country but his own, adapts himself less happily to foreign conditions
than Britons who have been schooled by stern necessity to make themselves
equally comfortable in Wei-Hai-Wei or Wigan. Add to this the natural
outspoken American affection for, and belief in, American institutions
and mode of life, and you will understand why American troops on the
march through Europe will cheer themselves hoarse at the sight of such
reminders of Home as an American policeman directing the traffic in a
French town, or an imported American locomotive puffing along a French
railroad.
And there is one other American institution for which the American soul
thirsts in this barren land—the American newspaper. Behold us billeted
for a day or two in the little town of Crapaudville-sur-Loire. Existence
there is a series of _queues_. In the morning we arise right early and
make a careful toilet. For this purpose we form a _queue_, or water-line,
at the town pump. This is not a lengthy business, because it does not
take long to fill a pannikin with water: the only interruptions which
occur are due to natural gallantry, as when an attractive Ally arrives to
fill her family kettle. After that comes breakfast-time, which entails
standing in another _queue_, or chow-line. After that as many of us as
can contrive to do so hurry off to stand in the most important _queue_ of
the day—the news-line. A train from Paris, of arthritic tendencies and
irregular habits, is due about noon, bearing newspapers, which are doled
out at a price of twenty-five centimes.
There are, of course, sharp degrees of comparison. The great Paris
morning journals are nothing in our young lives. They are written in
a language which we do not know, and their headlines are lacking in
enterprise. The Paris issue of the _London Daily Mail_ is better. It
reaches us in the form of a special American edition, which caters
generously to our national predilection for type several inches high.
But beyond that it does not go. _Blossom and blossom and blossom, but
never the promise of fruit!_ The reading matter below the headlines is
constrained, lacking in pep—dead stuff. At least, so Joe McCarthy says.
The Paris editions of the _New York Herald_ and _Chicago Tribune_ furnish
more nourishment, although in these days of paper famine they are sadly
attenuated affairs—mere single sheets, sometimes. Then there is our own
A.E.F. weekly—_The Stars and Stripes_. It is ably conducted and full of
meat; but at the best it is only an official publication, mainly about
the War. And it was not printed in America. What we crave for is home
news—home gossip—home advertisements. A single copy of an American Sunday
newspaper, with comic supplement complete, would fetch its weight in
dollar bills over here. Our spirits yearn to participate once more in the
Bringing up of Father, or the fratricidal rivalries of Mutt and Jeff;
or to witness the perennial discomfitures of those two intensely human
impostors, Percy and Ferdy. Even those nasty little Boche abortions, the
Katzenjammer Kids, would be something.
The happiest man is he who receives once in a while a copy of his local
newspaper from home. These come rarely enough, for second-class mail
matter is incurring mysterious casualties these days.
However, one of these priceless packages arrived not long ago for Eddie
Gillette, all the way from a little town in the Northwest. Eddie tore
off the wrapper, and almost set his teeth into the paper. Everything was
there for which his soul hungered—news about America, about his own town,
about people whom he knew personally—conveyed by means of the arresting
headline, the pointed phrase, and the intellectual pemmican of the
heavily leaded summary. The War news, of course, was weeks old, but Ed
devoured it rapturously. He knew now how the War was really going.
“This guy Allenby must be some dandy fighter,” he observed to Al
Thompson, looking up.
“Sure, Ed!” replied Al pleasantly. “Why?”
“He’s been doing fine in the Holy Land. See what it says here.”
Ed held up the newspaper for Al to see, and pointed to the head of a
column:
BRITISH CRUSADERS IN NAZARETH
ALLENBY WINS JESUS CHRIST’S HOME TOWN FROM TURKS
“That’s the goods!” remarked Ed approvingly, as he folded the paper
with reverent care and tucked it inside his shirt. “The feller that
writes that stuff has gotten the real idea for a story. The others over
here”—designating apparently the editors of the London _Times_ and Paris
_Matin_—“ain’t got nothing _to_ them. No, _sir_! They don’t write nothing
but small-town stuff!”
“You said it, Ed!” agreed Al.
“All the same,” observed the critic, rising and stretching his giant
limbs, “this yer reading the papers from home may give a feller a grand
and glorious feeling, but it makes him feel mighty lonesome and homesick
too.” He raised a pair of great fists heavenward. “Oh, _Boy_! when I get
back home after this War, if the Statue of Liberty ever wants to see Ed
Gillette again, she’ll have to turn around to do it!”
