dat air buryin' ground, w'y long about midnight somethin'll
-happen an' you's sartain shore to be shy a couple of niggers when de
-mawnin' comes. Kernul, suh, we don't none of us wanter be shot fur runnin'
-'way, but dat's perzactly whut's gwine happen ef ary one of us has to
-march back an' fo'th by dat place w'en de darkness of de night sets in.'
-And the colonel understood, and he took mercy on 'em, so that's why if the
-Germans should happen to arrive at night by way of the graveyard they
-could march right among us, probably without having a shot fired at them.
-</p>
-<p>
-“But don't think our boys are afraid,” the young major added with pride in
-his voice. “I'd take a chance on going anywhere with these black soldiers
-at my back. So would any of the rest of the officers. We haven't had any
-actual fighting experience yet—that'll come in a week or two when we
-relieve a French regiment that's just here in front of us holding the
-front lines—but we are not worrying about what'll happen when we get
-our baptism of fire. Only I'm afraid we're going to have a mighty
-disappointed regiment on our hands in about two months from now, when
-these black boys of ours find out that even in the middle of August
-watermelons don't grow in Northern France.”
- </p>
-<p>
-As we left the regimental headquarters, which was a half-shattered wine
-shop with breaches in the wall and less than half a roof to its top floor,
-the young major went along with us to our car to give our chauffeur better
-directions touching on a maze of cross roads along the last lap of the
-run.
-</p>
-<p>
-En route he enriched my notebook with a lovely story, having the merit
-moreover—a merit that not all lovely stories have—of being
-true.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Day before yesterday,” so his narrative ran, “we began drilling the
-squads in grenade throwing—with live grenades. Up until then we'd
-exercised them only on dummy grenades, but now they were going to try out
-the real thing. We had batches of the new grenades—the kind that are
-exploded by striking the cap at the lower end upon something hard. You
-probably know how the drill is carried on: At the call of 'One' from the
-squad commander the men strike the cap ends against a stone or something;
-at 'Two' they draw back the thing full arm length, and at 'Three' they
-toss it with a stiff overhand swing. There's plenty of time of course for
-all this if nobody fumbles, because the way the fuses are timed five
-seconds elapse between the striking of the cap and the explosion. If you
-fling your grenade too soon a Heinie is liable to pick it up and throw it
-back at you before it goes off. If you hold it too long you're apt to lose
-an arm or your life. That's why we are so particular about timing the
-movements.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, one squad lined up out here in a field with their eyes bulging out
-like china door knobs. They were game enough but they weren't very happy.
-The moment the word 'One' was given a little stumpy darky in my battalion
-that we call Sugar Foot flung his grenade as far as he could.
-</p>
-<p>
-“When the rest of the grenades had been thrown the platoon commander
-jumped all over Sugar Foot. He said to him: 'Look here, what did you mean
-by throwing that grenade before these other boys threw theirs? Don't you
-know enough to wait for “Three” before you turn loose?'
-</p>
-<p>
-“'Yas, suh, lieutenant,' says Sugar Foot; 'but I jes' natchelly had to
-th'ow it. W'y, lieutenant, I could feel dat thing a-swellin' in my hand.'”
- </p>
-<p>
-It may have been the same Sugar Foot—assuredly it was the likes of
-him—who gave us the salute so briskly as we sped out of the village
-on the far side from the side on which we entered it. Followed then a
-swift coursing through a French-held sector wherein at each unfolding
-furlong of chalky-white highway we beheld sights which, being totted up,
-would have made enough to write a book about, say three years back. But
-three years back is ancient history in this war, and what once would have
-run into chapters is now worth no more than a paragraph, if that much.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the end of this leg of the journey we were well out of the static zone
-and well into the active one. And so, after going near where sundry French
-batteries ding-donged away with six-inch shells—shrapnel, high
-explosives and gas in equal doses—at a German position five miles
-away, we emerged from the protecting screenage of forest after the fashion
-stated in the opening sentences of this chapter, and learned that we had
-landed where we had counted on landing when we started out.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was the regiment we were looking for, sure enough. Its colonel, our
-friend, having been apprised by telephone from two miles rearward at one
-of his battalion headquarters that we were approaching, had sent word per
-runner that he waited to welcome us down at his present station just
-behind the forward observation posts.
-</p>
-<p>
-So we climbed aboard the one piece of rolling stock that was left astride
-the metals of a road over which, until August of 1914, transcontinental
-trains had whizzed, and the ginger-colored humourist slapped the sloping
-withers of his steed and that patient brute flinched a protesting flinch
-that ran through his frame from neck to flanks, and we were off for the
-front trenches by way of the Fifty-ninth Street cross-town line on as
-unusual a journey as I, for one, have taken since coming over here to this
-war-worn country, where the unusual thing is the common thing these days.
-Off with an ex-apartment-house doorman from San Juan Hill, New York City,
-for our steersman; a creaking small flat car for a chariot; a homegrown
-mule for motive power; a Yankee second lieutenant and a French liaison
-officer for added passengers; and for special scenic touches alongside the
-bramble-grown cut through which we jogged, machine guns so mounted as to
-command aisles chopped through the thickets, and three-inch guns plying
-busily at an unseen objective. To this add the whewful remarks let fall in
-passing by the big ones from farther back as they conversed among
-themselves on their way over to annoy the Him, and at intervals aërial
-skirmishes occurring away up overhead—'twas a braw and a bonny day
-for aërial fighting, as a stage Scotchman might say—and you will
-have a fairly complete picture of the ensemble in your own mind, I trust.
-But don't forget to stir in the singing of birds and the buzzing of
-insects.
-</p>
-<p>
-The negro troopers we encountered now, here in the copses, sometimes
-singly or oftener still in squads and details, were dissimilar physically
-as well as in certain temperamental respects to their fellows of the draft
-regiment we had seen a little while before. They were apt to be mulattoes
-or to have light-brown complexions instead of clear black; they were
-sophisticated and town wise in their bearing; their idioms differed from
-those others, and their accents too; for almost without exception they
-were city dwellers and many of them had been born North, whereas the
-negroes from Dixie were rural products drawn out of the heart of the
-Farther South. But for all of them might be said these things: They were
-soldiers who wore their uniforms with a smartened pride; who were jaunty
-and alert and prompt in their movements; and who expressed, as some did
-vocally in my hearing, and all did by their attitude, a sincere and
-heartfelt inclination to get a whack at the foe with the shortest possible
-delay. I am of the opinion personally—and I make the assertion with
-all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all of
-the Southerner's inherited and acquired prejudices touching on the race
-question—that as a result of what our black soldiers are going to do
-in this war, a word that has been uttered billions of times in our
-country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all
-kindliness—but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left
-behind a sting for the heart—is going to have a new meaning for all
-of us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be
-another way of spelling the word American.
-</p>
-<p>
-However, that is getting in the moral of my tale before I am anywhere near
-its proper conclusion. The reader consenting, we'll go back to the place
-where we were just now, when we rode over the one-mule traffic line to the
-greeting that had been organised for us two miles away. By chance we had
-chosen a most auspicious moment for our arrival. For word had just been
-received touching on the honours which the French Government had been
-pleased to confer upon two members of the regiment, Henry Johnson and
-Needham Roberts, to wit, as follows: For each the War Cross and for each a
-special citation before the whole French Army, and in addition a golden
-palm, signifying extraordinary valour, across the red-and-green ribbon of
-Johnson's decoration. So it was shortly coming to pass that a negro,
-almost surely, would be the first private of the American Expeditionary
-Forces to get a golden palm along with his Croix de Guerre. It might be
-added, though the statement is quite superfluous in view of the attendant
-circumstances, that he earned it.
-</p>
-<p>
-Through the cable dispatches which my companions straightway sent, they
-being correspondents for daily papers, America learned how Johnson and
-Roberts, two comparatively green recruits, were attacked at night in a
-front-line strong point by a raiding party estimated to number between
-twenty and twenty-five; and how after both had been badly wounded and
-after Roberts had gone down with a shattered leg he, lying on his back,
-flung hand grenades with such effect that he blew at least one of the
-raiders to bits of scrap meat; and how Johnson first with bullets, then
-with his clubbed rifle after he had emptied it, and finally with his bolo
-gave so valiant an account of himself that the attacking party fled back
-to their own lines, abandoning most of their equipment and carrying with
-them at least five of their number, who had been either killed outright or
-most despitefully misused by the valiant pair. If ever proof were needed,
-which it is not, that the colour of a man's skin has nothing to do with
-the colour of his soul these twain then and there offered it in abundance.
-</p>
-<p>
-The word of what the French military authorities meant to do having been
-received, it had spread, and its lesson was bearing fruit.
-</p>
-<p>
-So we found out when the colonel took us on a journey through the forward
-trenches. Every other private and every other noncom. we ran across had
-his rifle apart and was carefully oiling it. If they were including the
-coloured boys now when it came to passing round those crosses he meant to
-get one too, and along with it a mess of Germans—Bush-Germans, by
-his way of expression. The negro soldier in France insists on pronouncing
-boche as Bush, and on coupling the transmogrified word to the noun German,
-possibly because the African mind loves mouth-filling phrases or perhaps
-just to make all the clearer that, according to his concepts, every boche
-is a German and every German is a boche.
-</p>
-<p>
-As we passed along we heard one short and stumpy private, with a
-complexion like the bottom of a coal mine and a smile like the sudden
-lifting of a piano lid, call out to a mate as he fitted his greased rifle
-together:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Henry Johnson, he done right well, didn't he? But say, boy, effen they'll
-jes gimme a razor an' a armload of bricks an' one half pint of bust-haid
-licker I kin go plum to Berlin.”
- </p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XVIII. “LET'S GO!”
- </h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE most illuminating insight of all, into the strengthened ambition which
-animated the rank and file of the Old Fifteenth was vouchsafed to us as we
-three, following along behind the tall shape of the Colonel, rounded a
-corner of a trench and became aware of a soldier who sat cross-legged upon
-his knees with his back turned to us and was so deeply intent upon the
-task in hand that he never heeded our approach at all. On a silent signal
-from our guide we tiptoed near so we could look downward over the bent
-shoulders of the unconscious one and this, then, was what we saw:
-</p>
-<p>
-A small, squarely built individual, of the colour of a bottle of good
-cider-vinegar, who balanced upon his knees a slab of whitish stone—it
-looked like a scrap of tombstone and I am inclined to think that is what
-it was—and in his two hands, held by the handle, a bolo with a
-nine-inch blade. First he would anoint the uppermost surface of the white
-slab after the ordained fashion of those who use whetstones, then
-industriously he would hone his blade; then he would try its edge upon his
-thumb and then anoint and whet some more. And all the while, under his
-breath, he crooned a little wordless, humming song which had in it some of
-the menace of a wasp's petulant buzzing. He was making war-medicine. A
-United States soldier whose remote ancestors by preference fought hand to
-hand with their enemies, was qualifying to see Henry Johnson and go him
-one better. The picture was too sweet a one to be spoiled by breaking in
-on it. We slipped back out of sight so quietly the knife-sharpener could
-never have suspected that spying eyes had looked in upon him as he engaged
-in these private devotions of his.
-</p>
-<p>
-“They're all like that buddy with the bolo, and some of them are even more
-so,” said the colonel after we had tramped back again to the dugout in a
-chalk cliff, which he temporarily occupied as a combination parlour,
-boudoir, office, breakfast room and headquarters. “We were a pretty green
-outfit when they brought us over here. Why, even after we got over to
-France some of my boys used to write me letters tendering their
-resignations, to take effect immediately. They had come into the service
-of their own free will—as volunteers in the National Guard—so
-when they got tired of soldiering, as a few of them did at first, they
-couldn't understand why they shouldn't go out of their own free wills.
-</p>
-<p>
-“They used us on construction work down near one of the ports for a while
-after we landed. Then here a couple of weeks ago they sent us up to take
-over this sector. The men are fond of saying that all they had by way of
-preparation for the job was four days' drilling and a haircut.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Did I say just now that we were green? Well, that doesn't half describe
-it, let me tell you. This sector was calm enough, as frontline sectors go,
-when we took it over. But the first night my fellows had hardly had time
-enough to learn to find their way about the trenches when from a forward
-rifle pit a rocket of a certain colour went up, 'signifying: 'We are being
-attacked by tanks.'
-</p>
-<p>
-“It gave me quite a shock, especially as there had been no artillery
-preparation from Fritz's side of the wire, and besides there is a swamp
-between the lines right in front of where that rifle pit is, so I didn't
-exactly see how tanks were going to get across unless the Germans ferried
-them over in skiffs. So before calling out the regiment I decided to make
-a personal investigation. But before I had time to start on it two more
-rockets went up from another rifle pit at the left of the first one, and
-according to the code these rockets meant: 'Lift your barrage—we are
-about to attack in force.' Since we hadn't been putting down any barrage
-and there was no reason for an attack and no order for one this gave me
-another shock. So I put out hot-foot to find out what was the matter.
-</p>
-<p>
-“It seemed a raw recruit in the first pit had found a box of rockets. Just
-for curiosity, I suppose, or possibly because he wished to show the
-Bush-Germans that he regarded the whole thing as being in the nature of a
-celebration, or maybe because he just wanted to see what would happen
-afterward, he touched off one of them. And then a fellow down the line
-seeing this rocket decided, I guess, that a national holiday of the French
-was being observed and so he touched off two. But it never will happen
-again.
-</p>
-<p>
-“The very next night we had a gas alarm two miles back of here in the next
-village, where one of my battalions is billeted. It turned out to be a
-false alarm, but all through the camp the sentries were sounding their
-automobile horns as a warning for gas masks. But Major Blank's orderly
-didn't know the meaning of the signals, or if he did know he forgot it in
-the excitement of the moment. Still he didn't lose his head altogether. As
-he heard the sound of the tootings coming nearer and nearer he dashed into
-the major's billet—the major is a very sound sleeper—and
-grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him right out of his blankets. “'Wake
-up, major!' he yelled, trying to keep on shaking with one hand and to
-salute with the other. 'Fur Gawd's sake, suh, wake up. The Germans is
-comin'—in automobiles!'
-</p>
-<p>
-“Oh yes, they were green at the start; but they are as game as any men in
-this man's Army are. You take it from me, because I know. They weren't
-afraid of the cold and the wet and the terrific labour when they worked
-last winter down near the coast of France on as mean a job of work as
-anybody ever tackled. They were up to their waists in cold water part of
-the time—yes, most of the time they were—but not a one of them
-flinched. And believe me there's no flinching among them now that we are
-up against the Huns! You don't need the case of Johnson and Roberts to
-prove it. It is proved by the attitude of every single man among them. It
-isn't hard to send them into danger—the hard part is to keep them
-from going into it on their own accord. They say the dark races can't
-stand the high explosives—that their nerves go to pieces under the
-strain of the terrific concussion. If that be so the representatives of
-the dark races that come from America are the exceptions to the rule. My
-boys are getting fat and sassy on a fare of bombings and bombardments, and
-we have to watch them like hawks to keep them from slipping off on little
-independent raiding parties without telling anybody about it in advance.
-Their real test hasn't come yet, but when it does come you take a tip from
-me and string your bets along with this minstrel troupe to win.
-</p>
-<p>
-“My men have a catch phrase that has come to be their motto and their
-slogan. Tell any one of them to do a certain thing and as he gets up to go
-about it he invariably says, 'Let's go!' Tell a hundred of them to do a
-thing and they'll say the same thing. I hear it a thousand times a day.
-The mission may involve discomfort or the chance of a sudden and
-exceedingly violent death. No matter—'Let's go!' that's the
-invariable answer. Personally I think it makes a pretty good maxim for an
-outfit of fighting men, and I'll stake my life on it that they'll live up
-to it when the real trial comes.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Two days we stayed on there, and they were two days of a superior variety
-of continuous black-face vaudeville. There was the evening when for our
-benefit the men organised an impromptu concert featuring a quartet that
-would succeed on any man's burlesque circuit, and a troupe of
-buck-and-wing dancers whose equals it would be hard to find on the Big
-Time. There was the next evening when the band of forty pieces serenaded
-us. I think surely this must be the best regimental band in our Army.
-Certainly it is the best one I have heard in Europe during this war. On
-parade when it played the Memphis Blues the men did not march; the music
-poured in at their ears and ran down to their heels, and instead of
-marching they literally danced their way along. As for the dwellers of the
-French towns in which this regiment has from time to time been quartered,
-they, I am told, fairly go mad when some alluring, compelling, ragtime
-tune is played with that richness of syncopated melody in it which only
-the black man can achieve; and as the regiment has moved on, more than
-once it has been hard to keep the unattached inhabitants of the village
-that the band was quitting from moving on with it.
-</p>
-<p>
-If I live to be a hundred and one I shall never forget the second night,
-which was a night of a splendid, flawless full moon. We stood with the
-regimental staff on the terraced lawn of the chief house in a
-half-deserted town five miles back from the trenches, and down below us in
-the main street the band played plantation airs and hundreds of negro
-soldiers joined in and sang the words. Behind the masses of upturned dark
-faces was a ring of white ones where the remaining natives of the place
-clustered, with their heads wagging in time to the tunes.
-</p>
-<p>
-And when the band got to Way Down Upon the Swanee River I wanted to cry,
-and when the drum major, who likewise had a splendid barytone voice, sang,
-as an interpolated number, Joan of Arc, first in English and then in
-excellent French, the villagers openly cried; and an elderly peasant,
-heavily whiskered, with the tears of a joyous and thankful enthusiasm
-running down his bearded cheeks, was with difficulty restrained from
-throwing his arms about the soloist and kissing him. When this type of
-Frenchman feels emotion he expresses it moistly.
-</p>
-<p>
-Those two days we heard stories without number, all of them true, I take
-it, and most of them good ones. We heard of the yellow youth who beseeched
-his officer to send him with a “dang'ous message” meaning by that that he
-craved to go on a perilous mission for the greater glory of the A. E. F.
-and incidentally of himself; and about the jaunty individual who pulled
-the firing wire of a French grenade and catching the hissing sound of the
-fulminator working its way toward the charge exclaimed: “That's it—fry,
-gosh dem you, fry!” before he threw it. And about how a sergeant on an
-emergency trench-digging job stuck to the task, standing hip-deep in icy
-water and icy mud, until from chill and exhaustion he dropped unconscious
-and was like to drown in the muck into which he had collapsed head
-downward, only his squad discovered him up-ended there and dragged him
-out; and about many other things small or great, bespeaking fortitude and
-courage and fidelity and naïve Afric waggery.
-</p>
-<p>
-Likewise into my possession came copies of two documents, both of which I
-should say are typical just as each is distinctive of a different phase of
-the negro temperament. One of them, the first one, was humorous. Indeed to
-my way of thinking it was as fine an example of unconscious humour as this
-war is likely to produce. The other was—well, judge for yourself.
-</p>
-<p>
-Before the regiment moved forward for its dedication to actual warfare it
-was impressed upon the personnel in the ranks that from now on, more even
-than before, a soldier in his communications with his superior officer
-must use the formal and precise language of military propriety. The lesson
-must have sunk in, because on the thrillsome occasion when a certain
-private found himself for the first time in a forward rifle pit and for
-the first time heard German rifle bullets whistling past his ears he
-called to him a runner and dispatched to the secondary lines this message,
-now quoted exactly as written except that the proper names have been
-changed:
-</p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-“Lieutenant Sidney J. McClelland,
-
-“Commanding Company B,—, A. E. F.,
-
-U. S. A.
-
-“Dear Sir: I am being fired on heavily from the left.
-I await your instructions.
-
-“Trusting these few lines will find you the same,
-
-I remain, Yours truly,
-
-“Jefferson Jones.”
- </pre>
-<p>
-The other thing was an extract from a letter written by an
-eighteen-year-old private to his old mother in New York, with no idea in
-his head when he wrote it that any eyes other than those of his own people
-would read it after it had been censored and posted. The officer to whom
-it came for censoring copied from it one paragraph, and this paragraph ran
-like this:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Mammy, these French people don't bother with no colour-line business.
-They treat us so good that the only time I ever knows I'm coloured is when
-I looks in the glass.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Coming away—and we came reluctantly—we skirted the edge of the
-billeting area where the regiment of Southern negroes was quartered, and
-again we heard them singing. But this time they sang no plaintive
-meeting-house air. They sang a ringing, triumphant, Glory-Glory-Hallelujah
-song. For—so we learned—to them the word had come that they
-were about to move up and perhaps come to grips with the Bush-Germans.
-Yes, most assuredly n-i-g-g-e-r is going to have a different meaning when
-this war ends.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XIX. WAR AS IT ISN'T
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HREE of us, correspondents, had gone up with a division of ours that was
-taking over one of the Picardy sectors. The French, moved out by degrees
-as we by degrees moved in. On the night when we actually came into the
-front lines two of us slept—or tried to—in a house of a
-village perhaps a mile and a half behind the forward trenches. The third
-man went on perhaps a half mile nearer the trouble zone with a battalion
-of an infantry regiment that on the morrow would relieve some sorely
-battered poilus in the trenches. It is with an experience of this third
-man I now mean to deal.
-</p>
-<p>
-He found lodgment in a château on the outskirts of a village the name of
-which does not matter—and probably never will matter again, seeing
-that it fairly was blasted out of the earth by its foundations the next
-time the Germans attempted to resume their advance toward the Channel. As
-for the château, which likewise must be quite gone by now, it was more of
-a château than some of the buildings that go by this high-sounding title
-in the edges of Normandy.
-</p>
-<p>
-A château may mean a veritable castle of a place, with towers upon it and
-a moat and gardens and terraces and trout ponds round about it. Then again
-on the other hand it may mean merely a sizable private residence, standing
-somewhat aloof in its own plot from the close-huddled clustering of lesser
-folks' cottages that make up the town proper. The term is almost as
-elastic in its classifications as the word estate is in America. In this
-instance, though, the château was a structure of some pretensions and much
-consequence. Rather, it had been when its owner fled before the great
-spring advance, leaving behind him all that he owned except a few portable
-belongings. The neighbours had run away, too, and for months now the only
-tenants of the vicinity had been troops.
-</p>
-<p>
-French officers and a few American officers were occupying the château.
-Every room and every hallway was crowded already, but space for the
-correspondent to spread down his bedding roll was provided in an inner
-chamber on the second floor. At two o'clock in the morning, by consent of
-the divisional commander, he was going out into the debatable land between
-the trenches with a wire-mending party. There is always a chance that a
-wire party will bump into a squad of enemies on the prowl or surprise a
-raiding outfit from Fritzie's trenches, and then there are doings to
-ensue.
-</p>
-<p>
-Two o'clock was four hours off and the special guest hoped to get a little
-sleep in the 'tween times. It was a vain hope, because, to judge by their
-behaviour, the Germans had found out a relief division was on its way in.
-Since nightfall they had been shelling the back areas of the sector, and
-particularly the lines of communication, with might and main—and
-six-inch guns. For the most part the shells were passing entirely over and
-far beyond the château, but they made quite as much noise as though they
-had been dropping in the courtyard outside—more noise, as a matter
-of seeming, because the screech of a big shell in its flight overhead
-racks the eardrums as the crash of the explosion rarely does unless the
-explosion occurs within a few rods of one.
-</p>
-<p>
-So for four hours or thereabouts our correspondent lay on his pallet,
-wide-eyed, and with every nerve in his body standing on end and wriggling.
-When the French liaison officer who had volunteered to escort him on the
-adventure rapped upon his door he was quite ready to start. He had taken
-off nothing except his trench helmet and his gas mask before turning in,
-anyhow.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Walk very quietly, if you please,” bade the Frenchman, leading the way
-out, with a pocket flashlight in his hand.
-</p>
-<p>
-Obeying the request the correspondent tiptoed along behind his guide. To
-get outdoors they passed through two other rooms and down a flight of
-stairs and along a hallway opening into the wrecked garden. In the beds
-that were in the rooms and upon blankets on the floors of the rooms and
-also in the hallway French officers were stretched, exhaling the heavy
-breaths of men who have worked hard and who need the rest they are taking.
-Only one man stirred, and that was downstairs as the pair who were
-departing picked their way between the double rows of sleepers. A loose
-plank creaked sharply under the weight of the American, and a man stirred
-in his coverlids and opened his eyes for a moment; and then, turning over,
-was off again almost instantly.
-</p>
-<p>
-At that, understanding came to the correspondent—he knew now why the
-thoughtful liaison officer had cautioned him to step lightly. To these men
-lying here about him the infernal clamour of the shells had become a
-customary part of their lives, whether waking or sleeping. To their
-natures, accustomed as they were to it, this hideous din was a lullaby
-song. But any small unusual sound, such as the noise of a booted foot
-falling upon a squeaky board, might rouse them, and two men clumping
-carelessly past them would have brought every one of them out of his
-slumbers, sitting up.
-</p>
-<p>
-Paradoxes such as this are forever cropping up in one's wartime
-experiences. Indeed, war may be said to be made up of countless paradoxes,
-overlapping and piled one upon another. To me the most striking of the
-outstanding manifestations of war on its paradoxical side is the fact that
-in this war nothing, or almost nothing, actually turns out in accordance
-with what one's idea of it had been beforehand. Looking backward on what I
-myself have viewed of its physical and metaphysical aspects I can think of
-scarcely an element or a phase which accorded with my preconceived brain
-image of the thing. I do not mean by this that as a spectacle it has been
-disappointing, but that almost invariably it has been different from what
-I was expecting it would be. I found this to be true in 1914, back at the
-very beginning.
-</p>
-<p>
-Take for example the fashion after which men bear themselves as they go
-into battle; and, for a more striking illustration than that, their
-customary deportment after they actually are in the battle. I figure that
-beforehand my own notion of what these two demonstrations would be like
-was based probably in part upon conceptions derived from old-time pictures
-of Civil War engagements, highly coloured, highly imaginative
-representations such as used to hang upon the parlour walls of every
-orthodox rural home in our country; and in part upon fiction stories with
-war for a background which I had read; and finally perhaps in some lesser
-part upon the moving-picture man's ideas as worked out with more or less
-artistic license in the pre-war films. I rather think the average
-stay-at-home's notions in these regards must be pretty much what mine
-were, because he probably derived them from the same sources. The utter
-dissimilarity of the actual thing as I have repeatedly viewed it in three
-countries of Europe astonished me at first, and in lessening degree
-continued to astonish me until the real picture of it had supplanted the
-conjured one in my mind.
-</p>
-<p>
-If the reader's ideas are still fundamentally organised as mine formerly
-were he thinks men on the edge of the fight, with the prospect before them
-of very shortly being at grips with the enemy, maintain a sober and a
-serious front, wearing upon them the look of men who are upborne and
-inspired by a purpose to acquit themselves steadfastly and well. By the
-same process of reasoning I take it that the reader, conceding he or she
-has never been brought face to face with war, pictures men on the march in
-periods of comparative immunity from immediate peril as singing their way
-along, with jokes and catchwords flitting back and forth and a general
-holidaying air pervading the scene presented by the swinging column. Now
-my observation has been that the exact opposite is commonly the case.
-</p>
-<p>
-Men on the casual march, say, from one billeting place to another, are apt
-to push ahead stolidly and for the most part in silence. It is hard work,
-marching under heavy equipment is, and after a few hours of it the
-strongest individual in the ranks feels the pangs of weariness in his
-scissoring legs and along his burdened back. So he bends forward from the
-hips and he hunches his shoulders and wastes mighty little of his breath
-in idle persiflage. Only toward the end of the journey, when rest and food
-are in impending prospect, do his spirits revive to a point where he feels
-like singing and guying his mates. The thud-thud-thud of the feet upon the
-highroad, the grunted commands of the officers, and the occasional clatter
-of metal striking against metal as a man shifts his piece are likely to be
-the only accompaniments of the hike for miles on end; and there isn't much
-music really in such sounds as these.
-</p>
-<p>
-But suppose the same men are moving into action and know whither they are
-bound. The preliminary nervousness that possesses every normally
-constituted man at the prospect of facing the deadliest forms of danger
-now moves these men to hide their true emotions under a masking of gaiety.
-This gaiety, which largely is assumed at the outset, presently becomes
-their real mood. Nine men out of ten who pass are indulging in quips and
-catches. Nine in ten are ready to laugh at trivialities that ordinarily
-would go unnoticed. One standing by to watch them must diagnose the
-average expression on the average face as betokening exultation rather
-than exaltation. The tenth man is quiet and of a thoughtful port. He is
-forcing himself to appraise the situation before him in its right
-proportions, and so the infection that fills his comrades passes him by.
-Yet it is safe to bet on it that the sober one-tenth, in the high hour of
-the grapple, will contend with just as much gallantry as the nine-tenths
-can hope to show.
-</p>
-<p>
-Particularly is the mental slant that I have here sought to describe true
-in its application to raw troops who have yet to taste of close-up
-fighting. Seasoned veterans who have weathered the experience before now
-and who know what it means, and know, too, that they may count upon
-themselves and their fellows to acquit themselves valorously, are upborne
-by a certain all-pervading cheerfulness—perhaps as a rule confidence
-would be a better word than cheerfulness—but they are not quite so
-noisy, not quite so enthusiastic as the greener hands. At this moment they
-are not doing very much in the cheering line, though they will yell just
-as loudly as any when the order is to fix bayonets and charge.
-</p>
-<p>
-Paradoxically the reaction upon men who have come whole out of the inferno
-of battling at close quarters affects these two compared classes of
-soldier-men differently—at least that has been my observation. The
-unseasoned men, to whom the hell from which they have just emerged has
-been for them a new kind of hell, are as likely as not almost downcast in
-their outward demeanour, irritable and peevish in their language. For one
-thing, they are dog-tired; for another, I would say, a true appreciation
-of the ordeal through which they have passed is now coming home to them;
-for still another, the shock of having seen their mates wiped out all
-about them surely affects the general consciousness of the survivors; and
-finally, as I appraise their sensations, the calm following the tumult and
-the struggle leaves them well-nigh numbed. Certainly it frequently leaves
-them inarticulate almost to dumbness. Give them twenty-four hours for rest
-and mental adjustment, and the coltishness of youth returns to them in
-ample measure, especially if there is a victory to their credit.
-</p>
-<p>
-On the contrasting hand, if you want to witness an exhibition of good
-cheer at the end of a day of fighting seek for it among the veterans. On a
-certain day in May when the second of the great German drives was in
-progress I chanced to be at a spot where a brigade of French infantry—a
-brigade with a magnificent record made earlier in the war—was thrown
-into action to reenforce a hard-pressed and decimated British command.
-Almost without exception the little dusty, rusty poilus went to the
-fighting in a sort of matter-of-fact methodical silence more impressive to
-me than loud outbursts could possibly have been. Quietly, swiftly, without
-lost motion or vain exclamations, but moving all like men intent upon the
-performance of a difficult and an unpleasant but a highly necessary task,
-they took up their guns, adjusted their packs of ammunition, set their
-helmets over their foreheads, and walked with no undue haste but only with
-an assured and briskened serenity into the awfulness that was beyond the
-clouds of smoke and dust, just yonder.
-</p>
-<p>
-That same evening, by a streak of luck, I returned to approximately the
-same spot at the moment when those who were left of the Frenchmen prepared
-to bivouac on the edges of the same terrain where all the afternoon they
-had fought. With the help of some skeleton formations of British companies
-they had withstood the German onslaught; more than that, they had broken
-two advancing waves of the gray coats and finally had swept the ripped and
-riddled legions of the enemy back for a good mile, so that now they held
-the field as victors. Elsewhere along that fifty-mile front there might be
-a different story to tell, but here in this small corner of the great
-canvas of the mighty battle a localised success that was worth while had
-been achieved by these heroes. Under them now their legs quivered from
-stark weariness. Some were black like negroes; the stale sweat and the
-dried dirt and the powder grit had caked them over. Some were red like
-Indians, where the crusted blood from small unconsidered wounds dyed the
-skin on their faces and their hands.
-</p>
-<p>
-Now with the fog of fighting turning grey upon their unwashed bodies they
-sprawled on the stained and trodden meadow grass alongside the road,
-looking, with their figures foreshortened by lying, most absurdly like
-exceedingly dirty small boys who had been playing at soldiering. Yet spent
-and worn as they were they gibed us as we passed, and with uplifted
-canteens they toasted us—presumably in the thin Pinard; and they
-sang songs without number and they uttered spicy Gallic jokes at the
-expense of the mess cooks for their tardiness in making ready the supper
-stews. The job of the day was done with and ended; it was a fit time for
-being merry, and these little men were most exceedingly merry.
-</p>
-<p>
-Such was the excess of their jollifying that had one not known better one
-might have suspected that they had been drinking something stronger than
-the thin wine ration upon which no Frenchman ever gets drunk. I recall one
-stunted chap who reeled and staggered as he made his way toward our halted
-car to ask us for news from the eastward. He had stuck into the sooted
-muzzle of his rifle a sheaf of wild flowers; and reeling and rocking on
-his heels he sought to embrace us when we offered him cigarettes. He was
-tipsy all right; but not with liquor—with emotion; the sort of
-emotion that temporarily befuddles a fighting man who has fought well and
-who is glad to have finished fighting for the time being, at least. As we
-left him he was propped upon his short unsteady legs at the roadside
-singing the song that your poilu always by preference sings when his mood
-inclines to the blithesome; he sang the Madelon.
-</p>
-<p>
-Right here, I think, is a good enough time for me to say that in these
-times the place to hear the Marseillaise hymn played or sung is not France
-but America. In America one hears it everywhere—the hand organs play
-it, the theatre orchestras play it, the military bands play it, pretty
-ladies sing it at patriotic concerts. In France in seven months I have
-heard it just twice—once in the outskirts of the great battle on
-March twenty-sixth, just outside of Soissons, when a handful of French
-soldiers hurrying up to the fight were moved by some passing fancy, which
-we who heard them could not fathom, to chant a verse or two of the song;
-and again on Memorial Day, when an American band played it in a French
-burying ground at a coast town where the graves of three hundred of our
-own soldiers were decorated.
-</p>
-<p>
-It may be that the Frenchman has grown wearied of the sound of his
-national air, or it may be—and this, I think, is the proper
-explanation—that in this time of stress and suffering for his land
-the Marseillaise hymn has for him become a thing so high and so holy that
-he holds it for sacred moments, to be rendered then as the accompaniment
-for a sacrificial rite of the spirit and of the soul. At any rate it is
-true that except on the one occasion I have just mentioned I have yet to
-hear the French soldier in the field sing the Marseillaise hymn. He much
-prefers his cheerful chansons, and when an American band plays for him it
-is a jazz tune that most surely may be counted upon to make him cry “<i>Encore!
-</i>”
- </p>
-<p>
-As illustrative of the difference in temperament between the veteran and
-the beginner at war I should like to describe what many times I have
-witnessed as an incident in the streets of Paris. All through the past
-spring and the early part of the summer the members of the class of 1919
-were holding celebrations in commemoration of the fact that they were
-about to be called to the service. Their emblematic colour for this year
-is red, and their chosen flower is the poppy, so the youngsters call
-themselves Coquelicots, which is the French name for the crimson wild
-poppy that grows everywhere in France. The class of 1918, who went out
-last year, were Pâquerettes—white daisies; and those of 1917 were
-Bluets, or cornflowers. Every three years the fancy repeats itself in the
-same sequence and the same cycle, so that the trinity of the national
-colours may be preserved.
-</p>
-<p>
-Almost any hour, day or night, one might see troops of those about to be
-mobilised—schoolboys of eighteen, apprentice lads, peasant youths,
-cadets of military academies—parading the avenues. They wore all
-manner of fantastic garbings, with enormous red neckties and red sashes,
-and battered high hats banded with red, and with poppies stuck in their
-buttonholes or festooned in garlands about their necks. And always they
-were singing and skylarking, marching with fantastic jig steps in
-grotesque queue formations, and playing pranks upon the pedestrians who
-got in their way. The sight made an American think of college fraternities
-conducting outdoor initiations. The scene gave colour and the sparkle of
-youthful exuberance to a city where the sad sights are commoner than the
-happy ones.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was inevitable that in every few rods of their progress the youngsters
-would encounter soldiers on leave, and then the boys, dropping for a
-moment their joyousness, would gravely salute the veterans, and the
-veterans as gravely would return the salute. Then the roisterers would
-whirl off down the sidewalk waving their exaggerated walking sticks and
-kicking up their heels as is the way with youth the world over, and the
-soldiers in their stained patched tunics, and their worn leather housings,
-and with their worn resolute faces—how often I have seen this little
-byplay repeated!—would exchange swift expressive glances with one
-another and smile meaning, sad little smiles, and shake their heads in a
-sort of passive resignation to the inevitable, before they went trudging
-on in their heavy, run-down, shabby boots. They knew—these war-worn
-elders did—what the chosen man children of the generation just
-emerging from the first stages of its adolescence would very shortly be
-called upon to face; and so they shook their heads in silent but regretful
-affirmation of the certain prospect of an added burden of woefulness and
-suffering for the flowered youth of their stricken land. For these men who
-had trod the paths of glory that are so flinty and so hard could
-understand what must lie ahead so much better than those stripling lads to
-whom the road to war was as yet a shining and a golden highway!
-</p>
-<p>
-Have you ever seen at the movies a film purporting to show an actual scene
-in the trenches under hostile fire, wherein the men on guard there all
-faced, with squinted eyes and scowling brows, across the parapets,
-fingering their weapons nervously, and rarely or never glanced toward the
-camera, but seemingly were so absorbed in their ambitions to pot the
-foeman across the way they had no thought for anything except the tragic
-undertaking in hand? Then again, have you ever seen another so-called war
-reel with a similar setting, which brought before you the figures of
-soldiers who from behind the shelter of the piled-up sandbags grinned
-self-consciously in the direction of the machine that was recording their
-forms and their movements for back-home consumption, and who between
-intervals of loading and firing deported themselves pretty much as any
-group of sheepishly pleased young men might while under the eye of a
-photographing machine and who for the moment appeared to be more inspired
-by a perfectly normal human impulse to show off than by any other thought?
-</p>
-<p>
-Now I have seen both these varieties of pictures and assuming that the
-reader has, too, I put to him or her this question: Granting that one of
-these films was the genuine article, namely, a view of a section of a
-front-line trench taken at risk of the operator's life; and that the other
-was a manufactured thing, with carefully rehearsed supers made up as
-soldiers posing in obedience to a hired director's orders, which one, in
-the reader's opinion, was the authentic thing and which the bogus?
-</p>
-<p>
-If I have figured the probable answer aright the probable answer is wrong.
-The picture in which the soldiers behaved in conformity with the average
-civilian's notion of the way a soldier does behave under fire—to
-wit, by being all intent upon the job of shooting, with no regard for any
-lesser diversions—was the imitation; and the film in which you saw
-the soldiers crowding forward in the narrow trench way in order to be sure
-of getting into the focus area—the one where you saw the soldiers
-grinning toward you and winking and nudging their fellows and generally
-behaving like curious and embarrassed children—well, that was the
-genuine article.
-</p>
-<p>
-For the fact of the matter is that once the novelty of his new environment
-has worn off—and it does wear off with marvellous speed—the
-soldier in the front-line trench carries on after identically the same
-patterns that would govern him under ordinary circumstances. The detail
-that he is in a place of imminent danger becomes to him of secondary
-importance. Except for the chance that any moment he may stop a bullet his
-mode of habit resolves itself back to its familiar elements. He is bored
-or he is interested by exactly the same things that would bore him or
-excite him anywhere else. To him the shooting back and forth across the
-top very soon becomes a more or less tedious part of the daily routine of
-the trench life, but the intrusion into his corner of a moving-picture man
-with a camera is a novelty, an event very much out of the ordinary;
-therefore he pays much more attention to the taking of the picture than to
-what goes on pretty steadily during practically all of his waking hours.
-</p>
-<p>
-For added qualities of seeming indifference to externals in the midst of
-great and stirring exertions, see the artillerymen who serve with the
-heavies. Generally things are fairly lively among those dainty, darling,
-death-dealing pets that are called the 75's. Under their camouflaging they
-look like speckled pups when they do not look like spotted circus ponies.
-It is a brisksome and a heartening thing to see how fast a crew of
-Frenchmen can serve a battery of these little pintos, feeding the
-three-inch shells into the pieces with such celerity that at a distance
-the reports merge together so one might almost imagine he heard the voice
-of an overgrown machine gun speaking, instead of the intermingled voices
-of five separate trouble makers. Near Compiègne one day I watched a
-battery of 75's at work on the Germans advancing in mass formation, I
-keeping count of the reports; and the average number of shots per minute
-per gun was twelve.
-</p>
-<p>
-But the heavies work more slowly, and their crews have a sluggish look
-about them as befitting men who do their fighting all at long range and
-never see the foe; though I suspect the underlying reason to be that they
-have learned to combine the maximum of efficiency and of accuracy with the
-minimum of apparent effort and the minimum of apparent enthusiasm.
-Particularly is this to be said in cases where the gunners have become
-expert through long practice.
-</p>
-<p>
-On the Montdidier Front on a gloriously beautiful afternoon of early
-summer I kept company for two hours with three French batteries of 155's.
-The guns were ranged in dirt emplacements under a bank alongside a sunken
-road that meandered out from the main street of a village that was empty
-except for American and French soldiers. The Germans were four miles away,
-beyond a ridge of low hills. By climbing to the crest of the nearermost
-rise and lying there in the rank grass and looking through glasses one
-could make out the German lines. Without glasses one could mark fairly
-well where the shells from our side fell. But during the time I stayed
-there no single man among the artillerymen manifested any desire
-whatsoever to ascertain the visible effects of his handiwork.
-</p>
-<p>
-Over the ground telephone an order would come from somewhere or other,
-miles away. The officer in command of one of the batteries would sing out
-the order to fire so many rounds at such and such intervals. The angles—the
-deflections for charge temperature, air temperature, barometer pressure
-and wind—had all been worked out earlier in the day, and a few
-corrections for range were required. So all the men had to do was to fire
-the guns. And that literally was all that they did do.
-</p>
-<p>
-Not all the explosions in that immediate vicinity were caused by
-“departs,” either. Occasionally there were to be heard the unmistakable
-whistle and roar and the ultimate crack of an “arrive,” for the Germans'
-counterbatteries did not remain silent under the punishment the French
-were dealing out. But when an arrive fell anywhere within eye range the
-men barely turned their heads to see the column of earth and dust and
-pulverised chalk-rock go geysering up into the air. It was only by chance
-I found out an enemy shell had fallen that morning among a gun crew
-stationed near the westerly end of the line of guns, perhaps a quarter of
-a mile away, and had blown seven men to bits and wounded as many more.
-</p>
-<p>
-Still, this apathy with regard to the potential consequences of being
-where an arrive bursts is not confined to the gunners. When one has had
-opportunity to see how many shells fall without doing any damage to human
-beings, and to figure out for oneself how many tons of metal it takes to
-kill a man, one likewise acquires a measure of this same apparent
-nonchalance.
-</p>
-<p>
-For sheer sang-froid it would be hard to match those whose work I watched
-that day. In intervals of activity they lounged under the gun wheels,
-smoking and playing card games; and when one battery was playing and
-another temporarily was silent the members of the idle battery paid
-absolutely no heed to the work of their fellows.
-</p>
-<p>
-In two hours just one thing and only one thing occurred to jostle them out
-of their calm. Something mysterious and very grievous befell a half-grown
-dog, which, having been abandoned or forgotten by his owners, still lived
-on in the ruins of the town and foraged for scraps among the mess
-kitchens. Down the road past the guns came the pup, ki-yiing his troubles
-as he ran; and at the sound of his poignant yelps some of the gunners quit
-their posts and ran out into the road, and one of them gathered up the
-poor beastie in his arms and a dozen more clustered about offering the
-consolation of pats and soothing words to the afflicted thing. Presently
-under this treatment he forgot what ailed him, and then the men went back
-to their places, discussing the affair with many gestures and copious
-speech. Ten German shells plumping down near by would not have created
-half so much excitement as the woes of one ownerless doggie had created. I
-said to myself that if the incident was typically French, likewise it was
-typical of what might be called the war temperament as exemplified among
-veteran fighters.
-</p>
-<p>
-I should add, merely to fill out the settings of the scene, that scarcely
-was there a ten-minute interlude this day in which German observation
-planes did not scout over our lines or French observation planes did not
-scout over theirs. Sometimes only a single plane would be visible, but
-more often the airmen moved in squadron formations. Each time of course
-that a plane ventured aloft its coursing flight across the heavens would
-be marked by bursting pompons of downy white or black smoke—white
-for shrapnel and black for explosive bursts—where the antiaircraft
-guns of one side or the other took wing shots at the pesky intruder. One
-time six sky voyagers were up simultaneously. Another time ten, and still
-another no less than sixteen might be counted at once. But to focus the
-attention of any of the persons then upon the earth below, an aërial
-combat between the two groups would have been required, and even this
-spectacle—which at the first time of witnessing it is almost the
-most stirring isolated event that military operations have to offer—very
-soon, with daily repetitions, becomes almost commonplace, as I myself can
-testify. War itself is too big a thing for one detached detail of it to
-count in the estimates that one tries to form of the whole thing. It takes
-a charge in force over the top or something equally vivid and spectacular
-to whet up the jaded mentality of the onlooker.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XX. THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>EEKING for the thrills that experience had taught me would nevertheless
-probably not be forthcoming anywhere in this so-called quiet sector, I
-went that same day with a young American officer to a forward post of
-command, which was another name for a screened pit dug in the scalp of a
-fair-sized hillock, immediately behind our foremost rifle pits. Sitting
-here upon the tops of our steel helmets, which the same make fairly good
-perches to sit on when the ground is muddied, we could look through
-periscope glasses right into the courtyard of a wrecked château held by
-the enemy. Upon this spot some of the guns behind us were playing
-industriously. We could see where the shells struck—now in the
-garden, now near the shattered outbuildings, now ripping away a slice of
-the front walls or a segment of the roof of the château itself; and we
-could see too, after the dust of each hit had somewhat lifted, the small
-gray figures of Germans scurrying about like startled ants.
-</p>
-<p>
-A mile away, about, were those Germans, and yet to all intents and
-purposes they might have been twenty miles away; for as things stood, and
-with the forces that they had at this point, it would have taken them days
-or perhaps weeks to bridge the gap between their lines and ours, and it
-would have taken us as long to get to where they were. For you see both
-forces had abundance of artillery, but each was holding its front lines
-with small groups of infantry. To sit there and peer into their defences
-was like looking into a distant planet peopled by men thinking different
-thoughts from ours, and swayed by different ambitions and moved by
-impulses all running counter to those of our breed.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nevertheless, I must confess that the sensation of crouching in that hole
-in the ground, spying upon the movements of those dwellers of that other
-small world, while high above us the shells passed over, shrieking their
-war-whoops as they travelled from or toward our back lines, very soon lost
-for me the savour of interest, just as it had lost it a month before when
-I did the same thing in front of Noyon, or two weeks before near Verdun,
-or as afterward it was to do when I repeated the experience near Rheims.
-</p>
-<p>
-So after a bit my companion and I fell to enjoying the beauties of the
-day. In front of us lay a strip of gentle pasture slope not badly marred
-by shell craters, and all green except where lovely wide slashes of a
-bright yellow flower cut across it like rifts of fallen sunshine. The
-lower reaches of air were filled with the humming of bees, and every
-minute the skylarks went singing up into the soft skies as though filled
-with a curiosity to find out what those wailing demons that sped
-crisscrossing through the heavens might be. Presently from a thicket
-behind us sounded a bell-like bird note with a sort of melodious cluck in
-it. I had never heard that note before except when uttered by wooden
-clocks of presumably Swiss manufacture, but I recognised it for what it
-was.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Listen,” said my companion: “that's the second time within a week I've
-heard it. A French liaison officer was with me then, and he said that for
-three years now the cuckoo had been silent, and he said that the French
-country people believed that since the cuckoo had begun calling again it
-was a sign the war would soon be over—that the cuckoo was calling
-for peace on earth.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I wonder if he was right,” I said.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, he was right so far as he personally was concerned. This war for
-him was nearly over. Night before last he was riding back to division
-headquarters in a side car, and a shell dropped on him at a crossroads and
-he and the driver were killed.”
- </p>
-<p>
-We sat a minute or two longer and nothing was said.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well,” he said at length, “if you've had enough of this we'll be getting
-back. It isn't very much of a show, once a fellow gets used to it, and I
-guess the major will have supper ready for us pretty soon. Ready to go?”
- </p>
-<p>
-We got up cautiously and put our helmets on the proper ends of us and
-started back through the shallow communication trench leading to the
-village.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Being where you can look right across and down into the German lines
-makes a fellow wonder,” I suggested. “It makes a fellow wonder what those
-men over yonder are thinking about and what their feelings toward us are,
-and whether they hate us as deeply as they hate the British'.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I guess I can figure out what one of them thinks anyhow,” he said with a
-quizzical side-wise glance at me. He flirted over his shoulder with his
-thumb. “I've got a brother somewhere over yonder ways—if he's
-alive.” He smiled at the look that must have come across my face. “Oh, you
-needn't suspect me,” he went on. “I judge I'm as good an American as you
-are or any man alive is, even if I do wear a German name. You see I'm a
-youngest son. I was born in the good old U. S. A. all right enough, but
-two of my brothers, older than I am, were born in Germany, and they didn't
-come to America when the rest of the family migrated. And one of them,
-last time I heard from him before we got into the mess, was a lieutenant
-in a Bavarian field battery. Being a German subject I suppose he figures
-he's only doing his duty, but how he can go on fighting for that swine of
-a Kaiser beats me. But then, I don't suppose I can understand; I'm an
-American citizen. Funny world, isn't it?
-</p>
-<p>
-“Say, listen! That cuckoo is calling again. I wonder if there is anything
-in the superstition of the French peasants that peace will come this year.
-Well, so far as I am concerned I don't want it to come until Uncle Sam has
-finished up this job in the right way. I only hope the next time I hear
-the cuckoo sing it'll be in the outskirts of Berlin—that is,
-providing a cuckoo can stand for the outskirts of Berlin.”
- </p>
-<p>
-I reminded him that the cuckoo was a bird that stole other bird's nests—or
-tried to.
-</p>
-<p>
-“That being so, I guess Berlin must be full of 'em,” said he.
-</p>
-<p>
-The major's headquarters—he was a major of artillery—was in
-the chief house of the little town. Curiously enough this was almost the
-only house in the town that had not been hit, and two days later it was
-hit, and in the ruins of it a friend of mine, another major, was crushed;
-but that is a different story, not to be detailed here. It stood—the
-house, I mean—in a little square courtyard of its own, as most
-village houses in this part of France do, being flanked on one side by its
-stable and on the other side by its cow barn and by its chicken houses.
-There was a high wall to inclose it along the side nearest the street,
-with rabbit hutches and pigeon cots tucked up under the wall. In the
-centre of the court was a midden for manure. It had been a cosy little
-place once. The dwelling was of red brick with a gay tiled roof, and the
-lesser buildings and the wall were built of stones, as is the French way.
-Even the rabbit hutches were stone, and the dovecot and the cuddy for the
-fowls. Now, except for American artillerymen, it was all empty of life.
-The paved yard was littered with wreckage; the doors of the empty cubicles
-stood open.
-</p>
-<p>
-I sat with the major and his adjutant on the doorstep of the cottage
-waiting for the orderlies to call us in to eat our suppers. Through the
-lolled gate in the wall an old man, a civilian, entered. He was tall and
-lean like one of the lombard trees growing in the spoiled vegetable garden
-at the back of the house, and he was dressed in a long frock coat that was
-all powdered with a white dust of the roads. He had a grave long face, and
-we saw that he limped a little as he came across the close toward us.
-Nearing us he took off his hat and bowed.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Pardon, 'sieurs,” he said in Norman French, “but could I look through
-this house?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“No civilians are permitted here now,” said the major. “How did you get
-here?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I was given a pass to return,” he explained. “Your pardon again,
-m'sieurs, but I am—I was—the mayor of this town, and this is
-my house. I mean, it was my house. The Germans came upon us so rapidly we
-had to leave on but two hours' notice, taking with us very little. Not
-until to-day could I secure leave to come back. I wished to see what was
-left of my home—I always had lived here before, you know—and
-to gather up some of my belongings, if I might.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Where did you come from?” asked the major.
-</p>
-<p>
-“From ————.” He named a town twenty-two miles
-away.
-</p>
-<p>
-“And how did you get here?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I walked.” He lifted his shoulders in an expressive gesture. “There was
-no other way. And I must walk back to-night. There is no shelter nearer
-except for soldiers.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He looked past us into the main room of the house. Its floor of tiles was
-littered with dried mud. A table and three broken chairs that had given
-way beneath the weight of heavy and careless men were its only furniture
-now. The window panes had been shattered. It was hard to picture that this
-once had been a cozy, comfortable room, clean and tidy, smartened with
-pictures and ornaments upon the walls and with curtains at the casement
-openings, which now gaped so emptily.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Not much is left, eh?” said the old man, his face twitching. “Well <i>c'est
-la guerre!</i>”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I'm afraid your home is rather badly wrecked,” said the major. “Since I
-came here my men have tried to do no more damage to it than they could
-help, but Algerians were here before us; and the Algerians, as you know,
-are rough in their habits and sometimes they loot houses. Do you wish to
-enter? If so, go ahead. And if you are hungry I would be glad to have you
-stay and eat with us.”
- </p>
-<p>
-The stranger hesitated a moment.
-</p>
-<p>
-“No, no,” he said; “of what use to go in? I have seen enough. And thank
-you, m'sieur but I do not wish any food.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He bowed once more and turned away from us; but he did not go away
-directly. He went across the court to his barn and tugged at a door that
-was half ajar. From within came the grumbled protest of a Yankee gunner
-lying just inside on a pile of straw, and indignant at being roused from a
-nap.
-</p>
-<p>
-The man who owned the barn backed away, making his apologies. He picked up
-a hay fork that lay upon the dungpile, and near the gate, under the shadow
-of the wall, he stooped again and picked up a broken clock that some one
-had tossed out of the house. Then, after one more glance all about the
-place as though he strove to fix in his mind a picture of it, not as now
-it was but as once it had been, he stepped through the gate, and with his
-pitiable salvage tucked under his bony arms he vanished up the road.
-</p>
-<p>
-When that night I summed up my experiences the memories of the day that
-stood out clearest in my mind were not of the guns nor the aëroplanes nor
-the bursting shells nor yet the sight in the German lines, but of the
-mistreated dog that howled and of the cuckoo that fluted in the thicket
-and of the old man who had trudged so far, over perilous roads, to look
-with his eyes for the last time, surely, upon the sorry ruination of his
-home. And I felt that I, a man whose business it is to see interesting
-things and afterward to put them down in black and white, was acquiring in
-some degree the perspective of the soldier, whose mental viewpoint is so
-foreshortened by the imminent presence of the greater phases of war that
-he comes after a while to regard the inconsequential, and so looks on the
-incidental phases of it as of more account than the complexities of its
-vast, hurrying, overdriven mechanism.
-</p>
-<p>
-For the point I have been trying, perhaps clumsily, to make clear all
-along is just this: As a general thing it may be set down that except for
-those infrequent occasions when there is a charge to be made or a charge
-to be repelled, or except when some freak of war, new to the trooper's
-experience, is occurring or has just occurred, he in all essential outer
-regards is exactly the same person that he was before he went
-a-soldiering, with nothing about him to distinguish him from what he was
-then, barring the fact that now he wears a uniform.
-</p>
-<p>
-Spiritually he may have been transformed; indeed he must have been, but it
-is a shading of spirituality that but rarely betrays itself in his fashion
-of speech or in his physical expression or in his behaviour. Doing the
-most heroic things he nevertheless does them without indulging in any of
-the heroics with which the fiction of books and the fiction of stagecraft
-love to invest the display of the finer and the higher emotions of
-mankind.
-</p>
-<p>
-Living where death in various guises is ever upon the stalk for him he
-learns to regard it no more than in civil life he regards the commoner
-manifestations of a code of civilised procedure that ethically is based
-upon a plan to safeguard his life and his limb from mischance and ill
-health. The habit of death becomes to him as commonplace as the habit of
-life once was. He gets used to the incredible and it turns commonplace. He
-gets used to the extraordinary, which after it has happened a few times
-becomes most ordinary. He gets used to being bombed and is bored thereby;
-gets used to gas alarms and bombardments; to high explosives, spewing
-shrapnel, and purring bullets; gets used to eating his meals standing up
-and taking his rest in broken bits. He gets used to all of war's programme—its
-impossibilities and its contradictions, its splendours, its horrors and
-its miseries. In short he gets used to living in a world that is turned
-entirely upside down, with every normal aspect in it capsised and every
-regular and ordained phase of it standing upon its head.
-</p>
-<p>
-For a fact it seems to me that in its final analysis the essence of war is
-merely the knack of getting used to war. And the instantaneous response of
-the average human being to its monstrous and preposterous aspects is a
-lesson to prove the elasticity and the infinite adaptability of the human
-mind. Because people can and do get used to it is the reason why they do
-not all go mad in the midst of it. Getting used to it—that's the
-answer. After a while one even gets used to the phenomenon that war rarely
-or never looks as you would think war should look—and that brings me
-by a roundabout way back again to the main text of my article.
-</p>
-<p>
-Troops travelling in numbers across country do not present the majestic
-panoramic effect that one might expect. This in part, though, is due to
-the common topography of France. Generally speaking, a given district is
-so cut up with roads threading the fields that the forces, for convenience
-in handling, are divided into short columns that move by routes that are
-practically parallel, toward a common destination. The sight of troops
-going into camp at night also is disappointing. In France, thickly settled
-as it is, with villages tucked into every convenient dip between the
-hills, the men are so rapidly swallowed up in the billeting spaces under
-house and bam roots that an hour or even half an hour after the march has
-ended you might traverse a district where, let us say, twenty thousand
-soldiers are quartered, and unless you know the correct figures the
-evidence offered to your eyes might deceive you into assuming that not
-one-tenth of that number were anywhere in the vicinity.
-</p>
-<p>
-It is this failure of war, when considered as a physical thing, to measure
-up to its traditional Impressiveness, that fills with despair the soul of
-the writing man, who craves to put down on paper an adequate conception of
-it in its entirety. Finally he comes to this: That either he must throw
-away the delusions he himself nourished and content himself by building
-together little mosaics with scraps gleaned from the big, untellable,
-untranslatable enigma that it is, or for the reader's sake must try to
-conjure up a counterfeit conception, which will correspond with what he
-knows the average reader's mental vision of the thing to be. In one event
-he is honest—but disappointing. In the other he is guilty of a
-willful deceit, but probably turns out copy that is satisfying to his
-audience. In either event, in his heart he is bound to realise the utter
-impossibility of depicting war as it is.
-</p>
-<p>
-It is one of the cumulating paradoxes of the entire paradoxical procedure
-that the best place to get a reasonably clear and intelligible idea of the
-swing and scope of a battle is not upon the site of the battle itself, but
-in a place anywhere from ten to twenty miles behind the battle. Directly
-at the front the onlooker observes only those small segments of the
-prevalent hostilities that lie directly under his eyes. He is hedged in
-and hampered by obstacles; his vision is circumscribed and confined to
-what may be presented in his immediate vicinity.
-</p>
-<p>
-Of course there are exceptions to this rule. I am speaking not of every
-case but of the average case.
-</p>
-<p>
-A fairish distance back, though, he may to an extent grasp the immensity
-of the operation. He sees the hammered troops coming out and the fresh
-troops going in; beholds the movements of munitions and supplies and
-reserves; observes the handling of the wounded; notes the provisions that
-are made for a possible advance and the preparations that have been made
-for a possible retreat. Even so, to the uninitiated eye the scheme appears
-jumbled, haphazard and altogether confused. It requires a mind acquainted
-with more than the rudiments of military science to discern purpose in
-what primarily appears to be so absolutely purposeless. There is nothing
-of the checkerboard about it; the orderliness of a chess game is lacking.
-The suggestion is more that of a whirlpool. So it follows that the novice
-watches only the maelstrom on the surface and rarely can he fathom out the
-guiding influences that ordain that each twistiwise current moves in its
-proper channel without impairment or impediment lor any one of the myriad
-of related activities.
-</p>
-<p>
-Being a novice he is astonished to note that only infrequently do wounded
-men act as his fictional reading has led him to believe they would act. To
-me the most astounding thing about this has been not that wounded men
-shriek and moan, but that nearly always they are so terribly silent. At
-the moment of receiving his hurt a man may cry out; often he does. But
-oftener than not he comes, mute and composed, to the dressing station. The
-example of certain men who lock their lips and refuse to murmur, no matter
-how great is their pain, inspires the rest to do likewise. A man who in
-civil life would make a great pother over a trivial mishap, in service
-will endure an infinitely worse one without complaint. If war brings out
-all the vices in some nations it most surely brings out the virtues in
-others. I hate to think back on the number of freshly wounded men I have
-seen, but when I do think back on it I am struck by the fact that barring
-a few who were delirious and some few more who were just emerging into
-agonised consciousness following the coma shock of a bad injury, I can
-count upon the fingers of my two hands the total of those who screamed or
-loudly groaned. Men well along the road to recovery frequently make more
-troublesome patients than those who have just been brought to the field
-hospitals; and a man who perhaps has lain for hours with a great hole in
-his flesh, stoically awaiting his turn under the surgeon's hands, will
-sometimes, as a convalescent, worry and fret over the prospect of having
-his hurts redressed.
-</p>
-<p>
-Among certain races the newly stricken trooper is more apt to be concerned
-by the fear that he may be incapacitated from getting back into the game
-than he is about the extent of his wound or the possibility that he may
-die of it. As an American I am proud to be able to say, speaking as a
-first-hand witness, that our own race should be notably included in this
-category. The Irishman who had been shot five times but was morally
-certain he would recover and return to the war because he thought he knew
-the fellow who had plugged him has his counterpart without number among
-the valorous lads from this side of the ocean whose names have appeared on
-the casualty lists.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XXI. PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HILE I am on the subject of unusual phases of modern warfare I should
-like to include just one more thing in the list—and that thing is
-the suddenness with which in France, and likewise in Belgium, one in going
-forward passes out of an area of peacefulness into an area of devastation
-and destruction. Almost invariably the transition is accomplished with a
-startling abruptness. It is as though a mighty finger had scored a line
-across the face of the land and said; “On this side of the line life shall
-go on as it always has gone on. Here men shall plough, and women shall
-weave, and children shall play, and the ordinary affairs of mankind shall
-progress with the seasons. On that side there shall be only death and the
-proofs of death and the promises of yet more deaths. There the fields
-shall be given over to the raven and the rat; the homes shall be blasted
-flat, the towns shall be razed and the earth shall be made a charnelhouse
-and a lazar pit of all that is foul and loathsome and abominable in the
-sight of God and man.”
- </p>
-<p>
-For emphasis of this sharp contrast you have only to take a motor run up
-out of a district as yet untouched by war into the scathed zone of past or
-present combat. By preference I should elect for you that the trip be made
-through a British sector, because the British have a way of stamping their
-racial individuality upon an area that they take over—they Anglicise
-it, so to speak. Besides, a tour through British-held territory partakes
-of the nature of a flying visit to an ethnological congress, seeing that
-nearly all the peoples who make up the empire are likely to have
-representatives here present, engaged in one capacity or another—and
-that adds interest and colour to the picture.
-</p>
-<p>
-Let us start, say, from a French market town on a market day. From far
-away in the north, as we climb into our car with our soldier driver and
-our officer escort, comes the faint hollow rumble of the great guns; but
-that has been going on nearly four years now, and in the monotony of it
-the people who live here have forgotten the threat that is in that distant
-thundering. Pippin-cheeked women are driving in, perched upon the high
-seats of two-wheeled hooded carts and bringing with them fowls and garden
-truck. In the square before the church booths are being set up for the
-sale of goods. Plump round-eyed children stand to watch us go down the
-narrow street, which runs between close rows of wattled, gable-ended stone
-or plaster cottages. Most of the little girls are minding babies;
-practically all of the little boys wear black pinafores belted in at their
-chubby waistlines, with soldier cap—always soldier caps—on
-their heads, and they love to stiffen to attention and salute the
-occupants of a military automobile.
-</p>
-<p>
-There are but few men in sight, and these are old men or else they wear
-uniforms. The houses are tidied and neat; the soil, every tillable inch of
-it, is in a state of intensive and painstaking cultivation. On all hands
-vineyards, orchards, pastures and grain fields are spread in squares and
-parallelograms. The road is bordered on either side by tall fine trees.
-Chickens, geese and turkeys scuttle away to safety from before the
-onrushing car, and at the roadside goats and cattle and sheep and
-sometimes swine are feeding. Each animal or each group of animals has its
-attendant herder. Horses are tethered outside the hedges where they may
-crop the free herbage. The landscape is fecund with life and productivity.
-</p>
-<p>
-It is a splendid road along which we course, wide and smooth and
-well-kept, and for this the reason is presently made plain. Steam rollers
-of British manufacture, with soldiers to steer them, constantly roll back
-and forth over stretches where broken stone has been spread by the repair
-gangs. These mending crews may be made up of soldiers—French,
-British, Portuguese or Italians; and then again they may be drafts of
-German prisoners or members of labour squads drawn from far corners of the
-world where the British or the French flag flies. Within an hour you will
-pass turbaned East Indians, Chinamen, Arabs, Nubians, Ceylonese,
-Senegalese, Maoris, Afri-dis, Moroccans, Algerians. Their head-dresses are
-likely to be their own; for the rest they wear the uniforms of the nation
-that has enlisted or hired them.
-</p>
-<p>
-Despite this polyglot commingling of types the British influence is upon
-everything. Military guideposts bearing explicit directions in English
-stand thick along the wayside, and in the windows of the shops are cruder
-signs to show that the French proprietors make a specialty of catering to
-the wants of Britishers. Here is one reading “Eggs and Potato Chips”;
-there one advertising to whom it may concern, “Washing Done Here.”
- “Post-cards and Souvenirs” is a common legend, and on the fronts of old
-wine-shops a still commoner one is “Ale and Stout.” Rows of beer bottles
-stand upon the window ledges, with platters of buns and sandwiches
-flanking them. A “Wet and Dry Canteen” flies a diminutive British flag
-from its peaky roof.
-</p>
-<p>
-Evidences of British military activity multiply and re-multiply
-themselves. Long trains of motor-trucks lumber by like great, grey
-elephants each with a dusty Tommy for its mahout. A convoy of small, new
-tanks go wallowing and bumping along bound frontward, and they suggest a
-herd of behemoths on the move. Their drivers as likely as not are Chinamen
-who presently will turn their unwieldy charges over to soldier-crews.
-Officers clatter past on horse-back looking, all of them, as though they
-had just escaped from the military outfitters; staff-cars whiz through the
-slower traffic; troops bound for the baths or for the trenches or for rest
-billets march stolidly up the road or down it as the case may be.
-Omnibuses from London town, now converted to military usage, are thick in
-the press. Military policemen are more numerous and more set upon
-scrutinising your pass than they were a few miles back. And civilians are
-fewer.
-</p>
-<p>
-Alongside the highway, settlements of wooden or iron huts increase in
-number and in proportions. Hospitals, headquarters of various units,
-bath-houses, punishment compounds, motor stations, supply depots,
-airdromes, ordnance repair plants, munition warehouses, Y. M. C. A. huts,
-gas test stations, rest barracks, gasoline depots and all the rest of it
-show themselves for what they are both by their shapes and by the notice
-boards which mark them. Here is cluttered all the infinitely complicated
-machinery of the war-making industry, with its accessories and its
-adjuncts, its essentials and its incidentals, but so far there is no
-actual evidence that the rude and disturbing hand of war has actually been
-laid upon the land. Rather is it a spectacle to make you think of a
-thousand circus days rolled into one, and mixed in with all this,
-travelling caravans, gypsy encampments, Wild West shows, horse-fairs,
-street carnivals and what not.
-</p>
-<p>
-Of a sudden the picture changes. There are no civilians visible now, no
-prisoners and no labour-battalions but only soldiers and not so many
-soldiers either as you encountered just behind you in the intermediate
-zone because as a general thing, the nearer you come to the actual theatre
-of hostilities, the fewer soldiers in mass are you apt to see. The
-soldiers may be near by but they are not to be found until you search for
-them. They have taken cover in dug-outs and in trenches and in remote
-billets hidden in handy, sheltered spots in the conformation of the
-rolling landscape.
-</p>
-<p>
-Now the vista stretching before you wears a bleak and untenanted look. You
-notice that the shade trees have disappeared. Instead of living trees
-there are only jagged stumps of trees or bare, shattered trunks from which
-the limbs have been sheared away by shell-fire, and to which the bark
-clings in scrofulous patches. Across the fields go winding, brown
-bramble-patches of rusted barbed wire. The earth is depressed into hollows
-and craters, or upthrown into ugly mounds and hillocks. In the wasted and
-disfigured meadows rank weeds sprout upon the edges of the ragged
-shellholes. The very earth seems to give off a sour and rancid stink.
-There is a village ahead of you; it is a village without roofs to its
-houses, or dwellers within its breached and tottering walls. It is a
-jumbled nightmare of a ruin. It is as though a tornado had blown a cluster
-of brick-kilns flat, and then an earthquake had come along and jumbled the
-fragments into still greater and more utter confusion.
-</p>
-<p>
-Protruding from the flattened rubble about it, there uprears a crooked,
-spindle-like pinnacle of tottering masonry. It may have been a corner of
-the church wall or the town hall. Now it is like a beckoning finger
-calling to heaven for vengeance. Upon it is set a notice-board to advise
-you that you are now in the “Alert Zone,” which means your gas-respirator
-must be snuggled up under your chin ready for use and that your steel
-helmet must be worn upon your head and that you must take such other
-precautions as may be required.
-</p>
-<p>
-You ride on then at reduced speed along a camouflaged byway for perhaps
-fifteen minutes. You come to where once upon a time, before the
-jack-booted, spike-headed apostles of Kul-tur descended upon this country,
-was another village standing. This village has been more completely
-obliterated out of its former image—if such a thing is possible—than
-its neighbour. It is little else than a red smear in the greyish yellow
-desolation, where constant bombardment has reduced the bricks of its
-houses to a powder and then has churned and pestled the powder into the
-harried earth. There remains for proof of one-time occupancy only the
-jagged lines of certain foundations and ugly mounds of mingled soil and
-debris. Up from beneath one of these mess-heaps, emerging like a
-troglodyte, from a hole which burrows downward to a hidden cellar, there
-crawls forth a grimed soldier who warns you that neither you nor your car
-may progress farther except at your dire risk, since this is an outpost
-position and once you pass from your present dubious shelter you will be
-in full view and easy target range of Brother Boche. You have advanced to
-the very forward verge of the battle-line and you didn't know it.
-</p>
-<p>
-One rather dark night, travelling in an unlighted car, three of us were
-trying to reach an American brigade headquarters where we expected to
-sleep. Our particular destination was a hamlet in a forest just behind and
-slightly east of the main defences of Verdun.
-</p>
-<p>
-We must have taken the wrong turn at a crossroads, for after going some
-distance along a rutted cart track through the woods we came to where a
-deep ditch—at least it seemed to be a deep ditch—had been dug
-right across the trail from side to side. By throwing on the brakes the
-chauffeur succeeded in halting the car before its front wheels went over
-and into the cut. We climbed out to investigate, and then we became aware
-of an American sentry standing twenty feet beyond us in the aforesaid
-ditch.
-</p>
-<p>
-“We are correspondents,” said a spokesman among us, “and we are trying to
-get to General So-and-So's headquarters. Can't we go any farther along
-this road?”
- </p>
-<p>
-Being an American this soldier had a sense of humour.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Not unless you speak German, you can't,” he drawled. “The Heinies are
-dead ahead of you, not two hundred yards from this here trench.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Without once suspecting it we had ridden clear through a sector held by us
-to the frontline defences alongside the beleaguered city of Verdun.
-</p>
-<p>
-It's just one paradox after another, is the thing we call war.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XXII. THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE deadlier end of a snake is the head end, where the snake carries its
-stingers. Since something happened in the Garden of Eden this fact has
-been a matter of common knowledge, giving to all mankind for all time
-respect for the snake and fear of him. But what not everybody knows is
-that before a constrictor can exert his squeezing powers to the uttermost
-degree he must have a dependable grip for his tail, else those mighty
-muscles of his are impotent; because a snake, being a physical thing, is
-subject to the immutable laws of physics. There must be a fulcrum for the
-lever, always; the coiled spring that is loose at both ends becomes merely
-a piece of twisted metal; and a constrictor in action is part a living
-lever and part a living spring. And another thing that not everybody knows
-is that before a snake with fangs can fling itself forward and bite it
-must have a purchase for the greater part of its length against some
-reasonably solid object, such as the earth or a slab of rock.
-</p>
-<p>
-Now an army might very well be likened to a snake, which sometimes
-squeezes its enemy by an enveloping movement but more often strikes at him
-with sudden blows. In the case of our own Army I particularly like the
-simile of a great snake—a rattlesnake, by preference, since in the
-first place the rattlesnake is essentially an American institution, and
-since once before our ancestors fought for their own freedom, much as we
-now are fighting for the freedom of the world, under a banner that carried
-the device of a rattler coiled. Moreover, the rattlesnake, which craves
-only to be let alone and which does not attack save on intrusion or
-provocation, never quits fighting, once it has started, until it is
-absolutely no more. You may scotch it and you may bruise and crush and
-break it, but until you have killed it exceedingly dead and cut it to bits
-and buried the bits you can never be sure that the job from your
-standpoint is finished. So for the purpose of introducing the subject in
-hand a rattlesnake it is and a rattlesnake it shall be to the end of the
-narrative, the reader kindly consenting—a rattlesnake whose bite is
-very, very fatal and whose vibrating tail bears a rattle for every star in
-the flag.
-</p>
-<p>
-For some months past it has been my very good fortune to watch the
-rattler's head, snouting its nose forth into the barbed wires and licking
-out with the fiery tongue of its artillery across the intervening shell
-holes at Heinie the Hun. Now I have just finished a trip along the body of
-the snake, stretching and winding through and across France for 800 miles,
-more or less, to where its tail is wetted by salt water at the coast ports
-in the south and the east and the southeast. This is giving no information
-to the enemy, since he knows already that the snake which is the army must
-have a head at the battleground and a neck in the trenches, and behind the
-head and the neck a body and a tail, the body being the lines of
-communication and the tail the primary supply bases.
-</p>
-<p>
-His own army is in the likeness of a somewhat similar snake; otherwise it
-could not function. Moreover, things are happening to him, even as these
-lines are written, that must impress upon his Teutonic consciousness that
-our snake is functioning from tip to tip. Unless he is blind as well as
-mad he must realise that he made a serious mistake when he disregarded the
-injunction of the old Colonials: “Don't Tread On Me.”
- </p>
-<p>
-In common with nearly every other man to whom has been given similar
-opportunity I have seen hundreds of splendid things at the Front where our
-people hold for defence or move for attack—heroism, devotion,
-sacrifice, an unquenchable cheerfulness, and a universal determination
-that permeates through the ranks from the highest general to the greenest
-private to put through the job that destiny has committed into our
-keeping, after the only fashion in which this job properly may be put
-through.
-</p>
-<p>
-In the trenches and immediately behind them I thought I had exhausted the
-average human capacity for thrills of pride, but it has turned out that I
-hadn't. For back of the Front, back of the line troops and the reserves,
-back all the way to the tail of the snake, there are things to be seen
-that in a less spectacular aspect—though some of them are
-spectacular enough, at that—are as finely typical of American
-resource and American courage and American capability as any of the sights
-that daily and hourly duplicate themselves among the guns.
-</p>
-<p>
-I am sure there still must be quite a number of persons at home who
-somehow think that once a soldier is armed and trained and set afoot on
-fighting ground he thereafter becomes a self-sustaining and
-self-maintaining organism; that either he is providentially provisioned,
-as the ravens of old fed the prophet, or that he forages for himself,
-living on the spoils of the country as the train bands and hired
-mercenaries used to live by loot in the same lands where our troops are
-now engaged. Or possibly they hazily conceive that the provender and the
-rest of it, being provided, manage to transport themselves forward to
-their user. If already we had not had too many unnecessary delegates
-loose-footing it over France this year I could wish that I might have had
-along with me on this recent trip a delegation of these unreflecting folk,
-for they would have beheld, as I did, a greater miracle than the one
-vouchsafed Elijah, yet a miracle of man's èncompassment, and in some
-measure would have come to understand how a vast American army, three
-thousand miles from home on foreign shores, is fed and furnished and
-furbished and refurbished, not at the expense of the dwellers of the soil
-but to their abundant personal benefit. Finally they would see in its
-operation the vastest composite job of creation, organisation and
-construction that has ever been put through, in the space of one year and
-three months about, by any men that ever toiled anywhere on this footstool
-of Jehovah.
-</p>
-<p>
-To me statistics are odious things, and whenever possible I avoid them.
-Besides, some of the figures I have accumulated in this journey are so
-incredibly stupendous that knowing them to be true figures I nevertheless
-hesitate to set them down. By my thinking way adjectives are needed and
-not numerals to set forth in any small measure a conception of the
-undertaking that has been accomplished overseas by our people and is still
-being accomplished with every hour that passes.
-</p>
-<p>
-Before this war came along Europeans were given to saying that we
-Americans rarely bragged of producing a beautiful thing or an artistic
-thing or a thing painstakingly done, but rather were given to advertising
-that here we had erected the longest bridge and there the tallest building
-and over yonder the largest railway terminal and down this way the most
-expensive mansion—that ever was. Perhaps the criticism was justified
-in peacetimes. Today in the light of what we have done in France these
-past few months back of the lines it not only is justified but it is
-multiplied, magnified and glorified. It no longer is a criticism; it is a
-tribute. When you think of the performance that stands to our credit you
-must think of it in superlatives, and when you speak of it you must speak
-in superlatives too. The words all end in “est.”
- </p>
-<p>
-On French soil within twelve months, and in several instances within six
-months, we have among other things constructed and set going the biggest
-cold-storage plant, with two exceptions, in the world; the biggest
-automobile storage depot, excluding one privately owned American concern,
-in the world; the biggest system of military-equipment warehouses in the
-world; probably the biggest field bakery in the world; the biggest
-strictly military seaport base in the world; what will shortly be the
-biggest military base hospital in the world; the biggest single warehouse
-for stock provender in the world; the biggest junkshop in the world; the
-biggest staff training school in the world—three months ago it had
-more scholars than any university in America ever has had; the biggest
-locomotive roundhouse under one roof; the biggest gasoline-storage plant;
-the next to the biggest training camp for aviators, the same being a sort
-of 'finishing school for men who have already had a degree of instruction
-elsewhere; the biggest acetylene-gas plant; and half a dozen other biggest
-things in the world—and we're not good and started yet!
-</p>
-<p>
-Every week sees the plants we have already constructed being enlarged and
-amplified; every week sees some new contract getting under way. Every
-month's end sees any similar period in the building of the Panama Canal
-made to seem almost a puny and inconsequential achievement by contrast and
-by comparison with what superbly and triumphantly has gone forward during
-that month. In military parlance it is called the Service of Supplies. It
-should be called the Service of the Supremely Impossible Supremely
-Accomplished. When this war is ended and tourists are permitted to visit
-foreign parts Americans coming abroad and seeing what has here been done
-will be prouder of their country and their fellow countrymen than ever
-they have been.
-</p>
-<p>
-The Service of Supplies, broadly speaking and in its bearing on operations
-upon the Continent, begins at tide mark and ends in the front-line
-trenches, with ramifications and side issues and annexes past counting,
-but all of them more or less interrelated with the main issues. For
-example the staff school can hardly be called a part of it, though lying,
-so to speak, in a whorl of the snake. It is divided into a Base Section,
-which is that part situate nearest to the coasts; an Intermediate Section,
-which is what its name implies; and an Advance Section, which extends as
-close up to the zone of hostilities as is consistent with reasonable
-safety, the term “reasonable safety” being a relative term in these days
-of hostile raiding planes. The Base Section is subdivided again into
-several lesser segments, each centring about a main port.
-</p>
-<p>
-Broadly described it might be said that any military equipment in its
-natural course is first unloaded and stored temporarily at the bases. Then
-it is moved into the Intermediate Section, where it is housed and kept
-until called for. Thereupon it goes on a third rail journey to the Advance
-Section, out of the depots of which it is requisitioned and sent ahead
-again by trucks or wagons, or more commonly by rail, to meet the
-day-to-day and the week-to-week requirements of the units in the field.
-</p>
-<p>
-While this is going on all the sundry hundreds of thousands of men engaged
-on duty along the Service of Supplies must be cared for without impairment
-to the principal underlying purpose—that of provisioning and arming
-the fighting man, and providing supplies and equipment for the hospitals
-and the depots and all the rest of it, world without end. When you sit
-down to figure how many times the average consignment, of whatsoever
-nature, is loaded and unloaded and reloaded again even after it has been
-brought overseas, and how many times it is handled and rehandled, checked
-in and checked out, accounted for and entered up, and eventually fed out
-in dribs as fodder for the huge coiling serpent we call an army—you
-begin to understand why it is that for every 100 men brought across the
-ocean upward of 50 must be assigned to work in some capacity or another
-along the communication ways.
-</p>
-<p>
-For the reader to visit the various departments and sub-departments and
-subber subdepartments that properly fall within the scope of the Service
-of Supplies would take of his time at least two weeks. It took that much
-of my time and I had a fast touring car at my disposal and between stops
-moved at a cup-racing clip. For the writer to attempt to set down in any
-comprehensive form the extent of the thing would fill a fat book of many
-pages. By reason of the limitations of space this article can touch only
-briefly on the general scheme and only sketchily upon those details that
-seemed to the present observer most interesting.
-</p>
-<p>
-For example at one port—and this not yet the busiest one of the
-ports turned over to us by our allies—we are operating an extensive
-system of French docks that already were there and with them an even
-larger system of docks constructed by our Army and now practically
-completed. Likewise we have here a great camp, as big a camp as many a
-community at home that calls itself a city, where negro labour battalions
-are living; two extensive rest camps for troops newly debarked from the
-transports; enormous freight yards and storage warehouses with still
-another camp handily near by for the accommodation of the yard gangs and
-the warehouse gangs; a base hospital that when completed will be the
-largest military base hospital on earth; a sizable artillery camp where
-gun crews and ordnance officers take what might be called a post-graduate
-course to supplement the training they had in the States; a remount
-station; an ordnance and aviation-storage warehouse; and a motor reception
-park.
-</p>
-<p>
-This, remember, is but one of several ports that we practically have taken
-over for the period of the war. On the land side of a second port are
-grouped a rest camp, a motor-assembling park, a system of docks inside a
-basin that is provided with locks, a locomotive-assembling plant, freight
-yards, warehouses without end, and two base hospitals.
-</p>
-<p>
-Taking either of these ports for a starting point and moving inland one
-would probably visit first the headquarters of the Service of Supplies,
-where also is to be found our main salvage depot for reclaiming all sorts
-of equipment except motor and air equipment—these go to salvage
-stations specially provided elsewhere—and not far away an aviation
-training centre. A little farther along as one travelled up-country he
-would come to an artillery instruction centre located in a famous French
-military school; to our engineer training centre and our engineer
-replacement depots; and thence onward to our air-service production centre
-with its mammoth plant for assembling, repairing and testing planes and
-with its camp for its personnel. This would bring one well into the
-Intermediate Section with its depots, freight yards and warehouses, and
-with its refrigerating plant, which is the third largest in existence and
-which shortly will have a twin sister a few miles away. There would be
-side excursions to the motor supply and spare parts depot, to the main
-motor repair station, to the locomotive repair shops, to the car shops, to
-the principal one of our aviation training centres, to the main field
-bakery, to the gasoline depots, the camouflaging plant and to various
-lesser activities.
-</p>
-<p>
-Finally one would land at the Advance Section depots with their complex
-regulating stations for the proper distribution of the material that has
-advanced hither by broken stages. And yet when one had journeyed thus far
-one would merely be at the point of the beginning of the real work of
-getting the stuff through to the forces without congestion, without
-unnecessary wastage, without sending up too much or too little but just
-exactly the proper amounts as needed.
-</p>
-<p>
-Now then, on top of this please remember that each important camp, each
-station, each centre has its own water system, its own electric light
-system, its own police force, its own fire department, its own sanitary
-squad, its own sewers, its own walks and drives and flower beds, its own
-emergency hospitals and dispensaries and surgeries, its own Y. M. C. A.,
-its own Red Cross unit, generally its own K. of C. workers and its own
-Salvation Army squad; as likely as not its own newspaper and its own
-theatre. Always it has its own separate communal life.
-</p>
-<p>
-Figure that in a score of places veritable cities have sprung up where
-last January the wind whistled over stubbled fields and snow-laden pine
-thickets. Figure that altogether 40,000,000 square feet of covered
-housing space are required and that more will be required as our
-expeditionary force continues to expand. Figure that in and out and
-through all these ramified activities our locomotives draw our cars over
-several hundred miles of sidings and yard trackage, which Uncle Sam has
-put down by the sweat of the brow of his excellent sons, supplemented by a
-copious amount of sweat wrung from the brows of thousands of German
-prisoners and thousands more of Indo-Chinese labourers imported by the
-French and loaned to us, and yet thousands more of native French labourers
-past or under the military age.
-</p>
-<p>
-Figure that while the work of construction has been going on upon a scope
-unprecedented in the scheme of human endeavour the men charged with the
-responsibility for it have had to divide their energies and their man
-power to the end that the growing Army should not suffer for any lack of
-essential sustenance while the other jobs went forward toward completion.
-Figure at the beginning of last winter, nine months ago, scarcely a
-spadeful of earth had been turned for the foundations anywhere. Figure in
-with all of this mental pictures of the Children of Israel building the
-pyramids for old Mister Pharaoh, of Goethals at the Isthmus, of Cæsar's
-legions networking Europe with those justly celebrated Romanesque roads of
-his, of the coral insects making an archipelago in nine months instead of
-stretching the proceeding through millions of years, as is the habit of
-these friendly little insects; figure in all these things—and if
-your headache isn't by this time too acute for additional effort without
-poignant throbbings at the temples you may begin to have a shadowy
-conception of what has happened along our Service of Supplies over here in
-France since we really got busy.
-</p>
-<p>
-So much for the glittering generalities—and Lawsie, how they do
-glitter with the crusted diamond dust of endeavour and stupendous
-accomplishment! Now for a few particularly brilliant outcroppings: There
-is a certain port at present in our hands. For our purposes it is a most
-important port—one of the most important of all the ports that the
-French turned over to us. When our engineers set up shop there the port
-facilities were very much as they had been when the Phoenicians first laid
-them out, barring some comparatively modern improvements subsequently
-tacked on by the Roman Emperors and still later by that famous but
-somewhat disagreeable old lady, Anne of Brittany. There were no steam
-cranes or electric hoists on the docks, and if there had been they would
-have been of little value except for ornamental purposes, seeing that by
-reason of harbourwise limitations ships of draft or of size could not
-range alongside but must be lightered of their cargoes at their mooring
-chains out in midchannel anywhere from half a mile to a mile and a half
-off shore. Moreover, there was but one railroad track running down to the
-water's edge. Even yet there are no steam cranes in operation; both
-freight and men must be brought to land in lighters. But mark you what man
-power plus brains plus necessity has accomplished in the face of those
-structural obstacles and those mechanical drawbacks.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the outset it was estimated by experts among our allies that possibly
-we could land 20,000 troops and 6,000 tons of freight a month at this port—if
-we kept nonunion hours and hustled. In one day in the early part of the
-present summer 42,000 American soldiers were debarked and ferried ashore
-with their portable equipment, and on another day of the same week through
-one of the original French-built docks—not through the whole row of
-them, but through one of the row—our stevedores cleared 5,000 tons
-of freight. Five thousand tons in one day, when those Continental
-wiseacres had calculated that by straining ourselves and by employing to
-their utmost all the facilities provided by all the docks in sight we
-might move 6,000 tons in a month! For this performance and for so frequent
-duplication of it that now it has become commonplace and matter-of-fact
-and quite in accordance with expectations, a great share of the credit is
-due to thousands of brawny black American stevedores drawn from the
-wharves of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, Galveston, Savannah, New
-Orleans and Newport News. The victory that we are going to win will not be
-an all-white victory by any manner of means.
-</p>
-<p>
-Besides the physical limitations there were certain others, seeming at
-first well-nigh insurmountable, which our military and civilian executives
-had to meet and contend with and overcome. I mean the Continental fashion
-of doing things—a system ponderously slow and infinitely cumbersome.
-When a job is done according to native requirements over here it is
-thoroughly done, as you may be quite sure, and it will last for an age;
-but frequently the preceding age is required to get it done. Europeans
-almost without exception are thrifty and saving beyond any conceivable
-standards of ours, but they are prodigals and they are spendthrifts when
-it comes down to expending what in America we regard as the most precious
-commodity of all, and that commodity is time. Some of our masters of
-frenzied finance could wreck a bank in less time than it takes to cash a
-check in a French one.
-</p>
-<p>
-Not even the exigencies and the sharp emergencies of wartime conditions
-can cure a people, however adaptable and sprightly they may be in most
-regards, of a system of thought and a system of habit that go back as far
-as they themselves go as a civilised race. Here is a concrete instance
-serving to show how at this same port that I have been talking about the
-Continental system came into abrupt collision with the American system and
-how the American system won out:
-</p>
-<p>
-The admiral in command of the American naval forces centring at this place
-received word that on a given day—to wit: three days from the time
-the news was wirelessed to him—a convoy would bring to harbour
-transports bearing about 50,000 Yank troopers. It would be the admiral's
-task to see that the ships promptly were emptied of their passengers and
-that the passengers were expeditiously and safely put upon solid land.
-After this had been done it devolved upon the brigadier in command of the
-land forces to quarter them in a rest camp until such time as they would
-be dispatched up the line toward the Front.
-</p>
-<p>
-The great movement of our soldiers overseas, which started in April and
-which proceeds without noticeable abatement as I write this, was then in
-midswing; and the rest camps in the neighbourhood were already crowded to
-their most stretchable limits. Nevertheless the general must provide
-livable accommodations for approximately 50,000 men somewhere in an
-already overcrowded area—and he had less than seventy-two hours in
-which to do it. He got busy; the members of his staff likewise got busy.
-</p>
-<p>
-That same night he called into conference a functionary of the French
-Government, in liaison service and detailed to cooperate with the
-Americans or with the British in just such situations as the one that had
-now risen. The official in question was zealous in the common cause—as
-zealous as any man could be—but he could not cure himself of
-thinking in the terms of the pattern his nation had followed in times of
-peace.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I must have a big rest camp ready by this time day after to-morrow,”
- said, in effect, the American. “So I went out this afternoon with my
-adjutant and some of my other officers and I found it.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Briefly he described a suitable tract four or five miles from the town.
-Then he went on: “How long do you think it would take for your engineers
-to furnish me with a fairly complete working survey of that stretch,
-including boundaries and the general topography with particular regards to
-drainage and elevations?”
- </p>
-<p>
-The Frenchman thought a minute, making mental calculations.
-</p>
-<p>
-“From four to six weeks I should say,” he hazarded. “Not sooner than four
-weeks surely.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I think I can beat that,” said the American.
-</p>
-<p>
-He turned to his desk phone and called up another office in the same
-building in which this conference was taking place—the office of his
-chief engineer officer.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Blank,” he said when he had secured connection, “how long will it take
-you to give me the survey of that property we went over this afternoon?
-You were to let me know by this evening.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Back came the answer:
-</p>
-<p>
-“By working all night, sir, I can hand it to you at noon to-morrow.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Are you sure I'll get it then?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Absolutely sure, sir.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Good,” said the general, and rang off. He faced the Frenchman.
-</p>
-<p>
-“The survey will be ready at noon tomorrow,” he said. “Now, then, I want
-arrangements made so that construction gangs can take possession of that
-land in the morning early. They've got a good many thousand tents to set
-up and some temporary shacks to build, and I'm going to sick 'em on the
-job at daylight.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“But what you ask is impossible, <i>mon général,</i>” expostulated the
-Frenchman. “Days will be required—perhaps weeks. We must follow a
-regular custom, else there will be legal complications. We must search out
-the owners of the various parcels of land included in the area and make
-separate terms with each of them for the use of his land by your people.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“And meanwhile what will those 50,000 soldiers that are due here inside of
-seventy-two hours be doing?”
- </p>
-<p>
-The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. “Very well then,” said the American.
-“Now here's what we must do: I want you please to get in touch, right
-away, with your Minister of War at Paris and tell him with my compliments
-that at daylight in the morning I am going to take possession of that
-tract, and I want the sanction of his department for my authority in
-taking the step. Afterward we'll settle with the owners of the land for
-the ground rent and for the proper damages and for all the rest of it. But
-now—with my compliments—tell the minister we've got to have a
-little action.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“But to write a letter and send it to Paris even by special courier, and
-to have it read and to get a reply back, would take three days at the very
-quickest,” the Frenchman replied.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I'm not asking you to write any letters. I'm asking you to call up the
-minister on the telephone—now, this minute, from this office, and
-over this telephone.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“But, my dear general, it is not customary to call a minister of the
-government on the telephone to discuss anything. There is a procedure for
-this sort of thing—a tradition, a precedent if you will.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“We'll have to make a new precedent of our own then. Here's the telephone.
-Suppose you get the minister on the wire and leave the rest to me. I'll do
-the talking from this end—and I'll take the responsibility.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“But—but, general,” faltered the dum-founded Frenchman, “have you
-thought of the question of water supply? There are no running streams near
-your proposed site; there are no reservoirs. Of what use for me to do as
-you wish and run the risk of annoying our Minister of War when you have no
-water? And of course without water of what use is your camp?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Don't let that worry you,” said the American. “The water supply has all
-been arranged for. In fact”—he glanced at his watch—“in fact
-you might say that already it is being installed.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“But—if you will pardon me—what you say is impossible!”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Not at all; it's very simple. This town is full of vintners' places and
-every vintner has—or rather he did have—a lot of those big
-empty wine casks on hand. Well, I sent two of my officers out this
-afternoon and bought every empty wine cask in this town. They rounded up
-600 of them, and there'll be more coming in from the surrounding country
-to-morrow morning. I know there will be, because I've got men out scouting
-for them, and at the price I'm willing to pay I'll have every spare wine
-cask in this part of France delivered here to me by this time to-morrow.
-But 600 was enough to start on. I've had 800 of them set up at handy
-places over my camp site—had it done this evening—and at this
-moment the other 300 are being loaded upon army trucks—six casks to
-a truck. To-morrow morning the trucks will begin hauling water to fill the
-casks now on the ground.”
- </p>
-<p>
-It was as he had said. The minister was called up at night on the
-telephone, and from him a very willing approval of the unprecedented step
-in contemplation was secured. The water hauling started at dawn, and so
-did the tent raising start. The survey was delivered at noon; half an hour
-later American labour battalions were digging ditches for kitchen drains
-and latrines, and in accordance with the contour of the chosen spot a
-makeshift but serviceable sewerage system was being installed. When the
-troops marched out to their camp in the late afternoon of the second day
-following, their camp was there waiting for them and their supper was
-ready.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XXIII. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>AKE any separate project along our line of communication. Pick it out at
-random. It makes no difference which particular spot you choose; you
-nevertheless are morally sure to find stationed there a man or a group of
-men who have learned to laugh at the problem of making bricks without
-straw. If put to it they could make monuments out of mud pies. Brought
-face to face with conditions and environments that were entirely new to
-their own experience, and confronted as they were at the outset by the
-task of providing essentials right out of the air—essentials that
-were vitally and immediately needed and that could not be forthcoming from
-the States for weeks or even months—an executive or an underlying
-invariably would find a way out of the difficulty.
-</p>
-<p>
-There was pressing need once for a receptacle in which rubber cement could
-be mixed in small quantities. Neither the local community nor the
-government stores yielded such a thing and there was no time to send clear
-back New York or Philadelphia for it. The man who was charged with the
-responsibility of getting that rubber cement mixed wait on a scouting
-tour. Somewhere he unearthed probably the only ice-cream freezer in rural
-Fiance outside of the immediate vicinity of Paris, and he acquired it at
-the proprietor's valuation and loaded it into his car and hurried back
-with it to his shop, and ten minutes after he arrived the required cement
-was being stirred to the proper consistency in the ice-cream freezer.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the main depot of automobile supplies they needed, right away, springs
-with which to repair broken-down light cars. As yet an adequate supply of
-spare parts had not been received from the base, nor was there any
-likelihood that a supply would be forthcoming at once. The colonel in
-charge of the depot sent men ranging through the countryside with
-instructions to buy up stuff that would make springs. They brought him in
-tons of purchases, and most unlikely looking material it was too—rusted
-chunks and strips and spirals of metal taken from the underpinnings of
-French market carts and agricultural implements; but the forces in the
-machine shops sailed in and converted the lot into automobile springs in
-no time at all.
-</p>
-<p>
-This same colonel already had a plant which, exclusive of the value of
-buildings specially built, represents at this time a national investment
-of $35,000,000, and the outlay was growing every hour. He used to be the
-head of a big metal-working establishment at home. As a specialist in his
-line he joined the Army to help out. Now every month he does a volume of
-buying that would have made his average year's turnover in times of peace
-look trifling in comparison. Just before he sailed to take over his
-present job he ordered $6,000,000 worth of motor parts at one fell swoop,
-as it were.
-</p>
-<p>
-Because of the rapidity with which our forces on foreign service
-multiplied themselves there was a rush order from General Headquarters for
-more buildings and yet more buildings, at one of our warehouse depots, to
-provide for storage of perishable foodstuffs in transit from the rear to
-the Front. Between seven-thirty o'clock in the morning and five o'clock in
-the evening of a given day a gang of steel riggers accomplished the
-impossible by rearing and bolting together the steel frame—posts,
-girders, plates, rafters and crossbeams—for a building measuring 96
-feet in width, 24 feet in height and 230 feet in length, the same being
-merely one of the units of a structure that very soon thereafter was up in
-the air and that measured 650 feet crosswise and 650 feet lengthwise, with
-railroad tracks stretching alongside and in between its various segments.
-</p>
-<p>
-“When we laid out our original plans for this project the French said it
-would be entirely too large for our uses, no matter how big an army we
-brought over,” remarked to me a young ex-civilian, now wearing a captain's
-markings on his flannel shirt, who had put through this undertaking. “Our
-people thought differently and we went ahead, trying to figure as we went
-along on all future contingencies. The result is that already we are
-enlarging upon the old specifications as rapidly as possible. Even so the
-supplies are piling up on us faster than we can store them. Look yonder.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He pointed to a veritable mountain of baled hay—a regular Himalaya
-of hay—which covered a corner of the field whereon we stood. It
-towered high above the tops of the trees behind it; it stretched dear to
-the edge of the woodlands beyond, and it was crowned, as a mountain peak
-should be, with white; only in this instance the blanket was of canvas
-instead of snow.
-</p>
-<p>
-“There are 80,000 tons of American baled hay in that pile,” he said, “and
-in a month from now if the present rate of growth keeps up it will be
-bigger by a third than it is now. It's quite some job—taking care of
-this man's army.”
