Before he had joined the army and been through a lot of front-line stuff
Jimmy McGee thought that it was mighty romantic to wear a uniform and
carry a gun off to war. But somebody spilled the beans for him pretty
soon. Jimmy couldn’t find any romance in the mud and rain when his chief
ration was black coffee, canned beef, and hardtack. When O. D. said that
he would have Mary write to him something stirred ’way down in him that
hadn’t stirred since he had quit thinking about war as a romantic
expedition, and Jimmy was pretty sure that the romance stuff was coming
back to life again.
“Wonder if Mary would want a souvenir of this _guerre_?” asked Jimmy,
thoughtfully.
“I know she would, because before I left she made me promise to bring
back a German helmet or something from the battles. But of course I
haven’t been near a fight yet,” answered O. D.
“Mary gets the helmet that I took from that Boche major, and _toot
sweet_, you can bet on that,” declared McGee.
“But you’ll want to keep the helmet yourself, Jimmy.”
“Hell afire, the helmet’s Mary’s. There’s no use waitin’ until the
_guerre_ is _finee_ before I give it to her, is there?” blurted out
Jimmy, confusedly.
“No—guess not. Send it to her, then. Mary’ll be tickled to death with it
and to know that it comes from a real soldier who’s been wounded. But go
on with what you were tellin’ me. When did you get sent up to the
front?”
“Arrh, we hung ’round Coetquidan until ’bout February first, then we got
orders to _partee_. We was darn sure that we was goin’ to the front, but
didn’t have no idea what part of it. Anyhow, if you had told us we
wouldn’t have known any better, as we never paid any particular
attention to any special fronts. All we knew was that the front was the
front.
“Guess you know by now that we don’t travel first-class in this country.
You’ve seen them little cars that looks like a shoe-box set on wheels,
marked, ‘40 _hommes_’—that’s forty like you and me—and ‘8
_chevaux_’—means eight horses or as many mules. Well, that’s the kind of
parlor-cars that I’ve been tourin’ France in. I always get in a
horse-car if I can, as it’s warmer, and, supposin’ the _chevaux_ don’t
step all over you, there’s a chance to lay down and cork off a bit.
“They loaded us bag and baggage on a train of them kind of cars and a
Frog blew some kind of a horn. We was off for the front. God a’mighty,
you should have heard them Yanks cheerin’ as we headed for the front.
Passed through a lot of big towns and _beaucoup_ villages where all of
the Frogs came out to look at us as if we was a travelin’ circus. Come
pretty near starvin’ before we got where we was goin’.
“Stayed on the train all one night and one whole day. About seven
o’clock of the second night I squirmed into about three feet of floor
space and _cushayed_. Must have slept pretty good, ’cause next thing I
knew somebody was shakin’ me and yellin’, ‘Hey, come out of it,
Jimmy—get up, we’re at the front.’ Gee! I snaps into it and rushes out
of the door expectin’ to see the front right outside. It was pretty
dark, but I looked hard and couldn’t see no Germans or trenches. It was
quiet as death. I says to Frank Reynolds, who was top-sergeant of E
Battery—you see, I had transferred from C to E—‘Where the hell is it?’
‘What?’ he asks. ‘The front, you nut,’ I told him. ‘Oh, it’s right
around here,’ and he waved his arms around pointin’ in every direction.
“I couldn’t see nothin’ but a railroad station and some flat cars.
‘Funniest front I’ve ever been on,’ said one of them Mexican-border
veterans. ‘This ain’t no front,’ says I.
“’Bout that time it sounded as if there was goin’ to be a
thunder-shower. Everybody looked at one another kinda funny-like. We
heard the thunder _encore_. I looked to the north and there was a lot of
flashes showin’ against the sky. The thunder began to growl like a bunch
of bears over a big bone. Some rockets shot up and spilled a lot of
sparks. A smart guy had to remark that they must be havin’ a Fourth of
July up there, but I was too busy tryin’ to _compree_ that them things
meant war. I kept sayin’ to myself, ‘That’s a war goin’ on out there;
that’s the thing we came up here to get in.’
“They talk a lot about thrills in love-stories and books, but those
story-page people don’t know a thrill from a bowl of mush compared to
the things that was runnin’ up and down my backbone that first night.