CHAPTER TEN
S.O.S. TO DILLPICKLE
To most of us hitherto the letters _S.O.S._ have signified calamity of
some kind—appeals for succour from sinking liners, and the like. Our
British liaison officers, too, tell us that S.O.S. is the epithet applied
to the rockets which are always kept in position in British front-line
trenches, to be discharged as an urgent intimation to the gunners behind
that the enemy are attacking in mass.
But in the American Army S.O.S. means “Service of Supply.” It denotes,
not panic, but order, and control, and abundance. It covers the
whole chainwork of activity known in most armies as the “Lines of
Communication.” The town where we find ourselves to-day is a great S.O.S.
centre. On its outskirts lie mushroom cities of huts and sheds. Here
is a great cold-storage depot: there are eight thousand tons of frozen
beef in this single building. Here is a big station for assembling
aeroplanes, where de Haviland planes of British design are being fitted
with Liberty engines. Through the town itself there flows by night and by
day a never-failing stream of food and munitions and replacement troops.
Needless to say the town lies upon one of the main roads along which the
Race to Berlin is being run.
Back along that road, alas! streams another current—a counter-current—of
wastage, material and human. Upon its surface is borne all the
dreadful litter of the battlefield—rusty rifles, damaged equipment,
blood-soaked uniforms. Here is a mighty depot, which handles and repairs
such wreckage. These buildings have all been constructed within the
past few months. It would take you half a day to walk through them.
In at one end of the establishment goes a squalid torrent of torn
clothing, unmated shoes, leaky rubber trench boots, odds and ends of
equipment. In due course, after a drastic series of laundering, sorting,
patching, stitching, or vulcanizing experiences—mainly at the hands of
a twittering army corps of Frenchwomen—each item in this melancholy
jumble finds itself reincarnated in various storehouses in the form of
properly assorted pairs of boots and shoes, neat second-hand uniforms,
and complete sets of equipment. Nothing is wasted. Stetson hats damaged
beyond repair are cut up into soles for hospital slippers. Uniforms too
badly ripped for decent renovation are patched, dyed grass-green, and
issued to German prisoners.
There are some thousands of these prisoners, with more coming. When
they arrive, their prevailing tint is grey. Their uniforms are grey,
by nature; their knee-high boots are grey, with dust; their faces are
grey, with exhaustion and grime. These human derelicts are submitted to
very much the same process of restoration as the damaged uniforms and
equipment. They are paraded, stripped, and marched into the first of a
series of renovation chambers. They pass under hot showers; they spend
a salutary period in what is delicately described as the “delousing
chamber”; they are then provided, first with underwear, then with shoes,
then with one of the grass-green uniforms aforesaid, and finally with
a cooking and toilet outfit. They are shaved and their hair is cut;
they are medically examined; they are card-indexed; a register is made
of their trades; they are housed in comfortable wooden huts within a
great barbed-wire enclosure; and within a few days they are at work upon
whatever tasks they happen to be best qualified for, earning twenty
centimes a day. They are fed upon the rations of American and British
soldiers, including white bread—the only white bread in Europe.
Perhaps some of them, before they came here, saw the Allied prisoners
in Germany—starved, robbed, beaten, and forced to work in salt-mines
or shell-areas until death made an end of their afflictions. These
languishing grass-green captives must bless the Geneva Convention, and
marvel at the uncultured folk who still stand by its provisions.
A camp of German prisoners practically runs itself. Fritz knows when he
is well off. There is no insubordination. Men come rigidly to attention
when an officer passes. The routine work is supervised by German
sergeants. In this particular camp you may enter one large hut and
behold some fifty German prisoners engaged upon clerical work connected
with camp administration—ration indents, card-indexes, and the like.
It is a task after the German heart. Each prisoner is absorbed in his
occupation. He can hardly bring himself to rise to his feet when the door
is thrown open for the Officer of the Day, and _Achtung!_ is called. His
pig’s eyes gleam contentedly behind his spectacles. And well they may! A
German delivered from the German Army and permitted to sit all day and
make a card index of himself may be excused for imagining that he has got
as near Heaven as a German is ever likely to get.
