WHEN our soldiers arrive on foreign soil, almost invariably, so it has
seemed to me watching them, they come ashore with serious faces and for
the most part in silence. Their eyes are busy, but their tongues are
taking vacation. For the time being they have lost that tremendous
high-powered exuberance which marks them at home, in the camps and the
cantonments, and which we think is as much a part of the organism of the
optimistic American youth as his hands and his legs are.
I noticed this thing on the day our ship landed at an English port.
We came under convoy in a fleet made up almost entirely of transports
bearing troops--American volunteers, Canadian volunteers, and aliens
recruited on American soil for service with the Allies. A Canadian
battalion, newly organised, marched off its ship and out upon the same
pier on which the soldiers who had crossed on the vessel upon which I
was a passenger were disembarking. The Canadians behaved like schoolboys
on a holiday.
It was not what the most consistent defender of the climate of Great
Britain would call good holidaying weather either. A while that day it
snowed, and a while it rained, and all the while a shrewish wind scolded
shrilly in the wireless rig and rampaged along the damp and drafty
decks. Nevertheless, the Canadians were not to be daunted by the
inhospitable attitude of the elements.
One in three of them, about, carried a pennant bearing the name of his
home town or his home province, or else he carried a little flag mounted
on a walking stick. Nine out of ten, about, were whooping. They cheered
for the ship they were leaving; they cheered for the sister ship that
had borne us overseas along with them; they cheered to feel once more
the solid earth beneath their feet; they cheered just to be cheerful,
and, cheering so, they traversed the dock and took possession of the
train that stood on a waterside track waiting to bear them to a rest
camp. I imagine they were still cheering when they got there.
Now if you knew the types we had aboard our packet you might have been
justified in advance for figuring that our outfit would be giving those
joyous Canadian youngsters some spirited competition in the matter of
making noises. We carried a full regiment of a Western division, largely
made up, as to officers and as to men, of national guardsmen from the
states of Colorado, Wyoming and Washington. They were cow-punchers,
ranch hands, lumbermen, fruit growers, miners--outdoor men generally.
Eighty men in the ranks, so I had learned during the voyage, were
full-blooded Indians off of Northwestern reservations. We had men along
who had won prizes for bronco-busting and bull-dogging at Frontier Day
celebrations in Cheyenne and in California; also men who had travelled
with the Wild West shows as champion ropers and experts at rough-riding.
Never before, I am sure, had one vessel at one time borne in her decks
so many wind-tanned, bow-legged, hawk-faced, wiry Western Americans as
this vessel had borne.
But did one hear the lone-wolf howl as our fellows went filing down
the gang-planks? Did one catch the exultant, shrill yip-yip-yip of the
round-up or the far-carrying war yell of the Cheyenne buck? One most
emphatically did not. If those three thousand and odd fellows had all
been pallbearers officiating at the putting away of a dear departed
friend they could not have deported themselves more soberly. Nobody
carried a flag, unless you would except the colour bearers, who bore
their colours furled about the staffs and protected inside of tarpaulin
holsterings. Nobody waved a broad-brimmed hat either in salute to the
Old World or in farewell to the ocean. Barring the snapped commands of
the officers, the clinking in unison of hobbed and heavy boot soles,
the shuffle of moving bodies, the creak of leather girthings put under
strain, and occasionally the sharp clink and clatter of metal as some
dangling side arm struck against a guard rail or some man shifted his
piece, the march-off was accomplished without any noise whatsoever.
It was interesting--and significant, too, I think--to spy upon those
intent, set faces and those eager, steady eyes as the files went by and
so away, bound, by successive stages of progress, with halts between
at sessioning billets and at training barracks, for the battle fronts
beyond the channel.
As between the Canadian and the United States soldiers I interpreted
this striking difference in demeanour at the disembarking hour somewhat
after this fashion: To a good many of the Dominion lads, no doubt, the
thing was in the nature of a home-coming, for they had been born in
England. A great many more of them could not be more than one generation
removed from English birth. Anyhow and in either event, they as
thoroughly belonged to and were as entirely part and parcel of the
Empire as the islanders who greeted them upon the piers. One way or
another they had always lived on British soil and under the shadow of
the Union Jack. They were not strangers; neither were they aliens, even
though they had come a far way; they were joint inheritors with native
Englishmen of the glory that is England's. The men they would presently
fight beside were their own blood kin. Quite naturally therefore
and quite properly they commemorated the advent into the parent land
according to the manner of the Anglo-Saxon when he strives to cover up,
under a mien of boisterous enthusiasm, emotions of a purer sentiment.