- </p>
-<p>
-In the midriff of the Intermediate Section is a project on which at this
-writing 10,000 men are at work, and on an air-service field adjoining it
-3,000 more men are engaged. Exclusive of material for local construction
-purposes 500 carloads of strictly military supplies arrive here daily, and
-approximately 75 carloads a day move out. Later the ratio of outgoing
-equipment will increase, but the incoming amount is not liable to fall off
-very much. To house the accumulating mass here and elsewhere in the same
-zone, including as it does engineers' stores, ordnance stores, fresh
-meats, salt meats, medical stores, harness, guns and quartermasters'
-stores, there has been provided or will be provided 4,500,000 square feet
-of roof-covered space and 10,000,000 square feet of open storage space.
-</p>
-<p>
-When I came that way the other day miles of the plain had been filled
-pretty thoroughly with buildings and with side tracks and wagon roads;
-and, scattered over a tract measuring roughly six miles one way and four
-miles the other, between 18,000 and 14,000 men were engaged. In January of
-this year, when a man who now accompanied me had visited the same spot, he
-said there was one building standing on the area, and that two side tracks
-were in use; all the rest was a barren stretch of snowdrifts and
-half-frozen mud and desolation. They were just beginning then to dig the
-foundations of our main cold-storage plant. It is finished and in
-operation to-day. Besides being a model plant it is the third largest
-cold-storage plant in the world, and yet it is to be distinguished from
-the sixty-odd buildings that surround it only by the fact that it is
-taller and longer and has more smokestacks on it than any of the rest.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the principal depot of the Advance Section, where the chief regulating
-officer is stationed, one of the biggest jobs is to sort out the man
-provender as it flows in by rail and to fill up each of fifty or sixty
-track-side warehouses with balanced rations—so much flour, so much
-salt meat, so much of salt, sugar, lard, canned goods, pepper, vinegar,
-pickles, and so on, to each building; or else to load a building with
-balanced man equipment—comprising shoes, socks, underwear, shirts,
-uniforms and the rest of it down to shoe laces and buttons, the purpose of
-this arrangement being that when a warehouse is emptied the man who is in
-charge, even before checking up on the loading gangs, already knows almost
-to a pound or a stitch just how many rations or how many articles of
-apparel have gone forward.
-</p>
-<p>
-In each warehouse the canned tomatoes, the vinegar and the stuff that
-contains mild acids are stored at the two ends of the building in
-crosswise barricades that extend to the roof. This disposal was an idea of
-the officer in control of the arrangement. He explained to us that in case
-of fire canned stuff bearing a heavy proportion of fluid would burn more
-slowly than the other foodstuffs, so there would be a better chance of
-confining the blaze to the building in which it originated and of
-preventing its spread to adjoining or adjacent buildings, which might be
-of brick or concrete or stone or sheet metal, but which are more apt to be
-of frame.
-</p>
-<p>
-A British colonel on a visit of inspection to, our Service of Supplies
-visited this project on the same day that I came. Radiating admiration and
-astonishment at every step and at every stop, he accompanied the young
-first lieutenant who was in personal charge of the warehousing scheme on a
-tour of his domain, which covered miles. When the round had been completed
-and the lieutenant had saluted and taken himself away the Britisher said
-to the chief regulating officer:
-</p>
-<p>
-“I have never seen anything so perfectly devised as your plan of operation
-and distribution here. I take it that the young man who escorted me
-through is one of your great American managing experts. I imagine he must
-have been borrowed from one of those marvellous mail-order houses of
-yours, of which I have heard so much. One thing puzzles me though—he
-must have come here fresh from business pursuits, and yet he bears himself
-like a trained soldier.”
- </p>
-<p>
-The chief regulating officer smiled a little smile.
-</p>
-<p>
-“That man,” he said, “is an old enlisted man of our little antebellum
-Regular Army. He didn't win his commission until he came over here. Before
-that he was a noncom on clerical duty in the quartermaster's department,
-and before that he was a plain private, and as far as I know he never
-worked a day for any concern except our own Government since he reached
-the enlisting age.”
- </p>
-<p>
-In addition to doing what I should say at an offhand guess was the work of
-ten reasonably active men, the colonel who supervises our Advance Section
-has found time since he took over his present employment to organise a
-brass band and a glee dub among his personnel, to map out and stage-manage
-special entertainments for the men, to entertain visitors who come
-officially and unofficially, to keep several thousand individuals busy in
-their working hours and happy in their leisure hours, and at frequent
-intervals to write for the benefit of his command special bulletins
-touching on the finer sides of the soldier's duties and the soldier's
-discipline. He gave me a copy of one of his more recent pronouncements. He
-called it a memorandum; I called it a classic. It ran as follows:
-</p>
-<p>
-“1. The salute, in addition to being a soldier's method of greeting, is
-the gauge by which he shows to the world his proficiency in the
-profession, his morale and the condition of his discipline.
-</p>
-<p>
-“2. For me the dial of a soldier's salute has three marks, and I read his
-salute more accurately than he himself could tell me.
-</p>
-<p>
-“3. The three gradations are:
-</p>
-<p>
-(a) I am a soldier; I know my trade or will know it very soon, and I will
-be a success as a soldier or a civilian, wherever I may be put.
-</p>
-<p>
-(b) I do not know what I am and do not care, I only do what I am forced to
-do, and will never be much of a success at anything.
-</p>
-<p>
-(c) I am a failure and am down and out, sick, homesick and disgruntled. I
-cannot stand the gaff.
-</p>
-<p>
-“4. As Americans try to conceal your feelings from our Allies.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Remember you are just as much fighters here as you would be carrying a
-pail of food to the fighting line or actually firing a gun.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Every extra exertion is an addition to the firing line direct.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Every bit of shirking is robbing the firing line.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Buck Up!”
- </p>
-<p>
-For qualities of human interest no joints in the snake's spine, no twists
-in his manifold convolutions measure up, I think, to the salvage depots.
-Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, an army in the field threw
-away what it did not use or what through breakage or stress became
-unserviceable. That day is gone. In this war the wastage is practically
-negligible. Our people have learned this lesson from the nations that went
-into the war before we entered it, but in all modesty I believe, from what
-I have seen, that we have added some first-rate improvements to the plan
-in the few months that have been vouchsafed us for experiments and
-demonstrations. Moreover, to the success of our plans in this regard there
-have been difficulties that did not confront our Allies to the same
-extent. For instance our biggest motor-repair depot is housed in what
-formerly had been a French infantry barracks—a series of buildings
-that had never been devised for the purposes to which they are now put,
-and that at first offered many serious problems, mechanical and physical.
-</p>
-<p>
-In tall brick buildings, under sheds and under tents and out in the open
-upon the old parade ground a great chain of machine shops, carpenter
-shops, paint shops, upholstery shops and leather-working shops has been
-coordinated and is cooperating to attain the maximum of possible
-production with the minimum of lost energy and lost effort. The scientist
-who reconstructs a prehistoric monster from a fossilised femur finds here
-his industrial prototype in the smart American mechanics who build up an
-ambulance or a motor truck from a fire-blackened, shell-riddled car frame,
-minus top, minus wheels, minus engine parts. What comes out of one total
-wreck goes into another that is not quite so totally so. And when a tool
-is lacking for some intricate job the Yank turns in and makes it himself
-out of a bit of scrap; and neither he nor his fellows think he has done
-anything wonderful either. It's just part of the day's work.
-</p>
-<p>
-The salvage depot for human equipment and for lighter field equipment is
-established at this writing in what was, not so very long ago, a shop
-where one of the French railroad lines painted its cars. It began active
-operations last January with six civilian employees under an officer who
-four weeks before he landed in France was a business man in Philadelphia.
-In June it had on its pay rolls nearly 4,000 workers, mainly women and
-many of them refugees.
-</p>
-<p>
-When all the floor space available—about 200,000 square feet of it—has
-been taken over the plant will have a personnel of about 5,000 hands, and
-it will be possible to do the reclamation work in clothing, shoes, rubber
-boots and slickers, harness and leather, canvas and webbing, field ranges,
-mess equipments, stoves, helmets, trenching tools, side arms, rifle
-slings, picks, shovels and metal gear generally for about 400,000 fighting
-men, with an estimated saving to Uncle Sam—exclusive of the vast sum
-saved in tonnage and shipping charges—of about $1,000,000 a month.
-</p>
-<p>
-At this time 10,000 garments and articles of personal attire are passing
-through this plant every twenty-four hours, and coming out cleaned,
-mended, remade or converted to other purposes. A man could spend a week
-here, I feel certain, and not count his sight-seeing time as wasted. Among
-the men workers he would find invalided and crippled soldiers of at least
-six nations—America, Belgium, France, Greece, Serbia and Italy.
-Among the women workers, who average in pay seven francs a day—big
-wages for rural France—he would find many women of refinement and
-education hailing from evacuated districts in northern France and Belgium,
-whose faces bespeak the terrors and torments through which they have
-passed in the attempted implanting of the seeds of Kultur upon their
-homelands. Now they sit all day, driving sewing machines or managing
-knitting looms alongside their chattering, gossiping sisters of the
-peasant class.
-</p>
-<p>
-And every hour in this beehive of industry the man who looked close would
-come upon things eloquently bespeaking the tragedy or the comedy of war's
-flotsam and jetsam. Now perhaps it would be a battered German bugle picked
-up by some souvenir-loving soldier, only to be flung into the camp salvage
-dump when its finder wearied of carrying it; and now it would be a khaki
-blouse with a bullet hole in the breast of it and great brown stains,
-stiff and dry, in its lining. A talking machine in fair order, the half of
-a tombstone and the full-dress equipment of a captain of Prussian Hussars
-were among the relics that turned up at the salvage depot in one week.
-</p>
-<p>
-There is no dump heap behind the converted paint bam, for the very good
-reason that practically there is nothing to dump. Everything is saved. The
-salvaged junk comes in by the carload lot from the Front—filthy,
-crumpled, broken, blood-crusted, verminous, tattered, smelly and smashed.
-Sorters seize upon it and separate it and classify it according to kind
-and state of disrepair. Men and women bear it in armloads to sterilisers,
-where live steam kills the lice and the lice eggs; thence it goes to the
-cleaning vats, after which it is sorted again and the real job of making
-something out of what seemed to be worse than nothing at all is
-undertaken, with experts, mainly Americans, to supervise each forward step
-in the big contract of renovation, restoration and utilisation.
-</p>
-<p>
-After the body clothing has been made clean and odourless it is assigned
-to one of three classes, to wit: (a) Garments needing minor repairs and
-still sightly and serviceable, which are put in perfect order and reissued
-to front-line troops; (b) garments not so sightly but still serviceable,
-which are issued to S O S workers, including stevedores, labourers,
-railroad engineers, firemen and forestry workers; (c) garments that are
-not sightly but that will repay repairing. These are dyed green and given
-to German prisoners of war. Practically no new material is used for
-repair. Garments that are past salvation in their present shape are cut up
-to furnish patches. Three garments out of four are reclaimed in one form
-or another; the fourth one becomes scrap for patchings. Shoes are washed
-in an acid disinfectant that cleanses the leather without injuring its
-fabric, and then they are dried and greased before going in to the
-workers. Shoes that are worth saving are saved to the last one; those past
-saving are ripped apart and the uppers are cut into shoe strings, while
-the soles furnish ground-up leather for compositions. Thanks to processes
-of washing, cleansing and repairing, a salvage average of approximately
-ninety per cent, is attained in slickers and rubber boots.
-</p>
-<p>
-Last spring the high military authorities decided to shorten the heavy
-overcoats worn by our soldiers, so it befalls that the lengths of cloth
-cut from the skirts of the overcoats are now being fashioned at the
-salvage plants into uppers for hospital slippers, while old campaign hats
-furnish the material for the soles. The completed article, very neat in
-appearance and very comfortable to wear, is turned out here in great
-numbers. Old tires are cooked down to furnish new heels for rubber boots.
-Old socks are unravelled for the sake of the wool in them. Tin receptacles
-that have held gasoline or oil are melted apart, and from their sides and
-tops disks are fashioned which, being coated with aluminum, become markers
-for the graves where our dead soldier boys have been buried. Smaller tins
-are smelted down into lumps and used for a dozen purposes. The solder from
-the cans is not wasted either. Even the hobnails of worn-down boot soles
-are saved for future use.
-</p>
-<p>
-Master of theatrical trick and device that he is, none the less David
-Belasco could learn lessons at our camouflaging plant. He probably would
-feel quite at home there, too, seeing that the place has a most
-distinctive behind-the-scenes atmosphere of its own; it is a sort of
-overgrown combination of scenery loft, property room, paint shop and
-fancy-dress costumer's establishment, where men who gave up sizable
-incomes to serve their country in this new calling work long hours seeking
-to improve upon the artifices already developed—and succeeding—and
-to create brand-new ones of their own.
-</p>
-<p>
-As a branch of military modernism camouflaging is even newer than the
-trade of scientific salvaging is and offers far larger opportunities for
-future exploitation. After all there are just so many things and no more
-that may be done with and to a pair of worn-out rubber boots, but in the
-other field the only limits are the limits of the designer's individual
-ingenuity and his individual skill.
-</p>
-<p>
-We came, under guidance, to a big open-fronted barracks where hundreds of
-French women and French girls made screenage for road protection and gun
-emplacements. The materials they worked with were simple enough: rolls of
-ordinary chicken wire, strips of burlap sacking dyed in four colours—bright
-green, yellowish green, tawny and brown—and wisps of raffia with
-which to bind the cloth scraps into the meshes of the wire. For summer use
-the bright green is used, for early spring and fall the lighter green and
-the tawny; and for winter the brown and the tawny mingled. For, you see,
-camouflage has its seasons, too, marching in step with the swing of the
-year. Viewed close up the completed article looks to be exactly what it is—chicken
-wire festooned thickly with gaudy rags. But stretch a breadth of it across
-a dip in the earth and then fling against it a few boughs cut from trees,
-and at a distance of seventy-five yards no man, however keen-eyed, can say
-just where the authentic foliage leaves off and the artificial joins on.
-</p>
-<p>
-For roadsides in special cases there is still another variety of
-camouflage, done in zebra-like strips of light and dark rags alternating,
-and this stuff being erected alongside the open highway is very apt indeed
-to deceive your hostile observer into thinking that what he beholds is
-merely a play of sunlight and shade upon a sloped flank of earth; and he
-must venture very perilously near indeed to discern that the seeming
-pattern of shadows really masks the movements of troops. This deceit has
-been described often enough, but the sheer art of it takes on added
-interest when one witnesses its processes and sees how marvellously its
-effects are brought about.
-</p>
-<p>
-In an open field used for experimenting and testing was a dump pile dotted
-thickly with all the nondescript débris that accumulates upon the outer
-slope of a dug-in defence where soldiers have been—loose clods of
-earth, bits of chalky stone, shattered stumps, empty beef tins, broken
-mess gear, discarded boots, smashed helmets, and such like. It was crowned
-with a frieze of stakes projecting above the top of the trench behind it,
-and on its crest stood one of those shattered trees, limbless and ragged,
-that often are to be found upon terrains where the shelling has been
-brisk.
-</p>
-<p>
-Here for our benefit a sort of game was staged. First we stationed
-ourselves sixty feet away from the mound. Immediately five heads appeared
-above the parapet—heads with shrapnel helmets upon them, and beneath
-the helmet rims sunburnt faces peering out. The eyes looked this way and
-that as the heads turned from side to side.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Please watch closely,” said the camouflage officer accompanying us. “And
-as you watch, remember this: Two of those heads are the heads of men. The
-three others are dummies mounted on sticks and manipulated from below.
-Since you have been at the Front you know the use of the dummy—the
-enemy sniper shoots a hole in it and the men in the pit, by tracing the
-direction of the bullet through the pierced composition, are able to
-locate the spot where Mister Sniper is hidden. Now then, try to pick out
-the real heads from the fake ones.”
- </p>
-<p>
-There were three of us, and we all three of us tried. No two agreed in our
-guesses and not one of us scored a perfect record; and yet we stood very
-much nearer than any enemy marksman could ever hope to get. The
-lifelikeness of the thing was uncanny.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Next take in the general layout of that spot,” said the camouflage
-expert, with a wave of his hand toward the dump pile. “Looks natural and
-orthodox, doesn't it? Seems to be just the outer side of a bit of trench
-work, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. Two of those stakes are what they appear
-to be—ordinary common stakes. The other two are hollow metal tubes,
-inside of which trench periscopes are placed. And the tree trunk is faked,
-too. It is all hollow within—a shell of light tough steel with a
-ladder inside, and behind that twisted crotch where the limbs are broken
-off the observer is stationed at this moment watching us through a
-manufactured knothole. The only genuine thing about that tree trunk is the
-bark on it—we stripped that off of a beech over in the woods.
-</p>
-<p>
-“The dump heap isn't on the level either, as you possibly know, since you
-may have seen such dump piles concealing the sites of observation pits up
-at the Front. Inside it is all dug out into galleries and on the side
-facing us it is full of peepholes—seventeen peepholes in all, I
-think there are. Let's go within fifteen feet of it and see how many of
-them you can detect.”
- </p>
-<p>
-At a fifteen-foot range it was hard enough for us to make out five of the
-seventeen peep places. Yet beforehand we understood that each tin can,
-each curled-up boot, each sizable tuft of withered grass, each swirl of
-the tree stump—masked a craftily hidden opening shielded with fine
-netting, through which a man crouching in safety beneath the surface of
-the earth might study the land in front of him. That innocent-appearing,
-made-to-order dump pile had the eyes of a spider; but even so, the
-uniformed invader might have climbed up and across it without once
-suspecting the truth.
-</p>
-<p>
-For a final touch the camouflage crew put on their best stunt of all. Five
-men encased themselves in camouflage suits of greenish-brown canvas which
-covered them head, feet, body and limbs, and which being decorated with
-quantities of dried, grasslike stuff sewed on in patches, made them look
-very much as Fred Stone used to look when he played the Scarecrow Man in
-“The Wizard of Oz” years ago. Each man carried a rifle, likewise
-camouflaged. Then we turned our backs while they took position upon a
-half-bare, half-greened hillock less than a hundred feet from us.
-</p>
-<p>
-This being done we faced about, and each knowing that five armed men were
-snuggled there against the bank tried to pick them out from their
-background. It was hard sledding, so completely had the motionless figures
-melted into the herbage and the chalky soil. Finally we united in the
-opinion that we had located three of the five. But we were wrong again. We
-really had picked out only one of the five. The two other suspected clumps
-were not men but what they seemed to be—small protrusions in the
-ragged and irregular turf. Yes, I am sure Mr. Belasco could have spent a
-fruitful half hour or so there with us.
-</p>
-<p>
-Thanks to yet another crafty and deceitful artifice of the camouflage
-outfit it is possible to make the enemy think he is being attacked by
-raiders advancing in force when as a matter of fact what he beholds
-approaching him are not files of men but harmless dummies operated by a
-mechanism that is as simple as simplicity itself. The attack will come
-from elsewhere while his attention is focused upon the make-believe feint,
-but just at present there are military reasons why he should not know any
-of the particulars. It would take the edge of his surprise, even though he
-is not likely to live to appreciate the surprise once the trick has been
-pulled.
-</p>
-<p>
-These details of the whole vast undertaking that I have touched upon here
-are merely bits that stand out with especial vividness from the recent
-recollections of a trip every rod of which was freighted with the most
-compelling interest for any one, and for an American with enduring and
-constant pride in the achievements of his own countrymen.
-</p>
-<p>
-There are still other impressions, many of than, big and little, that are
-going always to stick in my brain—the smell of the crisp brown
-crusty loaves, mingling with the smell of the wood fires at the bakery
-where half a million bread rations are cooked and shipped every day, seven
-days a week; the sight at the motor reception park, where a big proportion
-of the 60,000 motor vehicles of all sorts that are called for in our
-programme, as it stands now, can be stored at one time; the miles upon
-miles of canned goods through which I have passed, with the boxes towering
-in walls upon either side of me; the cold-storage chamber as big as a
-cathedral, where a supply of 5,000 tons of fresh meat is kept on hand and
-ready for use; a cemetery for our people, only a few months old, but
-lovely already with flowers and grass and neat gravel paths between the
-mounds; a blacksmith riveting about the left wrists of Chinese labourers
-their steel identification markers so that there may always be a positive
-and certain way of knowing just who is who in the gang, since to stupid
-occidental eyes all Chinamen look alike and except for these little
-bangles made fast upon the arms of the wearers there would be
-complications and there might be wilful falsifications in the pay rolls; a
-spectacled underofficer hailing us in perfect but plaintive English from a
-group of prisoners mending roads, to say in tones of deep lament that he
-used to be a dentist in Baltimore but made the mistake of going back to
-Germany for a visit to his old home just before the war broke out; a
-Catholic chaplain superintending the beautifying of a row of graves of
-Mohammedans who had died in our service, and who had been laid away
-according to the ritual of their own faith in a corner of a burying ground
-where Christians and Jews are sleeping together; a maimed Belgian soldier
-with three medals for valour on his shirt front, cobbling shoe soles in
-the salvage plant; a French waiter boy in a headquarters mess learning to
-pick out the chords of Dixie Land on an American negro's homemade guitar;
-a room in the staff school where a former member of the Cabinet of the
-United States, an ex-Congressman, an ex-police commissioner of New York
-City and one of the richest men in America, all four of them volunteer
-officers, sat at their lessons with their spines fish-hooked and their
-brows knotted; nineteen-year-old Yankee apprentice flyer doing such
-heart-stopping stunts in a practice plane as I never expect to see
-equalled by any veteran airman; the funeral, on the same day and at the
-same time, of one of his mates, who had been killed by a fall upon the
-field over which this daring youth now cavorted, with the coffin in an
-ambulance and a flag over the coffin, and behind the ambulance the firing
-squad, the Red Cross nurses from the local hospital and a company of his
-fellow cadets marching.
-</p>
-<p>
-And seeing all these sights and a thousand more like unto them I found
-myself as I finished my tour along the winding lengths of the great snake
-we call the Service of Supplies, wondering just who, of all the thousands
-among the men that labour behind the men behind the guns, deserve of their
-countrymen the greatest meed of credit—the high salaried executives
-out of civilian life who dropped careers and comforts and hope of
-preferment in their professions at home, to give of the genius of their
-brains to this cause; or the officers of our little old peacetime Army who
-here serve so gladly and so efficiently upon the poor pay that we give our
-officers, without hope ever of getting a proper measure of national
-appreciation for their efforts, since this war is so nearly an anonymous
-war, where the performances of the individual are swallowed up in the
-united efforts of the mass; or the skilled railway trainmen volunteering
-to work on privates' wages for the period of the war; or the plain
-enlisted man cheerfully, eagerly, enthusiastically toiling here, so far
-back of the Front, when in his heart he must long to be up there with his
-fellows where the big guns boom.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a>
-</p>
-<div style="height: 4em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-<h2>
-CHAPTER XXIV. FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK
-</h2>
-<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">B</span>LOWS with a hammer may numb one, but it is the bee-sting that quickens
-the sensibilities to a realisation of what is afoot. That is why, I
-suppose, the mighty thing called war is for me always summed up in small,
-incidental but outstanding phases of it. In its complete aspect it is too
-vast to be comprehended by any one mind or any thousand minds; but by
-piecing together the lesser things, one after a while begins in a dim
-groping fashion to get a concept of the entirety.
-</p>
-<p>
-When I went up to Ypres, it was not the unutterable desolation and
-hideousness of what had been once one of the fairest spots on earth that
-especially impressed me: possibly because Ypres to-day is a horror too
-terrible and a tragedy too utter for human contemplation save at the risk
-of losing one's belief in the ultimate wisdom of the cosmic scheme of
-things. Nor was it the wreck of the great Cloth Hall which even now, with
-its overthrown walls and its broken lines and its one remaining spindle of
-ruined tower, manages to retain a suggestion of the matchless beauty which
-forevermore is gone. Nor yet was it the cemetery, whereon for sheer,
-degenerate malignity the Germans targeted their heavy guns until they had
-broached nearly every grave, heaving up the dead to sprawl upon the
-displaced clods. One becomes, in time, accustomed to the sight of dead
-soldiers lying where they have fallen, because a soldier accepts the
-chances of being killed and of being left untombed after he is killed. The
-dread spectacle he presented is part and parcel of the picture of war. But
-these men and women and babes that the shells dispossessed from their
-narrow tenements of mould had died peacefully in their beds away back
-yonder—and how long ago it seems now!—when the world itself
-was at peace. They had been shrouded in their funeral vestments; they had
-been laid away with cross and candle, with Book and prayer; over them
-slabs of the everlasting granite had been set, and flowers had been
-planted above them and memorials set up; and they had been left there
-beneath the kindly loam, cradled for all eternity till Gabriel's Trump
-should blow.
-</p>
-<p>
-But when I came there and saw what <i>Kul-tur</i> had wrought amongst them—how
-with exquisite irony the blasts had shattered grave after grave whose
-stones bore the carved words <i>Held in Perpetuity</i> and how
-grandmothers and grandsires and the pitiable small bones of little
-children had been flung forth out of the gaping holes and left to moulder
-in the rags of their cerements where all who passed that way might see
-them—why, it was a blasphemy and an indecency and a sacrilege which
-no man, beholding it, could ever, so long as he lived, hope to forget.
