When the war broke out he was in the West, the manager of an opera
company touring the coast towns, and immediately he determined to
take a hand. At first he experienced considerable perplexity as to
how he was to get "mixed up" in the war. Apart from his nationality,
his small stature, a finger missing from his right hand, and a
pronounced limp--both legacies from the Spanish-American war in the
Philippines--seemed destined to preclude him from serving in the
army of any country in any capacity. He was even refused by a party
of Americans forming a Red Cross contingent for duty with any of the
belligerents willing to accept their service.
However, he remembered an old friend, a major of Engineers in charge
of a company at a China station, and he immediately hurried from San
Francisco across the Pacific to Hong-Kong, where he found the --th
Siege Company, R.E., under orders to move, and cursing destiny, in the
shape of the British War Office, which refused to allow them to be
in at the fall of Tsing-tau. Forthwith he attached himself to them.
His sole qualification consisted of an erratic but handy knowledge
of mechanics, picked up here and there--as chauffeur to a Vancouver
millionaire, as a greaser, ganger, and a stoker, but principally
during eighteen months of desultory employment in the machine-shops of
Pittsburg. After much argument concerning the King's Regulations with
regard to recruits and the position of a man in the ranks, the major
had taken him on the strength as mechanic for the three motor-cycles
owned by his command. In September, 1914, he left the Western theatre
of war--quietly exultant, as I imagine.
He was curiously frank as to his attitude towards the war.
"I have always liked big things, and I had to get into this somehow,"
he said, finishing a large _cassis_. "This war is the biggest thing
that ever happened to this old world, and if I were left out of it I
should go mad--I should, or commit suicide. That's how I feel about
it. Looking on is no good to me; I have to be right in it. But I've
illusions. Neither your cause nor the Germans' nor the newspaper gas
of both parties interest me. If the Allies hadn't adopted me I should
have squeezed somehow into one of the armies of the Central Powers. Of
course, the party I joined, that party I stick to; you can count on me
to the last drop of my blood. But you take me--I've no patriotism, as
you understand these things."
They landed in France early in October, and within forty-eight hours
were with a corps at a point where the British forces lay resting after
the Marne and the Aisne. With those battles the operations passed
the mobile phase and began to settle down to the stagnation of the
trenches.
The novel conditions of warfare in the earth demanded new methods
and ingenious adaptations, and soon the Engineers found themselves
overwhelmed with orders from corps headquarters and harassed by
perplexed divisions and brigades. Bombs and explosive missiles of all
sorts were in great demand, but materials other than Tickler's jam-pots
were not to be procured. And pumps were wanted; emplacements, redoubts,
trenches, field works of all descriptions required overseers from the
Engineers to superintend the working-parties, composed of uninitiated
infantry.