Course you know the guns and flashes was quite a ways, ’bout twenty
kilos from where we was, and there wasn’t much danger of us gettin’ in
any trouble ourselves. But seein’ and hearin’ just got me to thinkin’
about the old _guerre_ and knowin’ that we was in it at last—well, it
kind of made me feel a little different, that’s all.
“We harnessed the old _chevaux_ up, hooked ’em to the guns and got all
the other junk, includin’ them _fourgeons_—French wagons, you
know—started. ’Bout dawn we rumbled through a town that looked as if it
had been shut up for the winter. Wasn’t a light goin’. Not a pup on the
streets. Nothin’ but us. There was _beaucoup_ houses all shot to
hell—roofs gone, windows out, walls cavin’ in. Some places were nothin’
but rubbish. There was so little left of a few houses that you couldn’t
have salvaged a thing even if you had a pull with the guy at the salvage
dump. I found out later that the name of the place was _Swasson_
(Soissons). Must have been some battlin’ ’round that joint.
“After leavin’ _Swasson_ we hit a road that led right up to the
trenches, or damn near it, anyway. Anybody, even an S. O. S. bird with
six months’ experience in Paris, would have guessed that we must be
somewhere near the front. There was old trenches runnin’ every which
way; at that time I thought the detail that dug ’em must have been
zigzag, as all of the trenches was crooked like a bunch of old dead
snakes. I saw _beaucoup_ barbed wire stretched ’round. But I’ve seen
lots more since that day.
“As we hiked along a gun would boom out some place up along the front.
Wasn’t none of that war stuff that you look for after readin’ some war
books. Just now and then a boom and a flash or two.
“It was mighty cold ridin’ a horse that night. Bein’ from Florida, I
ain’t used to much cold weather, and my hands and feet come pretty near
bein’ ice before we finally got to our _échelon_ near a tumbled-down
village called Chassemy. Listen ’bout that _échelon_ stuff. It was
somethin’ new to me before I got to the front, as I never took Greek at
school. Well, it seems that _échelon_ means the place that ain’t quite
at the front, but just about as bad, bein’ as how the Boche can always
shell _échelons_ with big guns. The men, horses, and other things that
ain’t needed at the front all the time stay at the _échelon_ till they
send for them. Time we made the _échelon_ everybody was so sleepy that
we didn’t wait to unroll, but just sprawled about on the barrack floor
and _cushayed_.
“I came to about four o’clock in the afternoon and we started to hunt
somethin’ to eat, naturally. Everybody was damn curious to know just
where the front was. Nobody seemed to know just exactly what way to take
to get to it and to our positions. You see, we were to relieve the
French. There was nothin’ else to do but wait ’round.
“Finally, two days later, three French officers came over and got the
Cap to go off with them to reconnoiter. He came back that night and told
us that we would move the guns into position next day.
“Next night we took the four pieces and everythin’ needed to fight the
_guerre_ with and hit for the front. You can imagine us goin’ to the
front for the first time. Lots of the boys was expectin’ a battle before
we got up there and other guys kept lookin’ for dead men or wounded. It
was the same as walkin’ to church on Sunday. We got to the front without
knowin’ it.
“‘Here we are,’ says the skipper, and he halted the column on the side
of a road. The top-sergeant thought he was tryin’ to fool us and asked
him what the halt was for. ‘Do you want to go out in No Man’s Land?’
asked the Cap. To tell the truth, it was hard for any of us to believe
that we were at the front. You’ll find that the front ain’t what it’s
cracked up to be, in a way.
“We put the guns in four positions that had already been built by the
French and camouflaged ’em with a lot of nettin’. When I saw ’em in
daylight I thought I was lookin’ at a scene in a theater. The gun
positions was right on the road, mind you—any one passin’ could see ’em,
and I thought that we would hide the things ’way down in some kind of a
mysterious valley, or somethin’ like that.
“Our homes were ’way down under the earth, dug-outs they call ’em. No
chance much to keep warm in dug-outs, and two men couldn’t pass each
other in ’em, they was so narrow. We _cushayed_ on wooden planks. Every
thing, kitchens, officers’ quarters, and all, were down in dug-outs.
When you did get upon the ground you had to be mighty careful as there
was _beaucoup_ shell-holes. The fields looked as if they had the
smallpox—and it was hard to keep from fallin’ into them shell-holes.
