UNDER FIRE
On the day before our departure for the front from the concentration
area in Picardy, every officer in the division, and they numbered almost
a thousand, was summoned to the temporary divisional headquarters, where
General Pershing addressed to them remarks which have since become known
as the commander's "farewell to the First." We had passed out from his
command and from then on our orders were to come from the commander of
the French army to which the division was to be attached.
General Pershing stood on a mound at the rear of a beautiful chateau of
Norman architecture, the Chateau du Jard, located on the edge of the
town of Chaumont-en-Vexin. The officers ranged themselves in informal
rows on the grass. Birds were singing somewhere above in the dense,
green foliage, and sunlight was filtering through the leaves of the
giant trees.
The American commander spoke of the traditions which every American
soldier should remember in the coming trials. He referred to the
opportunity then present for us, whose fathers established liberty in
the New World, now to assist the Old World in throwing off its yoke of
tyranny. Throughout this touching farewell to the men he had trained--to
his men then leaving for scenes from which some of them would never
return--the commander's voice never betrayed the depth of feeling behind
it.
That night we made final arrangements for the morrow's move. I
travelled with the artillery where orders were received for the
reduction of all packs to the lightest possible as all men would be
dismounted and the baggage wagons would be reserved for food, ammunition
and officers' luggage only. Officers' packs, by the same order, had to
shrink from one hundred and fifty pounds to twenty.
There were many misgivings that night as owners were forced to discard
cherished belongings. Cumbersome camp paraphernalia, rubber bathtubs,
pneumatic mattresses, extra blankets, socks, sweaters, etc., all parted
company from erstwhile owners. That order caused many a heart-break and
the abandonment of thousands of dollars' worth of personal equipment in
our area.
I have no doubt that some of the village maidens were surprised at the
remarkable generosity of officers and men who presented them with
expensive toilet sets. Marie at the village _estaminet_ received five of
them all fitted in neat leather rolls and inscribed with as many
different sets of initials. The old men of the town gloried in the
sweaters, woollen socks and underwear.
There was no chance to fudge on the slim baggage order. An officer,
bound by duty, weighed each officer's kit as it reached the baggage
wagons and those tipping the scales at more than the prescribed twenty
pounds, were thrown out entirely. I happened to be watching the loading
when it came turn for the regimental band to stow away its encased
instruments in one wagon. It must be remembered that musicians at the
front are stretcher bearers. The baggage judge lifted the case
containing the bass horn.
"No horn in the world ever weighed that much," he said. "Open it up,"
was the terse command. The case was opened and the base horn pulled out.
The baggage officer began operations on the funnel. I watched him
remove from the horn's interior two spare blankets, four pairs of socks,
an extra pair of pants and a carton of cigarettes. He then inserted his
arm up to the shoulder in the instrument's innards and brought forth two
apples, a small tin of blackberry jam and an egg wrapped in an
undershirt.
The man who played the "umpah umpah" in the band was heartbroken. The
clarinet player, who had watched the operation and whose case followed
for inspection, saved the inspector trouble by removing an easily hidden
chain of sausage. I noticed one musician who was observing the ruthless
pillage but, strangely, his countenance was the opposite of the others.
He was actually smiling. I inquired the cause of his mirth.
"When we packed up, those guys with the big hollow instruments all had
the laugh on me," he said. "Now I've got it on them. I play the
piccolo."
All the mounted men under the rank of battery commanders were dismounted
in order to save the horses for any possibilities in the war of
movement. A dismounted artilleryman carrying a pack and also armed with
a rifle, is a most disconsolate subject to view just prior to setting
out for a long tramp. In his opinion, he has been reduced too near the
status of the despised doughboy.
It really doesn't seem like artillery unless one has a horse to ride and
a saddle to strap one's pack on. In the lineup before we started, I saw
two of these gunners standing by weighted down with their cumbersome,
unaccustomed packs. They were backed against a stone wall and were
easing their burdens by resting the packs on the stone ledge. Another
one similarly burdened passed and, in a most serious tone, inquired:
"Say, would either of you fellows like to buy another blanket roll?" The
reply of two dejected gunners would bar this story from publication.
We were on the march early in the morning, but not without some initial
confusion by reason of the inevitable higher orders which always come at
the last minute to change programmes. On parallel roads through that
zone of unmarred beauty which the Normans knew, our columns swung along
the dusty highroads.
There were many who held that America would not be thoroughly awake to
the full meaning of her participation in the war until the day there
came back from the battlefields a long list of casualties--a division
wiped out or decimated. Many had heard the opinions expressed in France
and many firmly believed that nothing short of such a shock would arouse
our nation to the exertion of the power and speed necessary to save the
Allied cause from defeat.
On this march, that thought recurred to some and perhaps to many who
refrained soberly from placing it in words. I knew several in the
organisation who felt that we were on our way to that sacrifice. I can
not estimate in how many minds the thought became tangible, but among
several whom I heard seriously discussing the matter, I found a perfect
willingness on their part to meet the unknown--to march on to the
sacrifice with the feeling that if the loss of their life would help
bring about a greater prosecution of the war by our country, then they
would not have died in vain.
If this was the underlying spirit, it had no effect whatever upon
outward appearances which could hardly be better described than with
Cliff Raymond's lilting words: "There are roses in their rifles just the
same." If this move was on to the sacrifice--if death awaited at the
end of the road, then those men were marching toward it with a song.
It takes a hard march to test the morale of soldiers. When the feet are
road-sore, when the legs ache from the endless pounding of hobnails on
hard macadam, when the pack straps cut and burn to the shoulder blades,
and the tin hat weighs down like a crown of thorns, then keep your ear
open for a jest and if your hearing is rewarded, you will know that you
march with men.
Many times that first day, those jests came to enliven dejected spirits
and put smiles on sweat-rinsed faces. I recall our battery as it
negotiated the steep hills. When the eight horses attached to the gun
carriages were struggling to pull them up the incline, a certain
subaltern with a voice slow, but damnably insistent, would sing out,
"Cannoneers, to the wheels." This reiterated command at every grade
forced aching shoulders already weary with their own burdens to strain
behind the heavy carriages and ease the pull on the animals.
Once on a down grade, our way crossed the tracks of a narrow gauge
railroad. Not far from the crossing could be seen a dinky engine puffing
and snorting furiously in terrific effort to move up the hill its
attached train of loaded ammunition cars. The engine was having a hard
fight when some light-hearted weary one in our column gave voice to
something which brought up the smile.
"Cannoneers, to the wheel!" was the shout and even the dignified
subaltern whose pet command was the butt of the exclamation, joined in
the wave of laughs that went down the line.
An imposing chateau of the second empire now presided over by an
American heiress, the wife of a French officer, was regimental
headquarters that night. Its barns and outbuildings were the cleanest
in France according to individuals who had slept in so many barns that
they feel qualified to judge.
"Painfully sanitary," said a young lieutenant, who remarked that the
tile floor might make a stable smell sweeter but it hardly offered the
slumbering possibilities of a straw shakedown. While the men arranged
their blankets in those quarters, the horses grazed and rolled in green
paddocks fenced with white painted rails. The cooks got busy with the
evening meal and the men off duty started exploring the two nearby
villages.
For the American soldier, financial deals were always a part of these
explorations. It was seldom more than an hour after his arrival in a
populated village before the stock market and board of trade were in
full operation. These mobile establishments usually were set up in the
village square if headquarters did not happen to be located too close.
There were plenty to play the roles of bulls and bears; there was much
bidding and shouting of quotations.
The dealings were not in bushels of wheat or shares in oils or rails.
Delicacies were the bartered commodities and of these, eggs were the
strongest. The German intelligence service could have found no surer way
to trace the peregrinations of American troops about France, than to
follow up the string of eggless villages they left behind them.
As soon as billets were located, those without extra duty began the egg
canvass of the town. There was success for those who made the earliest
start and struck the section with the most prolific hens. Eggs were
bought at various prices before news of the American arrivals had caused
peasants to set up a new scale of charges. The usual late starter and
the victim of arrangements was the officer's striker who lost valuable
time by having to take care of his officer's luggage and get the latter
established in billets. It was then his duty to procure eggs for the
officer's mess.
By that time, all natural egg sources had been obliterated and the only
available supply was cornered by the soldiers' board of trade. The
desired breakfast food could be obtained in that place only. It was the
last and only resort of the striker, who is euphoniously known as a dog
robber. In the board of trade he would find soldiers with helmets full
of eggs which could be bought at anywhere from two to three times their
original price. It was only by the payment of such prices that the
officer was able to get anything that could possibly leave a trace of
yellow on his chin. If there was a surplus, the soldiers themselves had
ample belt room to accommodate it.
In one village tavern, I saw one soldier eat fourteen eggs which he
ordered Madame to fry in succession. I can believe it because I saw it.
Madame saw it also, but I feel that she did not believe her eyes. A
captain of the Judge Advocate's office also witnessed the gastronomic
feat.
"Every one of those eggs was bought and paid for," he said. "Our
department handles claims for all stolen or destroyed property and we
have yet to receive the first claim from this town. Of course every one
knows that a hungry man will steal to eat and there are those who hold
that theft for the purpose of satisfying demands of the stomach is not
theft. But our records show that the American soldier in France is ready
to, willing to, and capable of buying what he needs outside of his
ration allowance.
"We have some instances of stealing, but most of them are trivial.
Recently, we took from the pay of one whole battalion the cost of
thirty-one cheeses which were taken from a railroad restaurant counter.
The facts were that some of our troops en route were hungry and the
train was stopping only for five minutes and the woman behind the
counter didn't have time to even take, much less change, the money
offered, so the men grabbed the cheeses and ran out just in time to
board the train as it was moving off.
"There was one case, though, in which Uncle Sam didn't have the heart to
charge any one. He paid the bill himself and maybe if you could send the
story back home, the citizens who paid it would get a laugh worth the
money. It happened during a recent cold spell when some of our troops
were coming from seaboard to the interior. They travelled in semi-opened
horse cars and it was cold, damn cold.
"One of the trains stopped in front of a small railroad station and six
soldiers with cold hands and feet jumped from the car and entered the
waiting room, in the centre of which was a large square coal stove with
red hot sides. One man stood on another one's shoulders and disjointed
the stove pipe. At the same time, two others placed poles under the
bottom of the stove, lifted it off the floor and walked out of the room
with it.
"They placed it in the horse car, stuck the pipe out of one door and
were warm for the remainder of the trip. It was the first time in the
history of that little village that anybody had ever stolen a red hot
stove. The French government, owning the railroads, made claim against
us for four hundred francs for the stove and eleven francs' worth of
coal in it. Uncle Sam paid the bill and was glad to do it.
"I know of only one case to beat that one and that concerned an
infantryman who stole a hive full of honey and took the bees along with
it. The medical department handled one aspect of the case and the
provost marshal the other. The bees meted out some of the punishment and
we stung his pay for the costs."
There was one thing, however, that men on the move found it most
difficult to steal and that was sleep. So at least it seemed the next
morning when we swung into the road at daybreak and continued our march
into the north. Much speculation went the rounds as to our destination.
The much debated question was as to whether our forces would be
incorporated with Foch's reserve armies and held in readiness for a
possible counter offensive, or whether we should be placed in one of the
line armies and assigned to holding a position in the path of the German
push. But all this conjecture resulted in nothing more than passing the
time. Our way led over byroads and side lanes which the French master of
circulation had laid down for us.
Behind an active front, the French sanctified their main roads and
reserved them for the use of fast motor traffic and the rushing up of
supplies or reserves in cases of necessity. Thousands of poilus too old
for combat duty did the repair work on these main arteries. All minor
and slow moving traffic was side-tracked to keep the main line clear. At
times we were forced to cross the main highroads and then we encountered
the forward and backward stream of traffic to and from the front. At one
of those intersections, I sought the grass bank at the side of the road
for rest. Two interesting actors in this great drama were there before
me. One was an American soldier wearing a blue brassard with the white
letters M. P. He was a military policeman on duty as a road marker
whose function is to regulate traffic and prevent congestion.
Beside him was seated a peculiar looking person whose knee length skirts
of khaki exposed legs encased in wrap puttees. A motor coat of yellow
leather and the visored cap of a British Tommy completed the costume.
The hair showing beneath the crown of the cap was rather long and
straight, but betrayed traces of having been recently close cropped. For
all her masculine appearance, she was French and the young road marker
was lavishing upon her everything he had gleaned in a Freshman year of
French in a Spokane high school.
I offered my cigarette case and was surprised when the girl refrained.
That surprise increased when I saw her extract from a leather case of
her own a full fledged black cigar which she proceeded to light and
smoke with gusto. When I expressed my greater surprise, she increased it
by shrugging her shoulders prettily, plunging one gauntleted hand into a
side pocket and producing a pipe with a pouch of tobacco.
There was nothing dainty about that pipe. It had no delicate amber stem
nor circlet of filigree gold. There was no meerschaum ornamentation. It
was just a good old Jimmy pipe with a full-grown cake in the black burnt
bowl, and a well bitten, hard rubber mouth piece. It looked like one of
those that father used to consent to have boiled once a year, after
mother had charged it with rotting the lace curtains. If war makes men
of peace-time citizens, then----
[Illustration: FIRST OF THE GREAT FRANCO-AMERICAN COUNTER-OFFENSIVE AT
CHATEAU-THIERRY. THE FRENCH BABY TANKS, KNOWN AS "CHARS D'ASSAUTS,"
ENTERING THE WOOD OF VILLERS-COTTERETS, SOUTHWEST OF SOISSONS]
[Illustration: YANKS AND POILUS VIEWING THE CITY OF CHATEAU-THIERRY,
WHERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY, THE YANKS TURNED THE TIDE OF BATTLE
AGAINST THE HUNS]
But she was a girl and her name was Yvonne. The red-winged letter on her
coat lapel placed her in the automobile service and the motor ambulance
stationed at the road side explained her special branch of work. She
inquired the meaning of my correspondent's insignia and then
explained that she had drawn pastelles for a Paris publication before
the war, but had been transporting _blesses_ since. The French lesson
proceeded and Spokane Steve and I learned from her that the longest word
in the French language is spelled "Anticonstitutionellement." I
expressed the hope that some day both of us would be able to pronounce
it.
On the girl's right wrist was a silver chain bracelet with
identification disk. In response to our interested gaze, she exhibited
it to us, and upon her own volition, informed us that she was a
descendant of the same family as Jeanne d'Arc. Steve heard and winked to
me with a remark that they couldn't pull any stuff like that on anybody
from Spokane, because he had never heard that that Maid of Orleans had
been married. Yvonne must have understood the last word because she
explained forthwith that she had not claimed direct descendence from the
famous Jeanne, but from the same family. Steve looked her in the eye and
said, "Jay compraw."
She explained the meaning of the small gold and silver medals suspended
from the bracelet. She detached two and presented them to us. One of
them bore in relief the image of a man in flowing robes carrying a child
on his shoulder, and the reverse depicted a tourist driving a motor
through hilly country.
"That is St. Christophe," said Yvonne. "He is the patron saint of
travellers. His medal is good luck against accidents on the road. Here
is one of St. Elias. He is the new patron saint of the aviators. You
remember. Didn't he go to heaven in a fiery chariot, or fly up on golden
wings or something like that? Anyhow, all the aviators wear one of his
medals."
St. Christophe was attached to my identification disk. Steve declared
infantrymen travelled too slowly ever to have anything happen to them
and that he was going to give his to a friend who drove a truck. When I
fell in line with the next passing battery and moved down the road,
Spokane Steve and the Yvonne of the family of Jeanne had launched into a
discussion of prize fighting and chewing tobacco.
* * * * *
In billets that night, in a village not far from Beauvais, the singing
contest for the prize of fifty dollars offered by the battalion
commander Major Robert R. McCormick was resumed with intense rivalry
between the tenors and basses of batteries A and B. A "B" Battery man
was croaking Annie Laurie, when an "A" Battery booster in the audience
remarked audibly,
"Good Lord, I'd rather hear first call." First call is the bugle note
that disturbs sleep and starts the men on the next day's work.
A worried lieutenant found me in the crowd around the rolling kitchen
and inquired:
"Do you know whether there's a provost guard on that inn down the road?"
I couldn't inform him, but inquired the reason for his alarm.
"I've got a hunch that the prune juice is running knee deep to-night,"
he replied, "and I don't want any of my section trying to march
to-morrow with swelled heads."
"Prune juice" is not slang. It is a veritable expression and anybody who
thinks that the favourite of the boarding house table cannot produce a
fermented article that is _tres fort_ in the way of a throat burner, is
greatly mistaken. In France the fermented juice of the prune is called
"water of life," but it carries a "dead to the world" kick. The simple
prune, which the army used to call "native son" by reason of its
California origin, now ranks with its most inebriating sisters of the
vine.
The flow of _eau de vie_ must have been dammed at the inn. On the road
the next day, I saw a mule driver wearing a sixteen candle power black
eye. When I inquired the source of the lamp shade, he replied:
"This is my first wound in the war of movement. Me and the cop had an
offensive down in that town that's spelt like Sissors but you say it
some other way." I knew he was thinking of Gisors.
The third and fourth day's march brought us into regions nearer the
front, where the movement of refugees on the roads seemed greater, where
the roll of the guns came constantly from the north, where enemy motors
droned through the air on missions of frightfulness.
There was a major in our regiment whose knowledge of French was confined
to the single affirmative exclamation, "Ah, oui." He worked this
expression constantly in the French conversation with a refugee woman
from the invaded districts. She with her children occupied one room in
the cottage. When the major started to leave, two days later, the
refugee woman addressed him in a reproving tone and with tears. He could
only reply with sympathetic "Ah, oui's," which seemed to make her all
the more frantic.
An interpreter straightened matters out by informing the major that the
woman wanted to know why he was leaving without getting her furniture.
"What furniture?" replied the puzzled major.
"Why, she says," said the interpreter, "that you promised her you would
send three army trucks to her house back of the German lines and bring
all of her household goods to this side of the line. She says that she
explained all of it to you and you said, 'Ah, oui.'"
The major has since abandoned the "ah, oui" habit.
At one o'clock one morning, orders reached the battalion for
reconnaissance detail; each battery to be ready to take road by
daylight. We were off at break of day in motor trucks with a reel cart
of telephone wire hitched on behind. Thirty minutes later we rumbled
along roads under range of German field pieces and arrived in a village
designated as battalion headquarters to find that we were first to reach
the sector allotted for American occupation. The name of the town was
Serevilliers.
Our ears did not delude us about the activity of the sector, but I found
that officers and men of the detail were inclined to accept the heavy
shelling in a non-committal manner until a French interpreter attached
to us remarked that artillery action in the sector was as intense as any
he had experienced at Verdun.
If the ever present crash of shells reminded us that we were opposite
the peak of the German push, there was plenty of work to engage minds
that might otherwise have paid too much attention to the dangers of
their location. A chalk cellar with a vaulted ceiling and ventilators,
unfortunately opening on the enemy side of the upper structure, was
selected as the battalion command post. The men went to work immediately
to remove piles of dirty billeting straw under which was found glass,
china, silverware and family portraits, all of which had been hurriedly
buried by the owners of the house not two weeks before.
While linemen planned communications, and battery officers surveyed gun
positions, the battalion commander and two orienting officers went
forward to the frontal zone to get the first look at our future targets
and establish observation posts from which our firing could be
directed. I accompanied the small party, which was led by a French
officer familiar with the sector. It was upon his advice that we left
the roads and took cuts across fields, avoiding the path and road
intersections and taking advantage of any shelter offered by the ground.
Virgin fields on our way bore the enormous craters left by the explosion
of poorly directed German shells of heavy calibre. Orders were to throw
ourselves face downward upon the ground upon the sound of each
approaching missile. There is no text book logic on judging from the
sound of a shell whether it has your address written on it, but it is
surprising how quick that education may be obtained by experience.
Several hours of walking and dropping to the ground resulted in an
attuning of the ears which made it possible to judge approximately
whether that oncoming, whining, unseen thing from above would land
dangerously near or ineffectively far from us. The knowledge was common
to all of us and all of our ears were keenly tuned for the sounds. Time
after time the collective judgment and consequent prostration of the
entire party was proven well timed by the arrival of a shell
uncomfortably close.
We gained a wooded hillside that bristled with busy French
seventy-fives, which the German tried in vain to locate with his
howitzer fire. We mounted a forest plateau, in the centre of which a
beautiful white chateau still held out against the enemy's best efforts
to locate it with his guns. One shell addressed in this special
direction fortunately announced its coming with such unmistakable
vehemence that our party all landed in the same shell hole at once.
Every head was down when the explosion came. