MAKING THE MEN WHO MAN THE GUNS
While our infantry perfected their training in the Vosges, the first
American artillery in France undertook a schedule of studies in an old
French artillery post located near the Swiss frontier. This place is
called Valdahon, and for scores of years had been one of the training
places for French artillery. But during the third and fourth years of
the war nearly all of the French artillery units being on the front, all
subsequent drafts of French artillerymen received their training under
actual war conditions.
So it was that the French war department turned over to the Americans
this artillery training ground which had been long vacant. Three
American artillery regiments, the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh, comprising
the first U. S. Artillery Brigade, began training at this post.
The barracks had been long unoccupied and much preparatory work was
necessary before our artillerymen could move in. Much of this work
devolved upon the shoulders of the Brigade Quartermaster.
The first difficulty that he encountered was the matter of illumination
for the barracks, mess halls and lecture rooms. All of the buildings
were wired, but there was no current. The Quartermaster began an
investigation and this was what he found:
The post had been supplied with electricity from a generating plant
located on a river about ten miles away. This plant had supplied
electrical energy for fifteen small French towns located in the
vicinity. The plant was owned and operated by a Frenchman, who was
about forty years old. The French Government, realising the necessity
for illumination, had exempted this man from military service, so that
he remained at his plant and kept the same in operation for the benefit
of the camp at Valdahon and the fifteen small towns nearby.
Then the gossips of the countryside got busy. These people began to say
that Monsieur X, the operator of the plant, was not patriotic, in other
words, that he was a slacker for not being at the front when all of
their menfolk had been sent away to the war.
Now it so happened that Monsieur X was not a slacker, and his
inclination had always been to get into the fight with the Germans, but
the Government had represented to him that it was his greater duty to
remain and keep his plant in operation to provide light for the
countryside.
When the talk of the countryside reached Monsieur X's ears, he being a
country-loving Frenchman was infuriated. He denounced the gossips as
being unappreciative of the great sacrifice he had been making for their
benefit, and, to make them realise it, he decided on penalising them.
Monsieur X simply closed down his plant, locked and barred the doors and
windows, donned his French uniform and went away to the front to join
his old regiment. That night those villagers in the fifteen nearby
towns, who had been using electrical illumination, went to bed in the
dark.
It required considerable research on the part of the Artillery
Quartermaster to reveal all these facts. The electric lights had been
unused for fifteen months when he arrived there, and he started to see
what he could do to put the plant back to work. It required nothing
less finally than a special action by the French Minister of War whereby
orders were received by Monsieur X commanding him to leave his regiment
at the front and go back to his plant by the riverside and start making
electricity again.
With the lights on and water piped in for bathing facilities, and
extensive arrangements made for the instalment of stoves and other
heating apparatus, the purchase of wood fuel and fodder for the animals,
the Brigade moved in and occupied the camp.
The American officer in command of that post went there as a Brigadier
General. As I observed him at his work in those early days, I seemed to
see in his appearance and disposition some of the characteristics of a
Grant. He wore a stubby-pointed beard and he clamped his teeth tight on
the butt end of a cigar. I saw him frequently wearing the $11.50
regulation issue uniform of the enlisted men. I saw him frequently in
rubber boots standing hip deep in the mud of the gun pits, talking to
the men like a father--a kindly, yet stern father who knew how to
produce discipline and results.
While at the post, he won promotion to a Major General's rank, and in
less than six months he was elevated to the grade of a full General and
was given the highest ranking military post in the United States. That
man who trained our first artillerymen in France was General Peyton C.
March, Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
Finding the right man for the right place was one of General March's
hobbies. He believed in military mobilisation based on occupational
qualifications. In other words, he believed that a man who had been a
telephone operator in civilian life would make a better telephone
operator in the army than he would make a gunner.
I was not surprised to find that this same worthy idea had permeated in
a more or less similar form down to the lowest ranks in General March's
command at that time. I encountered it one cold night in October, when I
was sitting in one of the barrack rooms talking with a man in the ranks.
That man's name was Budd English. I met him first in Mexico on the
American Punitive Expedition, where he had driven an automobile for
Damon Runyon, a fellow correspondent. English, with his quaint
Southwestern wit, had become in Mexico a welcome occupant of the large
pyramidal tent which housed the correspondents attached to the
Expedition. We would sit for hours hearing him tell his stories of the
plains and the deserts of Chihuahua.
English and I were sitting on his bed at one corner of the barrack room,
rows of cots ranged each side of the wall and on these were the snoring
men of the battery. The room was dimly illuminated by a candle on a
shelf over English's head and another candle located on another shelf in
the opposite corner of the room. There was a man in bed in a corner
reading a newspaper by the feeble rays of the candle.
Suddenly we heard him growl and tear the page of the newspaper in half.
His exclamation attracted my attention and I looked his way. His hair
was closely cropped and his head, particularly his ears and forehead,
and jaw, stamped him as a rough and ready fighter.
"That's Kid Ferguson, the pug," English whispered to me, and then in
louder tones, he enquired, "What's eating on you, kid?"
"Aw, this bunk in the paper," replied Ferguson. Then he glared at me
and enquired, "Did you write this stuff?"
"What stuff?" I replied. "Read it out."
Ferguson picked up the paper and began to read in mocking tones
something that went as follows:
"Isn't it beautiful in the cold early dawn in France, to see our dear
American soldiers get up from their bunks and go whistling down to the
stables to take care of their beloved animals."
English laughed uproariously.
"The Kid don't like horses no more than I do," he said. "Neither one of
us have got any use for them at all. And here, that's all they keep us
doing, is tending horses. I went down there the other morning with a
lantern and one of them long-eared babies just kicked it clean out of my
hand. The other morning one of them planted two hoofs right on
Ferguson's chest and knocked him clear out of the stable. It broke his
watch and his girl's picture.
"You know, Mr. Gibbons, I never did have any use for horses. When I was
about eight years old a horse bit me. When I was about fifteen years old
I got run over by an ice-wagon. Horses is just been the ruination of me.
"If it hadn't been for them I might have gone through college and been
an officer in this here army. You remember that great big dairy out on
the edge of the town in El Paso? Well, my dad owned that and he lost all
of it on the ponies in Juarez. I just hate horses.
"I know everything there is to know about an automobile. I have driven
cross country automobile races and after we come out of Mexico, after we
didn't get Villa, I went to work in the army machine shops at Fort Bliss
and took down all them motor trucks and built them all over again.
"When Uncle Sam got into the war against Germany, this here Artillery
Battalion was stationed out at Fort Bliss, and I went to see the Major
about enlisting, but I told him I didn't want to have nothing to do with
no horses.
"And he says, 'English, don't you bother about that. You join up with
this here battalion, because when we leave for France we're going to
kiss good-bye to them horses forever. This here battalion is going to be
motorised.'
"And now here we are in France, and we still got horses, and they don't
like me and I don't like them, and yet I got to mill around with 'em
every day. The Germans ain't never going to kill me. They ain't going to
get a chance. They just going to find me trampled to death some morning
down in that stable."
Two or three of the occupants of nearby beds had arisen and taken seats
on English's bed. They joined the conversation. One red-headed
youngster, wearing heavy flannel underwear in lieu of pajamas, made the
first contribution to the discussion.
"That's just what I'm beefing about," he said. "Here I've been in this
army two months now and I'm still a private. There ain't no chance here
for a guy that's got experience."
"Experience? Where do you get that experience talk?" demanded English.
"What do you know about artillery?"
"That's just what I mean, experience," the red-headed one replied with
fire. "I got experience. Mr. Gibbons knows me. I'm from Chicago, the
same as he is. I worked in Chicago at Riverview Park. I'm the guy that
fired the gattling gun in the Monitor and Merrimac show--we had two
shows a day and two shows in the evening and----"
"Kin you beat that," demanded English. "You know, if this here
red-headed guy don't get promotion pretty quick, he's just simply going
to quit this army and leave us flat here in France facing the Germans.
"Let me tell you about this gattling gun expert. When they landed us off
of them boats down on the coast, the battalion commander turned us all
loose for a swim in the bay, and this here bird almost drowned. He went
down three times before we could pull him out.