-</p>
-<p>
-And yet, as I just said, it was not the defilement of the cemetery of
-Ypres which impressed me most when I went up to Ypres. It was the
-lamp-posts.
-</p>
-<p>
-Ypres had been studded thick with lampposts; ornamental and decorative
-standards of wrought iron they were, spaced at intervals of forty yards or
-so for the length of every street and on both sides of every street. And
-every single lamp-post in Ypres, as I took the pains to see for myself,
-had been struck by shells or by flying fragments of shells. Some had been
-hit once or twice, some had been quite hewn down, some had been twisted
-into shapeless sworls of tortured metal; not one but was scathed after one
-mutilating fashion or another.
-</p>
-<p>
-In other words, during these four years of bombardment so many German
-shells had descended upon Ypres that no object in it of the thickness of
-six inches at its base and say, two inches at its top, had escaped being
-struck. Or putting it another way, had all these shells been fired through
-a space of hours instead of through a space of years, they would have
-rained down on the empty town with the thickness and the frequency of
-drops in a heavy thunder-shower.
-</p>
-<p>
-Never was the Hun quite so thorough as when he was punishing some helpless
-thing that could not fight back.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-Riding along through France on a Sunday, these times, one is reasonably
-certain to meet many little girls wearing their white communion frocks,
-and many Chinamen under umbrellas.
-</p>
-<p>
-The latter mostly hail from Indo-China. The French imported them in
-thousands for service in the labour battalions behind the lines. During
-the week, dressed in nondescript mixtures of native garb and cast-off
-uniforms, they work at road-mending or at ditch-digging or on
-truck-loading jobs. On Sundays they dress themselves up in their best
-clothes and stroll about the country-side. And rain or shine, each one
-brings along with him his treasured umbrella and carries it unfurled above
-his proud head. It never is a Chinese umbrella, either, but invariably a
-cheap black affair of local manufacture. Go into one of the barracks where
-these yellow men are housed and at the head of each bunk there hangs a
-black umbrella, which the owner guards as his most darling possession. If
-he dies I suppose it is buried with him.
-</p>
-<p>
-Nobody knows here why every Sunday, Chinaman sports an umbrella, unless it
-be that in his Oriental mind he has decided that possession of such a
-thing stamps him as a person of travel and culture who, like any true
-cosmopolitan, is desirous of conforming to the customs of the country to
-which he has been transported. But a Frenchman, if careless, sometimes
-leaves his umbrella behind when he goes forth for a promenade; a Chinaman
-in France, never.
-</p>
-<p>
-When a ship-load of these chaps lands they are first taken to a blacksmith
-shop and upon the left wrist of each is securely and permanently fastened
-a slender steel circlet bearing a token on which is stamped the wearer's
-name and his number. So long as he is in the employ of the State this
-little band must stay on his arm. It is the one sure means of identifying
-him and of preventing payroll duplications.
-</p>
-<p>
-With the marker dangling at his sleeve-end he makes straightway for a shop
-and buys himself a black cotton umbrella and from that time forward,
-wherever he goes, his steel bangle and his umbrella go with him. He cannot
-part from one and not for worlds would he part from the other.
-</p>
-<p>
-One Sunday afternoon in a village in the south of France I saw that rarest
-of sights—a drunken Chinaman. He wiggled and waggled as he walked,
-and once he sat down very hard, smiling foolishly the while, but he never
-lost his hold on the handle of his umbrella and when he had picked himself
-up, the black bulge of it was bobbing tipsily above his tipsy head as he
-went weaving down the road behind a mile-long procession of his fellows,
-all marching double file beneath their raised umbrellas.
-</p>
-<p>
-Whisper—there is current a scandalous rumour touching on these
-little moon-faced allies of ours. It is said that among them every fourth
-man, about, isn't a man at all. He's a woman wearing a man's garb and
-drawing a man's pay; or rather she is, if we are going to keep the genders
-on straight. But since the women work just as hard as the men do nobody
-seems to bother about the deceit. They may not have equal suffrage over in
-Indo-China but the two sexes there seem to have a way of adjusting the
-industrial problems of the day on a mutually satisfactory basis of
-understanding.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-“Piccadilly Circus. This way to Swan and Edgar's.”
- </p>
-<p>
-The sign-board was the top of a jam box. The upright to which it was
-nailed was the shell-riddled trunk of a plane tree with one sprig of dried
-mistletoe clinging in a crotch where limbs had been, like a tuft of dead
-beard on a mummy's chin. Piccadilly Circus was a roughly-rounded spot at a
-cross-road where the grey and sticky mud—greyer than any mud you
-stay-at-homes ever saw; stickier than any mud you ever saw—made a
-little sea which quaked and shimmered greasily like a quicksand. The way
-to Swan and Edgar's was down a communication trench with shored sides to
-it, so that the semi-liquid walls could not cave in, and with duck boards
-set in it upon spiles for footing, so that men passing through would not
-be engulfed and drowned in the quagmire beneath.
-</p>
-<p>
-So much for the immediate setting. The adjacent surroundings were of a
-pattern to match the chosen sample. All about on every side for miles on
-end, was a hell of grey mud, here up-reared into ridges and there
-depressed into holes; and the ridges heaved up to meet a skyline of the
-same sad colour as themselves, and the holes were like the stale dead
-craters of a stale dead moon.
-</p>
-<p>
-Elsewhere in the land, spring had come weeks before, but here the only
-green was the green of the skum on the grey water in the bottoms of the
-shell-fissures; the only living things were the ravens that cawed over the
-wasted landscape, and the great, fat, torpid rats with mud glued in their
-whiskers and their scaled tails caked with mud, that scuttled in and out
-of the long-abandoned German pill-boxes or through holes in the rusted
-iron sides of three dismantled British tanks. For lines of trees there
-were up-ended wrecks of motor trucks and ambulances; for the hum of bees,
-was the hum of an occasional sniper's bullet; for the tap of the
-wood-pecker, was the rat-tat of machine guns marking time for a skirmish
-miles away; for growing crops, in these once fecund and prolific stretches
-of the Flanders flat-lands, there were eighty-thousand unburied dead, all
-encysted in the mud except where the gouging shells had uprooted them out
-of the loblolly. And from far up on the rise toward Passchen-daele came
-the dull regurgitations of the big guns, as though the war had sickened of
-its own horrors and was retching in its nausea.
-</p>
-<p>
-What now was here must, in a measure, always be here. For surely no
-husbandman would dare ever to drive his ploughshare through a field which
-had become a stinking corruption; where in every furrow he would
-inevitably turn up mortal awfulness, and where any moment his steel might
-strike against one of the countless unexploded shells which fill the earth
-like horrid plums in a yet more horrid pudding.
-</p>
-<p>
-You couldn't give this desolation a name; our language yields no word to
-fit it, no adjective to cap it. Yet right here in the stark and rotten
-middle of it a British Tommy had stopped to have his little joke. Was he
-downhearted? No! And so to prove he wasn't,—that his spirits were
-high and that his racial gift of humour was unimpaired, he stuck up a sign
-of sprawled lettering and it said:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Piccadilly Circus. This way to Swan and Edgar's.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Mister Kaiser, you might have known, if your mental processes hadn't been
-stuck on skew-wise, forty ways for Sunday, that you could never break
-through an army of good sports who make jokes at death and coin gibes at
-what might well drive less hardy souls to madness.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-Mighty few men outwardly conform to the rôles they actually fill in life.
-I am not speaking of drum-majors in bands or tattooed men in side-shows or
-floor-walkers in department stores. Such parties are picked for their jobs
-because, physically, they live up to the popular conception; perhaps I
-should say the popular demand. I am speaking of the run of the species. A
-successful poet is very apt to look like an unsuccessful paper-hanger and
-I have known a paper-hanger who was the spittin' image of a free
-versifier.
-</p>
-<p>
-I think, though, of two men I have met over here who were designed by
-nature and by environment to typify exactly what they are. One is Haig and
-the other is Pershing. Either would make the perfect model for a statue to
-portray the common notion of a field-marshal. General Sir Douglas Haig is
-a picture, drawn to scale, of the kind of British general that the
-novelists love to describe; in mannerism, in figure, in size, in bearing,
-in colouring and expression, he is all of that. And by the same tokens
-Pershing in every imaginable particular is the typical American
-fighting-man. Incidentally I might add that these two men are two of the
-handsomest and most splendid martial figures I have ever met. They say
-Haig is the best-dressed officer in the British army and that is saying a
-good deal, considering that the officers of the British army are the best
-dressed officers of any army.
-</p>
-<p>
-Pershing has the poise and port of a West Point cadet; has a cadet's
-waist-line and shoulder-lines, too. A man may keep a youthful face but in
-the curves of his back is where nearly always he betrays his age. Look at
-Pershing's back without knowing who he was and you would put him down as
-an athlete in his early twenties.
-</p>
-<p>
-I have taken lunch with General Sir Douglas Haig, and his staff, including
-his Presbyterian chaplain who is an inevitable member of the commander's
-official family, and I have dined with General Pershing and his staff, as
-Pershing's guest. When you break bread with a man at his table you get a
-better chance to appraise him than you would be likely to get did you
-casually meet him elsewhere. From each headquarters I brought away the
-settled conviction that I had been in the company of one of the
-staunchest, most dependable, most capable personalities to whom authority
-and power were ever entrusted. Different as they were in speech and in
-gesture, from each there radiated a certain thing which the other likewise
-possessed and expressed without knowing that he expressed it—a sense
-of a stupendous, unremitting responsibility, gladly accepted and well
-discharged; an appreciation of having in his hands a job to do, the tools
-for the doing of which are human beings, and in the doing of which, should
-he make a mistake, the error will be charged up against him in figures of
-human life.
-</p>
-<p>
-Always I shall remember one outstanding sentence which Haig uttered and
-one which Pershing uttered. Curiously enough, each was addressing himself
-to the same subject, to wit: the American soldier. Haig said:
-</p>
-<p>
-“The spirit of the American soldier as I have seen him over here since
-your country entered the war, is splendid. When he first came I was struck
-by his good humour, his unfailing cheerfulness, his modesty, and most of
-all by his eager, earnest desire to learn the business of war as speedily
-and as thoroughly as possible. Now as a British commander, I am very, very
-glad of the opportunity to fight alongside of him—so glad, that I do
-not find the words offhand, to express the depth of my confidence in the
-steadfastness and the intelligence and the courage he is every day
-displaying.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Pershing said:
-</p>
-<p>
-“When I think, as I do constantly think, of the behaviour of our men
-fighting here in a foreign land; of the disciplined cheerfulness with
-which they have faced discomforts, of the constant determination with
-which they have confronted difficulties, and of the splendid dash with
-which they have met the enemy in battle, I cannot speak what is in my mind
-because my emotions of gratitude are so great they keep me from speaking
-of these things.”
- </p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-At a French railway station any day one sees weeping women but they do not
-weep until after the trains which carry their men-folk back to the
-trenches have gone. To this rule I have never seen an exception.
-</p>
-<p>
-A soldier who has finished his leave—a <i>permissionaire</i> the
-French call him—comes to the station, returning to his duties at the
-Front. It may be he is a staff officer gorgeous in gold lace. It may be he
-is a recruit of this year's class with the fleece of adolescence still
-upon his cheeks but with the grave assurance of a veteran in his gait. Or
-it may be that he is a grizzled territorial bent forward by one of those
-enormous packs which his sort always tote about with them; and to me this
-last one of the three presents the most heart-moving spectacle of any.
-Nearly always he looks so tired and his uniform is so stained and so worn
-and so wrinkled! I mean to make no cheap gibe at the expense of a nation
-which has fine-tooth-combed her land for man, power to stand the drain of
-four years of war when I say that according to my observations the
-back-line reserves of France in 1918 are a million middle-aged men whose
-feet hurt them.
-</p>
-<p>
-Be he staff officer though, or beardless youth or fifty-year-old
-rear-guard it is certain that his women-folk will accompany him to the
-station to tell him farewell. He has had his week at home. By to-night he
-will be back again at the Front, in the mud and the filth and the cold and
-the wet. By to-morrow he may be dead. But there is never a tear shed at
-parting. He kisses his wife or his mother or his sister or all of them; he
-hugs to his breast his babies, if he has babies. Then he climbs aboard a
-car which already is crowded with others like him, and as the train draws
-away the women run down the platform alongside the train, smiling and
-blowing kisses at him and waving their hands and shouting good-byes and
-bidding him to do this or that or the other thing.
-</p>
-<p>
-And then, when the train has disappeared they drop down where they are and
-cry their hearts out. I have witnessed this spectacle a thousand times, I
-am sure, and always the sight of it renews my admiration for the women of
-what I veritably believe to be the most patient and the most steadfast
-race of beings on the face of the globe.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-In early June, I went up to where the first division of ours to be sent
-into the British lines for its seasoning under fire was bedded down in
-billets hard by the Flanders border; and there I saw a curious thing.
-There were Canadians near at hand, and Australians and New Zealanders and
-one might naturally suppose the Yankee lads would by preference fraternise
-with these soldiers from the Dominions and the Colonies who in speech, in
-mode of life and in habit of thought were really their brothers under the
-skin.
-</p>
-<p>
-Not at all. In many cases, if not in a majority of cases, that came under
-my notice I found Americans chumming with London Cockneys, trading tobacco
-for cheese; prunes for jam, cigarettes for captured souvenirs; guying the
-Londoners because they drank tea in the afternoons and being guyed because
-they themselves wanted coffee in the mornings.
-</p>
-<p>
-The phenomenon I figured out to my own satisfaction according to this
-process of deduction: First, that the American and the Cockney had
-discovered that jointly they shared the same gorgeous sense of humour,
-albeit expressed in dissimilar ways; second, that each had found out the
-other was full of sporting instincts, which made another tie between them;
-and third and perhaps most cogent reason of all, that whatever the Yankee
-might say, using his own slang to say it, sounded unutterably funny in the
-Cockney's ear, and what the Cockney said on any subject, in his dialect,
-was as good as a vaudeville show to the Yankee.
-</p>
-<p>
-Personally I do not believe it was the Anglo-Saxon strain calling to the
-Anglo-Saxon strain, because the American was as likely to be of Italian or
-Irish or Jewish or Teutonic or Slavic antecedents as he was to be of pure
-English ancestry. I am sure it was not the common use by both of the same
-language—with variations on the part of either. But I am sure that
-it was the joyous prospect of getting free and unlimited entertainment out
-of the conversations of a new pal.
-</p>
-<p>
-Anyway our soldiers are cementing us together with a cement that will bind
-the English-speaking races in a union which can never be sundered, I am
-sure of that much.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-The madness which descended upon our enemies when they started this war
-would appear to have taken a turn where it commonly manifests itself in
-acts of stark degeneracy. Every day I am hearing tales which prove the
-truth of this. If there was only one such story coming to light now and
-then we might figure the terrible thing as proof of the nastiness of an
-individual pervert manifesting itself; but where the evidence piles up in
-a constantly accumulating mass it makes out a case so complete one is
-bound to conclude that a demoniacal rottenness is running through their
-ranks, affecting officer and men alike. For the sake of the good name of
-mankind in general one strives not to accept all these tales but the bulk
-of them must be true.
-</p>
-<p>
-A young tank-officer of ours whom I knew before the war in New York, where
-he was a rising lawyer, and whom I knew to be truthful, tells me that an
-honest appearing British non-com in turn, told him that a week or two ago
-the Britishers having cleaned up a nest of enemy machine guns, sent a
-detail out to bury the dead. The squad had buried two Germans, then they
-came upon the body of one of their own men who had fallen in the fighting
-two days earlier when the Britishers made their first attack upon the
-Germans only to be forced back and then to come again with better success.
-The sergeant who stood sponsor for the narrative declared that as he bent
-over the dead Englishman to unfasten the identification tag from the
-wrist, he saw that something was fastened to the dead man's arm and that
-this something was partly hidden beneath the body. Becoming instantly
-suspicious, he warned the other men to stand back and then kneeling down
-and feeling about cautiously, he found a bomb so devised that a slight jar
-would set it off. Before they fell back, the surviving Germans had
-attached this devilish thing to a corpse with the benevolent intent of
-blowing to bits the first man among the victors who should undertake to
-move the poor clay with intent to give it decent burial.
-</p>
-<p>
-Our men have been warned against gathering up German helmets and German
-rifles in places from which the enemy has retired, because such souvenirs
-have a way of blowing up in the finders' hands by reason of the explosive
-grenades that have been attached to them and hidden beneath them with the
-cap so arranged that a tug at the wired-on connection will set off the
-charge; but this crowning atrocity shows they are making improvements in
-their system. From sawing down fruit trees, from shoveling filth in the
-drinking wells, from wantonly destroying the villages which for years have
-sheltered them, from laying waste the lands which they are being forced
-now to surrender back into the hands of their rightful proprietors, the
-ingenious Hun has progressed in his military education to where he makes
-dead men serve his purposes. Personally, I have heard of but one act to
-match this one. An American trooper entered a half-wrecked hamlet which
-the retreating Germans had just evacuated, and on going into a villager's
-house, saw a china doll lying upon a cupboard shelf, and saw that, hitched
-to the doll, was one of these touchy hand-bombs. Now, it is only
-reasonable to assume the German who planned this surprise went upon the
-assumption that the doll would be the prized possession of some French
-child and that when the family who owned the house found their way back to
-it, the child would run first of all to recover her treasured dollie and
-picking it up would be killed or mangled, thereby scoring one more
-triumph, if a small one, for Vaterland and Kaiser.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-To a dressing station behind our front lines up beyond St. Mihiel—so
-I am reliably informed—our stretcher-bearers brought two wounded
-prisoners and laid them down. One of the pair was a Prussian captain with
-a hole in his breast; the other a weedy boy-private with a shattered leg.
-There were two surgeons at work here—a Frenchman and an American.
-</p>
-<p>
-As the Frenchman bent over the captain, in the joy of service forgetting
-for the moment that the man lying before him was his enemy and filled only
-with a desire to save life and relieve human agony, the Prussian who
-seemingly had been unconscious, opened his eyes in recognition. Thereupon
-the surgeon, making ready to strip away the first-aid dressings from the
-punctured chest, spoke to his patient in French saying he trusted the
-captain did not suffer great pain. The reply Was Prussianesque. The
-wounded man cleared his throat and spat full in the Frenchman's face.
-</p>
-<p>
-I hope I am not blood-thirsty, but I am happy to be able to relate a
-satisfactory sequel. The Frenchman, who must have been a gentleman as well
-as a soldier, stood true to the creed of an honourable and merciful
-calling. He merely put up his hand and without a word wiped the spittle
-from his face which had grown white as death under the strain of enduring
-the insult. But an American stretcher-bearer who had witnessed the act,
-snatched up a rifle from a heap of captured accoutrements near the door of
-the dugout and brought the butt of it down, full force, across the
-hateful, gloating mouth of the Prussian.
-</p>
-<p>
-For contrast, mark the behaviour of the boy-soldier who also had just been
-borne in. It was the American surgeon who took the private's case in hand.
-Now this American surgeon was of pure German descent and bore a German
-name and he spoke well the tongue of his ancestors. So naturally he
-addressed the groaning lad in German.
-</p>
-<p>
-Between gasps of pain, the lad told his interrogator that he was a Saxon,
-that his age was eighteen and that he had been in service at the Front for
-nearly a year. Even in the midst of his suffering he showed pleasure at
-finding among his captors a man who knew and could use the only language
-which he himself knew. Noting this, the surgeon continued to address the
-youngster as he made ready to do to the mangled limb what was needful to
-be done.
-</p>
-<p>
-As his skilled fingers touched the wound, some sub-conscious instinct
-quickened perhaps by the fact that he had just employed the mother-speech
-of his parents set him to whistling between his teeth a song he had known
-as a child. And that song was <i>Die Wackt am Rhein</i>.
-</p>
-<p>
-Under his ministering hands the young Saxon twitched and jerked. Perhaps
-he thought the surgeon meant to gloat over him, captured and maimed for
-life as he was; perhaps it was another emotion which prompted him to cry
-out in a half-strangled shriek:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Don't whistle that song—don't!”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I am sorry,” said the American, “I did not mean to hurt your feelings. I
-thought you might like to hear it—that it might soothe you.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Like to hear it? Never!” panted the lad. “I hate it—I hate it—I
-hate it!”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Surely though you love your country and your Emperor, don't you?” pressed
-the American, anxious to fathom the psychology of the prisoner's nature.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I love my country—yes,” answered the boy, “but as to the Kaiser, to
-him I would do this—” And he drew a finger across his throat with a
-quick, sharp stroke.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-I am putting down this scrap of narrative in a room in a hotel that is two
-hundred years old, in the heart of a wonderful old Norman city and while I
-am writing it, twenty miles away, in front of Montdidier, they are giving
-my friend the kind of funeral he asked for.
-</p>
-<p>
-I call him my friend, although I never saw him until four weeks ago. He
-was a man you would want for your friend. Physically and every other way,
-he was the sort of man that Richard Harding Davis used to love to describe
-in his stories about soldiers of fortune. He seemed to have stepped right
-out of the pages of one of Davis's books—he was tall and straight
-and slender, as handsome a man as ever I looked at and a soldier in every
-inch of him. The other officers of the regiment admired him but his men,
-as I have reason to know, worshipped him—and that, in the final
-appraisals, is the test of an officer and a gentleman in any army.
-</p>
-<p>
-I met him on the day when I rode up into Picardy to attach myself bag and
-baggage—one bag and not much baggage—to a foot-regiment of our
-old regular army, then moving into the battle-lines to take over a sector
-from the French. He had a Danish name and his father, I believe, was a
-Dane; but he was born in a Western state nearly forty years ago. In the
-Spanish war he was a kid private; saw service as a non-com in the
-Philippine mess; tried civil life afterwards and couldn't endure it; went
-to Central America and took a hand in some tinpot revolution or other;
-came home again and was in business for a year or so, which was as long as
-his adventurous soul could stand a stand-still life; then moved across the
-line into the Canadian Northwest and got a job in the Royal Mounted
-Police. In 1914, when the war broke, he volunteered in a Canadian
-battalion as a private. On our entrance into the conflict he was a major
-of the Dominion Forces.
-</p>
-<p>
-He resigned this commission forthwith, hurried back to the States and
-joined up at the first recruiting office he saw after he reached New York.
-And now when I met him, he had his majority in an American regiment which
-has a long and a most honourable record behind it.
-</p>
-<p>
-During this past month I saw a good deal of him. So far as I could judge,
-he had one, and just one, bit of affectation about him—if you could
-call it that. He wore always the British trench helmet that he had worn in
-the Canadian forces and he liked to finger the gap in its brim where a bit
-of shrapnel chipped it as he climbed up Vimy Ridge, and he liked to tell
-about that day of Vimy so glorious and so tragic for the valorous whelps
-of the British lion who hail from our own side of the blue water. He had
-another small vanity too, as I now understand—a vanity which to-day
-is being gratified.
-</p>
-<p>
-Six days ago I left the regiment to spend a day and a night with a battery
-of five-inch guns just west of Montdidier. As I was starting off he hailed
-me and we made an engagement for a dinner together here in this town where
-the food is very, very good, said dinner to take place “sometime soon.” He
-was standing in the road as I rode away and when I looked back out of the
-car he waved his hand at me.
-</p>
-<p>
-The village where I stayed for that night and the following day, formed a
-hinge in the line that our forward forces had taken over. It was within
-two miles of the German trenches and within three or four miles of some of
-their heavy batteries. Through the night I slept at battalion
-headquarters, in the only house in the town which up until then had
-escaped serious damage from German gunfire.
-</p>
-<p>
-Coming back again to my regiment—as I shall call it—on the
-second day following, I learned that almost immediately after my departure
-the batteries I left in and near this village had been ordered to take up
-a prepared position in a patch of woods a mile farther in the rear and
-that my friend's battalion had gone up to hold the town and to act as a
-reserve unit there until its turn should come to relieve part of another
-infantry regiment in the trenches proper. So I knew that in all
-probability he now was domiciled in the cottage where I had slept the
-night previous. As it turned out my guess was right—that was where
-he was. Three days ago I borrowed a side-car and ran on down here where I
-could get in touch with the divisional censor and file some of the copy I
-have been grinding out lately.
-</p>
-<p>
-Yesterday afternoon in the main square I bumped into the adjutant of my
-regiment and with him, one of the French liaison officers attached to the
-regiment.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Hello,” I said, “what brings you two down here?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“We came to get some flowers for the funeral to-morrow,” the adjutant told
-me.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Whose funeral?” I asked.
-</p>
-<p>
-When they told me whose funeral, I was stunned for a moment. From them I
-learned when my friend died and how. And this, then, is the story of it:
-</p>
-<p>
-Night before last he and his battalion liaison officer, a Frenchman of
-course, and his battalion adjutant were eating supper in that same small
-red brick house which had sheltered me for a night. The Germans had been
-punishing the place at long distance; now there was a lull in the
-bombardment, but just as the three of them finished their meal, the enemy
-reopened fire. Almost at once a shell fell in the courtyard before the
-house and another demolished a stone stable in the orchard behind it. All
-three hurried down into an improvised bomb-proof shelter in the cellar.
