YOU rode along a highroad that was built wide and ran straight, miles
on, and through a birch forest that was very dense and yet somehow very
orderly, as is the way with French highroads, and with French forests,
too, and after a while you came to where the woods frazzled away from
close-ranked white trunks into a fringing of lacy undergrowth, all giddy
and all gaudy with wild flowers of many a colour.
Here, in a narrow clearing that traversed the thickets at right
angles to the course you had been following, there disclosed himself a
high-garbed North American mule, a little bit under weight, so that his
backbone stood out sharply like the ridgepole of a roof pitched steep,
with hollows by his hip joints to catch the rain water in. Viewing him
astern or on the quarter you discerned that his prevalent architecture,
though mixed, inclined to the mansard type. Viewing him bow-on you
observed that he wore a gas mask upon his high and narrow temples and
that from beneath this adornment, which would be startling elsewhere but
which at the Front is both commonplace and customary, he contemplated
the immediate foreground with half-closed, indolent eyes and altogether
was as much at home as though his chin rested upon the hickory top rider
of a snake fence in his native Ozarks instead of resting, as it did,
athwart the crosspiece of a low signpost reading: “Danger Beyond--All
Cars Halt Here! Proceed Afoot!”
You might be sure that never did any mule born in Missouri take his
languid ease amid surroundings more unique for a mule to be in, inside
or outside of that sovereign commonwealth. There was, to begin with,
his gas mask, draped upon the spindled brow and ready, on warning, to
be yanked down over the muzzle and latched fast beneath the throat;
probably as a veteran mule he was used to that. But there were other
things: High-velocity shells from a battery of six-inches somewhere in
the woods to the west were going over his head at regular half-minute
intervals, each in its passage making a sound as though everybody on
earth in chorus had said “Whew-w-w-! “--like that. Merely by cocking an
eyelid aloft he could have beheld, sundry thousands of feet up, three
French combat planes hunting a German raider back to his own lines, the
French motors humming steadily like honeybees but the German droning to
a deeper note with sullen heavy rift tones breaking into its cadences,
for all the world like one of those big noisy beetles that invade your
bedchamber on a hot night. Merely by squinting straight ahead he could
have seen at the farther edge of the little glade a triple row of white
crosses, each set off by the wooden rosette device in red, white and
blue with which the French, when given time, mark the graves of their
fallen fighters. Merely by sniffing he could have caught from a mile
distant the faint but unmistakable reek that hangs over battlefields
when they are getting to be old battlefields but are not yet very old,
and that nearly always distresses green work animals at the first time
of taking it into their nostrils. None of these things he did though,
but remained content and motionless save for his wagging ears and his
switching tail and his uneasy lower lip. He was just standing there,
letting the hot sunshine seep into him through all his pores.
Otherwise, however, his more adjacent settings were in a manner of
speaking conventional and according to mules. For he was attached by
virtue of an improvised gear of wire ropes and worn leather breeching
to a small fiat car that bestraddled a rusty railroad track; and at his
head stood a ginger-coloured youth of twenty years or thereabouts.
In our own land you somehow expect, when you find a mule engaged in
industry, to find an American of African antecedents managing him. So
the combination was in keeping with the popular conception. Only in
this instance the attendant youth wore part of a uniform and had a steel
shrapnel helmet clamped down upon his skull.
Said youth caught a nod from a corporal of his own race who lounged
against a broken wall, the wall being practically all that remained of
what once had been the home of a crossings guard alongside a railroad
that was a real railroad no longer; and at that he climbed nimbly on
muleback.
He gathered up the guiding strings, and this then was the starting
signal he gave as he showed all his teeth--he seemed to have fifty
teeth at least--in a gorgeous and friendly grin: “All abo'd fur the
Fifty-nint' Street crosstown line!”
By that you would have known, if you knew your New York at all, that
this particular muleteer must hail from that nook of Li'l Ole Manhattan
which since the days of the Yanko-Spanko war, when a certain group of
black troopers did a certain valiant thing, has been called San Juan
Hill, and that away off here where now he was, in the back edges
of France, he had in his own mind at the moment a picture of West
Fifty-ninth Street as it might look--and probably would--on this bright
warm afternoon, stretching as a narrow band, biaswise, of the town from
the Black Belt on the West Side with its abutting chop-suey parlours and
its fragrant barber shops and its clubrooms for head and side waiters,
on past Columbus Circle into the lighter coloured districts to the
eastward; and likewise that since he did have the image in his mind he
perhaps grinned his toothful grin to hide a pang of homesickness for the
place where he belonged.