“After foolin’ around with the old army stuff of changin’ orders a
hundred times a day we put over our first shots by registerin’ on a
brewery that the Germans was supposed to live in. Before I forget it let
me tell you one of the funniest things about fronts. Our guns pointed
one way and the front was in another, or almost that bad, anyway. I kept
thinkin’ the lines was out beyond the muzzles of our pieces, but the Cap
said that it was off to the right more and that if we walked that way
we’d most likely run into the Germans’ first-line trenches. Sure was a
puzzle to me for a long time.
“Well, can’t say that there was any too much excitement up on the old
Cheman de Damns front (Chemin des Dames) except the mornin’ that Jimmy
Leach, our cook, made real biscuits. It’s a wonder the Heinies didn’t
hear us hollerin’ and come over, we made so much fuss over those
biscuits. Then there was hell to pay after we put over a big barrage
once. You _compree_ barrages, don’t you, that’s when all the big and
little guns start popping off at once accordin’ to some kind of a
schedule and generally the doughboys go over under the barrage to attack
the Boche trenches. You see, before we got up there the Boches and
French were fightin’ the _guerre_ like this, ‘You don’t shoot and I
won’t.’ We changed that argument _toot sweet_ by startin’ in with
barrages and raids. Naturally the Germans got mad and came back at us.
That made the French hotter than hell. A general came right over to our
general and said it had to be stopped. No wonder the _guerre_ ain’t
ended. As we was under the French command we had to do accordin’ to
orders.
“You might think that we got into the ways of the _guerre_ with an awful
jolt. But we didn’t. It just came to us gradual like. We got used to the
whine of a shell and got so we could tell when they was comin’ and
goin’. There wasn’t many casualties. Few fellows got bumped off in the
infantry on raidin’ parties. We lost a couple or so in the artillery.
“I saw my first dead man, killed in the _guerre_, about three weeks
after goin’ in the line. Fragments of a shell had hit him in two or
three places. He was messed up all over one side of the road. I couldn’t
tell much if he was a man or mule, the way he was scattered ’round. A
fellow standin’ near said it was Bill Rand, a lad I used to sleep in the
same tent with at Boxford. Course I was sorry for poor Bill, but it
didn’t worry me much. Never thought of it anymore—that’s the way it’s
been for all the boys. Just got used to takin’ the _guerre_ as it came
along.
“The cooties got on us up there and I ain’t been lonesome for ’em since
that time—don’t believe a fellow can ever get rid of the damn things.
Gas was the big thing that scared me at first. Now it’s bombs. O. D.,
one of them Boche planes dronin’ over your bean, waitin’ to pull up his
tailboard and let a bomb drop, is the worst thing I ever want to be up
against. You ’ain’t got a bit of protection, unless, of course, you’re
’way under the ground.
“Talkin’ about the gas stuff reminds me of what happened to Bill Conway.
Bill was an old regular, been in the service eighteen years, soldiered
every place the American flag ever flew and told us that gas, bombs, and
shrapnel all tied up in one bag couldn’t made him budge. We knew Bill
pretty well and if there was anything that had him licked it was gas. He
used to go to sleep with his mask on sometimes. Well, Jimmy Leach and a
few of us decided to get Bill one night, so we hid his old gas-mask and
when he got in the dug-out somebody beat on a tin can and bawled out,
‘Gas—gas!’
“Say, you would have died laughin’ at old Bill. He jumps for his mask.
Nothin’ doin’. He tried to take Jimmy Leach’s, but couldn’t. Everybody
had piled into the bunks and pulled blankets over their heads. Some of
’em began groanin’ and coughin’. ‘Oh, my God, I’m gassed, I’m gassed!’
yelled Bill, and he dived under a pile of his own blankets. ‘So am I,’
shouted Leach, comin’ up for air. The rest of us all threw the blankets
back and began smokin’. Finally, after ’bout half an hour, and he nearly
suffocated, Bill stuck his head out and saw us and that there wasn’t any
gas. Maybe he didn’t cuss us out! Said we were tin soldiers and belonged
to a tin army. Some day if I ever get back to my old newspaper job and a
typewriter I’m goin’ to write a book about Bill Conway and call it _Tin
Sojers_.”