JIMMIE HIGGINS WORKS FOR HIS UNCLE
I
They gave Jimmie Higgins a couple of days to lie about in the
grounds of the hospital, and make the acquaintance and hear the
experiences of men who had lost arms and legs in battle, or had been
burned by flame-throwers, or ruined for life by poison-gases.
Strange as it might seem, Jimmie found among these men not a few
with whom he could talk, whose point of view was close to his own.
These Britishers had been through the mill; they knew. None of the
glory stuff for them! Leave that for the newspaper scribblers, the
bloody rascals who stayed at home and beat on tomtoms, driving other
men to march in and die. You went and got yourself battered up,
ruined for life--and then what would they do for you? It was a hard
world to a man who was crippled and helpless. Yes, said Jimmie; the
same hard world that it was to a Socialist, a dreamer of justice.
But there was the old dilemma, from which he had never been able to
find escape, whether in Leesville, U.S.A., or on the high seas, or
here in old England. What were you going to do about the Huns? To
hold out your hand to them was like putting it into a tiger's cage.
No, by God, you had to fight them, you had to lick them, cost what
it might! And the speaker would go on and tell of things he had
seen: a Prussian officer who had shot a British surgeon in the back,
after this surgeon had bound up his wounds; a commandant of a
prison-camp who had withdrawn all medical aid in a typhus epidemic,
and allowed his charges to perish like rats.
So, hell though it was, you had to go through with it; if you were a
man, you had to set your teeth and grip your hands and take your
share of the horror, whatever it might be. And Jimmie, being
something of a little man in his way, would set his teeth and grip
his hands and take in imagination, the share of the particular human
wreck who happened to be talking to him. So Jimmie Higgins was
battered back and forth, like a tennis-ball, between the two forces
of Militarism and Revolution.
Just now was another crisis--the Huns had begun a furious drive in
Flanders, the third battle of Ypres, and the British were falling
back, not in rout, but in retreat which might become rout at any
hour. The bulletins came in several times a day, and people in the
streets would stop and read them, their faces full of fear. When the
wind was right you could hear the guns across the Channel; Jimmie
would lie at night and listen to the dull, incessant thunder--a
terrific, man-made storm, in which showers of steel were raining
down upon the heads of soldiers hiding in shell-holes and
hastily-dug trenches. The war seemed very near indeed when the wind
was right!
II
Still, a fellow has to live. Jimmie was in a foreign land for the
first time in his life, and when they turned him loose, he and a
couple of other American chaps went wandering about the streets,
staring at the sights of this town, which had been a small harbour
before the war, but now was a vast centre of the world's commerce,
one of the routes by which large sections of Britain were moved
across the Channel every day.
You saw in the streets no men out of uniform, except a few old ones;
you saw nobody at all idle, except the young children. The women
were driving the trucks, and operating the street-cars, which were
called “trams”, and the elevators, which were called “lifts”.
Everybody's face was sober and drawn, but they lightened up when
they saw the Americans, who had come so far to help them in their
trouble. In the cake-shops, and the queer little “pubs” where
rosy-cheeked girls sold very thin beer, they could not be polite
enough to the visitors from overseas; even the haughtiest-looking
“bobby” would stop to tell you the way about the streets. “First to
the roight, third to the left,” he would say, very fast; and when
you looked bewildered, he would say it again, as fast as ever.
But they needed motor-cycles so badly in the new American armies
that they didn't give Jimmie much time to be a hero; he got his
orders and a new outfit, and bade farewell to the Honourable
Beatrice, promising to write to her now and then, and not to be too
hard on the aristocracy. He crossed the Channel, alive with boats
like the Hudson River with its ferries, and came to another and
still bigger port, which the Americans had taken and made over new
for the war. Long vistas of docks had been built since the fighting
began; Jimmie saw huge cranes that dipped down into the hold of a
ship, and pulled out whole locomotives, or maybe half a dozen
automobile trucks in one swoop.
Behind these docks was a tangle of railroad yards and tracks, and
miles upon miles of sheds, piled to the top with stores of every
sort you could imagine. A whole encampment-city covered the
surrounding hills, crowned by an old, creaking, moss-grown
windmill--the Middle Ages looking in dismay upon these modern times.
Nobody took the trouble to invite Jimmie to inspect these marvels,
but he got glimpses here and there, and men with whom he chatted
told him more. One man had been directing the unloading of canned
tomatoes; for six months he had seen nothing but crates upon crates
and car-loads upon car-loads of canned tomatoes, coming into one end
of a shed and going out at the other. Somewhere in the higher
regions dwelt a marvellous tomato-brain, which knew exactly how many
cans a division of dough-boys in a training-camp would consume each
day, how many would be needed by patients in hospitals, by lumbermen
in French forests, by revellers in Y.M.C.A. huts. Every now and then
a ship brought another supply, and the man who told Jimmie about it
bossed a gang of negroes who piled the crates on trucks.
And then Jimmie met a Frenchman, who had been a waiter in a Chicago
hotel, and now was bossing a gang of wire-haired Korean labourers.
Jimmie had thought he knew all the races of the earth in the shops
and mills and mines of America; but here he heard of new kinds of
men--Annamese and Siamese, Pathans and Sikhs, Madagascans and
Abyssinians and Algerians. All the British empire was here, and all
the French colonies. There were Portuguese and Brazilians and West
Indians, bushmen from Australia and Zulus from South Africa; and
these not having proven enough, America was now pouring out the
partly melted contents of her pot--Hawaiians and Porto Ricans,
Filipinos and “spiggoties”, Eskimos from Alaska, Chinamen from San
Francisco, Sioux from Dakota, and plain black plantation niggers
from Louisiana and Alabama! Jimmie saw a gang of these latter
mending a track which had been blown out of place by a bomb from an
aeroplane; their black skins shining with sweat, their white teeth
shining with good-nature as they swung their heavy crow-bars, a long
row of them moving like a machine chanting to keep in unison,
“Altogether--heave!” the officer would call, and the line would
swing into motion--
“Get a MULE!
An' a JACK!
No SLOW!
No SLACK!
Put the HUMP!
In yo' BACK--”
III
For nearly four years Jimmie had been reading about France, and now
he was here, and could see the sights with his own eyes. People with
wooden shoes, for example! It was worth coming across the seas to
see women and kids going clatter, clatter along the cobbled streets.
And the funny little railroad-coaches, with rows of doors like
rabbit-pens. It was a satisfaction to notice that the train had a
real man-sized engine, with U.S.A. painted thereon. Jimmie owned a
share in that engine, and experienced Socialistic thrills as he rode
behind it.
He had got separated from his “unit”, thanks to the submarine and
the sojourn in the hospital. They had given him a pass, with orders
to proceed to a certain town, travelling on a certain train. Now
Jimmie sat looking out of the window, as happy as a boy out of
school. A beautiful country, the fresh green glory of spring
everywhereupon it; broad, straight military highways lined with
poplars, and stone houses with queer steep roofs, and old men and
women and children toiling in the fields.
Jimmie chattered with the men in the compartment, soldiers and
workers, each a cog in the big machine, each bound upon some
important errand. Each had news to tell--tales of the fighting, or
of the progress of preparation. For more than a year now America had
been getting ready, and here, in the most desperate crisis of the
war, what was she going to do? Everybody was on tip-toe with
excitement, with impatience to get into the scrap, to make good in
the work upon which his soul was set. Every man knew that the
“dough-boys” would show themselves the masters of “Fritz”; they knew
it as religious people know there is a God in Heaven--only, unlike
most religious people, they were anxious to get to this heaven and
meet this God at the earliest possible moment. Next to Jimmie sat a
Wisconsin farmer-boy, German in features, in name, even in accent;
yet he was ready to fight the soldiers of the Kaiser--and quite sure
he could lick them! Had he not lived since childhood in a free
country, and been to an American public-school?
Everybody had funny stories to tell about the adventures of soldiers
in a foreign land. The French were all right, of course, especially
the girls; but the shop-keepers were frugal, and you had better
count your change, and bite the coins they offered you. As for the
language--holy smoke! Why did civilized people want to talk a lingo
that made you grunt like a pig--or like a penful of pigs of all
sizes? Across the way sat a Chicago street-car conductor with a
little lesson book, and now and then he would read something out
loud. AN, IN, ON, UN, and many different sizes of pigs! When you
wanted bread, you asked for a pain, and when you wanted a dish of
eggs, you asked for a cat-roof omelette. How was this for a
tongue-twister--say five hundred and fifty-five francs in French!