“When this War is over,” observes Mr. Joe McCarthy, gazing meditatively
through the barbed wire, “I guess someb’dy will have to chase these ducks
back to Germany with a gun!”
* * * * *
Frenchwomen are not the only representatives of their sex in the American
Expeditionary Force. There are hundreds of American women too, from every
walk of American life. There are the hospital nurses, the stenographers,
the telephone operators, the motor-drivers—all duly enrolled members
of the Regular Service. Then there are the women of the Auxiliary
Forces—the Red Cross, and its sister organizations—all doing a man’s
share, and something over. Their work is not supposed, of course, to take
them up into the battle zone. They serve at the Base, or on Lines of
Communication. But in these days of Big Berthas and promiscuous bombing
raids, no one is safe. The battle zone is the extent of ground which an
aeroplane can cover, as the inhabitants of London know to their cost.
Some of the worst devastation in France may be witnessed at certain
British hospital bases on the French coast, miles from any battle-line.
Still, women have been known to find their way into the Line. As some
student of nature has told us, “It is hard to keep a squirrel off the
ground.”
One summer morning an old acquaintance of ours, Miss Frances Lane, and
her crony, or accomplice, Miss Helen Ryker, came off night duty at their
hospital and sniffed the fresh air luxuriously. They had twelve hours of
complete freedom from responsibility before them—a circumstance not in
itself calculated to correct Miss Lane’s natural lightness of ballast.
In most hospitals nurses coming off night duty are not unreasonably
expected to spend at least some portion of the following day in bed. But
youthful vitality, abetted by summer sunshine and a martial atmosphere,
make a formidable combination against the forces of common sense. This
particular hospital was only thirty miles from the Line. On still days
the turmoil of the guns could be heard quite plainly.
After breakfasting, Miss Lane took her friend by the elbow and led her to
the great military map on the wall, with the position of the battle-line
clearly defined upon it by an irregular frontier of red worsted, and said:
“Helen, listen! Just where are we on this little old map?”
Miss Ryker, who possessed the unusual feminine accomplishment of being
able to read maps and railroad time-tables, laid a slender finger-tip
upon the blue chalk-mark which designated the geographical position of
the hospital.
“There,” she said.
“And,” pursued Miss Lane, in a low voice, “_where do we go from here_?”
Miss Ryker, who was a girl of few words, began to measure out distances
with her finger and thumb.
“The nearest point to us,” she announced at last, “is a place called
Delficelles.”
“Delficelles? Our boys captured it not long ago,” said Frances in
confirmation. “I guess the trenches must lie just beyond.”
On one point she was right: Delficelles had been captured by an American
Division a fortnight previously. On the other she was wrong, for a reason
which will presently appear.
“We are going to visit them,” continued Miss Lane.
“How do we get there?” enquired her practical friend.
Miss Lane looked stealthily round, as a precaution against eavesdroppers.
Then she smiled seraphically.
“I guess we can do it on our faces,” she remarked.
* * * * *
To get up into the Line—that tortured strip of territory, some five miles
wide, which winds from the North Sea to the Alps, and within which two
solid walls of men have faced one another for nearly four years—there
are two recognized courses of procedure. One is to be a member of an
armed party—an Infantry Battalion, say, going up to take over a sector of
trenches. There is no doubting the _bona fides_ of such an excursion.
The other course is incumbent upon solitary individuals like
despatch-riders and unchaperoned civilians. These must have a much-signed
and countersigned pass. Even Staff Officers are not exempt from this law.
That lesson was learned as far back as nineteen fourteen, when German
officers, arrayed in the uniform of the British General Staff, kindly
accompanied the British Army during the retreat from Mons and added to
the already considerable difficulties of a hectic situation by directing
troops down wrong roads and issuing orders of a demoralizing nature.
So now it is almost as difficult for an unauthorized person to get into
the fighting area as into the Royal Yacht Squadron, or the New York
Subway at 6 P.M. Mesdames Lane and Ryker were obviously neither an
armed party nor chaperoned civilians. But young and attractive females
have means of attaining their ends which are denied to the rest of
creation. Ask not how the feat was achieved. Enquire not the names of the
susceptible lorry-drivers who succumbed, nor of the tall young military
policeman at Dead Dog Corner who melted incontinently beneath the appeal
of Miss Lane’s blue eyes. Let it suffice that by early afternoon our
two runagates found themselves safely deposited in what was left of the
village of Delficelles. (By the way, the local soldiery pronounced it
“Dillpickle,” so we will let it go at that.)