"Now, if they don't make him a Brigadier General pretty quick, he's
going to get sore and put in for a transfer to the Navy on the grounds
of having submarine experience. But he's right in one thing--experience
don't count for what it should in the army.
"Right here in our battery we got a lot of plough boys from Kansas that
have been sitting on a plough and looking at a horse's back all their
lives, and they got them handling the machinery on these here guns. And
me, who knows everything there is to know about machinery, they won't
let me even find out which end of the cannon you put the shell in and
which end it comes out of. All I do all day long is to prod around a
couple of fat-hipped hayburners. My God, I hate horses."
But regardless of these inconveniences those first American artillerymen
in our overseas forces applied themselves strenuously to their studies.
They were there primarily to learn. It became necessary for them at
first to make themselves forget a lot of things that they had previously
learned by artillery and adapt themselves to new methods and instruments
of war.
Did you ever hear of "Swansant, Kansas"? You probably won't find it on
any train schedule in the Sunflower State; in fact, it isn't a place at
all. It is the name of the light field cannon that France provided our
men for use against the German line.
"Swansant, Kansas" is phonetic spelling of the name as pronounced by
American gunners. The French got the same effect in pronunciation by
spelling the singular "soixante quinze," but a Yankee cannoneer trying
to pronounce it from that orthography was forced to call it a "quince,"
and that was something which it distinctly was not.
One way or the other it meant the "Seventy-fives"--the "Admirable
Seventy-five"--the seventy-five millimetre field pieces that stopped the
Germans' Paris drive at the Marne--the same that gave Little Willie a
headache at Verdun,--the inimitable, rapid firing, target hugging, hell
raising, shell spitting engine of destruction whose secret of recoil
remained a secret after almost twenty years and whose dependability was
a French proverb.
At Valdahon where American artillery became acquainted with the
Seventy-five, the khaki-clad gun crews called her "some cannon." At
seven o'clock every morning, the glass windows in my room at the post
would rattle with her opening barks, and from that minute on until noon
the Seventy-fives, battery upon battery of them, would snap and bark
away until their seemingly ceaseless fire becomes a volley of sharp
cracks which sent the echoes chasing one another through the dark
recesses of the forests that conceal them.
The targets, of course, were unseen. Range elevation, deflection, all
came to the battery over the signal wires that connected the firing
position with some observation point also unseen but located in a
position commanding the terrain under fire.
A signalman sat cross-legged on the ground back of each battery. He
received the firing directions from the transmitter clamped to his ears
and conveyed them to the firing executive who stood beside him. They
were then megaphoned to the sergeants chief of sections.
The corporal gunner, with eye on the sighting instruments at the side of
each gun, "laid the piece" for range and deflection. Number one man of
the crew opened the block to receive the shell, which was inserted by
number two. Number three adjusted the fuse-setter, and cut the fuses.
Numbers four and five screwed the fuses in the shells and kept the
fuse-setter loaded.
The section chiefs, watch in hand, gave the firing command to the gun
crews, and number one of each piece jerked the firing lanyard at ten
second intervals or whatever interval the command might call for. The
four guns would discharge their projectiles. They whined over the damp
wooded ridge to distant imaginary lines of trenches, theoretical
cross-roads, or designated sections where the enemy was supposed to be
massing for attack. Round after round would follow, while telephoned
corrections perfected the range, and burst. The course of each shell was
closely observed as well as its bursting effect, but no stupendous
records were kept of the individual shots. That was "peace time stuff."
These batteries and regiments were learning gunnery and no scarcity of
shells was permitted to interfere with their education. One officer told
me that it was his opinion that one brigade firing at this schooling
post during a course of six weeks, had expended more ammunition than all
of the field artillery of the United States Army has fired during the
entire period since the Civil War. The Seventy-five shells cost
approximately ten dollars apiece, but neither the French nor American
artillery directors felt that a penny's worth was being wasted. They
said cannon firing could not be learned entirely out of a book.
I had talked with a French instructor, a Yale graduate, who had been two
years with the guns at the front, and I had asked him what in his
opinion was the most disconcerting thing that could happen to effect the
morale of new gunners under actual fire. I wanted some idea of what
might be expected of American artillerymen when they made their initial
appearance on the line.
We discussed the effect of counter battery fire, the effect on gun crews
of asphyxiating gas, either that carried on the wind from the enemy
trenches or that sent over in gas shells. We considered the demoralising
influences of aerial attacks on gun positions behind the line.
"They are all bad," my informant concluded. "But they are expected. Men
can stand without complaint and without qualm any danger that is
directed at them by the foe they are fighting. The thing that really
bothers, though, is the danger of death or injury from their own weapons
or ammunition. You see, many times there is such a thing as a faulty
shell, although careful inspection in the munitions plants has reduced
this danger to a percentage of about one in ten thousand.
"At the beginning of the war when every little tin shop all over the
world was converted into a munitions factory to supply the great need of
shells, much faulty ammunition reached the front lines. Some of the
shells would explode almost as soon as they left the gun. They are
called shorts. The English, who had the same trouble, call them 'muzzle
bursts.'
"Sometimes the shell would explode in the bore of the cannon, in which
case the cannoneers were usually killed either by pieces of the shell
itself or bits of the cannon. The gunners have to sit beside the cannon
when it is fired, and the rest of the gun crew are all within eight feet
of it. If there is an explosion in the breech of the gun, it usually
wipes out most of the crew. A muzzle burst, or a breech explosion, is
one of the most disconcerting things that could happen in a battery.
"The other men in the battery know of course that a faulty shell caused
the explosion. They also know that they are firing ammunition from the
same lot. After that, as they pull the trigger on each shot, they don't
know whether the shell is going out of the gun all right or whether it
is going to explode in the breech and kill all of them. That thought in
a man's mind when he pulls the firing lanyard, that thought in the minds
of the whole crew as they stand there waiting for the crash, is
positively demoralising.
"When it happens in our French artillery the cannoneers lose confidence
in their pieces. They build small individual dugouts a safe ways back
from the gun and extend the lanyard a safe distance. Then, with all the
gun crew under cover, they fire the piece. This naturally removes them
from their regular firing positions beside the pieces, reduces the
accuracy and slows up the entire action of the battery. The men's
suspicions of the shells combined with the fear of death by their own
weapons, which is greater than any fear of death at the hands of the
enemy, all reduce the morale of the gun crews."
Now, for an incident. A new shipment of ammunition had reached the post.
The caissons were filled with it. Early the following morning when the
guns rumbled out of camp to the practice grounds, Battery X was firing
in the open. At the third shot the shell from piece number two exploded
prematurely thirty yards from the muzzle. Pieces three and four fired
ten and twenty seconds later with every man standing on his toes in his
prescribed position.
Ten rounds later, a shell from number three gun exploded thirty feet
after leaving the bore. Shell particles buried themselves in the ground
near the battery. Piece number four, right next to it, was due to fire
in ten seconds. It discharged its projectiles on the dot. The gun crews
knew what they were up against. They were firing faulty ammunition. They
passed whispered remarks but reloaded with more of the same ammunition
and with military precision on the immediate command. Every man stuck to
his position. As each gun was fired the immediate possibilities were not
difficult to imagine.
Then it happened.
"Commence firing," megaphoned the firing executive. The section chief of
number one piece dropped his right hand as the signal for the discharge.
The corporal gunner was sitting on the metal seat in front of his
instruments and not ten inches to the left of the breech. Cannoneer
number one of the gun crew occupied his prescribed position in the same
location to the immediate right of the breech. Gunner number two was
standing six feet behind the breech and slightly to the left ready to
receive the ejected cartridge case. Gunner number three was kneeling
over the fuse setter behind the caisson which stood wheel to wheel with
the gun carriage. Gunners four and five were rigid statues three feet
back of him. Every man in the crew had seen the previous bursts of
dangerous ammunition.
Number one's eye caught the descending hand of the section chief. He
pulled the lanyard.
There was an eruption of orange coloured flame, a deafening roar, a
crash of rendered steel, a cloud of smoke blue green, and yellow.
A black chunk of the gun cradle hurtled backward through the air with a
vicious swish. A piece of the bore splintered the wheels and buried
itself in the ammunition caisson. Thick hunks of gun metal crumbling
like dry cake filled the air. The ground shook.
The corporal gunner pitched backward from his seat and collapsed on the
ground. His mate with fists buried in his steel seared eyes staggered
out of the choking fumes. The rest of the crew picked themselves up in a
dazed condition. Fifty yards away a horse was struggling to regain his
feet.
Every man in the three other gun crews knew what had happened. None of
them moved from their posts. They knew their guns were loaded with
shells from the same lot and possibly with the same faults. No man knew
what would happen when the next firing pin went home. The evidence was
before them. Their eyes were on the exploded gun but not for long.
"Crash," the ten second firing interval had expired. The section chief
of piece number two had dropped his hand. The second gun in the battery
had fired.
"Number two on the way," sang out the signalman over the telephone wire
to the hidden observation station.
Ten seconds more for another gun crew to cogitate on whether disaster
hung on the dart of a firing pin.
"Crash."
"Number three on the way."
Another ten seconds for the last section to wonder whether death would
come with the lanyard jerk.
"Crash."
"Number four on the way." Round complete. The signalman finished his
telephone report.
Four horses drawing an army ambulance galloped up from the ravine that
sheltered them. The corporal gunner, unconscious and with one leg
pulverised was lifted in. Two other dazed members of the crew were
helped into the vehicle. One was bleeding from the shoulder. The lead
horses swung about; the ambulance rattled away.
"Battery ready to fire. Piece number one out of action." It was the
signalman reporting over the wire to the observer.
Battery X fired the rest of the morning and they used ammunition from
the same lot and every man knew what might happen any minute and every
man was in his exact position for every shot and nobody happened to
think about hiding in a dugout and putting a long string on the firing
lanyard.
It had been an unstaged, unconscious demonstration of nerve and grit and
it proved beyond all question the capacity of American artillerymen to
stand by the guns.
The gunner corporal told the nurse at his bedside how it all happened,
but he was still under the effects of the anesthetic. He did not refer
to the morale of his battery mates because it had not occurred to him
that there was anything unusual in what they did. But he did think that
he could wiggle the toes on his right leg. The doctor told me that this
was a common delusion before the patient had been informed of the
amputation.
Incidents such as the one related had no effect whatever upon the
progress of the work. From early dawn to late at night the men followed
their strenuous duties six days a week and then obtained the necessary
relief on the seventh day by trips down to the ancient town of Besancon.
In this picturesque country where countless thousands fought and died,
down through the bloody centuries since and before the Christian era,
where Julius Caesar paused in his far flung raids to dictate new inserts
to his commentaries, where kings and queens and dukes and pretenders
left undying traces of ambition's stormy urgings, there it was that
American soldiers, in training for the war of wars, spent week-end
holidays and mixed the breath of romance with the drag of their
cigarettes.
The extender of Roman borders divided that region into three parts,
according to the testimony of the first Latin class, but he neglected to
mention that of these three parts the one decreed for American
occupation was the most romantic of them all.
* * * * *
It is late on a Saturday afternoon and I accept the major's offer of a
seat in his mud-bespattered "Hunka Tin." The field guns have ceased
their roar for the day and their bores will be allowed to cool over
Sunday. Five per cent. of the men at the post have received the coveted
town leave.
They form a khaki fresco on the cab and sides of the giant commissary
trucks that raise the dust along the winding white road over the hills.
Snorting motorcycles with two men over the motor and an officer in the
side car skim over the ground, passing all others. A lukewarm sun
disappears in a slot in the mountains and a blue grey mist forms in the
valleys. A chill comes over the air and a cold new moon looks down and
laughs.
It is a long ride to the ancient town, but speed laws and motor traps
are unknown and the hood of the Detroit Dilemma shakes like a wet dog as
her sizzling hot cylinders suck juice from a full throttle. We cross one
divide through a winding road bordered by bushy trees and as orderly as
a national park. We coast through a hillside hamlet of barking dogs and
saluting children who stand at smiling attention and greet our passage
with a shrill "Veev La Mereek" (Vive l'Amerique).
We scud across a broad, level road built well above the lowland, and
climb through zig-zagging avenues of stately poplars to the tunnel that
pierces the backbone of the next ridge.
While the solid rock walls of the black bore reverberate with the echoes
from our exhaust, we emerge on a road that turns sharply to the left and
hugs a cliff. Below winds a broad river that looks like mother of pearl
in the moonlight. The mountain walls on either side rise at angles
approximating 45 degrees, and in the light their orderly vineyards look
like the squares on a sloping checkerboard. In front of us and to the
right the flanking ridges converge to a narrow gorge through which the
river Doub runs to loop the town.
Commanding this gorge from the crests of the two rocky heights are
sinister sentinels whose smooth, grey walls and towers rise sheer from
the brink of the cliffs. The moonlight now catching the ramparts of the
em-battlements splashes them with strokes of white that seem ever
brighter in contrast with the darker shadows made by projecting portions
of the walls. Spaniard and Moor knew well those walls, and all the
kingly glory that hurried France to the reign of terror has slept within
their shadows.
Our way down the cliff side is hewn out of the beetling rock. To our
left, a jagged wall of rock rises to the sky. To our right, a step,
rock-tumbled declivity drops to the river's edge.
The moonlight brings funny fancies, and our yellow headlights, wavering
in concentric arcs with each turn of the course, almost seem to glint on
the helmets and shields of the spear-bearing legionaries that marched
that very way to force a southern culture on the Gauls. We slow down to
pass through the rock-hewn gate that once was the Roman aqueduct
bringing water down from mountain springs to the town.
Through the gate, a turn to the left and we reach the black bottom of
the gorge untouched by the rising moon. We face a blast of wind that
slows our speed and brings with it the first big drops of rain. We stop
at the "Octroi" and assure the customs collector that we are military,
and that we carry no dutiable wine, or beans or wood into the town.
Yet another gate, built across the narrow road between the cliff and the
river, and we enter the town. It has been raining and the cobblestones
are slippery. They shine in the gleams of pale light that come from the
top-heavy street lamps. Gargoyle water spouts drip drainage from the
gables of moss-speckled tiles.
We pass a fountain that the Romans left, and rounded arches further on
show where the hooded Moor wrote his name in masonry. Barred windows and
stone balconies projecting over the street take one's mind off the
rattling motor and cause it to wander back to times when serenading
lovers twanged guitars beneath their ladies' windows and were satisfied
with the flower that dropped from the balcony.
The streets are wet and dark now and through their narrow windings our
headlights reveal tall figures in slickers or khaki overcoats topped by
peaked felt hats with the red cords of American artillerymen. Their
identification is a surprise to the dreamer, because one rather expects
these figures to sulk in the deeper shadows and screen their dark,
bearded faces with the broad brims of black felt hats or muffle
themselves to the chin in long, flowing black cloaks that hide rapiers
and stilettos and other properties of mediaeval charm.
We dine in a room three hundred years old. The presence of our
automobile within the inner quadrangle of the ancient building jars on
the sense of fitness. It is an old convent, now occupied by irreligious
tenants on the upper three floors, restaurants and estaminets on the
lower floor. These shops open on a broad gallery, level with the
courtyard, and separated from it only by the rows of pillars that
support the arches. It extends around the four sides of the court.
Centuries ago shrouded nuns, clasping beads or books of office, walked
in uncommunicative pairs and mumbled their daily prayers beneath these
time-worn arches, and to-night it affords a promenade for officers
waiting for their meals to be served at madame's well laid tables
within.
Madame's tables are not too many. There is not the space economy of an
American cafe, where elbows interlock and waiters are forced to navigate
fearsome cargoes above the diners' heads. Neither is there the
unwholesome, dust-filled carpet of London's roast beef palaces.
Madame's floor is bare, but the wood has stood the scrubbings of years,
and is as spotless as grass-dried linen. The high ceiling and the walls
are of white stucco. In bas-relief are clusters of heraldic signs, of
bishops' crooks and cathedral keys, of mounted chargers and dying
dragoons, of miter and crown, and trumpet and shield, and cross.
Large mirrors, circled with wreaths of gilded leaves, adorn both end
walls, and beneath one of them remains an ornate fireplace and
mantelpiece of bologna coloured marble, surmounted with a gilt cock of
wondrous design. Beneath the other mirror madame has placed her buffet,
on which the boy who explores the dusty caves below places the cobwebbed
bottles of red wine for the last cork pulling. Large gold chandeliers,
dangling with glass prisms, are suspended from high ceiling and flood
the room with light, against which the inner shutters of the tall
windows must be shut because of danger from the sky.
There is colour in that room. The Roman conquerors would have found it
interesting. If former armed occupants of the old town could have
paraded in their ancient habiliments through the room like a procession
from the martial past, they would have found much for their attention in
this scene of the martial present. American khaki seems to predominate,
although at several tables are Canadian officers in uniforms of the same
colour but of different tailoring.
The tables are flecked with all varieties of French uniforms, from
scarlet pants with solitary black stripes down the leg, to tunics of
horizon blue. In one corner there are two turbaned Algerians with heads
bent close over their black coffee, and one horn of the hall rack shows
a red fez with a gold crescent on the crown.
Consider the company. That freckle-faced youth with the fluffed reddish
hair of a bandmaster is a French aviator, and among the row of
decorations on his dark blue coat is one that he received by reason of a
well known adventure over the German lines, which cannot be mentioned
here. That American colonel whose short grey hair blends into the white
wall behind him is a former member of the United States war college and
one of the most important factors in the legislation that shaped the
present military status of his country. That other Frenchman with the
unusual gold shoulder straps is not a member of the French army. He is
a naval officer, and the daring with which he carried his mapping chart
along exposed portions of the line at Verdun and evolved the
mathematical data on which the French fired their guns against the
German waves has been the pride of both the navy and the army.
Over there is a young captain who this time last year was a "shavetail"
second in command at a small post along the line of communications in
Chihuahua. Next to him sits a tall dark youngster wearing with pride his
first Sam Browne belt and "U. S. R." on his collar. He carted human
wreckage to the hospitals on the French front for two years before Uncle
Sam decided to end the war. There's another one not long from the
"Point," booted and spurred and moulded to his uniform. He speaks with a
twang of old Virginia on every syllable and they say his family--but
that has nothing to do with the fact that he is aid to a major general
and is in these parts on a mission.
There are three American women in the room. One who is interested in Y.
M. C. A. work and a number of newspapers, wears a feminine adaptation of
the uniform and holds court at the head of a table of five officers.
Another, Mrs. Robert R. McCormick, who is engaged in the extension of
the canteen work of a Paris organisation, is sitting at our table and
she is willing to wager her husband anything from half a dozen gloves to
a big donation check that Germany will be ready for any kind of peace
before an American offensive in the spring.
The interests of the other American woman are negative. She professes no
concern in the fact that war correspondents' life insurances are
cancelled, but she repeats to me that a dead correspondent is of no use
to his paper, and I reply that if madame puts yet another one of her
courses on the board, one correspondent will die with a fork in his hand
instead of a pencil.
The diners are leaving. Each opening of the salon door brings in a gust
of dampness that makes the tablecloths flap. Rain coats swish and rustle
in the entry. Rain is falling in sheets in the black courtyard. The moon
is gone.
A merry party trails down the stone gallery skirting the quadrangle.
Their hobnailed soles and steel plated heels ring on the stone flags.
The arches echo back their song:
"In days of old
A warrior bold
Sang merrily his lay, etc. etc. etc.
My love is young and fair.
My love has golden hair,
So what care I
Though death be nigh, etc. etc. etc."
With frequent passages where a dearth of words reduce the selection to
musical but meaningless ta-de-ta-tas, the voices melt into the blackness
and the rain.
"Great times to be alive," I say to the wife. "This place is saturated
with romance. I don't have to be back to the post until to-morrow night.
Where will we go? They are singing 'Carmen' in the old opera house on
the square. What do you say?"
"There's a Charlie Chaplin on the programme next to the hotel," the wife
replies.
Romance was slapped with a custard pie.