I figured that I knew these things, who had journeyed by motor with two
more for a hundred and eighty miles across country to pay a visit to the
first sector in our front lines that had been taken over by a regiment
of negro volunteers--?-now by reason of departmental classifyings known
as the Three Hundred and Somethingth of the American Expeditionary
Forces. Because New York was where I also belonged, and this genial
postilion was of a breed made familiar to me long time ago in
surroundings vastly dissimilar to these present ones.
To the three of us word had come, no matter how, that negro troops of
ours were in the line. No authoritative announcement to that effect
having been forthcoming, we were at the first hearing of the news
skeptical. To be sure the big movement overseas was at last definitely
and audaciously under way; the current month's programme called for the
landing on French soil of two hundred thousand Americans of fighting age
and fighting dispositions, which contract, I might add, was carried out
so thoroughly that not only the promised two hundred thousand but a good
and heaping measure of nearly sixty thousand more on top of that arrived
before the thirtieth. It is The Glory of the Coming all right, this
great thing that has happened this summer over here, and I am glad that
mine eyes have seen it. It is almost the finest thing that the eye of
an American of this generation has yet seen or is likely to see before
Germany herself is invaded.
But even though the sea lanes were streaky with the wakes of our convoys
and the disembarkation ports cluttered with our transports, we doubted
that coloured troops were as yet facing the enemy across the barbed-wire
boundaries that separate him from us. Possibly this was because we
had grown accustomed to thinking of our negroes as members of labour
battalions working along the lines of communication--unloading ships
and putting up warehouses and building depots and felling trees in the
forests of France, which seem doomed to fall either through shelling or
by the axes of the timbering crews of the Allies.
“You must be wrong,” we said to him who brought us the report. “You
must have seen an unusually big lot of negroes going up to work in the
lumber camps in the woods at the north.”
“No such thing,” he said. “I tell you that we've got black soldiers on
the job--at least two regiments of them. There's a draft regiment from
somewhere down South, and another regiment from one of the Eastern
States--one of the old National Guard outfits I think it is--about
fifteen miles to the east of the first lot. Here, I can show you about
where they are--if anybody's got a map handy.”
Everybody had a map handy. A correspondent no more thinks of moving
about without a map than he thinks of moving about without a gas mask
and a white paper, which is a pass. He wouldn't dare move without the
mask; he couldn't move far without the pass, and the next to these two
the map is the most needful part of his travelling equipment.
So that was how the quest started. As we came nearer to the somewhat
indefinitely located spot for which we sought, the signs that we were
on a true trail multiplied, in bits of evidence offered by supply-train
drivers who told us they lately had met negro troopers on the march
in considerable number. As a matter of fact there were then four black
regiments instead of two taking up sector positions in our plan of
defence. However, that fact was to develop later through a statement put
forth with the approval of the censor at General Headquarters.
After some seven hours of reasonably swift travel in a high-powered car
we had left behind the more peaceful districts back of the debatable
areas and were entering into the edges of a village that had been
shot to bits in the great offensive of 1914, which afterward had been
partially rebuilt and which lately had been abandoned again, after the
great offensive of 1918 started.
Right here from somewhere in the impending clutter of nondescript
ruination we heard many voices singing all together. The song was a
strange enough song for these surroundings. Once before in my life and
only once I have heard it, and that was five years ago on an island off
the coast of Georgia. I don't think it ever had a name and the author of
it had somehow got the Crucifixion and the Discovery of America confused
in his mind.
We halted the car behind the damaged wall of an abandoned garden, not
wishing to come upon the unseen choristers until they had finished.
Their voices rose with the true camp-meeting quaver, giving reverence to
the lines:
In Fo'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-one
'Tuna den my Saviour's work begun.
And next the chorus, long-drawn-out and mournful:
Oh, dey nailed my Saviour 'pen de cross,
But he never spoke a mumblin' word.