I could conceive some of them as laughing very loudly because inside of
themselves they wanted to cry; as straining their vocal cords the better
to ease the twitch-ings at their heart cockles.
But the Americans, even if they wore names bespeaking British
ancestry--which I should say at an offhand guess at least seventy-five
per cent of them did--were not moved by any such feelings. Such ties as
might link their natures to the breed from which they remotely sprang
were the thinnest of ties, only to be revealed in times of stress
through the exhibition of certain characteristics shared by them in
common with their very distant English and Scotch and Irish and Welsh
kinsmen. For England as England they had no affectionate
yearnings. England wasn't their mother; she was merely their
great-great-grandmother, with whom their beloved Uncle Sam had had at
least two serious misunderstandings. To all intents and purposes this
was a strange land--certainly its physical characteristics had an alien
look to them--and to it they had come as strangers.
I fancy, though, the chief reasons for their quiet seriousness went
down to causes even deeper than this one. I believe that somehow the
importance of the task to which they had dedicated themselves and the
sense of the responsibility intrusted to them as armed representatives
of their own country's honour were brought to a focal point of
realisation in the minds of these American lads by the putting of foot
on European soil. The training they had undergone, the distances they
had travelled, the sea they had crossed--most of them, I gathered, had
never smelt salt water before in their lives--the sight of this foreign
city with its foreign aspect--all these things had chemically combined
to produce among them a complete appreciation of the size of the job
ahead of them; and the result made them dumb and sedate, and likewise it
rendered them aloof to surface sensations, leaving them insulated by a
sort of noncommittal pose not commonly found among young Americans in
the mass--or among older Americans in the mass for that matter.
Perhaps a psychologist might prove me wrong in these amateur deductions
of mine. For proof to bolster up my diagnosis I can only add that on
three subsequent occasions, when I saw American troops ferrying ashore
at French ports, they behaved in identically this same fashion, becoming
for a period to be measured by hours practically inarticulate and
incredibly earnest. Correspondents who chanced to be with me these three
several times were impressed as I had been by the phenomenon.
But the condition does not last; you may be very sure of that. If there
exists a more adaptable creature than the American soldier he has not
yet been tagged, classified and marked Exhibit A for identification.
Once the newly arrived Yank has lost his sea legs and regained his shore
ones; once the solemnity and incidentally the novelty of the ceremony of
his entrance into Europe has worn away; once he has learned how to think
of dollars and cents in terms of francs and centimes and how to speak
a few words in barbarous French--he reverts to type. His native
irreverence for things that are stately and traditional rises up within
him, renewed and sharpened; and from that moment forward he goes into
this business of making war against the Hun with an impudent grin
upon his face, and in his soul an incurable cheerfulness that neither
discomfort nor danger can alloy, and a joke forever on his lips. That
is the real essence of the trenches--the humour that is being secreted
there with the grimmest and ghastliest of all possible tragedies for a
background.
I wouldn't call it exactly a new type of humour, because always humour
has needed the contrast of dismalness and suffering to set it off
effectively, but personally I am of the opinion that it is a kind of
humour that is going to affect our literature and our mode of living
generally after the war is ended.
Bairnsfather, the English sketch artist, did not invent the particular
phase of whimsicality--the essentially distinctive variety of seriocomic
absurdity--which has made the world laugh at his pictures of Old Bill
and Bert and Alf. He did a more wonderful thing: he had the wit and the
genius to catch an illusive atmosphere which existed in the trenches
before he got there and to put it down in black on white without losing
any part of its savoury qualities. In slightly different words he
practically told me this when I ran across him up near the Front the
other day while he was setting about his new assignment of depicting the
humour of the American soldier as already he had depicted that of the
British Tommy. He had, he said, made one discovery already--that there
was a tremendous difference between the two schools.
This is quite true, and if some talented Frenchman--it will take a
Frenchman, of course--succeeds in making sketches that will reflect the
wartime humour of the French soldier as cleverly as Bairnsfather has
succeeded at the same job with the British high private for his model
it will no doubt be found that the poilu's brand of humour is as
distinctively his own as the American soldier's is or the English
soldier's is.
