CHAPTER XXIII. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

TAKE any separate project along our line of communication. Pick it out

at random. It makes no difference which particular spot you choose; you

nevertheless are morally sure to find stationed there a man or a group

of men who have learned to laugh at the problem of making bricks without

straw. If put to it they could make monuments out of mud pies. Brought

face to face with conditions and environments that were entirely new to

their own experience, and confronted as they were at the outset by the

task of providing essentials right out of the air--essentials that were

vitally and immediately needed and that could not be forthcoming from

the States for weeks or even months--an executive or an underlying

invariably would find a way out of the difficulty.

There was pressing need once for a receptacle in which rubber cement

could be mixed in small quantities. Neither the local community nor the

government stores yielded such a thing and there was no time to send

clear back New York or Philadelphia for it. The man who was charged

with the responsibility of getting that rubber cement mixed wait on

a scouting tour. Somewhere he unearthed probably the only ice-cream

freezer in rural Fiance outside of the immediate vicinity of Paris, and

he acquired it at the proprietor's valuation and loaded it into his car

and hurried back with it to his shop, and ten minutes after he arrived

the required cement was being stirred to the proper consistency in the

ice-cream freezer.

At the main depot of automobile supplies they needed, right away,

springs with which to repair broken-down light cars. As yet an adequate

supply of spare parts had not been received from the base, nor was there

any likelihood that a supply would be forthcoming at once. The colonel

in charge of the depot sent men ranging through the countryside with

instructions to buy up stuff that would make springs. They brought

him in tons of purchases, and most unlikely looking material it was

too--rusted chunks and strips and spirals of metal taken from the

underpinnings of French market carts and agricultural implements; but

the forces in the machine shops sailed in and converted the lot into

automobile springs in no time at all.

This same colonel already had a plant which, exclusive of the value of

buildings specially built, represents at this time a national investment

of $35,000,000, and the outlay was growing every hour. He used to be the

head of a big metal-working establishment at home. As a specialist

in his line he joined the Army to help out. Now every month he does a

volume of buying that would have made his average year's turnover in

times of peace look trifling in comparison. Just before he sailed to

take over his present job he ordered $6,000,000 worth of motor parts at

one fell swoop, as it were.

Because of the rapidity with which our forces on foreign service

multiplied themselves there was a rush order from General Headquarters

for more buildings and yet more buildings, at one of our warehouse

depots, to provide for storage of perishable foodstuffs in transit from

the rear to the Front. Between seven-thirty o'clock in the morning

and five o'clock in the evening of a given day a gang of steel riggers

accomplished the impossible by rearing and bolting together the steel

frame--posts, girders, plates, rafters and crossbeams--for a building

measuring 96 feet in width, 24 feet in height and 230 feet in length,

the same being merely one of the units of a structure that very soon

thereafter was up in the air and that measured 650 feet crosswise and

650 feet lengthwise, with railroad tracks stretching alongside and in

between its various segments.

“When we laid out our original plans for this project the French said it

would be entirely too large for our uses, no matter how big an army

we brought over,” remarked to me a young ex-civilian, now wearing

a captain's markings on his flannel shirt, who had put through this

undertaking. “Our people thought differently and we went ahead, trying

to figure as we went along on all future contingencies. The result is

that already we are enlarging upon the old specifications as rapidly as

possible. Even so the supplies are piling up on us faster than we can

store them. Look yonder.”

He pointed to a veritable mountain of baled hay--a regular Himalaya of

hay--which covered a corner of the field whereon we stood. It towered

high above the tops of the trees behind it; it stretched dear to the

edge of the woodlands beyond, and it was crowned, as a mountain peak

should be, with white; only in this instance the blanket was of canvas

instead of snow.

“There are 80,000 tons of American baled hay in that pile,” he said,

“and in a month from now if the present rate of growth keeps up it will

be bigger by a third than it is now. It's quite some job--taking care of

this man's army.”

In the midriff of the Intermediate Section is a project on which at this

writing 10,000 men are at work, and on an air-service field adjoining it

3,000 more men are engaged. Exclusive of material for local construction

purposes 500 carloads of strictly military supplies arrive here daily,

and approximately 75 carloads a day move out. Later the ratio of

outgoing equipment will increase, but the incoming amount is not liable

to fall off very much. To house the accumulating mass here and elsewhere

in the same zone, including as it does engineers' stores, ordnance

stores, fresh meats, salt meats, medical stores, harness, guns and

quartermasters' stores, there has been provided or will be provided

4,500,000 square feet of roof-covered space and 10,000,000 square feet

of open storage space.

When I came that way the other day miles of the plain had been filled

pretty thoroughly with buildings and with side tracks and wagon roads;

and, scattered over a tract measuring roughly six miles one way and four

miles the other, between 18,000 and 14,000 men were engaged. In January

of this year, when a man who now accompanied me had visited the same

spot, he said there was one building standing on the area, and that two

side tracks were in use; all the rest was a barren stretch of snowdrifts

and half-frozen mud and desolation. They were just beginning then to dig

the foundations of our main cold-storage plant. It is finished and in

operation to-day. Besides being a model plant it is the third largest

cold-storage plant in the world, and yet it is to be distinguished from

the sixty-odd buildings that surround it only by the fact that it is

taller and longer and has more smokestacks on it than any of the rest.

At the principal depot of the Advance Section, where the chief

regulating officer is stationed, one of the biggest jobs is to sort out

the man provender as it flows in by rail and to fill up each of fifty

or sixty track-side warehouses with balanced rations--so much flour,

so much salt meat, so much of salt, sugar, lard, canned goods, pepper,

vinegar, pickles, and so on, to each building; or else to load

a building with balanced man equipment--comprising shoes, socks,

underwear, shirts, uniforms and the rest of it down to shoe laces and

buttons, the purpose of this arrangement being that when a warehouse is

emptied the man who is in charge, even before checking up on the loading

gangs, already knows almost to a pound or a stitch just how many rations

or how many articles of apparel have gone forward.

In each warehouse the canned tomatoes, the vinegar and the stuff that

contains mild acids are stored at the two ends of the building in

crosswise barricades that extend to the roof. This disposal was an idea

of the officer in control of the arrangement. He explained to us that in

case of fire canned stuff bearing a heavy proportion of fluid would burn

more slowly than the other foodstuffs, so there would be a better chance

of confining the blaze to the building in which it originated and of

preventing its spread to adjoining or adjacent buildings, which might be

of brick or concrete or stone or sheet metal, but which are more apt to

be of frame.

A British colonel on a visit of inspection to, our Service of Supplies

visited this project on the same day that I came. Radiating admiration

and astonishment at every step and at every stop, he accompanied the

young first lieutenant who was in personal charge of the warehousing

scheme on a tour of his domain, which covered miles. When the round had

been completed and the lieutenant had saluted and taken himself away the

Britisher said to the chief regulating officer:

“I have never seen anything so perfectly devised as your plan of

operation and distribution here. I take it that the young man who

escorted me through is one of your great American managing experts.

I imagine he must have been borrowed from one of those marvellous

mail-order houses of yours, of which I have heard so much. One thing

puzzles me though--he must have come here fresh from business pursuits,

and yet he bears himself like a trained soldier.”

The chief regulating officer smiled a little smile.

“That man,” he said, “is an old enlisted man of our little antebellum

Regular Army. He didn't win his commission until he came over here.

Before that he was a noncom on clerical duty in the quartermaster's

department, and before that he was a plain private, and as far as I know

he never worked a day for any concern except our own Government since he

reached the enlisting age.”

In addition to doing what I should say at an offhand guess was the work

of ten reasonably active men, the colonel who supervises our Advance

Section has found time since he took over his present employment to

organise a brass band and a glee dub among his personnel, to map out and

stage-manage special entertainments for the men, to entertain visitors

who come officially and unofficially, to keep several thousand

individuals busy in their working hours and happy in their leisure

hours, and at frequent intervals to write for the benefit of his command

special bulletins touching on the finer sides of the soldier's duties

and the soldier's discipline. He gave me a copy of one of his more

recent pronouncements. He called it a memorandum; I called it a classic.

It ran as follows:

“1. The salute, in addition to being a soldier's method of greeting,

is the gauge by which he shows to the world his proficiency in the

profession, his morale and the condition of his discipline.

“2. For me the dial of a soldier's salute has three marks, and I read

his salute more accurately than he himself could tell me.

“3. The three gradations are:

(a) I am a soldier; I know my trade or will know it very soon, and I

will be a success as a soldier or a civilian, wherever I may be put.

(b) I do not know what I am and do not care, I only do what I am forced

to do, and will never be much of a success at anything.

(c) I am a failure and am down and out, sick, homesick and disgruntled.

I cannot stand the gaff.

“4. As Americans try to conceal your feelings from our Allies.

“Remember you are just as much fighters here as you would be carrying a

pail of food to the fighting line or actually firing a gun.

“Every extra exertion is an addition to the firing line direct.

“Every bit of shirking is robbing the firing line.”

“Buck Up!”

For qualities of human interest no joints in the snake's spine, no

twists in his manifold convolutions measure up, I think, to the salvage

depots. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, an army in the field

threw away what it did not use or what through breakage or stress became

unserviceable. That day is gone. In this war the wastage is practically

negligible. Our people have learned this lesson from the nations that

went into the war before we entered it, but in all modesty I believe,

from what I have seen, that we have added some first-rate improvements

to the plan in the few months that have been vouchsafed us for

experiments and demonstrations. Moreover, to the success of our plans

in this regard there have been difficulties that did not confront our

Allies to the same extent. For instance our biggest motor-repair depot

is housed in what formerly had been a French infantry barracks--a series

of buildings that had never been devised for the purposes to which they

are now put, and that at first offered many serious problems, mechanical

and physical.

In tall brick buildings, under sheds and under tents and out in the open

upon the old parade ground a great chain of machine shops, carpenter

shops, paint shops, upholstery shops and leather-working shops has

been coordinated and is cooperating to attain the maximum of possible

production with the minimum of lost energy and lost effort. The

scientist who reconstructs a prehistoric monster from a fossilised femur

finds here his industrial prototype in the smart American mechanics

who build up an ambulance or a motor truck from a fire-blackened,

shell-riddled car frame, minus top, minus wheels, minus engine parts.

What comes out of one total wreck goes into another that is not quite so

totally so. And when a tool is lacking for some intricate job the Yank

turns in and makes it himself out of a bit of scrap; and neither he nor

his fellows think he has done anything wonderful either. It's just part

of the day's work.

The salvage depot for human equipment and for lighter field equipment

is established at this writing in what was, not so very long ago, a shop

where one of the French railroad lines painted its cars. It began active

operations last January with six civilian employees under an officer

who four weeks before he landed in France was a business man in

Philadelphia. In June it had on its pay rolls nearly 4,000 workers,

mainly women and many of them refugees.

When all the floor space available--about 200,000 square feet of it--has

been taken over the plant will have a personnel of about 5,000 hands,

and it will be possible to do the reclamation work in clothing, shoes,

rubber boots and slickers, harness and leather, canvas and webbing,

field ranges, mess equipments, stoves, helmets, trenching tools, side

arms, rifle slings, picks, shovels and metal gear generally for about

400,000 fighting men, with an estimated saving to Uncle Sam--exclusive

of the vast sum saved in tonnage and shipping charges--of about

$1,000,000 a month.

At this time 10,000 garments and articles of personal attire are passing

through this plant every twenty-four hours, and coming out cleaned,

mended, remade or converted to other purposes. A man could spend a week

here, I feel certain, and not count his sight-seeing time as wasted.

Among the men workers he would find invalided and crippled soldiers

of at least six nations--America, Belgium, France, Greece, Serbia

and Italy. Among the women workers, who average in pay seven francs a

day--big wages for rural France--he would find many women of refinement

and education hailing from evacuated districts in northern France and

Belgium, whose faces bespeak the terrors and torments through which

they have passed in the attempted implanting of the seeds of Kultur

upon their homelands. Now they sit all day, driving sewing machines or

managing knitting looms alongside their chattering, gossiping sisters of

the peasant class.

