HE 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.
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.
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.
“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!”
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.
“Well, what?”
“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?”
“With all the money they'll get for that guy they should worry!”
The emphatic ker-blim of a rifle a hundred yards off furnished a vocal
exclamation point to further accent the comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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:
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Not far away and almost directly in front of me one of those
yellow-breasted starling birds was trying his song with considerable
success.
“How far away are they?” I inquired in the softest possible of whispers
of the nearer-most of the hole's tenants.
“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.”
Involuntarily I drew my head down into my shoulders. The youth alongside
laughed a noiseless laugh.
“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.”
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:
“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.”
The captain wormed into the burrow, filling it until it would hold no
more.
“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.
Before I could answer the private put in:
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”