There is an indefinable something, yet something structurally French, I
think, in the fact that when Captain Hamilton Fish--called Ham Fish for
short--arrived in France a few weeks before this was written the French
soldiers with whom his command was brigaded immediately rechristened him
Le Capitaine Jambon Poisson, and under this new Gallicised name he is
to-day one of the best-known personages among the French in the country.
Likewise there is a certain African individuality, or rather an
Afro-American individuality, in the story now being circulated through
the expeditionary forces, of the private in one of our negro regiments
who bragged at his company mess of having taken out a life-insurance
policy for the full amount allowed a member of the Army, under the
present governmental plan.
“Whut you wan' do dat fur?” demanded a comrade. “You ain't married an'
you ain't got no fambly. Who you goin' leave all dat money to ef you
gits killed?”
“I ain't aimin' to git killed,” stated the first darky. “Dat's de very
reason I taken out all dat insho'ence.”
“How come you ain't liable to git killed jes' de same ez ary one of de
rest of us is?”
“W'y, you pore ign'ant fool, does you s'pose w'en Gin'el Pershing finds
out he's got a ten-thousand-dollar nigger in dis man's Army dat he's
gwine take any chances on losin' all dat money by sendin' me up to de
Front whar de trouble is? Naw suh-ree, he ain't!”
From a commingling of memories of recent events there stands out a thing
of which I was an eye-and-ear-witness back in April, when the first
of our divisions to go into the line of the great battle moved up and
across France from a quieter area over in Lorraine, where it had been
holding a sector during the early part of the spring. Each correspondent
was assigned to a separate regiment for the period of the advance,
being quartered in the headquarters mess of his particular regiment
and permitted to accompany its columns as it moved forward toward
the Picardy Front. That is to say, he was permitted to accompany its
columns, but it devolved upon him to furnish his own motive power.
Baggage trains and supply trains had been pared to the quick in order to
expedite fast marching; no provision for transporting outsiders had been
made, nor would any such provision have been permitted. A colonel was
lucky if he had an automobile to himself and his adjutant; generally he
had to carry a French liaison officer or two along with him in addition
to his personal equipment.
I had been added to the personnel of an infantry regiment, which meant
I could not steal an occasional ride while moving from one billet to
another on the jolting limber of a field gun. Such boons were vouchsafed
only to those more fortunate writers who belonged for the time being to
the artillery wing. One day I walked. I was lucky in that I did not
have to carry my bedding roll and my haversack; these a kindly disposed
ambulance driver smuggled into his wagon, rules and regulations to the
contrary notwithstanding.
Another day the philanthropic lieutenant colonel rode his saddle horse
and turned over to me his side car, the same being a sort of combination
of tin bathtub and individual bootblack stand, hitched onto a
three-wheeled motor cycle. What with impedimenta and all, rather
overflowed its accommodations, but from the bottoms of my blistered feet
to the topmost lock of my wind-tossed hair I was grateful to the donor
as we went scudding along, the steersman and I, at twenty-five miles an
hour.
On a third day I hired a venerable mare and an ancient two-wheeled
covered cart, with a yet more ancient Norman farmer to drive the outfit,
and under the vast poke-bonnet hood of the creaking vehicle the twain
of us journeyed without stopping, from early breakfast time until nearly
sunset time. The old man did not know a word of English, but mile after
mile as we plodded along, now overtaking the troops who had started
their hike at dawn, and now being overtaken by them as the antique mare
lost power in her ponderous but rheumatic legs, he conversed at me--not
with me, but steadily at me--in his provincial patois, which was the
same as Attic Greek to me, or even more so, inasmuch as the only French
I have is restaurant French, which begins with the hors d'oeuvres and
ends just south of the fromages among the standard desserts.
Nevertheless, I deemed it the part of politeness to show interest by
making a response from time to time when he was pausing to take a fresh
breath. So about once in so often I would murmur “Yes,” with the rising
inflection, or “No,” or “Is that so?” or “Can such things really be?”
as the spirit moved me. And always he seemed perfectly satisfied with my
observations, which he could not hear--I should have stated before now
that among other things he was stone-deaf--and wouldn't have been able
to understand even if he had heard them. And then he would go right on
talking some more. From his standpoint, I am convinced, it was a most
enjoyable journey and a highly instructive one besides.