And every hour in this beehive of industry the man who looked close

would come upon things eloquently bespeaking the tragedy or the comedy

of war's flotsam and jetsam. Now perhaps it would be a battered German

bugle picked up by some souvenir-loving soldier, only to be flung into

the camp salvage dump when its finder wearied of carrying it; and now it

would be a khaki blouse with a bullet hole in the breast of it and great

brown stains, stiff and dry, in its lining. A talking machine in fair

order, the half of a tombstone and the full-dress equipment of a captain

of Prussian Hussars were among the relics that turned up at the salvage

depot in one week.

There is no dump heap behind the converted paint bam, for the very good

reason that practically there is nothing to dump. Everything is saved.

The salvaged junk comes in by the carload lot from the Front--filthy,

crumpled, broken, blood-crusted, verminous, tattered, smelly and

smashed. Sorters seize upon it and separate it and classify it according

to kind and state of disrepair. Men and women bear it in armloads to

sterilisers, where live steam kills the lice and the lice eggs; thence

it goes to the cleaning vats, after which it is sorted again and the

real job of making something out of what seemed to be worse than nothing

at all is undertaken, with experts, mainly Americans, to supervise

each forward step in the big contract of renovation, restoration and

utilisation.

After the body clothing has been made clean and odourless it is assigned

to one of three classes, to wit: (a) Garments needing minor repairs

and still sightly and serviceable, which are put in perfect order and

reissued to front-line troops; (b) garments not so sightly but still

serviceable, which are issued to S O S workers, including stevedores,

labourers, railroad engineers, firemen and forestry workers; (c)

garments that are not sightly but that will repay repairing. These are

dyed green and given to German prisoners of war. Practically no new

material is used for repair. Garments that are past salvation in their

present shape are cut up to furnish patches. Three garments out of four

are reclaimed in one form or another; the fourth one becomes scrap for

patchings. Shoes are washed in an acid disinfectant that cleanses the

leather without injuring its fabric, and then they are dried and greased

before going in to the workers. Shoes that are worth saving are saved to

the last one; those past saving are ripped apart and the uppers are

cut into shoe strings, while the soles furnish ground-up leather for

compositions. Thanks to processes of washing, cleansing and repairing,

a salvage average of approximately ninety per cent, is attained in

slickers and rubber boots.

Last spring the high military authorities decided to shorten the heavy

overcoats worn by our soldiers, so it befalls that the lengths of cloth

cut from the skirts of the overcoats are now being fashioned at the

salvage plants into uppers for hospital slippers, while old campaign

hats furnish the material for the soles. The completed article, very

neat in appearance and very comfortable to wear, is turned out here in

great numbers. Old tires are cooked down to furnish new heels for rubber

boots. Old socks are unravelled for the sake of the wool in them. Tin

receptacles that have held gasoline or oil are melted apart, and from

their sides and tops disks are fashioned which, being coated with

aluminum, become markers for the graves where our dead soldier boys have

been buried. Smaller tins are smelted down into lumps and used for a

dozen purposes. The solder from the cans is not wasted either. Even the

hobnails of worn-down boot soles are saved for future use.

Master of theatrical trick and device that he is, none the less David

Belasco could learn lessons at our camouflaging plant. He probably

would feel quite at home there, too, seeing that the place has a most

distinctive behind-the-scenes atmosphere of its own; it is a sort of

overgrown combination of scenery loft, property room, paint shop and

fancy-dress costumer's establishment, where men who gave up sizable

incomes to serve their country in this new calling work long

hours seeking to improve upon the artifices already developed--and

succeeding--and to create brand-new ones of their own.

As a branch of military modernism camouflaging is even newer than the

trade of scientific salvaging is and offers far larger opportunities for

future exploitation. After all there are just so many things and no more

that may be done with and to a pair of worn-out rubber boots, but in the

other field the only limits are the limits of the designer's individual

ingenuity and his individual skill.

We came, under guidance, to a big open-fronted barracks where hundreds

of French women and French girls made screenage for road protection and

gun emplacements. The materials they worked with were simple enough:

rolls of ordinary chicken wire, strips of burlap sacking dyed in four

colours--bright green, yellowish green, tawny and brown--and wisps of

raffia with which to bind the cloth scraps into the meshes of the wire.

For summer use the bright green is used, for early spring and fall the

lighter green and the tawny; and for winter the brown and the tawny

mingled. For, you see, camouflage has its seasons, too, marching in step

with the swing of the year. Viewed close up the completed article looks

to be exactly what it is--chicken wire festooned thickly with gaudy

rags. But stretch a breadth of it across a dip in the earth and then

fling against it a few boughs cut from trees, and at a distance of

seventy-five yards no man, however keen-eyed, can say just where the

authentic foliage leaves off and the artificial joins on.

For roadsides in special cases there is still another variety

of camouflage, done in zebra-like strips of light and dark rags

alternating, and this stuff being erected alongside the open highway is

very apt indeed to deceive your hostile observer into thinking that what

he beholds is merely a play of sunlight and shade upon a sloped flank of

earth; and he must venture very perilously near indeed to discern that

the seeming pattern of shadows really masks the movements of troops.

This deceit has been described often enough, but the sheer art of it

takes on added interest when one witnesses its processes and sees how

marvellously its effects are brought about.

In an open field used for experimenting and testing was a dump pile

dotted thickly with all the nondescript débris that accumulates upon the

outer slope of a dug-in defence where soldiers have been--loose clods of

earth, bits of chalky stone, shattered stumps, empty beef tins, broken

mess gear, discarded boots, smashed helmets, and such like. It was

crowned with a frieze of stakes projecting above the top of the trench

behind it, and on its crest stood one of those shattered trees, limbless

and ragged, that often are to be found upon terrains where the shelling

has been brisk.

Here for our benefit a sort of game was staged. First we stationed

ourselves sixty feet away from the mound. Immediately five heads

appeared above the parapet--heads with shrapnel helmets upon them, and

beneath the helmet rims sunburnt faces peering out. The eyes looked this

way and that as the heads turned from side to side.

“Please watch closely,” said the camouflage officer accompanying us.

“And as you watch, remember this: Two of those heads are the heads of

men. The three others are dummies mounted on sticks and manipulated

from below. Since you have been at the Front you know the use of the

dummy--the enemy sniper shoots a hole in it and the men in the pit, by

tracing the direction of the bullet through the pierced composition, are

able to locate the spot where Mister Sniper is hidden. Now then, try to

pick out the real heads from the fake ones.”

There were three of us, and we all three of us tried. No two agreed in

our guesses and not one of us scored a perfect record; and yet we stood

very much nearer than any enemy marksman could ever hope to get. The

lifelikeness of the thing was uncanny.

“Next take in the general layout of that spot,” said the camouflage

expert, with a wave of his hand toward the dump pile. “Looks natural and

orthodox, doesn't it? Seems to be just the outer side of a bit of trench

work, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. Two of those stakes are what they

appear to be--ordinary common stakes. The other two are hollow metal

tubes, inside of which trench periscopes are placed. And the tree trunk

is faked, too. It is all hollow within--a shell of light tough steel

with a ladder inside, and behind that twisted crotch where the limbs are

broken off the observer is stationed at this moment watching us through

a manufactured knothole. The only genuine thing about that tree trunk is

the bark on it--we stripped that off of a beech over in the woods.

“The dump heap isn't on the level either, as you possibly know, since

you may have seen such dump piles concealing the sites of observation

pits up at the Front. Inside it is all dug out into galleries and on the

side facing us it is full of peepholes--seventeen peepholes in all, I

think there are. Let's go within fifteen feet of it and see how many of

them you can detect.”

At a fifteen-foot range it was hard enough for us to make out five of

the seventeen peep places. Yet beforehand we understood that each tin

can, each curled-up boot, each sizable tuft of withered grass, each

swirl of the tree stump--masked a craftily hidden opening shielded

with fine netting, through which a man crouching in safety beneath

the surface of the earth might study the land in front of him. That

innocent-appearing, made-to-order dump pile had the eyes of a spider;

but even so, the uniformed invader might have climbed up and across it

without once suspecting the truth.

For a final touch the camouflage crew put on their best stunt of all.

Five men encased themselves in camouflage suits of greenish-brown canvas

which covered them head, feet, body and limbs, and which being decorated

with quantities of dried, grasslike stuff sewed on in patches, made them

look very much as Fred Stone used to look when he played the Scarecrow

Man in “The Wizard of Oz” years ago. Each man carried a rifle, likewise

camouflaged. Then we turned our backs while they took position upon a

half-bare, half-greened hillock less than a hundred feet from us.

This being done we faced about, and each knowing that five armed men

were snuggled there against the bank tried to pick them out from their

background. It was hard sledding, so completely had the motionless

figures melted into the herbage and the chalky soil. Finally we united

in the opinion that we had located three of the five. But we were wrong

again. We really had picked out only one of the five. The two other

suspected clumps were not men but what they seemed to be--small

protrusions in the ragged and irregular turf. Yes, I am sure Mr. Belasco

could have spent a fruitful half hour or so there with us.

Thanks to yet another crafty and deceitful artifice of the camouflage

outfit it is possible to make the enemy think he is being attacked by

raiders advancing in force when as a matter of fact what he beholds

approaching him are not files of men but harmless dummies operated by a

mechanism that is as simple as simplicity itself. The attack will come

from elsewhere while his attention is focused upon the make-believe

feint, but just at present there are military reasons why he should not

know any of the particulars. It would take the edge of his surprise,

even though he is not likely to live to appreciate the surprise once the

trick has been pulled.

These details of the whole vast undertaking that I have touched upon

here are merely bits that stand out with especial vividness from the

recent recollections of a trip every rod of which was freighted with the

most compelling interest for any one, and for an American with enduring

and constant pride in the achievements of his own countrymen.

There are still other impressions, many of than, big and little, that

are going always to stick in my brain--the smell of the crisp brown

crusty loaves, mingling with the smell of the wood fires at the bakery

where half a million bread rations are cooked and shipped every day,

seven days a week; the sight at the motor reception park, where a big

proportion of the 60,000 motor vehicles of all sorts that are called for

in our programme, as it stands now, can be stored at one time; the miles

upon miles of canned goods through which I have passed, with the boxes

towering in walls upon either side of me; the cold-storage chamber as

big as a cathedral, where a supply of 5,000 tons of fresh meat is kept

on hand and ready for use; a cemetery for our people, only a few months

old, but lovely already with flowers and grass and neat gravel paths

between the mounds; a blacksmith riveting about the left wrists of

Chinese labourers their steel identification markers so that there may

always be a positive and certain way of knowing just who is who in the

gang, since to stupid occidental eyes all Chinamen look alike and except

for these little bangles made fast upon the arms of the wearers there

would be complications and there might be wilful falsifications in the

pay rolls; a spectacled underofficer hailing us in perfect but plaintive

English from a group of prisoners mending roads, to say in tones of deep

lament that he used to be a dentist in Baltimore but made the mistake

of going back to Germany for a visit to his old home just before the war

broke out; a Catholic chaplain superintending the beautifying of a row

of graves of Mohammedans who had died in our service, and who had been

laid away according to the ritual of their own faith in a corner of a

burying ground where Christians and Jews are sleeping together; a

maimed Belgian soldier with three medals for valour on his shirt front,

cobbling shoe soles in the salvage plant; a French waiter boy in a

headquarters mess learning to pick out the chords of Dixie Land on an

American negro's homemade guitar; a room in the staff school where a

former member of the Cabinet of the United States, an ex-Congressman,

an ex-police commissioner of New York City and one of the richest men in

America, all four of them volunteer officers, sat at their lessons with

their spines fish-hooked and their brows knotted; nineteen-year-old

Yankee apprentice flyer doing such heart-stopping stunts in a practice

plane as I never expect to see equalled by any veteran airman; the

funeral, on the same day and at the same time, of one of his mates, who

had been killed by a fall upon the field over which this daring youth

now cavorted, with the coffin in an ambulance and a flag over the

coffin, and behind the ambulance the firing squad, the Red Cross nurses

from the local hospital and a company of his fellow cadets marching.

And seeing all these sights and a thousand more like unto them I found

myself as I finished my tour along the winding lengths of the great

snake we call the Service of Supplies, wondering just who, of all the

thousands among the men that labour behind the men behind the guns,

deserve of their countrymen the greatest meed of credit--the high

salaried executives out of civilian life who dropped careers and

comforts and hope of preferment in their professions at home, to give of

the genius of their brains to this cause; or the officers of our little

old peacetime Army who here serve so gladly and so efficiently upon

the poor pay that we give our officers, without hope ever of getting a

proper measure of national appreciation for their efforts, since

this war is so nearly an anonymous war, where the performances of the

individual are swallowed up in the united efforts of the mass; or the

skilled railway trainmen volunteering to work on privates' wages for

the period of the war; or the plain enlisted man cheerfully, eagerly,

enthusiastically toiling here, so far back of the Front, when in his

heart he must long to be up there with his fellows where the big guns

boom.

CHAPTER XXIV. FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

BLOWS with a hammer may numb one, but it is the bee-sting that quickens

the sensibilities to a realisation of what is afoot. That is why, I

suppose, the mighty thing called war is for me always summed up in

small, incidental but outstanding phases of it. In its complete aspect

it is too vast to be comprehended by any one mind or any thousand minds;

but by piecing together the lesser things, one after a while begins in a

dim groping fashion to get a concept of the entirety.

When I went up to Ypres, it was not the unutterable desolation and

hideousness of what had been once one of the fairest spots on earth that

especially impressed me: possibly because Ypres to-day is a horror too

terrible and a tragedy too utter for human contemplation save at the

risk of losing one's belief in the ultimate wisdom of the cosmic scheme

of things. Nor was it the wreck of the great Cloth Hall which even now,

with its overthrown walls and its broken lines and its one remaining

spindle of ruined tower, manages to retain a suggestion of the matchless

beauty which forevermore is gone. Nor yet was it the cemetery, whereon

for sheer, degenerate malignity the Germans targeted their heavy guns

until they had broached nearly every grave, heaving up the dead to

sprawl upon the displaced clods. One becomes, in time, accustomed to the

sight of dead soldiers lying where they have fallen, because a soldier

accepts the chances of being killed and of being left untombed after he

is killed. The dread spectacle he presented is part and parcel of

the picture of war. But these men and women and babes that the shells

dispossessed from their narrow tenements of mould had died peacefully

in their beds away back yonder--and how long ago it seems now!--when

the world itself was at peace. They had been shrouded in their funeral

vestments; they had been laid away with cross and candle, with Book and

prayer; over them slabs of the everlasting granite had been set, and

flowers had been planted above them and memorials set up; and they had

been left there beneath the kindly loam, cradled for all eternity till

Gabriel's Trump should blow.

But when I came there and saw what _Kul-tur_ had wrought amongst

them--how with exquisite irony the blasts had shattered grave after

grave whose stones bore the carved words _Held in Perpetuity_ and how

grandmothers and grandsires and the pitiable small bones of little

children had been flung forth out of the gaping holes and left to

moulder in the rags of their cerements where all who passed that way

might see them--why, it was a blasphemy and an indecency and a sacrilege

which no man, beholding it, could ever, so long as he lived, hope to

forget.

And yet, as I just said, it was not the defilement of the cemetery

of Ypres which impressed me most when I went up to Ypres. It was the

lamp-posts.

Ypres had been studded thick with lampposts; ornamental and decorative

standards of wrought iron they were, spaced at intervals of forty yards

or so for the length of every street and on both sides of every street.

And every single lamp-post in Ypres, as I took the pains to see for

myself, had been struck by shells or by flying fragments of shells. Some

had been hit once or twice, some had been quite hewn down, some had been

twisted into shapeless sworls of tortured metal; not one but was scathed

after one mutilating fashion or another.

In other words, during these four years of bombardment so many German

shells had descended upon Ypres that no object in it of the thickness of

six inches at its base and say, two inches at its top, had escaped

being struck. Or putting it another way, had all these shells been fired

through a space of hours instead of through a space of years, they would

have rained down on the empty town with the thickness and the frequency

of drops in a heavy thunder-shower.

Never was the Hun quite so thorough as when he was punishing some

helpless thing that could not fight back.

*****

Riding along through France on a Sunday, these times, one is reasonably

certain to meet many little girls wearing their white communion frocks,

and many Chinamen under umbrellas.

The latter mostly hail from Indo-China. The French imported them in

thousands for service in the labour battalions behind the lines. During

the week, dressed in nondescript mixtures of native garb and cast-off

uniforms, they work at road-mending or at ditch-digging or on

truck-loading jobs. On Sundays they dress themselves up in their best

clothes and stroll about the country-side. And rain or shine, each one

brings along with him his treasured umbrella and carries it unfurled

above his proud head. It never is a Chinese umbrella, either, but

invariably a cheap black affair of local manufacture. Go into one of the

barracks where these yellow men are housed and at the head of each bunk

there hangs a black umbrella, which the owner guards as his most darling

possession. If he dies I suppose it is buried with him.

Nobody knows here why every Sunday, Chinaman sports an umbrella, unless

it be that in his Oriental mind he has decided that possession of such

a thing stamps him as a person of travel and culture who, like any true

cosmopolitan, is desirous of conforming to the customs of the country to

which he has been transported. But a Frenchman, if careless, sometimes

leaves his umbrella behind when he goes forth for a promenade; a

Chinaman in France, never.

When a ship-load of these chaps lands they are first taken to a

blacksmith shop and upon the left wrist of each is securely and

permanently fastened a slender steel circlet bearing a token on which is

stamped the wearer's name and his number. So long as he is in the employ

of the State this little band must stay on his arm. It is the one sure

means of identifying him and of preventing payroll duplications.

With the marker dangling at his sleeve-end he makes straightway for

a shop and buys himself a black cotton umbrella and from that time

forward, wherever he goes, his steel bangle and his umbrella go with

him. He cannot part from one and not for worlds would he part from the

other.

One Sunday afternoon in a village in the south of France I saw that

rarest of sights--a drunken Chinaman. He wiggled and waggled as he

walked, and once he sat down very hard, smiling foolishly the while,

but he never lost his hold on the handle of his umbrella and when he had

picked himself up, the black bulge of it was bobbing tipsily above

his tipsy head as he went weaving down the road behind a mile-long

procession of his fellows, all marching double file beneath their raised

umbrellas.

Whisper--there is current a scandalous rumour touching on these little

moon-faced allies of ours. It is said that among them every fourth man,

about, isn't a man at all. He's a woman wearing a man's garb and drawing

a man's pay; or rather she is, if we are going to keep the genders on

straight. But since the women work just as hard as the men do nobody

seems to bother about the deceit. They may not have equal suffrage over

in Indo-China but the two sexes there seem to have a way of adjusting

the industrial problems of the day on a mutually satisfactory basis of

understanding.

*****

“Piccadilly Circus. This way to Swan and Edgar's.”

The sign-board was the top of a jam box. The upright to which it was

nailed was the shell-riddled trunk of a plane tree with one sprig of

dried mistletoe clinging in a crotch where limbs had been, like a tuft

of dead beard on a mummy's chin. Piccadilly Circus was a roughly-rounded

spot at a cross-road where the grey and sticky mud--greyer than any mud

you stay-at-homes ever saw; stickier than any mud you ever saw--made a

little sea which quaked and shimmered greasily like a quicksand. The way

to Swan and Edgar's was down a communication trench with shored sides

to it, so that the semi-liquid walls could not cave in, and with duck

boards set in it upon spiles for footing, so that men passing through

would not be engulfed and drowned in the quagmire beneath.

So much for the immediate setting. The adjacent surroundings were of a

pattern to match the chosen sample. All about on every side for miles

on end, was a hell of grey mud, here up-reared into ridges and there

depressed into holes; and the ridges heaved up to meet a skyline of the

same sad colour as themselves, and the holes were like the stale dead

craters of a stale dead moon.

Elsewhere in the land, spring had come weeks before, but here the only

green was the green of the skum on the grey water in the bottoms of the

shell-fissures; the only living things were the ravens that cawed over

the wasted landscape, and the great, fat, torpid rats with mud glued in

their whiskers and their scaled tails caked with mud, that scuttled in

and out of the long-abandoned German pill-boxes or through holes in the

rusted iron sides of three dismantled British tanks. For lines of trees

there were up-ended wrecks of motor trucks and ambulances; for the hum

of bees, was the hum of an occasional sniper's bullet; for the tap of

the wood-pecker, was the rat-tat of machine guns marking time for

a skirmish miles away; for growing crops, in these once fecund

and prolific stretches of the Flanders flat-lands, there were

eighty-thousand unburied dead, all encysted in the mud except where the

gouging shells had uprooted them out of the loblolly. And from far up on

the rise toward Passchen-daele came the dull regurgitations of the big

guns, as though the war had sickened of its own horrors and was retching

in its nausea.

What now was here must, in a measure, always be here. For surely no

husbandman would dare ever to drive his ploughshare through a field

which had become a stinking corruption; where in every furrow he would

inevitably turn up mortal awfulness, and where any moment his steel

might strike against one of the countless unexploded shells which fill

the earth like horrid plums in a yet more horrid pudding.

You couldn't give this desolation a name; our language yields no word to

fit it, no adjective to cap it. Yet right here in the stark and rotten

middle of it a British Tommy had stopped to have his little joke. Was he

downhearted? No! And so to prove he wasn't,--that his spirits were high

and that his racial gift of humour was unimpaired, he stuck up a sign of

sprawled lettering and it said:

“Piccadilly Circus. This way to Swan and Edgar's.”

Mister Kaiser, you might have known, if your mental processes hadn't

been stuck on skew-wise, forty ways for Sunday, that you could never

break through an army of good sports who make jokes at death and coin

gibes at what might well drive less hardy souls to madness.

*****

Mighty few men outwardly conform to the rôles they actually fill in

life. I am not speaking of drum-majors in bands or tattooed men in

side-shows or floor-walkers in department stores. Such parties are

picked for their jobs because, physically, they live up to the popular

conception; perhaps I should say the popular demand. I am speaking of

the run of the species. A successful poet is very apt to look like an

unsuccessful paper-hanger and I have known a paper-hanger who was the

spittin' image of a free versifier.

I think, though, of two men I have met over here who were designed by

nature and by environment to typify exactly what they are. One is Haig

and the other is Pershing. Either would make the perfect model for a

statue to portray the common notion of a field-marshal. General Sir

Douglas Haig is a picture, drawn to scale, of the kind of British

general that the novelists love to describe; in mannerism, in figure, in

size, in bearing, in colouring and expression, he is all of that. And by

the same tokens Pershing in every imaginable particular is the typical

American fighting-man. Incidentally I might add that these two men are

two of the handsomest and most splendid martial figures I have ever met.

They say Haig is the best-dressed officer in the British army and that

is saying a good deal, considering that the officers of the British army

are the best dressed officers of any army.

Pershing has the poise and port of a West Point cadet; has a cadet's

waist-line and shoulder-lines, too. A man may keep a youthful face but

in the curves of his back is where nearly always he betrays his age.

Look at Pershing's back without knowing who he was and you would put him

down as an athlete in his early twenties.

I have taken lunch with General Sir Douglas Haig, and his staff,

including his Presbyterian chaplain who is an inevitable member of the

commander's official family, and I have dined with General Pershing and

his staff, as Pershing's guest. When you break bread with a man at his

table you get a better chance to appraise him than you would be likely

to get did you casually meet him elsewhere. From each headquarters I

brought away the settled conviction that I had been in the company of

one of the staunchest, most dependable, most capable personalities to

whom authority and power were ever entrusted. Different as they were in

speech and in gesture, from each there radiated a certain thing which

the other likewise possessed and expressed without knowing that he

expressed it--a sense of a stupendous, unremitting responsibility,

gladly accepted and well discharged; an appreciation of having in his

hands a job to do, the tools for the doing of which are human beings,

and in the doing of which, should he make a mistake, the error will be

charged up against him in figures of human life.

Always I shall remember one outstanding sentence which Haig uttered

and one which Pershing uttered. Curiously enough, each was addressing

himself to the same subject, to wit: the American soldier. Haig said:

“The spirit of the American soldier as I have seen him over here since

your country entered the war, is splendid. When he first came I was

struck by his good humour, his unfailing cheerfulness, his modesty, and

most of all by his eager, earnest desire to learn the business of war as

speedily and as thoroughly as possible. Now as a British commander, I am

very, very glad of the opportunity to fight alongside of him--so

glad, that I do not find the words offhand, to express the depth of my

confidence in the steadfastness and the intelligence and the courage he

is every day displaying.”

Pershing said:

“When I think, as I do constantly think, of the behaviour of our men

fighting here in a foreign land; of the disciplined cheerfulness with

which they have faced discomforts, of the constant determination with

which they have confronted difficulties, and of the splendid dash with

which they have met the enemy in battle, I cannot speak what is in my

mind because my emotions of gratitude are so great they keep me from

speaking of these things.”

*****

At a French railway station any day one sees weeping women but they do

not weep until after the trains which carry their men-folk back to the

trenches have gone. To this rule I have never seen an exception.

A soldier who has finished his leave--a _permissionaire_ the French

call him--comes to the station, returning to his duties at the Front.

It may be he is a staff officer gorgeous in gold lace. It may be he is

a recruit of this year's class with the fleece of adolescence still upon

his cheeks but with the grave assurance of a veteran in his gait. Or it

may be that he is a grizzled territorial bent forward by one of those

enormous packs which his sort always tote about with them; and to me

this last one of the three presents the most heart-moving spectacle of

any. Nearly always he looks so tired and his uniform is so stained and

so worn and so wrinkled! I mean to make no cheap gibe at the expense of

a nation which has fine-tooth-combed her land for man, power to

stand the drain of four years of war when I say that according to my

observations the back-line reserves of France in 1918 are a million

middle-aged men whose feet hurt them.

Be he staff officer though, or beardless youth or fifty-year-old

rear-guard it is certain that his women-folk will accompany him to the

station to tell him farewell. He has had his week at home. By to-night

he will be back again at the Front, in the mud and the filth and the

cold and the wet. By to-morrow he may be dead. But there is never a tear

shed at parting. He kisses his wife or his mother or his sister or all

of them; he hugs to his breast his babies, if he has babies. Then he

climbs aboard a car which already is crowded with others like him, and

as the train draws away the women run down the platform alongside the

train, smiling and blowing kisses at him and waving their hands and

shouting good-byes and bidding him to do this or that or the other

thing.

And then, when the train has disappeared they drop down where they are

and cry their hearts out. I have witnessed this spectacle a thousand

times, I am sure, and always the sight of it renews my admiration for

the women of what I veritably believe to be the most patient and the

most steadfast race of beings on the face of the globe.

*****

In early June, I went up to where the first division of ours to be sent

into the British lines for its seasoning under fire was bedded down in

billets hard by the Flanders border; and there I saw a curious thing.

There were Canadians near at hand, and Australians and New Zealanders

and one might naturally suppose the Yankee lads would by preference

fraternise with these soldiers from the Dominions and the Colonies who

in speech, in mode of life and in habit of thought were really their

brothers under the skin.

Not at all. In many cases, if not in a majority of cases, that came

under my notice I found Americans chumming with London Cockneys, trading

tobacco for cheese; prunes for jam, cigarettes for captured souvenirs;

guying the Londoners because they drank tea in the afternoons and being

guyed because they themselves wanted coffee in the mornings.

The phenomenon I figured out to my own satisfaction according to this

process of deduction: First, that the American and the Cockney had

discovered that jointly they shared the same gorgeous sense of humour,

albeit expressed in dissimilar ways; second, that each had found out

the other was full of sporting instincts, which made another tie between

them; and third and perhaps most cogent reason of all, that whatever

the Yankee might say, using his own slang to say it, sounded unutterably

funny in the Cockney's ear, and what the Cockney said on any subject, in

his dialect, was as good as a vaudeville show to the Yankee.

Personally I do not believe it was the Anglo-Saxon strain calling to the

Anglo-Saxon strain, because the American was as likely to be of Italian

or Irish or Jewish or Teutonic or Slavic antecedents as he was to be of

pure English ancestry. I am sure it was not the common use by both of

the same language--with variations on the part of either. But I am

sure that it was the joyous prospect of getting free and unlimited

entertainment out of the conversations of a new pal.

Anyway our soldiers are cementing us together with a cement that will

bind the English-speaking races in a union which can never be sundered,

I am sure of that much.

*****

The madness which descended upon our enemies when they started this war

would appear to have taken a turn where it commonly manifests itself in

acts of stark degeneracy. Every day I am hearing tales which prove the

truth of this. If there was only one such story coming to light now and

then we might figure the terrible thing as proof of the nastiness of an

individual pervert manifesting itself; but where the evidence piles up

in a constantly accumulating mass it makes out a case so complete one is

bound to conclude that a demoniacal rottenness is running through their

ranks, affecting officer and men alike. For the sake of the good name

of mankind in general one strives not to accept all these tales but the

bulk of them must be true.

A young tank-officer of ours whom I knew before the war in New York,

where he was a rising lawyer, and whom I knew to be truthful, tells me

that an honest appearing British non-com in turn, told him that a week

or two ago the Britishers having cleaned up a nest of enemy machine

guns, sent a detail out to bury the dead. The squad had buried two

Germans, then they came upon the body of one of their own men who had

fallen in the fighting two days earlier when the Britishers made their

first attack upon the Germans only to be forced back and then to come

again with better success. The sergeant who stood sponsor for the

narrative declared that as he bent over the dead Englishman to unfasten

the identification tag from the wrist, he saw that something was

fastened to the dead man's arm and that this something was partly hidden

beneath the body. Becoming instantly suspicious, he warned the other men

to stand back and then kneeling down and feeling about cautiously, he

found a bomb so devised that a slight jar would set it off. Before they

fell back, the surviving Germans had attached this devilish thing to a

corpse with the benevolent intent of blowing to bits the first man among

the victors who should undertake to move the poor clay with intent to

give it decent burial.

Our men have been warned against gathering up German helmets and

German rifles in places from which the enemy has retired, because such

souvenirs have a way of blowing up in the finders' hands by reason

of the explosive grenades that have been attached to them and hidden

beneath them with the cap so arranged that a tug at the wired-on

connection will set off the charge; but this crowning atrocity shows

they are making improvements in their system. From sawing down fruit

trees, from shoveling filth in the drinking wells, from wantonly

destroying the villages which for years have sheltered them, from laying

waste the lands which they are being forced now to surrender back

into the hands of their rightful proprietors, the ingenious Hun has

progressed in his military education to where he makes dead men serve

his purposes. Personally, I have heard of but one act to match this one.

An American trooper entered a half-wrecked hamlet which the retreating

Germans had just evacuated, and on going into a villager's house, saw

a china doll lying upon a cupboard shelf, and saw that, hitched to the

doll, was one of these touchy hand-bombs. Now, it is only reasonable

to assume the German who planned this surprise went upon the assumption

that the doll would be the prized possession of some French child and

that when the family who owned the house found their way back to it, the

child would run first of all to recover her treasured dollie and picking

it up would be killed or mangled, thereby scoring one more triumph, if a

small one, for Vaterland and Kaiser.

*****

To a dressing station behind our front lines up beyond St. Mihiel--so

I am reliably informed--our stretcher-bearers brought two wounded

prisoners and laid them down. One of the pair was a Prussian captain

with a hole in his breast; the other a weedy boy-private with a

shattered leg. There were two surgeons at work here--a Frenchman and an

American.

As the Frenchman bent over the captain, in the joy of service forgetting

for the moment that the man lying before him was his enemy and filled

only with a desire to save life and relieve human agony, the Prussian

who seemingly had been unconscious, opened his eyes in recognition.

Thereupon the surgeon, making ready to strip away the first-aid

dressings from the punctured chest, spoke to his patient in French

saying he trusted the captain did not suffer great pain. The reply Was

Prussianesque. The wounded man cleared his throat and spat full in the

Frenchman's face.

I hope I am not blood-thirsty, but I am happy to be able to relate a

satisfactory sequel. The Frenchman, who must have been a gentleman as

well as a soldier, stood true to the creed of an honourable and merciful

calling. He merely put up his hand and without a word wiped the spittle

from his face which had grown white as death under the strain of

enduring the insult. But an American stretcher-bearer who had witnessed

the act, snatched up a rifle from a heap of captured accoutrements near

the door of the dugout and brought the butt of it down, full force,

across the hateful, gloating mouth of the Prussian.

For contrast, mark the behaviour of the boy-soldier who also had just

been borne in. It was the American surgeon who took the private's case

in hand. Now this American surgeon was of pure German descent and bore a

German name and he spoke well the tongue of his ancestors. So naturally

he addressed the groaning lad in German.

Between gasps of pain, the lad told his interrogator that he was a

Saxon, that his age was eighteen and that he had been in service at the

Front for nearly a year. Even in the midst of his suffering he showed

pleasure at finding among his captors a man who knew and could use the

only language which he himself knew. Noting this, the surgeon continued

to address the youngster as he made ready to do to the mangled limb what

was needful to be done.

As his skilled fingers touched the wound, some sub-conscious

instinct quickened perhaps by the fact that he had just employed the

mother-speech of his parents set him to whistling between his teeth a

song he had known as a child. And that song was _Die Wackt am Rhein_.

Under his ministering hands the young Saxon twitched and jerked. Perhaps

he thought the surgeon meant to gloat over him, captured and maimed for

life as he was; perhaps it was another emotion which prompted him to cry

out in a half-strangled shriek:

“Don't whistle that song--don't!”

“I am sorry,” said the American, “I did not mean to hurt your feelings.

I thought you might like to hear it--that it might soothe you.”

“Like to hear it? Never!” panted the lad. “I hate it--I hate it--I hate

it!”

“Surely though you love your country and your Emperor, don't you?”

pressed the American, anxious to fathom the psychology of the prisoner's

nature.

“I love my country--yes,” answered the boy, “but as to the Kaiser, to

him I would do this--” And he drew a finger across his throat with a

quick, sharp stroke.

*****

I am putting down this scrap of narrative in a room in a hotel that is

two hundred years old, in the heart of a wonderful old Norman city and

while I am writing it, twenty miles away, in front of Montdidier, they

are giving my friend the kind of funeral he asked for.

I call him my friend, although I never saw him until four weeks ago.

He was a man you would want for your friend. Physically and every other

way, he was the sort of man that Richard Harding Davis used to love to

describe in his stories about soldiers of fortune. He seemed to have

stepped right out of the pages of one of Davis's books--he was tall

and straight and slender, as handsome a man as ever I looked at and a

soldier in every inch of him. The other officers of the regiment admired

him but his men, as I have reason to know, worshipped him--and that, in

the final appraisals, is the test of an officer and a gentleman in any

army.

I met him on the day when I rode up into Picardy to attach myself bag

and baggage--one bag and not much baggage--to a foot-regiment of our

old regular army, then moving into the battle-lines to take over a

sector from the French. He had a Danish name and his father, I believe,

was a Dane; but he was born in a Western state nearly forty years ago.

In the Spanish war he was a kid private; saw service as a non-com in

the Philippine mess; tried civil life afterwards and couldn't endure

it; went to Central America and took a hand in some tinpot revolution or

other; came home again and was in business for a year or so, which was

as long as his adventurous soul could stand a stand-still life; then

moved across the line into the Canadian Northwest and got a job in the

Royal Mounted Police. In 1914, when the war broke, he volunteered in a

Canadian battalion as a private. On our entrance into the conflict he

was a major of the Dominion Forces.

He resigned this commission forthwith, hurried back to the States and

joined up at the first recruiting office he saw after he reached

New York. And now when I met him, he had his majority in an American

regiment which has a long and a most honourable record behind it.

During this past month I saw a good deal of him. So far as I could

judge, he had one, and just one, bit of affectation about him--if you

could call it that. He wore always the British trench helmet that he had

worn in the Canadian forces and he liked to finger the gap in its brim

where a bit of shrapnel chipped it as he climbed up Vimy Ridge, and he

liked to tell about that day of Vimy so glorious and so tragic for the

valorous whelps of the British lion who hail from our own side of the

blue water. He had another small vanity too, as I now understand--a

vanity which to-day is being gratified.

