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THE A. E. F.
THE A. E. F.
WITH GENERAL PERSHING
AND THE AMERICAN FORCES
BY
HEYWOOD BROUN
[Illustration: colophon]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
1918
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
TO
RUTH HALE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BIG POND 1
II. THE A. E. F. 11
III. LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILÀ 25
IV. THE FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 36
V. WITHIN SOUND OF THE GUNS 56
VI. SUNNY FRANCE 74
VII. PERSHING 92
VIII. MEN WITH MEDALS 102
IX. LETTERS HOME 115
X. MARINES 126
XI. FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS 136
XII. OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 147
XIII. HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS 164
XIV. WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 177
XV. VERDUN 192
XVI. WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 200
XVII. BACK FROM PRISON 221
XVIII. FINISHING TOUCHES 227
XIX. THE AMERICAN ARMY MARCHES TO THE TRENCHES 250
XX. TRENCH LIFE 260
XXI. THE VETERANS RETURN 281
Some of the material in this book is reprinted through the courtesy of
the _New York Tribune_.
THE A. E. F.
CHAPTER I
THE BIG POND
"Voilà un sousmarin," said a sailor, as he stuck his head through the
doorway of the smoking room. The man with aces and eights dropped, but
the player across the table had three sevens, and he waited for a
translation. It came from the little gun on the afterdeck. The gun said
"Bang!" and in a few seconds it repeated "Bang!" I heard the second shot
from my stateroom, but before I had adjusted my lifebelt the gun fired
at the submarine once more.
A cheer followed this shot. No Yale eleven, or even Harvard for that
matter, ever heard such a cheer. It was as if the shout for the first
touchdown and for the last one and for all the field goals and long
gains had been thrown into one. There was something in the cheer, too,
of a long drawn "ho-old 'em."
I looked out the porthole and asked an ambulance man: "Did we get her
then?"
"No, but we almost did," he answered. "There she is," he added. "That's
the periscope."
Following the direction of his finger I found a stray beanpole thrust
somewhat carelessly into the ocean. It came out of a wave top with a
rakish tilt. Probably ours was the angle, for the steamer was cutting
the ocean into jigsaw sections as we careened away for dear life, now
with a zig and then with a zag, seeking safety in drunken flight. When I
reached the deck, steamer and passengers seemed to be doing as well as
could be expected, and even better.
The periscope was falling astern, and the three hundred passengers,
mostly ambulance drivers and Red Cross nurses, were lined along the
rail, rooting. Some of the girls stood on top of the rail and others
climbed up to the lifeboats, which were as good as a row of boxes. It
was distinctly a home team crowd. Nobody cheered for the submarine. The
only passenger who showed fright was a chap who rushed up and down the
deck loudly shouting: "Don't get excited."
"Give 'em hell," said a home town fan and shook his fist in the
direction of the submarine. The gunner fired his fourth shot and this
time he was far short in his calculation.
"It's a question of whether we get her first or she gets us, isn't it?"
asked an old lady in about the tone she would have used in asking a
popular lecturer whether or not he thought Hamlet was really mad. Such
neutrality was beyond me. I couldn't help expressing a fervent hope that
the contest would be won by our steamer. It was the bulliest sort of a
game, and a pleasant afternoon, too, but one passenger was no more than
mildly interested. W. K. Vanderbilt did not put on a life preserver nor
did he leave his deck chair. He sat up just a bit and watched the whole
affair tolerantly. After all the submarine captain was a stranger to
him.
Our fifth and final shot was the best. It hit the periscope or
thereabouts. The shell did not rebound and there was a patch of oil on
the surface of the water. The beanpole disappeared. The captain left the
bridge and went to the smoking room. He called for cognac.
"Il est mort," said he, with a sweep of his right hand.
"He says we sunk her," explained the man who spoke French.
The captain said the submarine had fired one torpedo and had missed the
steamer by about ninety feet. The U-boat captain must have taken his eye
off the boat, or sliced or committed some technical blunder or other,
for he missed an easy shot. Even German efficiency cannot eradicate the
blessed amateur. May his thumbs never grow less!
We looked at the chart and found that our ship was more than seven
hundred miles from the nearest land. It seemed a lonely ocean.
One man came through the crisis with complete triumph. As soon as the
submarine was sighted, the smoking room steward locked the cigar chest
and the wine closet. Not until then did he go below for his lifebelt.