-</p>
-<p>
-“You fellows stay here,” said the major when they had reached the foot of
-the stairs. “I left my cigars and a couple of letters from home upstairs
-in the kitchen. I'll go up and get them and be back again with you in a
-minute.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Thirty seconds later, to the accompaniment of a great rending crash, the
-building caved in. Wreckage cascaded down the cellar stairs but the floor
-rafters above their heads stood the jar and the two who were below got off
-with bruises and scratches. They made their way up through the debris. A
-six-inch shell had come through the roof, blowing down two sides of the
-kitchen, and under the shattered walls the Major was lying, helpless and
-crushed.
-</p>
-<p>
-They hauled him out. He was conscious but badly hurt, as they could tell.
-The adjutant ran to a dug-out on the other side of the village and brought
-back with him the regimental surgeon. It didn't take the surgeon long to
-make his examination.
-</p>
-<p>
-To the others he whispered that there was no hope—the Major's spine
-was broken. But because he dreaded to break the word to the victim he
-essayed a bit of excusable deceit.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Major,” he said, bending over the figure stretched out upon the floor,
-“you've got it pretty badly, but I guess we'll pull you through. Only
-you'd better let me give you a little jab of dope in your arm—you
-may begin to suffer as soon as the numbness of the shock wears off.”
- </p>
-<p>
-My friend, so they told me, looked up in the surgeon's face with a
-whimsical grin.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Doc,” he said, “your intentions are good; but there comes a time when you
-mustn't try to fool a pal. And you can't fool me—I know. I know I've
-got mine and I know I can't last much longer. I'm dead from the hips down
-already. And never mind about giving me any dope. There are several things
-I want to say and I want my head clear while I'm saying them.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He told them the names and addresses of his nearest relatives—a
-brother and a sister, and he gave directions for the disposal of his kit
-and of his belongings. He didn't have very much to leave—professional
-soldiers rarely do have very much to leave.
-</p>
-<p>
-After a bit he said: “I've only one regret. I'm passing out with the
-uniform of an American soldier on my back and that's the way I always
-hoped 'twould be with me, but I'm sorry I didn't get mine as I went over
-the top with these boys of ours behind me. Still, a man can't have
-everything—can he?—and I've had my share of the good things of
-this world.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He began to sink and once they thought he was gone; but he opened his eyes
-and spoke again:
-</p>
-<p>
-“Boys,” he said, “take a tip from me who knows: this thing of dying is
-nothing to worry about. There's no pain and there's no fear. Why, dying is
-the easiest thing I've ever done in all my life. You'll find that out for
-yourselves when your time comes. So cheer up and don't look so glum
-because I just happen to be the one that's leaving first.”
- </p>
-<p>
-The end came within five minutes after this. Just before he passed, the
-liaison officer who was kneeling on the floor holding one of the dying
-man's hands between his two hands, felt a pressure from the cold fingers
-that he clasped and saw a flicker of desire in the eyes that were
-beginning to glaze over with a film. He bent his head close down and in
-the ghost of a ghost of a whisper, the farewell message of his friend and
-mine came to him between gasps.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Listen,” the Major whispered, “Old Blank,”—naming the regimental
-chaplain—“has pulled off a lot of slouchy funerals in this outfit.
-Tell him, for me, to give me a good swell one, won't you?”
- </p>
-<p>
-He went then, with the smile of his little conceit still upon his lips.
-</p>
-<p>
-That was why the two men whom I met here yesterday rode in to get flowers
-and wreaths. They told me the Colonel was going to have the regimental
-band out for the services to-day too, and that a brigadier-general and a
-major-general of our army would be present with their staffs and that a
-French general would be present with his staff. So I judge they are giving
-my friend what he wanted—a good swell one.
-</p>
-<p>
-The France to which tourists will come after the war will not be the
-France which peacetime visitors knew. I am not speaking so much of the
-ruined cities and the razed towns, each a mute witness now to thoroughness
-as exemplified according to the orthodox tenets of Kul-tur. For the most
-part these never can be restored to their former semblances—Hunnish
-efficiency did its damned work too well for the evil badness of it ever to
-be undone. Indeed I was told no longer ago than last week, when I went
-through Arras, dodging for shelter from ruin-heap to ruin-heap between
-gusts of shelling from the German batteries, that it is the intention of
-the French government to leave untouched and untidied certain areas of
-wanton devastation, so future generations of men looking upon these hell's
-quarter-sections, will have before their eyes fit samples of the finished
-handicraft of the Hun. I am sure this must be true of Arras because in the
-vicinity of the cathedral—I mean the place where the cathedral was
-once—signs are stuck up in rubble-piles or fastened to upstanding
-bits of splintered walls forbidding visitors to remove souvenirs or to
-alter the present appearance of things in any way whatsoever. I sincerely
-trust the French do carry out this purpose. Then in the years to come,
-when Americans come here and behold this spot, once one of the most
-beautiful in all Europe and now one of the foulest and most hideous, they
-may be cured of any lingering inclination to trust a people in whose veins
-there may linger a single trace of the taints of Kaiserism and militarism.
-However, I dare say that by then our present enemies will have been purged
-clean of the blight that now is in their blood.
-</p>
-<p>
-When I say that the France of the future will never be the France which
-once was a shrine for lovers of beauty to worship at—which was all
-one great altar dedicated to loveliness—I am thinking particularly
-of the rural districts and not of the communities. I base my belief upon
-the very reasonable supposition that after the armies are withdrawn or
-disbanded—or, as in the case of our foes, killed off or captured or
-driven back,—the peasants in their task of making the devastated
-regions fit once more for human habitation, will turn to the material most
-plentifully at hand and that of which the quickest use can be made. This
-means then, that instead of rebuilding with masonry and cement and plaster
-after the ancient modes, they will employ the salvage of military
-constructions. And by that same sign it means that ugly characterless
-wooden buildings with roofs of corrugated iron, and all slab-sided and
-angular and hopelessly plain, will replace the quaint gabled houses that
-are gone—and gone forever; and that where the picturesque stone
-fences ran zig-zagging across the faces of the meadows, and likewise where
-the centuries-old, plastered walls rose about byre and midden and
-stable-yard, will instead be stretched lines of barbed wire, nailed to
-wooden posts.
-</p>
-<p>
-The stuff will be there—in incredible quantities—and it will
-be cheap and it will be available for immediate use, once the forces of
-the Allies have scattered. It is only natural to assume therefore that the
-thrifty country-folk and the citizens of the villages will take it over.
-For a fact in certain instances they are already doing so. Just the other
-day, up near the Flanders border in the British-held territory, I saw a
-half grown boy wriggling through a maze of rusted wire along an abandoned
-defence line, like Brer Rabbit through the historic brier-patch; and when
-I drew nearer, curious to know what sort of game he played all alone here
-in a land where every game except the great game of war is out of fashion,
-I saw that he was tearing down the strands of the wire, and through the
-interpreter he told me he was going to enclose his mother's garden with
-the stuff. Think of a French garden fenced in after the style of a
-Nebraska ranch yard. Also I have taken note that the peasants are removing
-the plank shorings from the sides of old, disused trenches and with the
-boards thus secured are knocking up barns and chicken-sheds and even
-makeshift dwellings.
-</p>
-<p>
-Assuredly it will never be the old France, physically. But spiritually,
-the new France, wearing the scars of her sacrifice as the Redeemer of
-Mankind wore the nail-marks of His crucifixion, will be a vision of glory
-before the eyes of men forevermore. I like this simile as I set it down in
-my note-book. And I mean no irreverence as I liken the barbed wire to the
-Crown of Thoms and think of two cross-pieces of ugly wood out of a barrack
-or a rest-billet as being erected into the shape of The Cross.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-When the military policemen first came upon him in the Gare du Nord he
-made a picture worth looking at. For he stood above six-feet-two in his
-soleless and broken brogans, and he was as black as a coal-hole at twelve
-o'clock at night during a total eclipse of the moon and he was as broad
-across between the shoulders as the back of a hack. He wore a khaki shirt,
-a pair of ragged, blue overalls and an ancient campaign hat. He didn't
-appear to be going anywhere in particular; he was just standing there.
-</p>
-<p>
-Now the M. P.9 have a little scheme for trapping deserters and
-malingerers. They edge close up behind a suspect and then one of them
-snaps out “Shun!” in the tones of a drill-officer. If the fellow really is
-a truant from service, force of habit and the shock of surprise together
-make him come to attention and then he's a gone gosling, marching off the
-calaboose with steel jewelry on both his wrists.
-</p>
-<p>
-But when this pair slipped nearer and nearer until they could touch the
-big darky, and one of them barked the command right in his ear, he merely
-turned his head and without straightening his languid form inquired
-politely;
-</p>
-<p>
-“Speakin' to me, Boss?”
- </p>
-<p>
-Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, one of them asked for his papers.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Whut kinder papers?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Your military papers—your pass—something to identify you by.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“W'y, Boss,” he asked, “does you need papers to go round wid yere in Sant
-Nazare?” “This ain't St. Nazare,” they told him. “This is Paris.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Paris? My Lawd! Den dat 'splains it.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Explains what?” They were getting cross with him.
-</p>
-<p>
-“'Splains w'y I couldn't fine all dem niggers dey tole me wuz in Sant
-Nazare. Here I been in Paris all dis time—ever since early dis
-maw-nin'—an' I didn't know it. No wonner I couldn't locate dem big
-wharf-boats an' dem niggers.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Never mind that now—I just asked you where're your papers?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Papers? Me? Huh, Boss, I ain't got no more papers 'n a ha'nt. Effen you
-needs papers to git about on, you gen'elmen better tek me an' lock me up
-right now, 'ka'se I tells you, p'intedly, I ain't got nary paper to my
-name.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“That's precisely what we aim to do. Come on, you.”
- </p>
-<p>
-They took him to number ten Rue St. Anne where our provost-marshal in
-Paris has his headquarters and there the tale came out. I got it first
-hand from the captain of the Intelligence Department who examined him and
-I know I got it straight, because the captain was a monologist on the Big
-Time before he signed up for the war, and he has both the knack of
-narrative and the gift of dialects. Then later I myself saw the central
-figure in the comedy and interviewed him. In a way of speaking, I think
-his adventure was the most remarkable of any I have heard of on this side
-of the ocean—and I have heard my share. How a big lubberly American
-negro with absolutely nothing on his person to vouch for him or his
-purposes, could travel half way across a country where no one else may
-stir a mile without a pocket full of passes and <i>vises</i> and
-credentials; and how, lacking any knowledge of the language, he managed to
-do what he did do—but I am anticipating.
-</p>
-<p>
-It was at ten Rue St. Anne that my friend the ex-vaudevillian took him in
-hand with the intention of conferring the third degree. For quite a spell
-the interrogator couldn't make up his mind whether he dealt with the most
-guileless human being on French soil or with a shrewd black fugitive
-hiding his real self behind a mask of innocence. After he had made sure
-the prisoner was what he seemed to be, the intelligence officer kept on at
-him for the fun of the thing.
-</p>
-<p>
-Batting his eyes as the questions pelted at him, the giant made
-straightforward answers. His name was Watterson Towers; his age was
-summers 'round twenty-fo' or twenty-five, he didn't perzactly 'member
-w'ich; he was born and fotched up in Bowlin' Green, Kintucky, and at the
-time of his coming to France he resided at number thirty-fo', East
-Pittsburgh.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Number thirty-four what?” asked the inquisitor.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Naw suh, not no thirty-fo' nothin'—jes' plain thirty-fo'.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“But what street is it on?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“'Tain't on no strett, Boss.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“What do you mean—no street?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Boss, wuz you ever in East Pittsburgh? Well suh, den does you 'member dat
-string of little houses dat stands in a row right 'longside de railroad
-tracks ez you comes into town f'um de fur side? 'Taint no street, it's
-jes' only houses. Well suh, I lives in de thirty-fo'th one.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I see. How did you get here?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Me? I rid, mostly.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Rode on what?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Rid part de time on a ship an' part de time on de steam-cyars but fust
-an' last I done a mighty heap of walkin', also.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Further questioning elicited from Watterson Towers these salient facts: He
-had taken a job which carried him from East Pittsburgh to New York and
-left him stranded there. He had heard about the draft. He knew that sooner
-or later the draft would catch him and send him off to France where he
-would be expected to fight Germans, so he decided that before this could
-happen, he would visit France on his own hook, and as a civilian
-bystander, a private observer, so to speak, would view some of the
-operation of war at first-hand, with a view to deciding whether he cared
-enough for it as a sport, to take a hand in it voluntarily.
-</p>
-<p>
-He had smuggled himself aboard a transport—Heaven alone knew how!—and
-fortified with a bag of ginger-snaps he had remained hidden away in a
-cargo-hold until the ship sailed. Two days out from land a new and very
-painful sickness overcame the stowaway and he made his way up on deck for
-air. There he had been caught and had been sent to the galley to work his
-passage across. When he had progressed thus far, his cross-examiner broke
-in. “What was the name of the ship?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Boss, I plum' disremembers, but it muster been de bigges' ship dey is.
-W'y suh, dey wuz 'most six-hund'ed folks on dat ship, an' I had to wash up
-after ever' las' one of 'em. W'ite folks suttinly teks a lot of dishes
-w'en dey eats—I'll tell de world dat.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Well, where did the ship land?—do you know that much?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Boss, hit wuz some place wid a outlandish name an' dat's all I kin tell
-you. I never wuz no hand fur 'memberin' reg'lar names let alone dese yere
-jabber kind of words lak dese yere French folks talks wid.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“What happened when you came ashore?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“W'y, suh, dey let me off de ship an' a w'ite man on de wharf-boat he
-tells me I'se landed right spang in France an' he axes me does I want a
-job of wuk an' I tells him 'Naw suh, not yit.' I tells him I'se aimin' to
-travel round an' see de country an' de war 'fore I settles down to
-anythin'. Den 'nother w'ite man dat's standin' dere he tells me dey's a
-lot of my colour in a place called Sant Nazare an' I 'cides I'll go dere
-an' 'sociate aw'ile wid dem niggers. So I changed my money an' I—”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I thought you said you didn't have any money when you started?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I didn't, Boss, but de w'ite folks on de ship dey taken up a c'lection
-fur me, account of me washin' all dem dishes so nice an' clean. It come to
-twenty dollahs. So I changes it into dese yere francs. De man give me
-twenty francs fur my twenty dollahs—didn't charge me no interes'
-a-tall, but jes' traded even; an' den I sets out to find dis yere Sant
-Nazare place. Dat wuz two days ago an' I been mov-in' stiddy ever sense.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“How did you know what train to take?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“I didn't. I jes' went to de depot an' I dim' abo'd de fus' train I sees
-dat look lak she might be fixin' to go sommers. An' after 'w'ile one of
-dese Frenchies come 'round to me whar I wuz settin' sin' he jabber
-somethin' at me an' I tell him plain ez I kin, whar I wants to go an' is
-dis de right train? An' den he jabber some mo' an' I keep on tellin' him
-an' after 'w'ile he jes th'ow up both hands, lak dis, an' go on off an'
-leave me be in peace. W'ich dat very same thing happen to me ever' time I
-git on a train an' I done been on three or fo' 'fore I gits to dis place,
-dis mawnin'.
-</p>
-<p>
-“My way wuz to stay by de train t'well she stop an' don't start no mo' an!
-den I'd git off an' walk round lookin' for de big wharf-boats where de
-w'ite man tole me dem niggers would be wukkin', but not no place I went
-did I see ary wharf-boats, so I jes' kept a-movin' t'well I got yere, lak
-I'm tellin' it to you, an' I says to myself den, 'Dis sutt'inly must be
-Sant Nazare—it's shore big enough to be, anyway.' But I walked 'bout
-ten miles an' I couldn't find no wharf-boats an' no niggers neither,
-scusin' some Frenchified niggers all dressed up lak Misty Shriners, an'
-dey couldn't talk our way of talkin'. I seen plenty of our soldiers but I
-wuz'n' aimin' to be pesterin 'round wid no soldiers 'till I'd done seen de
-war. So finally I sees a big place dat look lak it mout be 'nother depot,
-an' I went on in there an' wuz fixn' to tek de next train out, w'en dem
-two soldier-men of your'n wid de bands on dere arms dey come up to me an'
-dey run me in. An' yere I is.”
- </p>
-<p>
-It was explained to Watterson Towers that, to avoid complications he had
-better enter the army forthwith and very promptly he agreed. Travel,
-seemingly, was beginning to pall on him. Then to spin out his gorgeous
-humour of the interview, the intelligence officer put one more question
-and when he told me the answer I agreed with him the reward had been worth
-the effort.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Now, Watterson,” he said, “what kind of a regiment would you prefer to
-join—an all-white regiment or an all-black regiment or a mixed
-regiment, part black and part white? You can 'take your choice—so
-speak up.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Boss,” said Watterson, “it don't make no dif'ence a-tall to me w'ich kind
-of a regiment 'tis—jes' so it's got a band!”
- </p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-One's war-time experiences is crowded with constant surprises. For five
-months, off and on, I have been living on the fourth floor of one of the
-largest and most noted of Paris hotels, and not until to-day did I find
-out that two floors of the building have all along been in possession of
-the government for hospital purposes. The patients, mainly wounded men who
-have been invalided back from the trenches are brought by night and
-carried in through a rear entrance, which opens on a barred and guarded
-alley-way. The guests never see them and they never come in contact with
-the guests.
-</p>
-<p>
-Under my feet all these weeks hundreds of disabled fighting-men have been
-getting better or getting worse, recovering or dying, and I would never
-have guessed their presence had it not been for the chance remark of a
-government official who is connected with one of the bureaus having charge
-of the <i>blessés</i>.
-</p>
-<p>
-I learn now that the same thing is true of several other prominent hotels,
-but so carefully is the business carried on and so skillfully do the
-authorities hide their secret that I am sure not one guest in a thousand
-ever stumbles upon the fact.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-When I was writing a tale about one visit of several which I paid to the
-old Luneville sectors where our buddies, in the spring of this year, first
-left their tooth-marks on the Heinies, I forgot to tell of an incident
-that occurred on the last day of our stay up there as the guests of a
-regiment of the Rainbows.
-</p>
-<p>
-Martin Green and I had just returned from a four-hour tramp through some
-of our trenches. It was long after the hour for the mid-day meal when we
-got back, weary and mud-coated, to regimental headquarters in a
-knocked-about village. But the colonel's cook obligingly dished up some
-provender for us and for the young intelligence officer who had been our
-guide that day. Just as we were finishing the last round of flap-jacks
-with molasses, the Germans began shelling the battered town so we
-adjourned to the nearest dug-out, which was the next door cellar, that had
-been thickened as to its roof with sand-bags and loose earth and strips of
-railroad iron. Down there we came upon several others who had taken
-shelter, including one of the majors.
-</p>
-<p>
-“When were you fellows figuring on starting back to your own billet?” he
-inquired. “Sometime this afternoon, wasn't it?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Yes,” said Green, “we had counted on leaving here about three o'clock.
-But I guess we'll be delayed, if the Germans keep up their strafing.
-Neither of us fancies trying to make a break out of here while the
-bombardment is going on, and I don't suppose our chauffeur would be so
-very enthusiastic over the prospect, either. I only hope the Germans let
-up on the fireworks display before dark. It's forty-odd miles to where
-we're going and the thought of riding that distance after nightfall over
-these torn-up roads with no lights burning on our car and the road full of
-supply trains coming up to the front, does not strike me as a particularly
-alluring prospect.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Don't worry,” said the Major with a grin which proved he was holding back
-something. “You can get away from here in—well, let's see—.”
- He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “In just one hour and
-three-quarters, or to be exact, in one hour and forty-six minutes from
-now, you can be on your way. It's now 2:15. At precisely one minute past
-four you can climb into your car and beat it from here and if you hurry
-you'll be home in ample time for dinner.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“You talk as though you were in the confidence of these Germans,” quoth
-Green.
-</p>
-<p>
-“In a way of speaking, I am,” said the Major. “I've been here for eight
-days now, and every day since I arrived, promptly at 2 p. M. those
-batteries over yonder open up on this place and all hands go underground.
-The shelling continues—in the ratio of one shell every two minutes—until
-four o'clock sharp. Then it stops, and until two o'clock the next day,
-things around here are nice and quiet and healthy. So don't get chesty and
-think this show was put on especially on your account, because it wasn't:
-it's in accordance with the regular programme. Therefore, judging to-day's
-matinee by past performances, I would say that at one minute past four you
-chaps can be on your way with absolutely nothing to worry about except the
-chances of a puncture.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Funny birds—these Germans,” exclaimed one of us, still half in
-doubt as to whether the Major joked.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Funny birds is right,” he said, “and then some. We've got it doped out
-after this fashion: The officer in command of the German battery just over
-the hill from where you were to-day probably has instructions to shoot so
-many rounds a day into us. So in order to simplify the matter he, being a
-true German, starts at two and quits at four, when he has used up his
-supply of ammunition for the day. Now that we're wise to his routine we
-don't take any chances, but withdraw ourselves from society during the two
-hours of the day when he is enjoying his customary afternoon hate. Old
-George J. Methodical we call him. You fellows still don't quite believe
-me, eh? Well, wait and see whether I'm right.”
- </p>
-<p>
-We waited and we saw, and he was right.
-</p>
-<p>
-Somewhere over our heads a charge of shrapnel or of high explosive
-exploded every two minutes until precisely four o'clock. Sharp on the hour
-the shells quit falling and before the dust had settled after the farewell
-blast we were gathering up our dunnage for the departure. As we sped out
-of the huddle of shattered cottages and struck the open road there was a
-half-mile stretch ahead of us and while we traversed it we were within
-easy range and plain view of the Germans. But no one took a wing shot at
-us as we whizzed across the open space.
-</p>
-<p>
-After we slid down over the crest into the protection of the wooded valley
-below, I remembered an old story—the story of the peddler who
-invaded a ten-floor office building in New York and made his way to the
-top floor before one of the hall attendants found him. The attendant
-kicked the peddler down one flight of stairs to the ninth floor and there
-another man fell upon him and kicked him down another flight to the eighth
-floor where a third man took him in hand and kicked him a flight and so he
-progressed until he had been kicked down ten flights by ten different men
-and had landed upon the sidewalk a bruised and battered wreck, with the
-fragments of his wares scattered about him. He sat up on the pavement then
-and in tones of deep admiration remarked: “Mein Gott, vot a berfect
-system!”
- </p>
-<p>
-In the original version of the tale the peddler was Yiddish. But I'm
-certain now that he was German and that he went back to the Vaterland
-after the war broke out and became the commander of a battery of five-inch
-guns on the old Luneville front.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-On the day before Decoration Day of this year of 1917 I was in a sea-port
-town on the northeastern coast of France which our people had taken over
-as a supply base. The general in command of our local forces said to me as
-we sat in his headquarters at dinner that evening; “I wish you'd get up
-early in the morning and go for a little ride with me out to the cemetery.
-You'll be going back there later in the day, of course, for the services
-but I want you to see something that you probably won't be able to see
-after nine or ten o'clock.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“What is it?” I asked.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Never mind now,” he answered. “To tell you in advance doesn't suit my
-purposes. But will you be ready to go with me in my car at seven o'clock?”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Yes, sir. I will.”
- </p>
-<p>
-I should say? it was about half-past seven when we rode in at the gates of
-the cemetery and made for the section which, by consent of the French, had
-been set apart as a burial place for our people. For considerably more
-than a year now, dating from the time I write this down, a good many
-thousands of Americans have been stationed in or near this port, and many,
-many times that number have passed through it. So quite naturally, though
-it is hundreds of miles from any of the past or present battle fronts, we
-have had numerous deaths there from accident or from disease or from other
-causes.
-</p>
-<p>
-We rounded a turn in the winding road and there before us stretched the
-graves of our dead boys, soldiers and sailors, marines and members of
-labor battalions; whites and blacks and yellow men, Jews and Gentiles,
-Catholics, Protestants and Mohammedans—for there were four followers
-of the faith of Islam taking their last sleep here in this consecrated
-ground—row upon row of them, each marked, except in the case of the
-Mohammedans, by a plain white cross bearing in black letters the name, the
-age, the rank and the date of death of him who slept there at the foot of
-the cross.
-</p>
-<p>
-Just beyond the topmost line of crosses stood the temporary wooden
-platform dressed with bunting and flags, where an American admiral and an
-American brigadier, a group of French officers headed by a major-general,
-a distinguished French civic official, and three chaplains representing
-three creeds were to unite at noon in an hour of devotion and tribute to
-the memories of these three-hundred-and-odd men of ours who had made the
-greatest of all human sacrifices.
-</p>
-<p>
-But it was not the sight of the rows of graves and the lines of crosses
-nor the peculiar devices uprearing slantwise at head and foot of the
-graves of the four Musselmans nor yet the brave play of tri-coloured
-bunting upon the sides and front of the platform yonder which caught my
-attention. For at that hour the whole place was alive with the shapes of
-French people—mostly of women in black but with a fair sprinkling of
-shapes of old men and of children among them. All these figures were busy
-at a certain task—and that task was the decorating of the graves of
-Americans.