Six days ago I left the regiment to spend a day and a night with a

battery of five-inch guns just west of Montdidier. As I was starting

off he hailed me and we made an engagement for a dinner together here in

this town where the food is very, very good, said dinner to take place

“sometime soon.” He was standing in the road as I rode away and when I

looked back out of the car he waved his hand at me.

The village where I stayed for that night and the following day, formed

a hinge in the line that our forward forces had taken over. It was

within two miles of the German trenches and within three or four miles

of some of their heavy batteries. Through the night I slept at battalion

headquarters, in the only house in the town which up until then had

escaped serious damage from German gunfire.

Coming back again to my regiment--as I shall call it--on the second

day following, I learned that almost immediately after my departure the

batteries I left in and near this village had been ordered to take up

a prepared position in a patch of woods a mile farther in the rear and

that my friend's battalion had gone up to hold the town and to act as a

reserve unit there until its turn should come to relieve part of

another infantry regiment in the trenches proper. So I knew that in all

probability he now was domiciled in the cottage where I had slept the

night previous. As it turned out my guess was right--that was where he

was. Three days ago I borrowed a side-car and ran on down here where I

could get in touch with the divisional censor and file some of the copy

I have been grinding out lately.

Yesterday afternoon in the main square I bumped into the adjutant of my

regiment and with him, one of the French liaison officers attached to

the regiment.

“Hello,” I said, “what brings you two down here?”

“We came to get some flowers for the funeral to-morrow,” the adjutant

told me.

“Whose funeral?” I asked.

When they told me whose funeral, I was stunned for a moment. From them I

learned when my friend died and how. And this, then, is the story of it:

Night before last he and his battalion liaison officer, a Frenchman of

course, and his battalion adjutant were eating supper in that same small

red brick house which had sheltered me for a night. The Germans had

been punishing the place at long distance; now there was a lull in the

bombardment, but just as the three of them finished their meal, the

enemy reopened fire. Almost at once a shell fell in the courtyard before

the house and another demolished a stone stable in the orchard behind

it. All three hurried down into an improvised bomb-proof shelter in the

cellar.

“You fellows stay here,” said the major when they had reached the foot

of the stairs. “I left my cigars and a couple of letters from home

upstairs in the kitchen. I'll go up and get them and be back again with

you in a minute.”

Thirty seconds later, to the accompaniment of a great rending crash,

the building caved in. Wreckage cascaded down the cellar stairs but the

floor rafters above their heads stood the jar and the two who were below

got off with bruises and scratches. They made their way up through the

debris. A six-inch shell had come through the roof, blowing down two

sides of the kitchen, and under the shattered walls the Major was lying,

helpless and crushed.

They hauled him out. He was conscious but badly hurt, as they could

tell. The adjutant ran to a dug-out on the other side of the village and

brought back with him the regimental surgeon. It didn't take the surgeon

long to make his examination.

To the others he whispered that there was no hope--the Major's spine

was broken. But because he dreaded to break the word to the victim he

essayed a bit of excusable deceit.

“Major,” he said, bending over the figure stretched out upon the floor,

“you've got it pretty badly, but I guess we'll pull you through. Only

you'd better let me give you a little jab of dope in your arm--you may

begin to suffer as soon as the numbness of the shock wears off.”

My friend, so they told me, looked up in the surgeon's face with a

whimsical grin.

“Doc,” he said, “your intentions are good; but there comes a time when

you mustn't try to fool a pal. And you can't fool me--I know. I know

I've got mine and I know I can't last much longer. I'm dead from the

hips down already. And never mind about giving me any dope. There are

several things I want to say and I want my head clear while I'm saying

them.”

He told them the names and addresses of his nearest relatives--a brother

and a sister, and he gave directions for the disposal of his kit and of

his belongings. He didn't have very much to leave--professional soldiers

rarely do have very much to leave.

After a bit he said: “I've only one regret. I'm passing out with the

uniform of an American soldier on my back and that's the way I always

hoped 'twould be with me, but I'm sorry I didn't get mine as I went

over the top with these boys of ours behind me. Still, a man can't have

everything--can he?--and I've had my share of the good things of this

world.”

He began to sink and once they thought he was gone; but he opened his

eyes and spoke again:

“Boys,” he said, “take a tip from me who knows: this thing of dying is

nothing to worry about. There's no pain and there's no fear. Why, dying

is the easiest thing I've ever done in all my life. You'll find that out

for yourselves when your time comes. So cheer up and don't look so glum

because I just happen to be the one that's leaving first.”

The end came within five minutes after this. Just before he passed, the

liaison officer who was kneeling on the floor holding one of the dying

man's hands between his two hands, felt a pressure from the cold fingers

that he clasped and saw a flicker of desire in the eyes that were

beginning to glaze over with a film. He bent his head close down and in

the ghost of a ghost of a whisper, the farewell message of his friend

and mine came to him between gasps.

“Listen,” the Major whispered, “Old Blank,”--naming the regimental

chaplain--“has pulled off a lot of slouchy funerals in this outfit. Tell

him, for me, to give me a good swell one, won't you?”

He went then, with the smile of his little conceit still upon his lips.

That was why the two men whom I met here yesterday rode in to get

flowers and wreaths. They told me the Colonel was going to have

the regimental band out for the services to-day too, and that a

brigadier-general and a major-general of our army would be present with

their staffs and that a French general would be present with his staff.

So I judge they are giving my friend what he wanted--a good swell one.

The France to which tourists will come after the war will not be the

France which peacetime visitors knew. I am not speaking so much of

the ruined cities and the razed towns, each a mute witness now to

thoroughness as exemplified according to the orthodox tenets of

Kul-tur. For the most part these never can be restored to their former

semblances--Hunnish efficiency did its damned work too well for the evil

badness of it ever to be undone. Indeed I was told no longer ago than

last week, when I went through Arras, dodging for shelter from ruin-heap

to ruin-heap between gusts of shelling from the German batteries, that

it is the intention of the French government to leave untouched and

untidied certain areas of wanton devastation, so future generations of

men looking upon these hell's quarter-sections, will have before their

eyes fit samples of the finished handicraft of the Hun. I am sure this

must be true of Arras because in the vicinity of the cathedral--I

mean the place where the cathedral was once--signs are stuck up

in rubble-piles or fastened to upstanding bits of splintered walls

forbidding visitors to remove souvenirs or to alter the present

appearance of things in any way whatsoever. I sincerely trust the French

do carry out this purpose. Then in the years to come, when Americans

come here and behold this spot, once one of the most beautiful in all

Europe and now one of the foulest and most hideous, they may be cured

of any lingering inclination to trust a people in whose veins there

may linger a single trace of the taints of Kaiserism and militarism.

However, I dare say that by then our present enemies will have been

purged clean of the blight that now is in their blood.

When I say that the France of the future will never be the France which

once was a shrine for lovers of beauty to worship at--which was all one

great altar dedicated to loveliness--I am thinking particularly of the

rural districts and not of the communities. I base my belief upon the

very reasonable supposition that after the armies are withdrawn or

disbanded--or, as in the case of our foes, killed off or captured

or driven back,--the peasants in their task of making the devastated

regions fit once more for human habitation, will turn to the material

most plentifully at hand and that of which the quickest use can be made.

This means then, that instead of rebuilding with masonry and cement

and plaster after the ancient modes, they will employ the salvage

of military constructions. And by that same sign it means that ugly

characterless wooden buildings with roofs of corrugated iron, and all

slab-sided and angular and hopelessly plain, will replace the quaint

gabled houses that are gone--and gone forever; and that where the

picturesque stone fences ran zig-zagging across the faces of the

meadows, and likewise where the centuries-old, plastered walls rose

about byre and midden and stable-yard, will instead be stretched lines

of barbed wire, nailed to wooden posts.

The stuff will be there--in incredible quantities--and it will be cheap

and it will be available for immediate use, once the forces of the

Allies have scattered. It is only natural to assume therefore that the

thrifty country-folk and the citizens of the villages will take it over.

For a fact in certain instances they are already doing so. Just the

other day, up near the Flanders border in the British-held territory,

I saw a half grown boy wriggling through a maze of rusted wire along

an abandoned defence line, like Brer Rabbit through the historic

brier-patch; and when I drew nearer, curious to know what sort of game

he played all alone here in a land where every game except the great

game of war is out of fashion, I saw that he was tearing down the

strands of the wire, and through the interpreter he told me he was going

to enclose his mother's garden with the stuff. Think of a French garden

fenced in after the style of a Nebraska ranch yard. Also I have taken

note that the peasants are removing the plank shorings from the sides of

old, disused trenches and with the boards thus secured are knocking up

barns and chicken-sheds and even makeshift dwellings.

Assuredly it will never be the old France, physically. But spiritually,

the new France, wearing the scars of her sacrifice as the Redeemer of

Mankind wore the nail-marks of His crucifixion, will be a vision of

glory before the eyes of men forevermore. I like this simile as I set

it down in my note-book. And I mean no irreverence as I liken the barbed

wire to the Crown of Thoms and think of two cross-pieces of ugly wood

out of a barrack or a rest-billet as being erected into the shape of The

Cross.

*****

When the military policemen first came upon him in the Gare du Nord he

made a picture worth looking at. For he stood above six-feet-two in

his soleless and broken brogans, and he was as black as a coal-hole at

twelve o'clock at night during a total eclipse of the moon and he was

as broad across between the shoulders as the back of a hack. He wore

a khaki shirt, a pair of ragged, blue overalls and an ancient campaign

hat. He didn't appear to be going anywhere in particular; he was just

standing there.

Now the M. P.9 have a little scheme for trapping deserters and

malingerers. They edge close up behind a suspect and then one of them

snaps out “Shun!” in the tones of a drill-officer. If the fellow really

is a truant from service, force of habit and the shock of surprise

together make him come to attention and then he's a gone gosling,

marching off the calaboose with steel jewelry on both his wrists.

But when this pair slipped nearer and nearer until they could touch

the big darky, and one of them barked the command right in his ear,

he merely turned his head and without straightening his languid form

inquired politely;

“Speakin' to me, Boss?”

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, one of them asked for his papers.

“Whut kinder papers?”

“Your military papers--your pass--something to identify you by.”

“W'y, Boss,” he asked, “does you need papers to go round wid yere in

Sant Nazare?” “This ain't St. Nazare,” they told him. “This is Paris.”

“Paris? My Lawd! Den dat 'splains it.”

“Explains what?” They were getting cross with him.

“'Splains w'y I couldn't fine all dem niggers dey tole me wuz in

Sant Nazare. Here I been in Paris all dis time--ever since early dis

maw-nin'--an' I didn't know it. No wonner I couldn't locate dem big

wharf-boats an' dem niggers.”

“Never mind that now--I just asked you where're your papers?”

“Papers? Me? Huh, Boss, I ain't got no more papers 'n a ha'nt. Effen you

needs papers to git about on, you gen'elmen better tek me an' lock me up

right now, 'ka'se I tells you, p'intedly, I ain't got nary paper to my

name.”

“That's precisely what we aim to do. Come on, you.”

They took him to number ten Rue St. Anne where our provost-marshal in

Paris has his headquarters and there the tale came out. I got it first

hand from the captain of the Intelligence Department who examined him

and I know I got it straight, because the captain was a monologist on

the Big Time before he signed up for the war, and he has both the knack

of narrative and the gift of dialects. Then later I myself saw the

central figure in the comedy and interviewed him. In a way of speaking,

I think his adventure was the most remarkable of any I have heard of on

this side of the ocean--and I have heard my share. How a big lubberly

American negro with absolutely nothing on his person to vouch for him or

his purposes, could travel half way across a country where no one

else may stir a mile without a pocket full of passes and _vises_ and

credentials; and how, lacking any knowledge of the language, he managed

to do what he did do--but I am anticipating.

It was at ten Rue St. Anne that my friend the ex-vaudevillian took him

in hand with the intention of conferring the third degree. For quite a

spell the interrogator couldn't make up his mind whether he dealt with

the most guileless human being on French soil or with a shrewd black

fugitive hiding his real self behind a mask of innocence. After he

had made sure the prisoner was what he seemed to be, the intelligence

officer kept on at him for the fun of the thing.