Reviewing my own emotions, I found that I had not been frightened quite
as badly as I expected. The submarine didn't begin to scare me as much
as the first act of "The Thirteenth Chair," but still I could hardly lay
claim to calm, for I had not spoken one of the appropriate speeches
which came to my mind after the attack. The only thing to which I could
point with pride was the fact that before putting on my lifebelt I
paused to open a box of candy, and went on deck to face destruction, or
what not, with a caramel between my teeth. But before the hour was up I
was sunk indeed.
It was submarine this and sousmarin that in the smoking room. The
U-boats lurked in every corner. One man had seen two and at the next
table was a chap who had seen three. There was the fellow who had
sighted the periscope first of all, the man who had seen the wake of the
torpedo, and the littlest ambulance driver who had sighted the submarine
through the bathroom window while immersed in the tub. He was the man
who had started for the deck with nothing more about him than a lifebelt
and had been turned back.
"I wonder," said a passenger, "whether those submarines have wireless?
Do you suppose now that boat could send messages on ahead and ask other
U-boats to look after us?" And just then the gun on the forward deck
went "Bang."
It was the meanest and most inappropriate sound I ever heard. It was an
anti-climax of the most vicious sort. It was bad form, bad art, bad
everything. I felt a little sick, and one of the contributing emotions
was a sort of fearfully poignant boredom. I tried to remember just what
the law of averages was and to compute as rapidly as possible the
chances of the vessel to complete two more days of travel if attacked by
a submarine every hour.
"The ocean is full of the damn things," said the man at the next table
petulantly.
This time the thing was a black object not more than fifty yards away.
The captain signaled the gunner not to fire again and he let it be known
that this was nothing but a barrel. Later it was rumored that it was a
mine, but then there were all sorts of rumors during those last two days
when we ran along with lifeboats swung out. There was much talk of a
convoy, but none appeared.
Many passengers slept on deck and some went to meals with their
lifebelts on. Everybody jumped when a plate was dropped and there was
always the possibility of starting a panic by slamming a door. And so we
cheered when the steamer came to the mouth of the river which leads to
Bordeaux. We cheered for France from friendship. We cheered from
surprise and joy when the American flag went up to the top of a high
mast and we cheered a little from sheer relief because we had left the
sea and the U-boats behind us.
They had been with us not a little from the beginning. Even on the first
day out from New York the ship ran with all lights out and portholes
shielded. Later passengers were forbidden to smoke on deck at night and
once there was a lifeboat drill of a sort, but the boats were not swung
out in the davits until after we met the submarine.
Early in the voyage an old lady complained to the purser because a young
man in the music room insisted on playing the Dead March from "Saul."
There was more cheerful music. The ambulance drivers saw to that. We had
an Amherst unit and one from Leland Stanford and the boys were nineteen
or thereabouts. It is well enough to say that all the romance has gone
out of modern war, but you can't convince a nineteen-year-older of that
when he has his first khaki on his back and his first anti-typhoid
inoculation in his arm. They boasted of these billion germs and they
swaggered and played banjos and sang songs. Mostly they sang at night on
the pitch black upper deck. The littlest ambulance driver had a nice
tenor voice and on still nights he did not care what submarine commander
knew that he "learned about women from her." He and his companions
rocked the stars with "She knifed me one night." Daytimes they studied
French from the ground up. It was the second day out that I heard a
voice from just outside my porthole inquire "E-S-T--what's that and how
do you say it?" Later on the littlest ambulance driver had made marked
progress and was explaining "Mon oncle a une bonne fille, mais mon père
est riche."
Romance was not hard to find on the vessel. The slow waiter who limped
had been wounded at the Marne, and the little fat stewardess had spent
twenty-two days aboard the German raider _Eitel Friedrich_. There were
French soldiers in the steerage and one of them had the Croix de Guerre
with four palms. He had been wounded three times.
But when the ship came up the river the littlest ambulance driver--the
one who knew "est" and women--summed things up and decided that he was
glad to be an American. He looked around the deck at the Red Cross
nurses and others who had stood along the rail and cheered in the
submarine fight, and he said:
"I never would have thought it of 'em. It's kinda nice to know American
women have got so much nerve."
The littlest ambulance driver drew himself up to his full five feet four
and brushed his new uniform once again.
"Yes, sir," he said, "we men have certainly got to hand it to the girls
on this boat." And as he went down the gangplank he was humming: "And I
learned about women from her."