Having reached the haven of their desire, they found, to their extreme
satisfaction and relief, that it seemed to be no part of any one’s duty
to turn them out. Indeed, such officers as they encountered punctiliously
saluted their uniform, while the rank and file addressed friendly and
appreciative greetings to them. One enthusiast produced a pocket camera,
and insisted upon performing a ceremony which he described as “spoiling a
film” upon the precious pair.
The village itself lay in a hollow behind a low ridge, and was in what
may be described as moderate ruins. One learns to make these distinctions
in the shell-area. Roughly, there are three grades. Villages whose roofs
are riddled by shrapnel and whose windows have ceased to exist, but
whose walls are still standing, may be regarded as practically intact,
and are much sought after as places of residence. At the other end of
the scale come the villages which were deliberately obliterated by
Brother Boche during one of his great retreats. There are many such in
the neighbourhood of Bapaume and Péronne. To-day not one stone of these
remains upon another. Not a tree is to be seen. It is only by accepting
the evidence of the map that you are able to realize that you are in a
village at all. The main street runs between high banks, overgrown by
weeds and nettles. If you part these and look underneath, you will find a
subsoil of brick rubble.
At the cross-roads in the centre, where once the church stood, you will
find a military sign-board giving the map-reference of the village,
followed perhaps by a postscript, thus:
+-------------------+
| Z.17.c.25. |
| |
| THIS WAS |
| |
| VILLERS CARBONNEL |
+-------------------+
_Fuit!_
The village of Dillpickle occupied an intermediate position between these
two extremes. Some of the houses were standing; others were merely a
pile of disintegrated bricks and mortar. Where one of these ruins had
overflowed into the street and obstructed the fairway, the _débris_ had
been cleared away and built up into a neat wall, guarding the sidewalk
from further irruption. Such houses as still stood were inhabited,
chiefly in the lower regions, by American artillerymen and the Infantry
Brigade in reserve. The village was rich in German notice-boards—black
stencilling on plain wood—announcing that here was the residence of the
_Kommandant_, or here a shelter from bombardment for so many _Männer_, or
that here it was _Verboten_ for the common herd to go. Most of these were
now pasted over with notices and orders in a different, and healthier,
language.
Our friends collected a German notice-board apiece as a souvenir, and
proceeded to ransack the village for further booty. Miss Ryker, who
was domestically minded, gleaned two forks, a spoon, and some cups and
saucers. Miss Lane, caring for none of these things, appropriated a
small mirror. Presently she announced:
“I guess we’ll go up to the trenches now, Helen. They must be just over
the hill, beyond that wood on the sky-line.”
But Miss Lane, as already noted, was wrong. The trenches did not lie just
over the hill, for the very good reason that there were no trenches. We
have grown so accustomed during this War to employing “trenches” as a
synonym for “battle-line” that we are apt to overlook the fact that it is
possible to fight upon the surface of the earth. For a long time both the
Allies and the Hun suffered from a disease called “Trenchitis,” induced
by an intensive experience of high explosive and machine-gun bullets.
If a force wished to defend itself, it produced picks and shovels and
dug itself in. If it wished to attack, it dug an advanced “jumping-off”
trench in the dead of night, approached by saps and tunnels, and so
made the open space to be covered in the assault as narrow as possible.
This is a useful and economical way of fighting, especially when your
troops are not sufficiently numerous to warrant prodigality. But it
wastes much valuable time; and since the day when the entire American
Nation was placed at the disposal of the Allies as a reinforcement, it
has been found possible to employ other methods. Down South, on the
Alsace-Lorraine front, where a lightly held outpost line runs for more
than a hundred miles toward Belfort, trench warfare is still fashionable.
But in the Argonne, where most of the fighting takes place in closely
wooded country, we remain more or less above ground, maintaining touch
with one another as best we can by means of an irregular chain of
grass-pits or fortified shell-craters.
So when our pair of truants reached the wood on the sky-line, and
penetrated cautiously to the other side, they beheld no trenches.