Along toward sunset we ambled with the utmost possible deliberation
into our destination. It was like the average small town of Northwestern
France in certain regards. At a little distance it seemed to be all
gable ends jumbled together haphazard and anyhow, as is the way of
village architecture in this corner of the world; and following an almost
universal pattern the houses scraped sides with one another in a double
file along the twisting main street, only swinging back to form a sort
of irregular square in the centre.
Here, in the heart of things communal, the grey church reared its bulk
above all lesser structures, with the school and the town hall facing
it, flanked one side by the town pump and the town shrine and the other
side by a public pond, where the horses and the cows watered, and grave,
plump little French children played along the muddy brink. But this
place had an air of antiquity which showed it antedated most of its
fellows even in a land where everything goes back into bygone centuries.
Indeed, the guidebook in peace days, when people used guidebooks, gave
it upward of a page of fine print--not so much for what it now was, but
for what once upon a time it had been. Julius Cæsar had founded it and
named it--and certain of the ruins of the original battlement still
stood in massy but shapeless clumps, while other parts had been utilised
to form the back ends of houses and barns and cowsheds. One of the first
of those pitiable caravans of innocents that swelled the ranks of the
Children's Crusade had been recruited here; and through the ages this
town, inconsequential as it had become in these latter times, gave to
France and to the world a great chronicler, a great churchman and at
least one great warrior.
What a transformation the mere coming of our troops had made! In the
public pond a squad of supply-trainsmen were sluicing down four huge
motor trucks that stood hub deep in the yellow water--“bathing the
elephants” our fellows called this job. Over rutted paving stones that
once upon a time had bruised the bare feet of captured Frankish warriors
Missouri mules were yanking along the baggage wagons, and their dangling
trace chains clinked against the cobbles just as the fetters on the
ankles of the prisoners must have clinked away back yonder.
In a courtyard where Roman soldiers may have played at knucklebones
a portable army range sent up a cloud of pungent wood smoke from
its abbreviated stack, and with the smell of the fire was mingled
a satisfying odour of soldier-grub stewing. Plainly there would be
something with onions in it--probably “Mulligan”--for supper this night.
Under a moss-hung wall against which, according to tradition, Peter the
Hermit stood with the cross in his hand calling the crusaders to march
with him to deliver the sepulchre of the Saviour out of the impious
hands of the heathen, a line of tired Yankee lads were sprawled upon
the scanty grass doing nothing at all except resting. There were wooden
signs lettered in English--“Regimental Headquarters,” and “Hospital,”
and “Intelligence Offices”--fastened to stone door lintels which time
had seamed and scored with deep lines like the wrinkles in an old dame's
face. Khaki-clad figures were to be seen wherever you looked.
Up the twisting and hilly street toiled a company belonging to my
particular regiment, and as they came into the billeting place and I new
the march was over, the wearied and burdened boys started singing the
Doughboys' Song, which with divers variations is always sung in any
infantry outfit that has a skeleton formation of old Regular Army men
for its core, as this outfit had, and which to the extent of the first
verse runs like this:
Here come the doughboys
With dirt behind their ears!
Here come the doughboys--
Their pay is in arrears.
The cavalree, artilleree, and the lousy engineers--
They couldn't lick the doughboys
In a hundred thousand years.
To the swinging lilt of the air the column angled past where my cart was
halted; and as it passed, the official minstrel of the company was moved
to deliver himself of another verse, evidently of his own composition
and dealing in a commemorative fashion with recent sentimental
experiences. As I caught the lines and set them down in my notebook they
were:
Here go the doughboys--
Good-bye, you little dears!
Here go the doughboys--
The girls is all in tears!
The june ferns and the gossongs
And the jolly old mong peres--
Well, they wont fur git the doughboys
For at least a hundred years!
The troubadour with his mates rounded the outjutting corner of the church
beyond the shrine, and I became aware of a highly muddied youngster who
sat in a cottage doorway with his legs extending out across the
curbing, engaged in literary labours. From the facts that he balanced
a leather-backed book upon one knee and held a stub of a pencil poised
above a fair clean page I deduced that he was posting his diary to date.
Lots of the American privates keep war diaries--except when they forget
to, which is oftener than not.