I was explaining to my companions, both of them Northern-born, that
mumbling in the language of the tidewater darky means complaining and
not what it means with us, but they bade me hush while we hearkened to
the next two verses, each of two lines, with the chorus repeated after
the second line:
In Fo'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-two
My Lawd begin his work to do!
In F o'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-three
Dey nailed my Saviour on de gallows tree.
And back to the first verse--there were only three verses, it
seemed--and through to the third, over and over again.
An invisible choir leader broke in with a different song and the others
caught it up. But this one we all knew--My Soul Bears Witness to de
Lawd--so we started the machine and rode round from back of the wall.
The singers, twenty or more of them, were lying at ease on the earth
alongside a house in the bright, baking sunshine of a still young but
very ardent summer. On beyond them everywhere the place swarmed with
their fellows in khaki, some doing nothing at all and some doing the
things that an American soldier, be he black or white, is apt to do when
off duty in billets. Almost without exception they were big men, with
broad shoulders and necks like bullocks, and their muscles bulged their
sleeves almost to bursting. From the fact that nine out of ten were
coal-black and from a certain intonation in their voices never found
among up-country negroes, a man familiar with the dialects and the types
of the Far South might know them for natives of the rice fields and the
palmetto barrens of the coast. Lower Georgia and South Carolina--there
was where they had come from plainly enough, with perhaps a sprinkling
among them of Florida negroes. Our course, steered as it was by chance
reckoning, had nevertheless been a true one.
We had found the draft outfit first. By the same token, if our original
informant had been right, another negro regiment--of volunteers this
time--would be found some fifteen miles to the eastward and northward
of where we were; and this latter unit was the one whose whereabouts we
mainly desired to discover, since, if it turned out to be the regiment
we thought it must be, its colonel would be a personal friend of all
three of us and his adjutant would be a former copy reader who had
served on the staff of the same evening newspaper years before, with two
of us.
We halted a while to pay our respects to the commander of these
strapping big black men--a West Pointer, still in his thirties and
inordinately proud of the outfit that was under him. He had cause to be.
I used to think that sitting down was the natural gait of the tidewater
darky; but here, as any one who looked might see, were soldiers who bore
themselves as smartly, who were as snappy at the salute and as sharp set
at the drill as any of their lighter-skinned fellow Americans in service
anywhere. Most of the officers were Southern-born men, they having been
purposely picked because of a belief that they would understand the
negro temperament. That the choosing of Southern officers had been a
sane choosing was proved already, I think, by what we saw as well as
by things we heard that day. For example, one of the majors--a young
Tennesseean--told us this tale, laughing while he told us:
“We've abolished two of our sentry posts in this town. Right over
yonder, beyond what's left of the village church, is what's left of the
village cemetery. I'll take you to see it if you care to go, though
it's not a very pleasant sight. For a year or more back in 1914 and 1915
shells used to fall in it pretty regularly and rip open the graves and
scatter the bones of those poor folks who were buried there--you know
the sort of thing you're likely to find in any of these little places
that have been under heavy bombardment. Well, when we moved here a week
and a half ago and got settled a delegation from the ranks waited on the
C. O. They told him that they had come over here to fight the Germans
and that they were willing to fight the Germans and anxious to start the
job right away, but that, discipline or no discipline, war or no war,
orders or no orders, they just naturally couldn't be made to hang round
a cemetery after dark.
“'Kernul, suh,' the spokesman said, 'ef you posts any of us cullud boys
'longside dat air buryin' ground, w'y long about midnight somethin'll
happen an' you's sartain shore to be shy a couple of niggers when de
mawnin' comes. Kernul, suh, we don't none of us wanter be shot fur
runnin' 'way, but dat's perzactly whut's gwine happen ef ary one of us
has to march back an' fo'th by dat place w'en de darkness of de night
sets in.' And the colonel understood, and he took mercy on 'em, so
that's why if the Germans should happen to arrive at night by way of
the graveyard they could march right among us, probably without having a
shot fired at them.
