THE most illuminating insight of all, into the strengthened ambition
which animated the rank and file of the Old Fifteenth was vouchsafed to
us as we three, following along behind the tall shape of the Colonel,
rounded a corner of a trench and became aware of a soldier who sat
cross-legged upon his knees with his back turned to us and was so deeply
intent upon the task in hand that he never heeded our approach at all.
On a silent signal from our guide we tiptoed near so we could look
downward over the bent shoulders of the unconscious one and this, then,
was what we saw:
A small, squarely built individual, of the colour of a bottle of good
cider-vinegar, who balanced upon his knees a slab of whitish stone--it
looked like a scrap of tombstone and I am inclined to think that is
what it was--and in his two hands, held by the handle, a bolo with a
nine-inch blade. First he would anoint the uppermost surface of the
white slab after the ordained fashion of those who use whetstones, then
industriously he would hone his blade; then he would try its edge upon
his thumb and then anoint and whet some more. And all the while, under
his breath, he crooned a little wordless, humming song which had in
it some of the menace of a wasp's petulant buzzing. He was making
war-medicine. A United States soldier whose remote ancestors by
preference fought hand to hand with their enemies, was qualifying to see
Henry Johnson and go him one better. The picture was too sweet a one to
be spoiled by breaking in on it. We slipped back out of sight so quietly
the knife-sharpener could never have suspected that spying eyes had
looked in upon him as he engaged in these private devotions of his.
“They're all like that buddy with the bolo, and some of them are even
more so,” said the colonel after we had tramped back again to the
dugout in a chalk cliff, which he temporarily occupied as a combination
parlour, boudoir, office, breakfast room and headquarters. “We were a
pretty green outfit when they brought us over here. Why, even after we
got over to France some of my boys used to write me letters tendering
their resignations, to take effect immediately. They had come into the
service of their own free will--as volunteers in the National Guard--so
when they got tired of soldiering, as a few of them did at first, they
couldn't understand why they shouldn't go out of their own free wills.
“They used us on construction work down near one of the ports for a
while after we landed. Then here a couple of weeks ago they sent us up
to take over this sector. The men are fond of saying that all they had
by way of preparation for the job was four days' drilling and a haircut.
“Did I say just now that we were green? Well, that doesn't half describe
it, let me tell you. This sector was calm enough, as frontline sectors
go, when we took it over. But the first night my fellows had hardly had
time enough to learn to find their way about the trenches when from a
forward rifle pit a rocket of a certain colour went up, 'signifying: 'We
are being attacked by tanks.'
“It gave me quite a shock, especially as there had been no artillery
preparation from Fritz's side of the wire, and besides there is a swamp
between the lines right in front of where that rifle pit is, so I
didn't exactly see how tanks were going to get across unless the Germans
ferried them over in skiffs. So before calling out the regiment I
decided to make a personal investigation. But before I had time to start
on it two more rockets went up from another rifle pit at the left of
the first one, and according to the code these rockets meant: 'Lift your
barrage--we are about to attack in force.' Since we hadn't been putting
down any barrage and there was no reason for an attack and no order for
one this gave me another shock. So I put out hot-foot to find out what
was the matter.
“It seemed a raw recruit in the first pit had found a box of rockets.
Just for curiosity, I suppose, or possibly because he wished to show the
Bush-Germans that he regarded the whole thing as being in the nature of
a celebration, or maybe because he just wanted to see what would happen
afterward, he touched off one of them. And then a fellow down the line
seeing this rocket decided, I guess, that a national holiday of the
French was being observed and so he touched off two. But it never will
happen again.
“The very next night we had a gas alarm two miles back of here in the
next village, where one of my battalions is billeted. It turned out to
be a false alarm, but all through the camp the sentries were sounding
their automobile horns as a warning for gas masks. But Major Blank's
orderly didn't know the meaning of the signals, or if he did know he
forgot it in the excitement of the moment. Still he didn't lose his
head altogether. As he heard the sound of the tootings coming nearer
and nearer he dashed into the major's billet--the major is a very sound
sleeper--and grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him right out of his
blankets. “'Wake up, major!' he yelled, trying to keep on shaking with
one hand and to salute with the other. 'Fur Gawd's sake, suh, wake up.
The Germans is comin'--in automobiles!'
“Oh yes, they were green at the start; but they are as game as any
men in this man's Army are. You take it from me, because I know. They
weren't afraid of the cold and the wet and the terrific labour when they
worked last winter down near the coast of France on as mean a job of
work as anybody ever tackled. They were up to their waists in cold water
part of the time--yes, most of the time they were--but not a one of them
flinched. And believe me there's no flinching among them now that we are
up against the Huns! You don't need the case of Johnson and Roberts to
prove it. It is proved by the attitude of every single man among them.
It isn't hard to send them into danger--the hard part is to keep them
from going into it on their own accord. They say the dark races can't
stand the high explosives--that their nerves go to pieces under the
strain of the terrific concussion. If that be so the representatives of
the dark races that come from America are the exceptions to the rule. My
boys are getting fat and sassy on a fare of bombings and bombardments,
and we have to watch them like hawks to keep them from slipping off on
little independent raiding parties without telling anybody about it in
advance. Their real test hasn't come yet, but when it does come you take
a tip from me and string your bets along with this minstrel troupe to
win.
“My men have a catch phrase that has come to be their motto and their
slogan. Tell any one of them to do a certain thing and as he gets up to
go about it he invariably says, 'Let's go!' Tell a hundred of them to
do a thing and they'll say the same thing. I hear it a thousand times
a day. The mission may involve discomfort or the chance of a sudden and
exceedingly violent death. No matter--'Let's go!' that's the invariable
answer. Personally I think it makes a pretty good maxim for an outfit
of fighting men, and I'll stake my life on it that they'll live up to it
when the real trial comes.”
Two days we stayed on there, and they were two days of a superior
variety of continuous black-face vaudeville. There was the evening
when for our benefit the men organised an impromptu concert featuring a
quartet that would succeed on any man's burlesque circuit, and a troupe
of buck-and-wing dancers whose equals it would be hard to find on the
Big Time. There was the next evening when the band of forty pieces
serenaded us. I think surely this must be the best regimental band in
our Army. Certainly it is the best one I have heard in Europe during
this war. On parade when it played the Memphis Blues the men did not
march; the music poured in at their ears and ran down to their heels,
and instead of marching they literally danced their way along. As for
the dwellers of the French towns in which this regiment has from time to
time been quartered, they, I am told, fairly go mad when some alluring,
compelling, ragtime tune is played with that richness of syncopated
melody in it which only the black man can achieve; and as the regiment
has moved on, more than once it has been hard to keep the unattached
inhabitants of the village that the band was quitting from moving on
with it.
If I live to be a hundred and one I shall never forget the second night,
which was a night of a splendid, flawless full moon. We stood with
the regimental staff on the terraced lawn of the chief house in a
half-deserted town five miles back from the trenches, and down below us
in the main street the band played plantation airs and hundreds of negro
soldiers joined in and sang the words. Behind the masses of upturned
dark faces was a ring of white ones where the remaining natives of the
place clustered, with their heads wagging in time to the tunes.
And when the band got to Way Down Upon the Swanee River I wanted to cry,
and when the drum major, who likewise had a splendid barytone voice,
sang, as an interpolated number, Joan of Arc, first in English and then
in excellent French, the villagers openly cried; and an elderly peasant,
heavily whiskered, with the tears of a joyous and thankful enthusiasm
running down his bearded cheeks, was with difficulty restrained from
throwing his arms about the soloist and kissing him. When this type of
Frenchman feels emotion he expresses it moistly.
Those two days we heard stories without number, all of them true, I
take it, and most of them good ones. We heard of the yellow youth who
beseeched his officer to send him with a “dang'ous message” meaning by
that that he craved to go on a perilous mission for the greater glory
of the A. E. F. and incidentally of himself; and about the jaunty
individual who pulled the firing wire of a French grenade and catching
the hissing sound of the fulminator working its way toward the charge
exclaimed: “That's it--fry, gosh dem you, fry!” before he threw it. And
about how a sergeant on an emergency trench-digging job stuck to the
task, standing hip-deep in icy water and icy mud, until from chill and
exhaustion he dropped unconscious and was like to drown in the muck
into which he had collapsed head downward, only his squad discovered him
up-ended there and dragged him out; and about many other things small
or great, bespeaking fortitude and courage and fidelity and naïve Afric
waggery.
Likewise into my possession came copies of two documents, both of which
I should say are typical just as each is distinctive of a different
phase of the negro temperament. One of them, the first one, was
humorous. Indeed to my way of thinking it was as fine an example
of unconscious humour as this war is likely to produce. The other
was--well, judge for yourself.
Before the regiment moved forward for its dedication to actual warfare
it was impressed upon the personnel in the ranks that from now on, more
even than before, a soldier in his communications with his superior
officer must use the formal and precise language of military propriety.
The lesson must have sunk in, because on the thrillsome occasion when a
certain private found himself for the first time in a forward rifle pit
and for the first time heard German rifle bullets whistling past his
ears he called to him a runner and dispatched to the secondary lines
this message, now quoted exactly as written except that the proper names
have been changed:
“Lieutenant Sidney J. McClelland,
“Commanding Company B,--, A. E. F.,
U. S. A.
“Dear Sir: I am being fired on heavily from the left.
I await your instructions.
“Trusting these few lines will find you the same,
I remain, Yours truly,
“Jefferson Jones.”
The other thing was an extract from a letter written by an
eighteen-year-old private to his old mother in New York, with no idea
in his head when he wrote it that any eyes other than those of his own
people would read it after it had been censored and posted. The officer
to whom it came for censoring copied from it one paragraph, and this
paragraph ran like this:
“Mammy, these French people don't bother with no colour-line business.
They treat us so good that the only time I ever knows I'm coloured is
when I looks in the glass.”
Coming away--and we came reluctantly--we skirted the edge of the
billeting area where the regiment of Southern negroes was quartered,
and again we heard them singing. But this time they sang no
plaintive meeting-house air. They sang a ringing, triumphant,
Glory-Glory-Hallelujah song. For--so we learned--to them the word had
come that they were about to move up and perhaps come to grips with
the Bush-Germans. Yes, most assuredly n-i-g-g-e-r is going to have a
different meaning when this war ends.