THE 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“You think this is brisk, eh?” asked our friend, the major. “Well, it's
only the starter; the ball has just opened.”
He tucked his thumbs into the girth harnessings of his Sam Browne and
spraddled his legs wide apart.
“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?”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The major consulted the luminous face of his wrist watch.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
“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.”
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:
“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.”
“How's that?” I asked.
“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.
“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?'
“That substantially was what every one of them said. And when I turned
them down some of 'em went away crying like babies.”
He glanced away across the blue hill. “I guess maybe I did a little
crying myself.”
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.
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:
“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.
“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!”