Fortunately you didn't have to say that many--not on the pay of a
dough-boy, put in a plumber from up-state in New York. For his part,
he did not bother to grunt--he would make drinking motions or
eating motions, and they would bring him things till they found what
he wanted. One time he had met a girl that he thought was all right,
and he wanted to treat her to a feed, so he drew a picture of a
chicken, thinking he would get it roasted. She had chattered away to
the waiter, and he had come back with two soft-boiled eggs. That was
the French notion of taking a girl out to dinner!
IV
They loaded Jimmie into a motor-lorry and whirled him away. You knew
you were going to the war then, by heck; there were two almost solid
processions of wagons and trucks, loaded with French soldiers and
materials going, and damaged French soldiers returning. It was like
Broadway at the most crowded hour; only here everything went by in a
whirl of dust--you got quick glimpses of drivers with tense faces
and blood-shot eyes. Now and then there would be a blockade, and men
would swear and fume in mixed languages; staff-cars in an extra
hurry would go off the road and bump along across country, while
gangs of negro labourers, French colonials, seized the opportunity
to fill up the ruts worn in the highway.
They put Jimmie off at a village where his motor-unit was located,
in a long shed made of corrugated iron, the sort of shed which the
army threw up overnight. Here were a score of men working at
repairs, and Jimmie stopped for no formalities, but took off his
coat and pitched in. There was plenty of work he could see; the
machines came, sometimes whole truck-loads of them, damaged in every
way he had ever seen before, and in new ways not dreamed of in
Kumme's bicycle-shop--tyres torn to shreds by fragments of shrapnel,
frames twisted out of shape by explosions, and nasty splotches of
blood completing the story.
It was one of the many places where American units had been taken to
plug the damaged French lines. There was a reserve battalion near
by, and outside this village a group of men were at work, putting up
tents for a hospital. Some thirty miles ahead was the front, and you
heard the guns off and on, a low sullen roar, punctuated with
hammer-strokes f big fellows. Millions of dollars every hour were
being blown to nothingness in that fearful inferno; a gigantic
meat-mill that was grinding up the bodies of men and had never
ceased day or night for nearly four years. You could be a violent
pacifist in sound of those guns, or you could be a violent
militarist, but you could not be indifferent to the war, you could
not be of two minds about it.
And yet--Jimmie Higgins was of two minds! He wanted to beat back the
Huns, who had made all this fearful mess; but also he wanted to beat
the profiteers who were making messes at home. It happened that
Jimmie had reached the army at a trying moment, when there were no
American big guns, and when promises of machine-guns and aeroplanes
had failed. There was wild excitement in the home papers, and not a
little grumbling in the army. It was graft and politics, men said;
and Jimmie caught eagerly at this idea. He pointed out how the
profiteers at home were entrenching themselves, making ready to
exploit the soldiers returning without jobs. That was a line of talk
the men were ready for, and the little machinist rejoiced to see the
grim look that came upon their faces. They would attend to it, never
fear; and Jimmie would go on to tell them exactly how to attend to
it!
V
But that was only now and then, when the wind was the other way, and
you did not hear the guns. For the most part Jimmie's thoughts were
drawn irresistibly to the front; about him were thousands of other
men, all their thoughts at the front, their hands clenched, their
teeth set, their beings centred upon the job of holding the Beast at
bay. Jimmie saw the grey ambulances come in, and the wounded lifted
out on stretchers, their heads bandaged, their bodies covered with
sheets, their faces a ghastly waxen colour. He saw the poilus, fresh
from the trenches, after God alone knew what siege of terror. They
came staggering, bent double under a burden of equipment. The first
time Jimmie saw them was a day of ceaseless rain, when the dust
ground up by the big lorries was turned into ankle-deep mud; the
Frenchmen were plastered with it from head to foot; you saw under
their steel helmets only a mud-spattered beard, and the end of a
nose, and a pair of deep-sunken eyes. They stopped to rest not far
from the place where Jimmie worked; they sank down in the wet, they
fell asleep in pools of water, where not even beasts could have
slept. You did not have to know any French to understand what these
men had been through. Good God! Was that what was going on up there?
Jimmie thanked his stars he was no nearer. But that coward's comfort
did not last him long, for Jimmie was not a coward, he was not used
to letting other men struggle and suffer for him. His conscience
began to gnaw at him. If that was what it cost to beat down the
Beast, to make the world safe for democracy, why should he be
escaping? Why should he be warm and dry and well-fed, while
working-men of France lay out in the trenches in the rain?