Batting his eyes as the questions pelted at him, the giant made

straightforward answers. His name was Watterson Towers; his age was

summers 'round twenty-fo' or twenty-five, he didn't perzactly 'member

w'ich; he was born and fotched up in Bowlin' Green, Kintucky, and at

the time of his coming to France he resided at number thirty-fo', East

Pittsburgh.

“Number thirty-four what?” asked the inquisitor.

“Naw suh, not no thirty-fo' nothin'--jes' plain thirty-fo'.”

“But what street is it on?”

“'Tain't on no strett, Boss.”

“What do you mean--no street?”

“Boss, wuz you ever in East Pittsburgh? Well suh, den does you 'member

dat string of little houses dat stands in a row right 'longside de

railroad tracks ez you comes into town f'um de fur side? 'Taint no

street, it's jes' only houses. Well suh, I lives in de thirty-fo'th

one.”

“I see. How did you get here?”

“Me? I rid, mostly.”

“Rode on what?”

“Rid part de time on a ship an' part de time on de steam-cyars but fust

an' last I done a mighty heap of walkin', also.”

Further questioning elicited from Watterson Towers these salient facts:

He had taken a job which carried him from East Pittsburgh to New York

and left him stranded there. He had heard about the draft. He knew that

sooner or later the draft would catch him and send him off to France

where he would be expected to fight Germans, so he decided that before

this could happen, he would visit France on his own hook, and as a

civilian bystander, a private observer, so to speak, would view some of

the operation of war at first-hand, with a view to deciding whether he

cared enough for it as a sport, to take a hand in it voluntarily.

He had smuggled himself aboard a transport--Heaven alone knew how!--and

fortified with a bag of ginger-snaps he had remained hidden away in a

cargo-hold until the ship sailed. Two days out from land a new and very

painful sickness overcame the stowaway and he made his way up on deck

for air. There he had been caught and had been sent to the galley

to work his passage across. When he had progressed thus far, his

cross-examiner broke in. “What was the name of the ship?”

“Boss, I plum' disremembers, but it muster been de bigges' ship dey is.

W'y suh, dey wuz 'most six-hund'ed folks on dat ship, an' I had to

wash up after ever' las' one of 'em. W'ite folks suttinly teks a lot of

dishes w'en dey eats--I'll tell de world dat.”

“Well, where did the ship land?--do you know that much?”

“Boss, hit wuz some place wid a outlandish name an' dat's all I kin tell

you. I never wuz no hand fur 'memberin' reg'lar names let alone dese

yere jabber kind of words lak dese yere French folks talks wid.”

“What happened when you came ashore?”

“W'y, suh, dey let me off de ship an' a w'ite man on de wharf-boat he

tells me I'se landed right spang in France an' he axes me does I want a

job of wuk an' I tells him 'Naw suh, not yit.' I tells him I'se aimin'

to travel round an' see de country an' de war 'fore I settles down to

anythin'. Den 'nother w'ite man dat's standin' dere he tells me dey's a

lot of my colour in a place called Sant Nazare an' I 'cides I'll go dere

an' 'sociate aw'ile wid dem niggers. So I changed my money an' I--”

“I thought you said you didn't have any money when you started?”

“I didn't, Boss, but de w'ite folks on de ship dey taken up a c'lection

fur me, account of me washin' all dem dishes so nice an' clean. It come

to twenty dollahs. So I changes it into dese yere francs. De man give

me twenty francs fur my twenty dollahs--didn't charge me no interes'

a-tall, but jes' traded even; an' den I sets out to find dis yere

Sant Nazare place. Dat wuz two days ago an' I been mov-in' stiddy ever

sense.”

“How did you know what train to take?”

“I didn't. I jes' went to de depot an' I dim' abo'd de fus' train I sees

dat look lak she might be fixin' to go sommers. An' after 'w'ile one

of dese Frenchies come 'round to me whar I wuz settin' sin' he jabber

somethin' at me an' I tell him plain ez I kin, whar I wants to go an' is

dis de right train? An' den he jabber some mo' an' I keep on tellin' him

an' after 'w'ile he jes th'ow up both hands, lak dis, an' go on off an'

leave me be in peace. W'ich dat very same thing happen to me ever' time

I git on a train an' I done been on three or fo' 'fore I gits to dis

place, dis mawnin'.

“My way wuz to stay by de train t'well she stop an' don't start no mo'

an! den I'd git off an' walk round lookin' for de big wharf-boats where

de w'ite man tole me dem niggers would be wukkin', but not no place I

went did I see ary wharf-boats, so I jes' kept a-movin' t'well I

got yere, lak I'm tellin' it to you, an' I says to myself den, 'Dis

sutt'inly must be Sant Nazare--it's shore big enough to be, anyway.'

But I walked 'bout ten miles an' I couldn't find no wharf-boats an' no

niggers neither, scusin' some Frenchified niggers all dressed up lak

Misty Shriners, an' dey couldn't talk our way of talkin'. I seen

plenty of our soldiers but I wuz'n' aimin' to be pesterin 'round wid no

soldiers 'till I'd done seen de war. So finally I sees a big place dat

look lak it mout be 'nother depot, an' I went on in there an' wuz fixn'

to tek de next train out, w'en dem two soldier-men of your'n wid de

bands on dere arms dey come up to me an' dey run me in. An' yere I is.”

It was explained to Watterson Towers that, to avoid complications he

had better enter the army forthwith and very promptly he agreed. Travel,

seemingly, was beginning to pall on him. Then to spin out his gorgeous

humour of the interview, the intelligence officer put one more question

and when he told me the answer I agreed with him the reward had been

worth the effort.

“Now, Watterson,” he said, “what kind of a regiment would you prefer

to join--an all-white regiment or an all-black regiment or a mixed

regiment, part black and part white? You can 'take your choice--so speak

up.”

“Boss,” said Watterson, “it don't make no dif'ence a-tall to me w'ich

kind of a regiment 'tis--jes' so it's got a band!”

*****

One's war-time experiences is crowded with constant surprises. For five

months, off and on, I have been living on the fourth floor of one of the

largest and most noted of Paris hotels, and not until to-day did I find

out that two floors of the building have all along been in possession of

the government for hospital purposes. The patients, mainly wounded men

who have been invalided back from the trenches are brought by night and

carried in through a rear entrance, which opens on a barred and guarded

alley-way. The guests never see them and they never come in contact with

the guests.

Under my feet all these weeks hundreds of disabled fighting-men have

been getting better or getting worse, recovering or dying, and I would

never have guessed their presence had it not been for the chance remark

of a government official who is connected with one of the bureaus having

charge of the _blessés_.

I learn now that the same thing is true of several other prominent

hotels, but so carefully is the business carried on and so skillfully

do the authorities hide their secret that I am sure not one guest in a

thousand ever stumbles upon the fact.

*****

When I was writing a tale about one visit of several which I paid to

the old Luneville sectors where our buddies, in the spring of this year,

first left their tooth-marks on the Heinies, I forgot to tell of an

incident that occurred on the last day of our stay up there as the

guests of a regiment of the Rainbows.

Martin Green and I had just returned from a four-hour tramp through some

of our trenches. It was long after the hour for the mid-day meal when

we got back, weary and mud-coated, to regimental headquarters in a

knocked-about village. But the colonel's cook obligingly dished up some

provender for us and for the young intelligence officer who had been our

guide that day. Just as we were finishing the last round of flap-jacks

with molasses, the Germans began shelling the battered town so we

adjourned to the nearest dug-out, which was the next door cellar, that

had been thickened as to its roof with sand-bags and loose earth and

strips of railroad iron. Down there we came upon several others who had

taken shelter, including one of the majors.

“When were you fellows figuring on starting back to your own billet?” he

inquired. “Sometime this afternoon, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” said Green, “we had counted on leaving here about three o'clock.

But I guess we'll be delayed, if the Germans keep up their strafing.

Neither of us fancies trying to make a break out of here while the

bombardment is going on, and I don't suppose our chauffeur would be so

very enthusiastic over the prospect, either. I only hope the Germans let

up on the fireworks display before dark. It's forty-odd miles to where

we're going and the thought of riding that distance after nightfall over

these torn-up roads with no lights burning on our car and the road

full of supply trains coming up to the front, does not strike me as a

particularly alluring prospect.”

“Don't worry,” said the Major with a grin which proved he was holding

back something. “You can get away from here in--well, let's see--.” He

glanced at the watch on his wrist. “In just one hour and three-quarters,

or to be exact, in one hour and forty-six minutes from now, you can be

on your way. It's now 2:15. At precisely one minute past four you can

climb into your car and beat it from here and if you hurry you'll be

home in ample time for dinner.”

“You talk as though you were in the confidence of these Germans,” quoth

Green.

“In a way of speaking, I am,” said the Major. “I've been here for eight

days now, and every day since I arrived, promptly at 2 p. M.

those batteries over yonder open up on this place and all hands go

underground. The shelling continues--in the ratio of one shell every two

minutes--until four o'clock sharp. Then it stops, and until two o'clock

the next day, things around here are nice and quiet and healthy. So

don't get chesty and think this show was put on especially on your

account, because it wasn't: it's in accordance with the regular

programme. Therefore, judging to-day's matinee by past performances, I

would say that at one minute past four you chaps can be on your way with

absolutely nothing to worry about except the chances of a puncture.”

“Funny birds--these Germans,” exclaimed one of us, still half in doubt

as to whether the Major joked.

“Funny birds is right,” he said, “and then some. We've got it doped out

after this fashion: The officer in command of the German battery just

over the hill from where you were to-day probably has instructions to

shoot so many rounds a day into us. So in order to simplify the matter

he, being a true German, starts at two and quits at four, when he has

used up his supply of ammunition for the day. Now that we're wise to his

routine we don't take any chances, but withdraw ourselves from society

during the two hours of the day when he is enjoying his customary

afternoon hate. Old George J. Methodical we call him. You fellows still

don't quite believe me, eh? Well, wait and see whether I'm right.”

We waited and we saw, and he was right.

Somewhere over our heads a charge of shrapnel or of high explosive

exploded every two minutes until precisely four o'clock. Sharp on the

hour the shells quit falling and before the dust had settled after the

farewell blast we were gathering up our dunnage for the departure. As

we sped out of the huddle of shattered cottages and struck the open road

there was a half-mile stretch ahead of us and while we traversed it we

were within easy range and plain view of the Germans. But no one took a

wing shot at us as we whizzed across the open space.

After we slid down over the crest into the protection of the wooded

valley below, I remembered an old story--the story of the peddler who

invaded a ten-floor office building in New York and made his way to the

top floor before one of the hall attendants found him. The attendant

kicked the peddler down one flight of stairs to the ninth floor and

there another man fell upon him and kicked him down another flight to

the eighth floor where a third man took him in hand and kicked him a

flight and so he progressed until he had been kicked down ten flights

by ten different men and had landed upon the sidewalk a bruised and

battered wreck, with the fragments of his wares scattered about him. He

sat up on the pavement then and in tones of deep admiration remarked:

“Mein Gott, vot a berfect system!”

In the original version of the tale the peddler was Yiddish. But I'm

certain now that he was German and that he went back to the Vaterland

after the war broke out and became the commander of a battery of

five-inch guns on the old Luneville front.

*****

On the day before Decoration Day of this year of 1917 I was in a

sea-port town on the northeastern coast of France which our people had

taken over as a supply base. The general in command of our local forces

said to me as we sat in his headquarters at dinner that evening; “I wish

you'd get up early in the morning and go for a little ride with me out

to the cemetery. You'll be going back there later in the day, of course,

for the services but I want you to see something that you probably won't

be able to see after nine or ten o'clock.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Never mind now,” he answered. “To tell you in advance doesn't suit

my purposes. But will you be ready to go with me in my car at seven

o'clock?”

“Yes, sir. I will.”

I should say? it was about half-past seven when we rode in at the

gates of the cemetery and made for the section which, by consent of

the French, had been set apart as a burial place for our people. For

considerably more than a year now, dating from the time I write this

down, a good many thousands of Americans have been stationed in or near

this port, and many, many times that number have passed through it. So

quite naturally, though it is hundreds of miles from any of the past or

present battle fronts, we have had numerous deaths there from accident

or from disease or from other causes.