At their feet the road dropped steeply into a little valley, filled with
woods which ran right up the slope beyond and disappeared into a smoky
mist on the opposite crest. The sun had not fulfilled its early promise,
and had disappeared by noon. A small drizzling rain was beginning to fall.
Helen Ryker, who loved her personal comforts, drew her blue cloak more
closely round her, and shivered.
“They don’t have any trenches _here_,” she announced, in aggrieved tones.
“They are in the woods down in the valley,” Miss Lane assured her. “You
can hear the firing.”
You certainly could. Up to their ears from the undergrowth on every side
rose the mutterings of warfare—solitary rifle-shots, and the intermittent
pup-pupping of machine guns. Down in the valley, at the foot of the road,
they could see a stream. The road had once crossed it by a bridge; but
the bridge was now a ruin, and the road had been diverted so as to cross
higher up, by some sort of pontoon.
Not a human being was in sight. One of the strangest characteristics
of modern warfare—warfare in which millions of men are employed where
formerly hundreds sufficed—is the entire invisibility of the combatants.
In these days of aeroplanes and magnifying periscopes no man ever makes
himself more conspicuous than need be. A hundred years ago soldiers went
into action in brightly coloured coats and flashing accoutrements. Now
their uniforms imitate the colours of nature—the colours of grass and
earth. Guns are painted to look like logs of wood. If a sniper wishes to
do a little business from a tree-top or a thicket, he not infrequently
paints himself green as a preliminary.
“It’s lonesome here!” continued Miss Ryker.
“I expect we shall find the boys presently,” replied the undefeated
Frances. “My gracious, Helen, what was that?”
Over their heads—quite close, it seemed—sailed something invisible, with
a weary sigh. It was a howitzer shell fired from an American battery five
miles behind them. The sound of its passage ceased, but almost directly
afterward a column of greenish-grey smoke spouted up from the wooded
hillside opposite, followed a few seconds later by a heavy detonation.
Helen and Frances found themselves unaffectedly gripping hands.
“What is it?” asked Helen tremulously.
One of Miss Lane’s most compelling characteristics was that she was never
at a loss for an answer.
“That? That’s artillery fire, I guess. That over there is the smoke of a
big gun.”
As usual, she was partially correct. What they saw and heard was,
indeed, artillery fire, but it was not the smoke of the gun, but the
smoke of the shell bursting among the German machine-gun nests.
“German or American?” asked Helen.
“American, sure. Let’s go on down this road, and see some more. It’s a
nice quiet road. There can’t be any danger.”
In the shell-area on the Western Front the fact that a road is quiet
does not by any means guarantee that it is “nice.” But the people who
really enjoy war are those who have not been there before. The pair of
adventurers set boldly off down the hill. As they started, a second
contribution from the howitzer battery passed over their heads, with the
lazy rustle which characterizes the descent of high-angle shells, and
burst in the woods opposite, fifty yards to the right of the first.
“There’s another gun firing!” exclaimed Miss Lane, clasping her hands
rapturously. “My, but I’m excited! C’m along, Helen!”
They hurried down the road, observing with a pleasant thrill that the
surface thereof was pitted with shell-holes. More experienced fire-eaters
would have noted that some of these holes were of extremely recent
origin—a few hours old, in fact. Once or twice they paused to collect
more souvenirs—shell-fuses and empty cartridge-cases.
Distances viewed across a valley are deceptive, and their stroll down the
road took longer than they expected. The rain was coming down harder than
ever.
“We ought to hit those trenches soon,” said Miss Lane.
“What are trenches like, anyway?” enquired Miss Ryker, a little
peevishly. She was beginning to make heavy weather of the expedition
under her cargo of crockery and expended ammunition.
Miss Lane, whose acquaintance with trench warfare had been derived mainly
from the Movies, made no reply. She had stopped by the roadside to read a
notice-board, nailed to what was left of a tree. It said:
_This road must NOT be used by troops during daylight._
She nodded her head sagely.
“That’s why there is no one around,” she remarked. “What were you saying
just now, Helen?”
Miss Ryker had discovered a fresh grievance.
“It seems to me that some of the firing has gotten _behind_ us!” she said.
The girls stood still, and listened. A third American shell swung over
their heads and burst in the woods opposite. Simultaneously came a sharp
outburst of machine-gun fire from the right—the right rear, in fact.