Jimmie went back and worked overtime without extra pay--something
that old man Granitch had never got out of him, you bet, nor old man
Kumme either. For three whole days he stayed a militarist,
forgetting his life-long training in rebellion. But then he got into
an argument with a red-headed Orangeman in his unit, who expressed
the opinion that every Socialist was a traitor at heart, and that
after the war the army should be used to make an end of them all.
Jimmie in his rage went farther than he really meant, and again got
a “calling down” from his superior officer; so for several days his
proletarian feelings blazed, he wanted the revolution right away,
Huns or no Huns.
VI
But most of the time now the spirit of the herd mastered Jimmie; he
wanted what all the men about him wanted--to hold back the Beast
from these fair French fields and quaint old villages, and these
American hospitals and rest-camps and Y.M.C.A. huts--to say nothing
of motor-cycle repair-sheds with Jimmie Higgins in them! And the
trouble was that the Beast was not being held back; he was coming
nearer and nearer--one bull rush after another! Jimmie's village was
near the valley of the Marne, and that was the road to Paris; the
Beast wanted to get to Paris, he really expected to get to Paris!
The sound of guns grew louder and louder, and rumour flew wild-eyed
and wild-tongued about the country. The traffic in the roads grew
denser, but moving more slowly now, for the Germans were shelling
the road ahead, and blockades were frequent; one huge missile had
fallen into a French artillery-train only a couple of miles away.
“They'll be moving us back, if this keeps up,” said Jimmie's
sergeant; and Jimmie wondered: suppose they didn't move them!
Suppose they forgot all about it? Was there any person whose
particular duty it was to remember to see that motor-cycle units got
moved in the precise nick of time? And what if the Germans were to
break through and sweep over all calculations? This was a little
more than Jimmie Higgins had bargained for when he entered the
recruiting-office in Leesville, U.S.A.!
They gave out gas-masks to everyone in Jimmie's unit, and put an
alarm bell in the shed, and made everybody practise putting on the
masks in a hurry. Jimmie was so scared that he thought seriously of
running away; but--such is the perversity of human nature--what he
did was to run in the opposite direction! His officer in command
came into the shed and demanded, “Can any of you men ride?” And
imagine any fellow who worked at repairing motor-cycles admitting
that he couldn't ride! “I can!” said Jimmie. “I can!” said every
other workman in the place.
“What is it!” asked Jimmie--always of the forward and pushing sort.
“The French ask for half a dozen men in a rush. They've had several
motor-cycle units wiped out or captured.”
“Gee!” said Jimmie. “I'll go!”
“And me!” said another. “And me!” “And me!”
“All right,” said the officer, and told them off: “You and you and
you. And you, Cullen, take command. Report to French headquarters at
Chatty Terry. You know where it is!”
“Sure, Mike!” said Cullen. “I been there.” Jimmie hadn't been to
“Chatty Terry”, but he knew it was somewhere across the Marne. The
officer gave him a map, showing the villages through which he would
go. Jimmie and his companions named these villages, using sensible
language, without concession to the fool notions of the natives.
Wipers, Reems, Verdoon, Devil Wood, Arm-in-tears, Saint Meal--all
these Jimmie had heard about; also a place where the Americans had
won their first glorious victory a week ago, and which they called,
sometimes Cantinny, sometimes Tincanny. And now Jimmie was going to
“Chatty Terry”, in charge of a red-headed Orangeman who a few days
ago had expressed the opinion that all Socialists were traitors and
should be shot!
The officer gave them passes, one for each man, in case they got
separated, and they started towards the place where the new machines
were lined up. On the way Jimmie had a moment of utter panic. What
was this he was getting himself in for, idiot that he was? Going up
there where the shells were falling, wiping out motor-cycle units!
And shells that were full of poison gases, most of them! Of all the
fool things he had done in his life this was the crown and climax!
His knees began to shake, he turned sick inside. But then he glanced
about, and caught Pat Cullen's menacing blue eye; Jimmie returned
the glare, and the spirit of battle flamed up in him, he laid hold
of the handles of a motor-cycle and strode towards the door. Was any
Irish mick going to catch him in a funk, and “bawl him out” before
this crowd, and put the Socialist movement to shame? Not much!