Three months before, or possibly six, the boy in the doorway would have
been a strange figure in a strange setting. About him was scarce an
object, save for the shifting figures of his own kind, to suggest the
place whence he hailed. The broom that leaned against the wall alongside
him was the only new thing in view. It was made of a sheaf of willow
twigs bound about a staff. The stone well curb ten feet away was covered
with the slow lichen growth of centuries. The house behind him, to judge
by the thickness of its thatched and wattled roof and by the erosions in
its three-foot walls of stone, had been standing for hundreds of years
before the great-granddaddies of his generation fought the Indians for a
right to a home site in the wilderness beyond the Alleghanies.
But now he was most thoroughly at home--and looked it. He spoke,
addressing a companion stretched out upon the earth across the narrow
way, and his voice carried the flat, slightly nasal accent of the
midwestern corn-lands:
“Say, Murf, what's the name of this blamed town, anyhow?”
“Search me. Maybe they ain't never named it. I know you can't buy a
decent cigarette in it, 'cause I've tried. The 'Y' ain't opened up yet
and the local shops've got nothin' that a white man'd smoke, not if
he never smoked again. What difference does the name make, anyway? All
these towns are just alike, ain't they?”
With the sophisticated eyes of a potential citizen of, say, Weeping
Willow, Nebraska, the first speaker considered the wonderfully quaint
and picturesque vista of weathered, slant-ended cottages stretching away
down the hill, and then, as he moistened the tip of his pencil with the
tip of his tongue:
“You shore said a mouthful--they're all just alike, only some's
funnier-lookin' than others. I wonder why they don't paint up and use a
little whitewash once in a while. Take that little house yonder now!”
He pointed his pencil toward a thatched cottage over whose crooked lines
and mottled colours a painter would rave. “If you was to put a decent
shingle roof on her and paint her white, with green trimmin's round the
doors and winders, she wouldn't be half bad to look at. Now, would she?
No cigarettes, huh? Nor nothin'!” Inspiration came to him as out of the
skies and he grinned at his own conceit. “Tell you what--I'll jest put
it down as 'Nowhere in France' and let it go at that.”
On the following day my friend, the lieutenant colonel, brought to the
noonday mess a tale which I thought carried a distinct flavour of the
Yankee trench essence. There was a captain in the regiment, a last
year's graduate of the Academy, who wore the shiniest boots in all the
land round about and the smartest Sam Browne belt, and who owned the
most ornate pair of riding trousers, and by other signs and
portents showed he had done his best to make the world safe for some
sporting-goods emporium back in the States. This captain, it seemed, had
approached a sergeant who was in charge of a squad engaged in policing
the village street, which is army talk for tidying up with shovel and
wheelbarrow.
“See here, sergeant,” demanded the young captain, “why don't you keep
your men moving properly?”
“I'm tryin' to, sir,” answered the sergeant.
“Well, look at that man yonder,” said the captain, pointing toward a
languid buck private who was leaning on his shovel. “I've been watching
him and he hasn't moved an inch, except to scratch himself, for the last
five minutes. Now go over there and stir him up! Shoot it into him good
and proper! I want to hear what you say to him.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, saluting.
With no suspicion of a grin upon his face he charged down upon the
delinquent.
“Here, you!” he shouted. “What do you mean, loafin' round here doin'
nothin'? What do you think you are, anyhow--one of them dam' West
Pointers?”
Floyd Gibbons, who was subsequently so badly wounded, rode one day into
a battery of heavy artillery on the Montdidier Front. A begrimed battery
man hailed him from a covert of green sods and camouflage where a
six-inch gun squatted: “You're with the Chicago _Tribune_, ain't you?”
“Yes,” answered Gibbons. “Why?”
“Well, I just thought I'd tell you that the fellows in this battery have
got a favourite line of daily readin' matter of their own, these days.”
“What do you call it?” inquired Gibbons. “We call it the Old Flannel
Shirt,” answered the gunner. “Almost any time you can see a fellow round
here goin' through his copy of it for hours on a stretch. He's always
sure to find something interestin' too. We may not be what you'd call
bookworms in this bunch, but we certainly are the champion little
cootie-chasers of the United States Army.”
Body vermin or wet clothes or bad billets or the chance of a sudden and
a violent taking-off--no matter what it is--the American soldier may be
counted upon to make a joke of it.
This ability to distil a laugh out of what would cause many a civilian
to swear or weep or quit in despair serves more objects than one in our
expeditionary forces. For one thing it keeps the rank and file of the
Army in cheerful mood to have the mass leavened by so many youths of
an unquenchable spirit. For another, it provides a common ground for
fraternising when Americans and Britishers are brigaded together or
when they hold adjoining sectors; for the Britisher in this regard is
constituted very much as the American is, except that his humour is apt
to assume the form of underestimation of a thing, whereas the American's
fancy customarily runs to gorgeous hyperbole and arrant exaggeration.
In a certain Canadian battalion that has made a splendid record for
itself--though for that matter you could say the same of every Canadian
battalion that has crossed the sea since the war began--there is a young
chap whom we will call Sergeant Fulton, because that is not his real
name. This Sergeant Fulton comes from one of the states west of the
Great Divide, and he elected on his own account and of his own accord to
get into the fighting nearly two years before his country went to
war. In addition to being a remarkably handsome and personable youth,
Sergeant Fulton is probably the best rifle shot of his age in the
Dominion forces. This gift of his, which is so valuable a gift in trench
fighting, was made apparent to his superior officers immediately after
he crossed the Canadian line in 1915 to enlist, whereupon he very
promptly was promoted from the ranks to be a non-com, and when his
command got into action in France he was detailed for sniper duty.
At that congenial employment the youngster has been distinguishing
himself ever since. Into the rifle pits young Fulton took something
besides his ability to hit whatever he shot at, and his marvellous
eyesight--he took a most enormous distaste for the institution of
royalty; and this, too, in spite of the fact that when he joined up he
swore allegiance to His Gracious Majesty George the Fifth. His ideas of
royalty seemingly were based upon things he read in school histories.
His conception of the present occupant of the English throne was a
person mentally gaited very much like Henry the Eighth or Richard the
Third, except with a worse disposition than either of those historic
characters had. Apparently he conceived of the incumbent as rising in
the morning and putting on a gold crown and sending a batch of nobles to
the Tower, after which he enacted a number of unjust laws and, unless he
felt better toward evening, possibly had a few heads off.
Acquaintance with his comrades at arms served to rid Sergeant Fulton of
some of these beliefs, but despite broadening influences he has
never ceased to wonder--generally doing his wondering in a loud clear
voice--how any man who loved the breath of freedom in his nostrils found
it endurable to live under a king when he might if he chose live under a
President named Woodrow Wilson.
One morning just at daybreak a Canadian captain--who, by the way, told
me this tale--crawled into a shell hole near the German lines where
Sergeant Fulton and two other expert riflemen had been lying all night,
like big-game hunters at a water hole, waiting for dawn to bring them
their chance. One of Fulton's mates was a Vancouver lad, the other a
London Tommy--a typical East-ender, but a very smart sniper.
“Cap,” whispered Fulton, from where he lay stretched on his belly in the
herbage at the edge of the crater, “you've got here just in time. Ever
since it began to get light a Fritzie has been digging over there in
their front trench. I've had him spotted for half an hour. He has to
squat down to dig; and that's telling on his back. Before long I figure
he's going to straighten up to get the crick out of himself. When he
does he'll show his head above the parapet, and that's when I'm going to
part his hair in the middle with a bullet. Take a squint, Cap, through
the periscope and you'll be able to locate him, dead easy. Then stay
right there and you'll see the surprise party come off.”
So the captain took a squint as informally requested. Sure enough, a
hundred yards away, across the debatable territory, pocked with ragged
shell pits and traversed by its two festering brown tangles of rusty
barbed wire, he could see the flash of an uplifted shovel blade and
see the brown clods flying over the lip of the enemy's parapet. He kept
watching. Presently for just a tiny fraction of time the round cap of a
German infantryman appeared above the earthen protection. The sergeant
had guessed right, and the sergeant's gun spoke once. Once was enough--a
greenhorn at this game would have known that much.
For there was a shriek over there, and a pair of empty outstretched
hands were to be seen for one instant, with the fingers clutching at
nothing; and then they disappeared, as their owner collapsed into the
hole he had been digging.
Then, according to the captain, as the sergeant opened his rifle breach
he turned toward the Cockney who crowded alongside him, and with a
gratified grin on his face and a weight of sarcasm in his voice he said:
“There goes another one, eh, bo, for King and Country?”
The Londoner answered on the instant, taking the same tone in the reply
that the American had taken in the taunt. “My word,” he said, “but Gawge
will be pleased w'en 'e 'ears wot you done fur 'im!”
Three of us made a long trip by automobile to pay a visit to a coloured
regiment, both trip and visit being described elsewhere in these
writings. The results more than repaid us for the time and trouble. One
of the main compensations was First Class Private Cooksey, who, because
he used to be an elevator attendant in a Harlem apartment house, gave
his occupation in his enlistment blank as “indoor chauffeur.” It was to
First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel of the regiment, seeing the
expression on the other's face when a _Minenwerfer_ from a German mortar
fell near by on the day the command moved up to the Front, and made
a hole in the earth deep enough and wide enough and long enough to hide
the average smokehouse in--it was, I repeat, to First Class Private
Cooksey that the colonel put this question:
“Cooksey, if one of those things drops right here alongside of us and
goes off, are you going to stay by me?”
“Kurnal,” stated Private Cooksey with sincerity, “I ain't goin' tell you
no lie. Ef one of them things busts clost to me I'll jest natch-elly be
obliged to go away frum here. But please, suh, don't you set me down as
no deserter. Jest put it in de books as 'absent without leave,' 'cause
I'll be due back jest ez soon ez I kin git my brakes to work.”
“But what if the enemy suddenly appears in force without any preliminary
bombardment?” pressed the colonel. “What do you think you and the rest
of the boys will do then?”
“Kurnal,” said Cooksey earnestly, “we may not stick by you but we'll
shore render one service anyway: We'll spread de word all over France
'at de Germans is comin'!”
Nevertheless, when the Germans did advance it is of record that neither
First Class Private Cooksey nor any of his black and brown mates showed
the white feather or the yellow streak or the turned back. Those to whom
the test came stayed and fought, and it was the Germans who went away.
It was a member of the Fifteenth who in all apparent seriousness
suggested to his captain that it might be a good idea to cross the
carrier pigeon with the poll parrot so that when a bird came back from
the Front it would be able to talk its own message instead of bringing
it along hitched to its shank.
Speaking of carrier pigeons reminds me of a yam that may or may not be
true--it sounds almost too good to be true--that is being related at the
Front. The version most frequently told has it that a half company of
a regiment in the Rainbow Division going forward early one morning in a
heavy fog for a raid across No Man's Land carried along with the rest of
the customary equipment a homing pigeon. The pigeon in its wicker cage
swung on the arm of a private, who likewise was burdened with his rifle,
his extra rounds of ammunition, his trenching tool, his pair of wire
cutters, his steel helmet, his gas mask, his emergency ration and quite
a number of other more or less cumbersome items.
It was to be a surprise attack behind the cloak of the fog, so there
was no artillery preparation beforehand nor barrage fire as the squads
climbed over the top and advanced into the mist-hidden beyond. Behind,
in the posts of observation and in the post of command--“P.O.” and
“P.C.” these are called in the algebraic terminology of modern war--the
colonel and his aids and his intelligence officers waited for the sound
of firing, and when after some minutes the distant rattle of rifle fire
came to their ears they began calculating how long reasonably it might
be before word reached them by one or another medium of communication
touching on the results of the foray. But the ground telephone remained
mute, and no runner returned through the fog with tidings. The suspense
tautened as time passed.
Suddenly a pigeon sped into view flying close to the earth. With scores
of pairs of eager eyes following it in its course the winged messenger
circled until it located its portable cote just behind the colonel's
position, and fluttering down it entered its familiar shelter.
An athletic member of the staff hustled up the ladder. In half a minute
he was tumbling down again, clutching in one hand the little scroll of
paper that he had found fastened about the pigeon's leg. With fingers
that trembled in anxiety the colonel unrolled the paper and read aloud
what was written upon it.
What he read, in the hurried chirography of a kid private, was the
following succinct statement: “I'm tired of carrying this derned bird.”
In London one night Don Martin, of the New York _Herald_, and I were
crossing the Strand just above Trafalgar Square. In the murk of the
unlighted street we bumped into a group of four uniformed figures.