We rounded a turn in the winding road and there before us stretched the

graves of our dead boys, soldiers and sailors, marines and members of

labor battalions; whites and blacks and yellow men, Jews and Gentiles,

Catholics, Protestants and Mohammedans--for there were four followers

of the faith of Islam taking their last sleep here in this consecrated

ground--row upon row of them, each marked, except in the case of the

Mohammedans, by a plain white cross bearing in black letters the name,

the age, the rank and the date of death of him who slept there at the

foot of the cross.

Just beyond the topmost line of crosses stood the temporary wooden

platform dressed with bunting and flags, where an American admiral

and an American brigadier, a group of French officers headed by

a major-general, a distinguished French civic official, and three

chaplains representing three creeds were to unite at noon in an hour of

devotion and tribute to the memories of these three-hundred-and-odd men

of ours who had made the greatest of all human sacrifices.

But it was not the sight of the rows of graves and the lines of crosses

nor the peculiar devices uprearing slantwise at head and foot of the

graves of the four Musselmans nor yet the brave play of tri-coloured

bunting upon the sides and front of the platform yonder which caught my

attention. For at that hour the whole place was alive with the shapes

of French people--mostly of women in black but with a fair sprinkling

of shapes of old men and of children among them. All these figures were

busy at a certain task--and that task was the decorating of the graves

of Americans.

As we left the car to walk through the plot I found myself taking off my

cap and I kept it off all the while I was there. For even before I had

been told the full story of what went on there I knew I stood in the

presence of a most high and holy thing and so I went bare-headed as I

would in any sanctuary.

We walked all through this God's acre of ours, the general and I. Some

of the women who laboured therein were old and bent, some were young but

all of them wore black gowns. Some plainly had been recruited from the

well-to-do and the wealthy elements of the resident population; more

though, were poor folk and many evidently were peasants who, one

guessed, lived in villages or on farms near to the city. Here would be

a grave that was heaped high with those designs of stiff, bright-hued

immortelles which the French put upon the graves of their own dead. Here

would be a grave that was marked with wreaths of simple field flowers or

with the great lovely white and pink roses which grow so luxuriantly on

this coast. Here would be merely great sheaves of loose blossoms; there

a grave upon which the flowers had been scattered broadcast, until the

whole mound was covered with the fragrant dewy offerings; and there,

again, I saw where fingers patently unaccustomed to such employment had

fashioned the long-stemmed roses into wreaths and crosses and even into

forms of shields.

Grass grew rich and lush upon all the graves. White sea-shells marked

the sides of them and edged the narrow gravelled walks. We came to where

there were two newly made graves; their occupants had been buried there

only a day or so before as one might tell by the marks in the trodden

turf, but a carpeting of sods cut from a lawn somewhere had been so

skillfully pieced together upon the mounds that the raw clods of clay

beneath were quite covered up and hidden from sight, so that only the

seams in the green coverlids distinguished these two graves from graves

which were older than they by weeks or months.

Alongside every grave, nearly, knelt a woman alone, or else a woman with

children aiding her as she disposed her showing of flowers and wreaths

to the best advantage. The old men were putting the paths in order,

raking the gravel down smoothly and straightening the borderings of

shells. There were no soldiers among the men; all were civilians, and

for the most part humble-appearing civilians, clad in shabby garments.

But I marked two old gentlemen wearing the great black neckerchiefs and

the flowing broadcloth coats of ceremonial days, who seemed as deeply

intent as any in what to them must have been an unusual labour. Coming

to each individual worker or each group of workers the general would

halt and formally salute in answer to the gently murmured greetings

which constantly marked our passage through the burying-ground. When

we had made the rounds we sat down upon the edge of the flag-dressed

platform and he proceeded to explain what I already had begun to reason

out for myself. Only, of course I did not know, until he told me, how it

all had started.

“It has been a good many months now,” he said, “since we dug the first

grave here. But on the day of the funeral a delegation of the most

influential residents came to me to say the people of the town desired

to adopt our dead. I asked just what exactly was meant by this and then

the spokesman explained.

“'General,' he said to me, 'there is scarcely a family in this place

that has not given one or more of its members to die for France. In most

cases these dead of ours sleep on battlefields far away from us, perhaps

in unmarked, unknown graves. This is true of all the parts of our

country but particularly is it true of this town, which is so remote

from the scenes of actual fighting. So in the case of this brave

American who is to-day to be buried here among us, we ask that a French

family be permitted formally to undertake the care of his grave, exactly

as though it were the grave of their own flesh-and-blood who fell as

this American has fallen, for France and for freedom. In the case

of each American who may hereafter be buried here we crave the same

privilege. We promise you that for so long as these Americans shall rest

here in our land, their graves will be as our graves and will be tended

as we would tend the graves of our own sons.

“'We desire that the name of each family thus adopting a grave may be

registered, so that should the adults die, the children of the next

generation as a sacred charge, may carry on the obligation which is now

to be laid upon their parents and which is to be transmitted down as a

legacy to all who bear their name. We would make sure that no matter how

long your fallen braves rest in the soil of France, their graves will

not be neglected or forgotten.

'“We wish to do this thing for more reasons than one: We wish to do it

because thereby we may express in our own poor way the gratitude we feel

for America. We wish to do it because of the thought that some stricken

mother across the seas in America will perhaps feel a measure of

consolation in knowing that the grave of her boy will always be made

beautiful by the hands of a Frenchwoman whose home, also, has been

desolated. And finally we wish to do it because we know it will bring

peace to the hearts of our French women to feel they have a right to put

French flowers upon the graves of your dead since they can never hope,

most of them, to be able to perform that same office for their heroic

dead.'”

The general stopped and cleared his voice which had grown a bit husky.

Then he resumed:

“So that was how the thing came about, and that explains what you see

here now. You see, the French have no day which exactly corresponds in

its spiritual significance to our Decoration Day and our Memorial

Day. All Souls' Day, which is religious, rather than patriotic in its

purport, is their nearest approach to it. But weeks ago, before the

services contemplated for to-day were even announced, the word somehow

spread among the townspeople. To my own knowledge some of these poor

women have been denying themselves the actual necessities of life in

order to be able to make as fine a showing for the graves which they

have adopted as any of the wealthier sponsors could make.

“Don't think, though, that these graves are not well kept at all times.

Any day, at any hour, you can come here and you will find anywhere from

ten to fifty women down on their knees smoothing the turf and freshening

the flowers which they constantly keep upon the graves. But I knew that

at daylight this morning all or nearly all of them would be here doing

their work before the crowds began to arrive for the services, and I

wanted you to see them at it, in the hope that you might write something

about the sight for our people at home to read. If it helps them better

to understand what is in the hearts of the French you and I may both

count our time as having been well spent.”

He stood up looking across the cemetery, all bathed and burnished as it

was in the soft rich sunshine.

“God,” he said under his breath, “how I am learning to love these

people!”

So I have here set down the tale and to it I have to add a sequel.

Decoration Day was months ago and now I learn that the custom which

originated in this coast town is spreading through the country; that in

many villages and towns where Americans are buried, French women whose

sons or husbands or fathers or brothers have been killed, are taking

over the care of the graves of the Americans, bestowing upon them the

same loving offices which they would visit, if they could, upon the

graves of their own men-folk.

*****

It was one of those days which will live always in my memory--my feet

wouldn't let me forget it even if my brain wanted to--when I had to walk

to keep up. The available forces offered by Pershing to the French and

British at the time of the great spring push of the Germans were moving

up across Picardy. I, as one of the correspondents assigned each to

a separate regiment, had set out at dawn to foot it for fifteen miles

across country at the tail of the headquarters company. This happened

to be a day, of which there were several, when neither a side-car,

a riding-horse, or a seat in an ambulance or a baggage-wagon was

available, and when the colonel's automobile was so crowded with the

colonel and his driver and his adjutant and his French liaison officer

and all their baggage, there was no room in it for me. That painful

period of my martial adventures has elsewhere in these writings been

described at greater or less length.

I was hoofing it over the flinty highway, trying to favour my blisters,

when I heard a hail behind me. I turned around and there was an angel

from Heaven, temporarily disguised as a Y. M. C. A. worker, sitting at

the wheel of a big auto-truck with the sign of the red triangle on its

sides.

“Could you use a little ride?” he inquired, grinning through the dust

clouds as he drew up alongside and halted.

Could I use a little ride! For fear he might change his mind or

something, I boarded him over a front wheel before I began expressing my

eternal gratitude.

This ceremony being over, he told me who he was, and I told him who I

was, and after that we became friends for life. He was a minister from

a city in southern California but he didn't look it now, what with a

four-days' growth of stubbly red whiskers on his weatherbeaten chops and

grease spots on his service uniform. He had given up a good salary and

he had left behind him a wife and three children--I am sure about the

wife and I'm pretty sure there were three children, or two anyhow--to

come over here and at the age of forty-four or thereabouts to run a

perambulating canteen for the boys. There are a lot more like him in

France, serving with the “Y” or the K. of C.'s or the Salvation Army

or the Red Cross and as a rule they assay about nineteen-hundred and

ninety-nine pounds of true gold to the ton.

“Willing to earn your passage, ain't you?” he inquired when the

introductions were concluded. “Well then, climb into the back of my bus

and stand by to get busy, heaving out the cargo.”

I looked then and saw his truck was loaded to the gunwales with boxes of

California oranges.

“What the-?” I began, in surprise.

“Go on and say it,” he urged. “Don't hang back just because I'm a parson

by trade. Trailing around with this man's army, I'm used to hearing cuss

words. Quite a jag of freight, isn't it? Some good fellow out in my

state shipped a train-load of oranges across with the request that they

be distributed among the boys, free gratis for nothing, and it's my

present job to catch up with this division and give part of the stuff

away. I lit out from Paris before daylight this morning and here I am.

But I can't steer this wagon and pass out the truck at the same time so

if you'll go aft and do the Walter Johnson, I'll play Bobby Waltour here

at this end and between us we can spread the light and keep right on

moving at the same time.”

Before we ran out of oranges, which was about three o'clock in the

afternoon just as we rolled into the village where the headquarters

company and the colonel and his staff--and incidentally I--were to be

billeted for the night, I had a sore arm to keep company with my sore

feet. All day this had been our procedure: As we ranged up behind a

column of marching troops my new pal, the red-haired dominie, would yell

out “Who wants a nice, juicy orange, fellows?” and then as we rolled on

by I would fling out the fruit, trying to make sure that every man got

one orange and that no man got more than one.

I threw oranges to men afoot, to men on wagons and on guns, to men and

officers on horseback and to men perched upon ambulances and wagons.

My throwing was faulty but the catching approximated perfection. An

arm would fly up and the flying orange would find a home in the deftly

cupped palm of the band at the far end of the arm. The news travelled

ahead of us, somehow, and whole companies would be lined up as we

arrived, to get their share.

A few minutes before the finish of the trip came, we caught up with a

couple of French battalions. Neither of us remembered the French word

for orange, but that made no difference. His whoop of announcement and

my first fling in the direction of a trudging Poilu, were as signals to

all the rest and up went their paws. Their intentions were good, but

I don't think I ever in all my life witnessed such a display of

miscellaneous muffing, and I used to see some pretty raw fielding back

at Paducah in the days of the old Kitty League. As the scorers would

say, there was an error for nearly every chance. Among the Americans not

one orange in ten had been dropped; among the Frenchmen not one in ten

was safely held.

“Get the answer, don't you?” inquired the preacher-driver as we left the

trudging Frenchmen behind and hurried ahead to connect with a khaki-clad

outfit just defiling out of a crossway into the main road a quarter of a

mile ahead of us.

“Sure,” I answered, “the Yanks make traps of their paws but the

Frenchmen make baskets of theirs. The orange stays in the trap but it

rolls out of a butter-fingered basket.”

“Yes,” he said, “but the real cause goes deeper down than that.

Baseball--that's the answer. Probably every American in France played

baseball when he was a kid, or else he still plays it. No Frenchman

ever knew anything about baseball until we came over here last year

and introduced it into the country. The average Frenchman looks on a

sporting event as a spectacle, but the average American, at some time or

other in his life, has been an active participant in his national sport

and the lessons we learn as children we never entirely forget even

though lack of practice may make us rusty.”