-</p>
-<p>
-As we left the car to walk through the plot I found myself taking off my
-cap and I kept it off all the while I was there. For even before I had
-been told the full story of what went on there I knew I stood in the
-presence of a most high and holy thing and so I went bare-headed as I
-would in any sanctuary.
-</p>
-<p>
-We walked all through this God's acre of ours, the general and I. Some of
-the women who laboured therein were old and bent, some were young but all
-of them wore black gowns. Some plainly had been recruited from the
-well-to-do and the wealthy elements of the resident population; more
-though, were poor folk and many evidently were peasants who, one guessed,
-lived in villages or on farms near to the city. Here would be a grave that
-was heaped high with those designs of stiff, bright-hued immortelles which
-the French put upon the graves of their own dead. Here would be a grave
-that was marked with wreaths of simple field flowers or with the great
-lovely white and pink roses which grow so luxuriantly on this coast. Here
-would be merely great sheaves of loose blossoms; there a grave upon which
-the flowers had been scattered broadcast, until the whole mound was
-covered with the fragrant dewy offerings; and there, again, I saw where
-fingers patently unaccustomed to such employment had fashioned the
-long-stemmed roses into wreaths and crosses and even into forms of
-shields.
-</p>
-<p>
-Grass grew rich and lush upon all the graves. White sea-shells marked the
-sides of them and edged the narrow gravelled walks. We came to where there
-were two newly made graves; their occupants had been buried there only a
-day or so before as one might tell by the marks in the trodden turf, but a
-carpeting of sods cut from a lawn somewhere had been so skillfully pieced
-together upon the mounds that the raw clods of clay beneath were quite
-covered up and hidden from sight, so that only the seams in the green
-coverlids distinguished these two graves from graves which were older than
-they by weeks or months.
-</p>
-<p>
-Alongside every grave, nearly, knelt a woman alone, or else a woman with
-children aiding her as she disposed her showing of flowers and wreaths to
-the best advantage. The old men were putting the paths in order, raking
-the gravel down smoothly and straightening the borderings of shells. There
-were no soldiers among the men; all were civilians, and for the most part
-humble-appearing civilians, clad in shabby garments. But I marked two old
-gentlemen wearing the great black neckerchiefs and the flowing broadcloth
-coats of ceremonial days, who seemed as deeply intent as any in what to
-them must have been an unusual labour. Coming to each individual worker or
-each group of workers the general would halt and formally salute in answer
-to the gently murmured greetings which constantly marked our passage
-through the burying-ground. When we had made the rounds we sat down upon
-the edge of the flag-dressed platform and he proceeded to explain what I
-already had begun to reason out for myself. Only, of course I did not
-know, until he told me, how it all had started.
-</p>
-<p>
-“It has been a good many months now,” he said, “since we dug the first
-grave here. But on the day of the funeral a delegation of the most
-influential residents came to me to say the people of the town desired to
-adopt our dead. I asked just what exactly was meant by this and then the
-spokesman explained.
-</p>
-<p>
-“'General,' he said to me, 'there is scarcely a family in this place that
-has not given one or more of its members to die for France. In most cases
-these dead of ours sleep on battlefields far away from us, perhaps in
-unmarked, unknown graves. This is true of all the parts of our country but
-particularly is it true of this town, which is so remote from the scenes
-of actual fighting. So in the case of this brave American who is to-day to
-be buried here among us, we ask that a French family be permitted formally
-to undertake the care of his grave, exactly as though it were the grave of
-their own flesh-and-blood who fell as this American has fallen, for France
-and for freedom. In the case of each American who may hereafter be buried
-here we crave the same privilege. We promise you that for so long as these
-Americans shall rest here in our land, their graves will be as our graves
-and will be tended as we would tend the graves of our own sons.
-</p>
-<p>
-“'We desire that the name of each family thus adopting a grave may be
-registered, so that should the adults die, the children of the next
-generation as a sacred charge, may carry on the obligation which is now to
-be laid upon their parents and which is to be transmitted down as a legacy
-to all who bear their name. We would make sure that no matter how long
-your fallen braves rest in the soil of France, their graves will not be
-neglected or forgotten.
-</p>
-<p>
-'"We wish to do this thing for more reasons than one: We wish to do it
-because thereby we may express in our own poor way the gratitude we feel
-for America. We wish to do it because of the thought that some stricken
-mother across the seas in America will perhaps feel a measure of
-consolation in knowing that the grave of her boy will always be made
-beautiful by the hands of a Frenchwoman whose home, also, has been
-desolated. And finally we wish to do it because we know it will bring
-peace to the hearts of our French women to feel they have a right to put
-French flowers upon the graves of your dead since they can never hope,
-most of them, to be able to perform that same office for their heroic
-dead.'”
- </p>
-<p>
-The general stopped and cleared his voice which had grown a bit husky.
-Then he resumed:
-</p>
-<p>
-“So that was how the thing came about, and that explains what you see here
-now. You see, the French have no day which exactly corresponds in its
-spiritual significance to our Decoration Day and our Memorial Day. All
-Souls' Day, which is religious, rather than patriotic in its purport, is
-their nearest approach to it. But weeks ago, before the services
-contemplated for to-day were even announced, the word somehow spread among
-the townspeople. To my own knowledge some of these poor women have been
-denying themselves the actual necessities of life in order to be able to
-make as fine a showing for the graves which they have adopted as any of
-the wealthier sponsors could make.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Don't think, though, that these graves are not well kept at all times.
-Any day, at any hour, you can come here and you will find anywhere from
-ten to fifty women down on their knees smoothing the turf and freshening
-the flowers which they constantly keep upon the graves. But I knew that at
-daylight this morning all or nearly all of them would be here doing their
-work before the crowds began to arrive for the services, and I wanted you
-to see them at it, in the hope that you might write something about the
-sight for our people at home to read. If it helps them better to
-understand what is in the hearts of the French you and I may both count
-our time as having been well spent.”
- </p>
-<p>
-He stood up looking across the cemetery, all bathed and burnished as it
-was in the soft rich sunshine.
-</p>
-<p>
-“God,” he said under his breath, “how I am learning to love these people!”
- </p>
-<p>
-So I have here set down the tale and to it I have to add a sequel.
-Decoration Day was months ago and now I learn that the custom which
-originated in this coast town is spreading through the country; that in
-many villages and towns where Americans are buried, French women whose
-sons or husbands or fathers or brothers have been killed, are taking over
-the care of the graves of the Americans, bestowing upon them the same
-loving offices which they would visit, if they could, upon the graves of
-their own men-folk.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-It was one of those days which will live always in my memory—my feet
-wouldn't let me forget it even if my brain wanted to—when I had to
-walk to keep up. The available forces offered by Pershing to the French
-and British at the time of the great spring push of the Germans were
-moving up across Picardy. I, as one of the correspondents assigned each to
-a separate regiment, had set out at dawn to foot it for fifteen miles
-across country at the tail of the headquarters company. This happened to
-be a day, of which there were several, when neither a side-car, a
-riding-horse, or a seat in an ambulance or a baggage-wagon was available,
-and when the colonel's automobile was so crowded with the colonel and his
-driver and his adjutant and his French liaison officer and all their
-baggage, there was no room in it for me. That painful period of my martial
-adventures has elsewhere in these writings been described at greater or
-less length.
-</p>
-<p>
-I was hoofing it over the flinty highway, trying to favour my blisters,
-when I heard a hail behind me. I turned around and there was an angel from
-Heaven, temporarily disguised as a Y. M. C. A. worker, sitting at the
-wheel of a big auto-truck with the sign of the red triangle on its sides.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Could you use a little ride?” he inquired, grinning through the dust
-clouds as he drew up alongside and halted.
-</p>
-<p>
-Could I use a little ride! For fear he might change his mind or something,
-I boarded him over a front wheel before I began expressing my eternal
-gratitude.
-</p>
-<p>
-This ceremony being over, he told me who he was, and I told him who I was,
-and after that we became friends for life. He was a minister from a city
-in southern California but he didn't look it now, what with a four-days'
-growth of stubbly red whiskers on his weatherbeaten chops and grease spots
-on his service uniform. He had given up a good salary and he had left
-behind him a wife and three children—I am sure about the wife and
-I'm pretty sure there were three children, or two anyhow—to come
-over here and at the age of forty-four or thereabouts to run a
-perambulating canteen for the boys. There are a lot more like him in
-France, serving with the “Y” or the K. of C.'s or the Salvation Army or
-the Red Cross and as a rule they assay about nineteen-hundred and
-ninety-nine pounds of true gold to the ton.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Willing to earn your passage, ain't you?” he inquired when the
-introductions were concluded. “Well then, climb into the back of my bus
-and stand by to get busy, heaving out the cargo.”
- </p>
-<p>
-I looked then and saw his truck was loaded to the gunwales with boxes of
-California oranges.
-</p>
-<p>
-“What the-?” I began, in surprise.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Go on and say it,” he urged. “Don't hang back just because I'm a parson
-by trade. Trailing around with this man's army, I'm used to hearing cuss
-words. Quite a jag of freight, isn't it? Some good fellow out in my state
-shipped a train-load of oranges across with the request that they be
-distributed among the boys, free gratis for nothing, and it's my present
-job to catch up with this division and give part of the stuff away. I lit
-out from Paris before daylight this morning and here I am. But I can't
-steer this wagon and pass out the truck at the same time so if you'll go
-aft and do the Walter Johnson, I'll play Bobby Waltour here at this end
-and between us we can spread the light and keep right on moving at the
-same time.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Before we ran out of oranges, which was about three o'clock in the
-afternoon just as we rolled into the village where the headquarters
-company and the colonel and his staff—and incidentally I—were
-to be billeted for the night, I had a sore arm to keep company with my
-sore feet. All day this had been our procedure: As we ranged up behind a
-column of marching troops my new pal, the red-haired dominie, would yell
-out “Who wants a nice, juicy orange, fellows?” and then as we rolled on by
-I would fling out the fruit, trying to make sure that every man got one
-orange and that no man got more than one.
-</p>
-<p>
-I threw oranges to men afoot, to men on wagons and on guns, to men and
-officers on horseback and to men perched upon ambulances and wagons. My
-throwing was faulty but the catching approximated perfection. An arm would
-fly up and the flying orange would find a home in the deftly cupped palm
-of the band at the far end of the arm. The news travelled ahead of us,
-somehow, and whole companies would be lined up as we arrived, to get their
-share.
-</p>
-<p>
-A few minutes before the finish of the trip came, we caught up with a
-couple of French battalions. Neither of us remembered the French word for
-orange, but that made no difference. His whoop of announcement and my
-first fling in the direction of a trudging Poilu, were as signals to all
-the rest and up went their paws. Their intentions were good, but I don't
-think I ever in all my life witnessed such a display of miscellaneous
-muffing, and I used to see some pretty raw fielding back at Paducah in the
-days of the old Kitty League. As the scorers would say, there was an error
-for nearly every chance. Among the Americans not one orange in ten had
-been dropped; among the Frenchmen not one in ten was safely held.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Get the answer, don't you?” inquired the preacher-driver as we left the
-trudging Frenchmen behind and hurried ahead to connect with a khaki-clad
-outfit just defiling out of a crossway into the main road a quarter of a
-mile ahead of us.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Sure,” I answered, “the Yanks make traps of their paws but the Frenchmen
-make baskets of theirs. The orange stays in the trap but it rolls out of a
-butter-fingered basket.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“Yes,” he said, “but the real cause goes deeper down than that. Baseball—that's
-the answer. Probably every American in France played baseball when he was
-a kid, or else he still plays it. No Frenchman ever knew anything about
-baseball until we came over here last year and introduced it into the
-country. The average Frenchman looks on a sporting event as a spectacle,
-but the average American, at some time or other in his life, has been an
-active participant in his national sport and the lessons we learn as
-children we never entirely forget even though lack of practice may make us
-rusty.”
- </p>
-<p>
-Which, of course, was quite true. Likewise, I think it is the underlying
-reason for the fact that our boys are the best hand-grenade tossers among
-the Allies.'
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-We certainly are creatures of habit. Because somebody, a century or so
-behind us, speaking with that air of authority which usually accompanies
-the voicing of a perfectly wrong premise, stated that all Irishmen were
-natural wits and that no Englishman, could see a joke, the world accepted
-the assertion as a verity. Never was a greater libel perpetrated upon
-either race. It has been my observation that the Irish at heart are a
-melancholy breed.
-</p>
-<p>
-Certain it is that no people have produced more first-rate humourists and
-more first-rate comedians than the English. Witness the British output of
-humour in this war; witness Bairnsfather and those satirical verses on war
-topics that have been running in <i>Punch</i> lately. I'm mostly Celt
-myself—North of Scotland and South of Ireland, with some Welsh and a
-little English mixed up in my strain—and I feel myself qualified to
-speak on these matters.
-</p>
-<p>
-Another common delusion among outsiders and particularly among Americans
-is that Englishmen are stolid unimaginative creatures who fail to show
-their feelings in moments of stress because they haven't any great flow of
-feelings to show. Now, as a general proposition, I think it may be figured
-that a Frenchman on becoming sentimental will give free vent to the
-thoughts that are in his heart; that an American will try to hide his
-emotions under a mask of levity and that an Englishman, expressing after a
-somewhat different pattern the racial embarrassment which he shares with
-the American, will seek to appear outwardly indifferent, incidentally
-becoming more or less inarticulate. The Frenchman takes no shame to
-himself that he weeps or sings in public; the Yankee is apt to laugh very
-loudly; the Englishman will be mute and will exhibit slight confusion
-which by some might be mistaken for mental awkwardness. But there are
-exceptions to all rules. In so far as the rule pertains to the Britisher,
-I am thinking of two exceptions. To one of these instances I was an
-eye-witness; the other incident was told to me by a man who had been
-present when it occurred. He said he was passing through Charing Cross
-station one night when he saw two Canadian subalterns emerging from one of
-the refreshment booths. Both of them had been wounded. One had his right
-arm in a sling and limped as he walked. The other was that most pitiable
-spectacle which this war can offer—a young man blinded. Across his
-eyes was drawn a white cloth band and he moved with the uncertain fumbling
-gait of one upon whom this affliction has newly come. With his uninjured
-arm the lame youth was steering his companion. The two boys—for they
-were only boys, my informant said—halted in an arched exitway to put
-on their top-coats before stepping out into the drizzle. The crippled
-officer released his hold upon his friend's elbow to shrug his own garment
-up upon his shoulders. The second <i>blessé</i> was making a sorry job at
-finding the armholes of his coat, when an elderly officer with the badges
-of a major-general upon his shoulders and a breast loaded with
-decorations, stepped up and with the words, “Let me help you, please,”
- held the coat in the proper position while deftly he guided the blind
-boy's limbs into the sleeve openings.
-</p>
-<p>
-All in a second the unexpected denouément came. The youngster reached in
-his pocket, then felt for the hand of his volunteer who had come to his
-assistance. “Thank you very much,” he said. And there in the palm of the
-astonished general lay a shilling.
-</p>
-<p>
-The other lieutenant hobbled to his comrade's side. He may have meant to
-whisper, but in his distress he fairly shouted it out: “You've just handed
-a tip to a major-general!” Horrified, the blind boy spun about on his
-heels to apologise.
-</p>
-<p>
-“I'm so sorry, sir,” he gasped. “I—I thought it was a porter, of
-course. I beg your pardon, a thousand times, sir. I hope you'll forgive me—you
-know, I can't see any more, sir.” And with that he held out his hand to
-take back the miserable coin.
-</p>
-<p>
-The splendid-looking old man put both his hands upon the lad's shoulders.
-His ruddy face was quivering and the tears were running down his cheeks.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Please don't, please don't,” he gulped, almost incoherently. “I want to
-keep your shilling, if you don't mind. Why God bless you, my boy, I want
-to keep it always. I wouldn't take a thousand pounds for it.”
- </p>
-<p>
-And then falling back one pace he saluted the lad with all the reverence
-he would have accorded his commander-in-chief or his king.
-</p>
-<p>
-Here is the other thing, the one of which I speak as having first-hand
-knowledge. Three of us, returning by automobile from a visit to the Verdun
-massif, took a detour in order to call upon our friends the blithe young
-Britishers who made up Night Bombing Squadron No. ——. They
-were a great outfit, representing as they did, every corner of the Empire;
-but the pick of the lot, to my way of thinking, were Big Bill and the
-Young-'Un, both captains and both seasoned pilots of big Handley-Page
-bombing planes. As I think I have remarked somewhere else in these pages,
-the average age of this crowd was somewhere around twenty-two.
-</p>
-<p>
-This fine spring night we arrived at their headquarters opportunely for
-there was to be a raiding expedition to the Rhine Valley. First though,
-there was a good dinner at which we were unexpected but nonetheless
-welcome guests. Catch a lot of English lads letting a little thing like
-the prospect of a four hundred mile air jaunt into Germany and back
-interfere with their dinner.
-</p>
-<p>
-Just before the long, lazy twilight greyed away, to be succeeded by the
-silver radiance of the moonlight, all hands started for the hangars a mile
-or two away across on the other side of the patch of woods which
-surrounded the camp. Upon the running-boards of our car we carried an
-overflow of six or eight airmen; the rest walked. Clinging alongside me
-where I rode in the front seat, was a tall, slender boy—a captain
-for all his youth—whom I shall call Wilkins, which wasn't his name
-but is near enough to it. He was the minstrel of the squadron; could play
-on half a dozen instruments, ineluding the piano, and sing Cockney ballads
-with a lovely nasal whine.
-</p>
-<p>
-At the field our added passengers dropped off and each ran to superintend
-the soldier crews as they went over the planes, tuning them up. After a
-little while the signal for departure came. One after another thirteen
-machines got away, each bearing its pilot and its gunner-ob-server and
-with its freight of great bombs dangling from its undersides as it rose
-and went soaring away toward the northeast, making a wonderful picture, if
-in rising, it chanced to cut across the white white disk of a splendid
-full moon which had just pushed itself clear of the wooded mountainside.
-</p>
-<p>
-Next day about noon-time our route again brought us within ten miles of
-the squadron's camp and we decided to turn aside that way for an hour or
-so and learn the results of the raid. Sprawled about the big living-room
-of their community house in the birch forest, we found a score or more of
-our late hosts.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Well, what sort of a show did you put on last night?” one of us inquired
-as we entered.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Oh, a priceless show,” came the answer from one. “We gave the dear old
-Boche a sultry evenin' and make no ruddy error about it. Spilt our little
-pills all over Mannheim and Treves. Scored a lot of direct hits too, as
-well as one might judge while comin' away in more or less of a hurry.”
- </p>
-<p>
-“It was rippin' fun while it lasted,” put in another. “We didn't get back
-though until nearly four o'clock this mornin'. It left me feel-in' rather
-seedy—I must have my beauty sleep or I'm no good for the whole day.”
- Behind his hand he yawned.
-</p>
-<p>
-Now ordinarily, the next question would have been framed with a view to
-finding out whether all the bombers had safely returned; but the airman's
-code of ethics forbade. It was perfectly proper to inquire regarding the
-effects of a raid into hostile territory but the outsider must refrain
-from seeking information regarding any losses on the part of the raiders
-until one of them volunteered the news of his own accord.
-</p>
-<p>
-But there was no rule against our silently counting noses and this we did,
-industriously. As nearly as I could make out there were, of those whom we
-knew had participated in the expedition, five or six missing from the
-assembled company; but then of course the absentees might be asleep in
-their quarters.
-</p>
-<p>
-It struck the three of us, and in my own case I know the impression
-deepened as the minutes passed, that for all their kindly hospitality and
-all their solicitude that we should feel at home, there was a common
-depression prevalent among them. Some, we thought betrayed their feelings
-by a silence not habitual among these high-spirited youths.. Some seemed
-abstracted and some just a trifle irritable. And when this one or that
-described the bombing of the enemy towns which had been their particular
-targets I was sure I detected something forced about the enthusiasm he out
-into his speech.
-</p>
-<p>
-Presently there befell one of those awkward little silences which
-inevitably occur in any gathering where the spirit of things is a bit
-forced and strained. It was broken by a lanky twenty-year-old flyer.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Hm—” he began, clearing his throat and striving to make his tone
-casual, “you know, Wilkins and his observer didn't get back.” That was all—no
-details of how his two mates had gone rocketing down somewhere behind the
-German lines probably to instant death. In these few words he stated the
-bald fact of it and then he looked away, suddenly and unduly interested in
-the movements of somebody passing by one of the open windows.
-</p>
-<p>
-On my right hand sat that winning little chap whom his mates called the
-Young-'Un. The Young-'Un was lighting a pipe.
-</p>
-<p>
-“Beastly annoyin',” he grunted between puffs at the stem of his
-briar-root, “losin' Wilkins. As a matter of fact he was the only decent
-pianist we had. Rotten luck and all that sort of thing to lose our
-pianist, eh what?” Coming from the Young-'Un, with his gentle smile and
-his soft whimsical drawl, the last remark seemed so utterly unsympathetic,
-so callous, so cold-blooded, that the shock of what he said left me mute.
-It left my two companions mute, too.
-</p>
-<p>
-I turned in my chair and looked at the Young-'Un. He seemed to have
-trouble getting his pipe going. His two hands were cupped over the bowl,
-making a mask for his face. By reason of his hands I could not see much of
-his face but I could see this much—that his chin was trembling, that
-the big muscles in his throat were twitching and jumping and that though
-he winked his eyes as fast as he could, he couldn't wink fast enough to
-keep the big tears from leaking out and running down his cheeks.
-</p>
-<p>
-Because he was an experienced airman it was a part of his professional
-code to make no pother over the loss of a fellow-flier by the hazard of
-chance which every one of them dared as a part of his daily life. Because
-he was an Englishman, he felt shame that he should show any emotion. But
-because his heart was broken he cried behind the cover of his hands.
-</p>
-<p>
-Shells and bombs are forever doing freakish things. The effects of their
-tantrums set one to thinking of the conduct of cyclones and earthquakes.
-For example:
-</p>
-<p>
-In Bar-le-Duc, which most Americans used to think of, not as a city but as
-a kind of jelly, I saw when we passed through there the other day, where a
-bomb dropped by a German airraider did a curious bit of damage. I reckon
-people who believe in omens and portents would call it significant. Just
-off the railroad station in a little paved square stands a monument put up
-by popular subscription to the men of this town who died for their country
-in 1870-71. Upon one face of the granite shaft, being the one which looks
-inward toward the town, are two bronze figures of heroic size. The
-lowermost figure is that of a dying boy-soldier, with one hand pressed to
-his breast and the other holding fast to his musket. The other figure—that
-of a winged angel typifying the spirit of France—is hovering above
-him with a palm branch extended over his drooping head.
-</p>
-<p>
-The bomb, descending from on high, must have grazed the face of the
-monument. A great hole in the pavement shows where it exploded. One flying
-fragment sheared away the fingers and thumbs of the dying soldier's hand
-so that the bronze musket was tom out of his grasp and flung upon the
-earth. Some one picked up the musket and laid it at the base of the marble
-but the hand sticks out into space empty and mutilated.
-</p>
-<p>
-I dare say a German might interpret this as meaning France would be left
-crippled, disarmed and mangled. But to me I read it as a sign to show that
-France, the conqueror, and not the conquered, will be one of the nations
-that are to take the lead in bringing about universal peace and universal
-disarmament, once Germany has been cused of what ails her.
-</p>
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<hr />
-<p>
-<br /><br />
-</p>
-<p>
-I saw them when they first landed at Camp Upton—furtive, frightened,
-slew-footed, slackshouldered, underfed, apprehensive—a huddle of
-unhappy aliens speaking in alien tongues; knowing little of the cause for
-which they must fight and possibly caring less.
-</p>
-<p>
-I saw them again three months later when the snow of the dreadful winter
-of 1917-18 was piling high about their wooden barracks down there on
-wind-swept Long Island. The stoop was beginning to come out of their
-spines, the shamble out of their gait. They had learned to hold their
-heads up, had learned to look every man in the eye and tell him to go
-elsewhere with a capital H. They knew now that discipline was not
-punishment and that the salute was not a mark of servility but an evidence
-of mutual self-respect as between officer and man. They wore their
-uniforms with pride. The flag meant something to them and the war meant
-something to them. Three short hard months of training had transformed
-them from a rabble into soldier-stuff; from a street-mob into the makings
-of an army; from strangers into Americans.
-</p>
-<p>
-After nine months I have seen them once more in France. For swagger, for
-snap, for smartness in the drill and for cockiness in the billet; for good
-humour on the march and for dash and spunk and deviltry in the fighting
-into which just now they have been sent, our army can show no better
-soldiers and no more gallant spirits than the lads who mainly make up the
-rank and file of this particular division.
-</p>
-<p>
-They are the foreign-born Jews and Italians and Slavs of New York's East
-Side, that were called up for service in the first draft.
-</p>
-<p>
-No wonder the mother who didn't raise her boy to be a soldier has become
-an extinct species back home.
-</p>
-<div style="height: 6em;">
-<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-</div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
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