Looking close we made out that one was an American soldier, that one was
a lanky Scot in kilts, slightly under the influence of something even
more exhilarating than the music of the pipes, and that the remaining
two were English privates. We gathered right away that an international
discussion of some sort was under way. At the moment of our approach the
American, a little dark fellow who spoke with an accent that betrayed
his Italian nativity, had the floor, or rather he had the sidewalk. We
halted in the half-darkness to listen.
“It's lika thees,” expounded the Yanko-Italian, “w'en I say 'I should
worry' it mean--it mean--why, it mean I shoulda not worry. You getta me,
huh?”
He glanced about him, plainly pleased with the very clear and
comprehensive explanation of this expressive bit of Americanism, which
had come to him in a sudden burst of inspiration.
The others stared at him blankly. It was one of the Englishmen who broke
the silence.
“You 'ave nothin' to worry habout hat all, and so you say that you hare
worryin'--his that hit?” he inquired. The American nodded. “Well, then,
hall Hi can say his hit sounds like barmy Yankee nonsense to me.”
“Lusten here, laddie, to me,” put in the Scotchman. “If you've naught to
worry about, why speak of it at all? That's whut I would be pleased to
know.”
“Hoh, never mind,” spoke up the second Englishman; “let's go get
hanother drink at the pub.”
“You're too late,” stated his countryman in lachrymose tones. “While
we've been chin-chinnin' 'ere the bloomin' pub 'as closed--it's arfter
hours for a drink.”
But the canny Scot already was feeling about with a huge paw in the back
folds of his kilt. From some mysterious recess he slowly drew forth a
flat flask.
“Lads,” he stated happily, “in the language of our American friend here,
we should worry, because as it happens, thanks to me own forethought, we
ha' na need to concern ourselves wi' worryin' at all, d'ye ken? Ha' the
furst nip, Yank!”
This recital would not be complete did I fail to include in it a
paragraph or so touching on the humorous proclivities of--guess
who!--the commander of a German submarine, no less; a person who
operated last winter mainly off the southernmost tip of Ireland with
occasional incursions into the British Channel. This facetious Teuton
was known to the crews of the British and American destroyers that did
their best to sink him--and finally, it is believed, did sink him--as
Kelly. Indeed in the derisive messages that this deep-sea joker used to
send over the wireless to our stations he customarily signed himself by
that name.
One day shortly before Kelly's U-boat disappeared altogether a commander
of an American destroyer was sending by radio to a French port a message
giving what he believed to be the probable location of the pestiferous
but cheerful foe. It must have been that the subject of his
communication was listening in on the air waves and that he knew the
code which the American was that day employing. For all at once he broke
in with his own wireless, and this was what the astonished operator at
the receiving station on shore got:
“Your longitude is fine, your latitude is rotten. This place is getting
too warm for me. I'm going to beat it. Good-bye. Kelly.”
Shortly after the first division of our new National Army reached France
a group of fifty men were sent from it as replacements in the ranks of
an old National Guard regiment which had been over for some time and
which had suffered casualties and losses. When the squad went forward to
their new assignment the general commanding the brigade from which the
chosen fifty had been drawn sent to the commander of the regiment for
which they were bound a letter reading somewhat after this style:
“There are not better men in our Army anywhere than the fifty I am
giving you, in accordance with an order received by me from General
Headquarters. Please see to it that no one in your regiment, whether
officer or private, refers by word, look, deed or gesture to the
circumstances under which these fifty men entered the service. Drafted
men, regulars and volunteers are all on the same footing, and merely
because my men came in with the draft and yours to a large extent
came in a little earlier is no reason why any discrimination should be
permitted in any quarter.”
A few weeks after the transfer had been accomplished the brigadier met
the colonel, and recalling to the latter the sense of the letter he had
written inquired whether there had been any suggestion of superiority on
the part of the former National Guardsmen toward the new arrivals.
“General,” broke out the colonel, “do you know what those infernal
cheeky scoundrels of yours have been doing ever since they joined? Well,
I'm going to tell you. They've been walking to and fro in my regiment
with their noses stuck up in the air, calling my boys 'draft-dodgers!”'
It's the essence of the trenches. And it's that--plus the courage they
bring and the enthusiasm they have--which is winning this war sooner
than some of the croakers at home expect it to be won.