“But don't think our boys are afraid,” the young major added with pride
in his voice. “I'd take a chance on going anywhere with these black
soldiers at my back. So would any of the rest of the officers. We
haven't had any actual fighting experience yet--that'll come in a week
or two when we relieve a French regiment that's just here in front of
us holding the front lines--but we are not worrying about what'll happen
when we get our baptism of fire. Only I'm afraid we're going to have a
mighty disappointed regiment on our hands in about two months from now,
when these black boys of ours find out that even in the middle of August
watermelons don't grow in Northern France.”
As we left the regimental headquarters, which was a half-shattered wine
shop with breaches in the wall and less than half a roof to its top
floor, the young major went along with us to our car to give our
chauffeur better directions touching on a maze of cross roads along the
last lap of the run.
En route he enriched my notebook with a lovely story, having the merit
moreover--a merit that not all lovely stories have--of being true.
“Day before yesterday,” so his narrative ran, “we began drilling the
squads in grenade throwing--with live grenades. Up until then we'd
exercised them only on dummy grenades, but now they were going to try
out the real thing. We had batches of the new grenades--the kind that
are exploded by striking the cap at the lower end upon something hard.
You probably know how the drill is carried on: At the call of 'One'
from the squad commander the men strike the cap ends against a stone
or something; at 'Two' they draw back the thing full arm length, and at
'Three' they toss it with a stiff overhand swing. There's plenty of time
of course for all this if nobody fumbles, because the way the fuses
are timed five seconds elapse between the striking of the cap and the
explosion. If you fling your grenade too soon a Heinie is liable to pick
it up and throw it back at you before it goes off. If you hold it
too long you're apt to lose an arm or your life. That's why we are so
particular about timing the movements.
“Well, one squad lined up out here in a field with their eyes bulging
out like china door knobs. They were game enough but they weren't very
happy. The moment the word 'One' was given a little stumpy darky in my
battalion that we call Sugar Foot flung his grenade as far as he could.
“When the rest of the grenades had been thrown the platoon commander
jumped all over Sugar Foot. He said to him: 'Look here, what did you
mean by throwing that grenade before these other boys threw theirs?
Don't you know enough to wait for “Three” before you turn loose?'
“'Yas, suh, lieutenant,' says Sugar Foot; 'but I jes' natchelly had
to th'ow it. W'y, lieutenant, I could feel dat thing a-swellin' in my
hand.'”
It may have been the same Sugar Foot--assuredly it was the likes of
him--who gave us the salute so briskly as we sped out of the village on
the far side from the side on which we entered it. Followed then a swift
coursing through a French-held sector wherein at each unfolding furlong
of chalky-white highway we beheld sights which, being totted up, would
have made enough to write a book about, say three years back. But three
years back is ancient history in this war, and what once would have run
into chapters is now worth no more than a paragraph, if that much.
At the end of this leg of the journey we were well out of the static
zone and well into the active one. And so, after going near where sundry
French batteries ding-donged away with six-inch shells--shrapnel, high
explosives and gas in equal doses--at a German position five miles away,
we emerged from the protecting screenage of forest after the fashion
stated in the opening sentences of this chapter, and learned that we had
landed where we had counted on landing when we started out.
It was the regiment we were looking for, sure enough. Its colonel, our
friend, having been apprised by telephone from two miles rearward at one
of his battalion headquarters that we were approaching, had sent word
per runner that he waited to welcome us down at his present station just
behind the forward observation posts.
So we climbed aboard the one piece of rolling stock that was left
astride the metals of a road over which, until August of 1914,
transcontinental trains had whizzed, and the ginger-colored humourist
slapped the sloping withers of his steed and that patient brute flinched
a protesting flinch that ran through his frame from neck to flanks,
and we were off for the front trenches by way of the Fifty-ninth Street
cross-town line on as unusual a journey as I, for one, have taken since
coming over here to this war-worn country, where the unusual thing is
the common thing these days. Off with an ex-apartment-house doorman from
San Juan Hill, New York City, for our steersman; a creaking small flat
car for a chariot; a homegrown mule for motive power; a Yankee second
lieutenant and a French liaison officer for added passengers; and for
special scenic touches alongside the bramble-grown cut through which we
jogged, machine guns so mounted as to command aisles chopped through the
thickets, and three-inch guns plying busily at an unseen objective. To
this add the whewful remarks let fall in passing by the big ones from
farther back as they conversed among themselves on their way over to
annoy the Him, and at intervals aërial skirmishes occurring away up
overhead--'twas a braw and a bonny day for aërial fighting, as a stage
Scotchman might say--and you will have a fairly complete picture of
the ensemble in your own mind, I trust. But don't forget to stir in the
singing of birds and the buzzing of insects.