Which, of course, was quite true. Likewise, I think it is the underlying

reason for the fact that our boys are the best hand-grenade tossers

among the Allies.'

*****

We certainly are creatures of habit. Because somebody, a century or so

behind us, speaking with that air of authority which usually accompanies

the voicing of a perfectly wrong premise, stated that all Irishmen

were natural wits and that no Englishman, could see a joke, the

world accepted the assertion as a verity. Never was a greater libel

perpetrated upon either race. It has been my observation that the Irish

at heart are a melancholy breed.

Certain it is that no people have produced more first-rate humourists

and more first-rate comedians than the English. Witness the British

output of humour in this war; witness Bairnsfather and those satirical

verses on war topics that have been running in _Punch_ lately. I'm

mostly Celt myself--North of Scotland and South of Ireland, with some

Welsh and a little English mixed up in my strain--and I feel myself

qualified to speak on these matters.

Another common delusion among outsiders and particularly among Americans

is that Englishmen are stolid unimaginative creatures who fail to show

their feelings in moments of stress because they haven't any great flow

of feelings to show. Now, as a general proposition, I think it may be

figured that a Frenchman on becoming sentimental will give free vent to

the thoughts that are in his heart; that an American will try to hide

his emotions under a mask of levity and that an Englishman, expressing

after a somewhat different pattern the racial embarrassment which he

shares with the American, will seek to appear outwardly indifferent,

incidentally becoming more or less inarticulate. The Frenchman takes no

shame to himself that he weeps or sings in public; the Yankee is apt to

laugh very loudly; the Englishman will be mute and will exhibit slight

confusion which by some might be mistaken for mental awkwardness. But

there are exceptions to all rules. In so far as the rule pertains to the

Britisher, I am thinking of two exceptions. To one of these instances I

was an eye-witness; the other incident was told to me by a man who had

been present when it occurred. He said he was passing through Charing

Cross station one night when he saw two Canadian subalterns emerging

from one of the refreshment booths. Both of them had been wounded. One

had his right arm in a sling and limped as he walked. The other was that

most pitiable spectacle which this war can offer--a young man blinded.

Across his eyes was drawn a white cloth band and he moved with the

uncertain fumbling gait of one upon whom this affliction has newly come.

With his uninjured arm the lame youth was steering his companion. The

two boys--for they were only boys, my informant said--halted in an

arched exitway to put on their top-coats before stepping out into the

drizzle. The crippled officer released his hold upon his friend's elbow

to shrug his own garment up upon his shoulders. The second _blessé_ was

making a sorry job at finding the armholes of his coat, when an elderly

officer with the badges of a major-general upon his shoulders and a

breast loaded with decorations, stepped up and with the words, “Let me

help you, please,” held the coat in the proper position while deftly he

guided the blind boy's limbs into the sleeve openings.

All in a second the unexpected denouément came. The youngster reached in

his pocket, then felt for the hand of his volunteer who had come to his

assistance. “Thank you very much,” he said. And there in the palm of the

astonished general lay a shilling.

The other lieutenant hobbled to his comrade's side. He may have meant

to whisper, but in his distress he fairly shouted it out: “You've just

handed a tip to a major-general!” Horrified, the blind boy spun about on

his heels to apologise.

“I'm so sorry, sir,” he gasped. “I--I thought it was a porter, of

course. I beg your pardon, a thousand times, sir. I hope you'll forgive

me--you know, I can't see any more, sir.” And with that he held out his

hand to take back the miserable coin.

The splendid-looking old man put both his hands upon the lad's

shoulders. His ruddy face was quivering and the tears were running down

his cheeks.

“Please don't, please don't,” he gulped, almost incoherently. “I want to

keep your shilling, if you don't mind. Why God bless you, my boy, I want

to keep it always. I wouldn't take a thousand pounds for it.”

And then falling back one pace he saluted the lad with all the reverence

he would have accorded his commander-in-chief or his king.

Here is the other thing, the one of which I speak as having first-hand

knowledge. Three of us, returning by automobile from a visit to the

Verdun massif, took a detour in order to call upon our friends the

blithe young Britishers who made up Night Bombing Squadron No. ----.

They were a great outfit, representing as they did, every corner of the

Empire; but the pick of the lot, to my way of thinking, were Big

Bill and the Young-'Un, both captains and both seasoned pilots of big

Handley-Page bombing planes. As I think I have remarked somewhere else

in these pages, the average age of this crowd was somewhere around

twenty-two.

This fine spring night we arrived at their headquarters opportunely for

there was to be a raiding expedition to the Rhine Valley. First though,

there was a good dinner at which we were unexpected but nonetheless

welcome guests. Catch a lot of English lads letting a little thing like

the prospect of a four hundred mile air jaunt into Germany and back

interfere with their dinner.

Just before the long, lazy twilight greyed away, to be succeeded by the

silver radiance of the moonlight, all hands started for the hangars a

mile or two away across on the other side of the patch of woods which

surrounded the camp. Upon the running-boards of our car we carried an

overflow of six or eight airmen; the rest walked. Clinging alongside me

where I rode in the front seat, was a tall, slender boy--a captain for

all his youth--whom I shall call Wilkins, which wasn't his name but is

near enough to it. He was the minstrel of the squadron; could play on

half a dozen instruments, ineluding the piano, and sing Cockney ballads

with a lovely nasal whine.

At the field our added passengers dropped off and each ran to

superintend the soldier crews as they went over the planes, tuning

them up. After a little while the signal for departure came. One after

another thirteen machines got away, each bearing its pilot and its

gunner-ob-server and with its freight of great bombs dangling from its

undersides as it rose and went soaring away toward the northeast, making

a wonderful picture, if in rising, it chanced to cut across the white

white disk of a splendid full moon which had just pushed itself clear of

the wooded mountainside.

Next day about noon-time our route again brought us within ten miles of

the squadron's camp and we decided to turn aside that way for an hour or

so and learn the results of the raid. Sprawled about the big living-room

of their community house in the birch forest, we found a score or more

of our late hosts.

“Well, what sort of a show did you put on last night?” one of us

inquired as we entered.

“Oh, a priceless show,” came the answer from one. “We gave the dear

old Boche a sultry evenin' and make no ruddy error about it. Spilt our

little pills all over Mannheim and Treves. Scored a lot of direct hits

too, as well as one might judge while comin' away in more or less of a

hurry.”

“It was rippin' fun while it lasted,” put in another. “We didn't get

back though until nearly four o'clock this mornin'. It left me feel-in'

rather seedy--I must have my beauty sleep or I'm no good for the whole

day.” Behind his hand he yawned.

Now ordinarily, the next question would have been framed with a view

to finding out whether all the bombers had safely returned; but the

airman's code of ethics forbade. It was perfectly proper to inquire

regarding the effects of a raid into hostile territory but the outsider

must refrain from seeking information regarding any losses on the part

of the raiders until one of them volunteered the news of his own accord.

But there was no rule against our silently counting noses and this we

did, industriously. As nearly as I could make out there were, of those

whom we knew had participated in the expedition, five or six missing

from the assembled company; but then of course the absentees might be

asleep in their quarters.

It struck the three of us, and in my own case I know the impression

deepened as the minutes passed, that for all their kindly hospitality

and all their solicitude that we should feel at home, there was a

common depression prevalent among them. Some, we thought betrayed their

feelings by a silence not habitual among these high-spirited youths..

Some seemed abstracted and some just a trifle irritable. And when this

one or that described the bombing of the enemy towns which had been

their particular targets I was sure I detected something forced about

the enthusiasm he out into his speech.

Presently there befell one of those awkward little silences which

inevitably occur in any gathering where the spirit of things is a bit

forced and strained. It was broken by a lanky twenty-year-old flyer.

“Hm--” he began, clearing his throat and striving to make his tone

casual, “you know, Wilkins and his observer didn't get back.” That was

all--no details of how his two mates had gone rocketing down somewhere

behind the German lines probably to instant death. In these few words he

stated the bald fact of it and then he looked away, suddenly and unduly

interested in the movements of somebody passing by one of the open

windows.

On my right hand sat that winning little chap whom his mates called the

Young-'Un. The Young-'Un was lighting a pipe.

“Beastly annoyin',” he grunted between puffs at the stem of his

briar-root, “losin' Wilkins. As a matter of fact he was the only decent

pianist we had. Rotten luck and all that sort of thing to lose our

pianist, eh what?” Coming from the Young-'Un, with his gentle smile

and his soft whimsical drawl, the last remark seemed so utterly

unsympathetic, so callous, so cold-blooded, that the shock of what he

said left me mute. It left my two companions mute, too.

I turned in my chair and looked at the Young-'Un. He seemed to have

trouble getting his pipe going. His two hands were cupped over the bowl,

making a mask for his face. By reason of his hands I could not see much

of his face but I could see this much--that his chin was trembling, that

the big muscles in his throat were twitching and jumping and that though

he winked his eyes as fast as he could, he couldn't wink fast enough to

keep the big tears from leaking out and running down his cheeks.

Because he was an experienced airman it was a part of his professional

code to make no pother over the loss of a fellow-flier by the hazard

of chance which every one of them dared as a part of his daily life.

Because he was an Englishman, he felt shame that he should show any

emotion. But because his heart was broken he cried behind the cover of

his hands.

Shells and bombs are forever doing freakish things. The effects of their

tantrums set one to thinking of the conduct of cyclones and earthquakes.

For example:

In Bar-le-Duc, which most Americans used to think of, not as a city but

as a kind of jelly, I saw when we passed through there the other day,

where a bomb dropped by a German airraider did a curious bit of

damage. I reckon people who believe in omens and portents would call

it significant. Just off the railroad station in a little paved square

stands a monument put up by popular subscription to the men of this

town who died for their country in 1870-71. Upon one face of the granite

shaft, being the one which looks inward toward the town, are two

bronze figures of heroic size. The lowermost figure is that of a dying

boy-soldier, with one hand pressed to his breast and the other holding

fast to his musket. The other figure--that of a winged angel typifying

the spirit of France--is hovering above him with a palm branch extended

over his drooping head.

The bomb, descending from on high, must have grazed the face of the

monument. A great hole in the pavement shows where it exploded. One

flying fragment sheared away the fingers and thumbs of the dying

soldier's hand so that the bronze musket was tom out of his grasp and

flung upon the earth. Some one picked up the musket and laid it at

the base of the marble but the hand sticks out into space empty and

mutilated.

I dare say a German might interpret this as meaning France would be left

crippled, disarmed and mangled. But to me I read it as a sign to show

that France, the conqueror, and not the conquered, will be one of the

nations that are to take the lead in bringing about universal peace and

universal disarmament, once Germany has been cused of what ails her.

*****

I saw them when they first landed at Camp Upton--furtive, frightened,

slew-footed, slackshouldered, underfed, apprehensive--a huddle of

unhappy aliens speaking in alien tongues; knowing little of the cause

for which they must fight and possibly caring less.

I saw them again three months later when the snow of the dreadful winter

of 1917-18 was piling high about their wooden barracks down there on

wind-swept Long Island. The stoop was beginning to come out of their

spines, the shamble out of their gait. They had learned to hold their

heads up, had learned to look every man in the eye and tell him to

go elsewhere with a capital H. They knew now that discipline was not

punishment and that the salute was not a mark of servility but an

evidence of mutual self-respect as between officer and man. They wore

their uniforms with pride. The flag meant something to them and the

war meant something to them. Three short hard months of training had

transformed them from a rabble into soldier-stuff; from a street-mob

into the makings of an army; from strangers into Americans.

After nine months I have seen them once more in France. For swagger, for

snap, for smartness in the drill and for cockiness in the billet; for

good humour on the march and for dash and spunk and deviltry in the

fighting into which just now they have been sent, our army can show no

better soldiers and no more gallant spirits than the lads who mainly

make up the rank and file of this particular division.

They are the foreign-born Jews and Italians and Slavs of New York's East

Side, that were called up for service in the first draft.

No wonder the mother who didn't raise her boy to be a soldier has become

an extinct species back home.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Glory of The Coming, by Irvin S. Cobb