The negro troopers we encountered now, here in the copses, sometimes
singly or oftener still in squads and details, were dissimilar
physically as well as in certain temperamental respects to their fellows
of the draft regiment we had seen a little while before. They were apt
to be mulattoes or to have light-brown complexions instead of clear
black; they were sophisticated and town wise in their bearing; their
idioms differed from those others, and their accents too; for almost
without exception they were city dwellers and many of them had been born
North, whereas the negroes from Dixie were rural products drawn out of
the heart of the Farther South. But for all of them might be said these
things: They were soldiers who wore their uniforms with a smartened
pride; who were jaunty and alert and prompt in their movements; and
who expressed, as some did vocally in my hearing, and all did by their
attitude, a sincere and heartfelt inclination to get a whack at the foe
with the shortest possible delay. I am of the opinion personally--and I
make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I
am a Southerner with all of the Southerner's inherited and acquired
prejudices touching on the race question--that as a result of what our
black soldiers are going to do in this war, a word that has been uttered
billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in
hate, sometimes in all kindliness--but which I am sure never fell on
black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart--is going to have
a new meaning for all of us, South and North too, and that hereafter
n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling the word American.
However, that is getting in the moral of my tale before I am anywhere
near its proper conclusion. The reader consenting, we'll go back to the
place where we were just now, when we rode over the one-mule traffic
line to the greeting that had been organised for us two miles away. By
chance we had chosen a most auspicious moment for our arrival. For
word had just been received touching on the honours which the French
Government had been pleased to confer upon two members of the regiment,
Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, to wit, as follows: For each the War
Cross and for each a special citation before the whole French Army, and
in addition a golden palm, signifying extraordinary valour, across the
red-and-green ribbon of Johnson's decoration. So it was shortly coming
to pass that a negro, almost surely, would be the first private of the
American Expeditionary Forces to get a golden palm along with his Croix
de Guerre. It might be added, though the statement is quite superfluous
in view of the attendant circumstances, that he earned it.
Through the cable dispatches which my companions straightway sent, they
being correspondents for daily papers, America learned how Johnson and
Roberts, two comparatively green recruits, were attacked at night in a
front-line strong point by a raiding party estimated to number between
twenty and twenty-five; and how after both had been badly wounded and
after Roberts had gone down with a shattered leg he, lying on his back,
flung hand grenades with such effect that he blew at least one of the
raiders to bits of scrap meat; and how Johnson first with bullets, then
with his clubbed rifle after he had emptied it, and finally with his
bolo gave so valiant an account of himself that the attacking party fled
back to their own lines, abandoning most of their equipment and carrying
with them at least five of their number, who had been either killed
outright or most despitefully misused by the valiant pair. If ever
proof were needed, which it is not, that the colour of a man's skin has
nothing to do with the colour of his soul these twain then and there
offered it in abundance.
The word of what the French military authorities meant to do having been
received, it had spread, and its lesson was bearing fruit.
So we found out when the colonel took us on a journey through the
forward trenches. Every other private and every other noncom. we ran
across had his rifle apart and was carefully oiling it. If they were
including the coloured boys now when it came to passing round
those crosses he meant to get one too, and along with it a mess of
Germans--Bush-Germans, by his way of expression. The negro soldier
in France insists on pronouncing boche as Bush, and on coupling the
transmogrified word to the noun German, possibly because the African
mind loves mouth-filling phrases or perhaps just to make all the clearer
that, according to his concepts, every boche is a German and every
German is a boche.
As we passed along we heard one short and stumpy private, with a
complexion like the bottom of a coal mine and a smile like the sudden
lifting of a piano lid, call out to a mate as he fitted his greased
rifle together:
“Henry Johnson, he done right well, didn't he? But say, boy, effen
they'll jes gimme a razor an' a armload of bricks an' one half pint of
bust-haid licker I kin go plum to Berlin.”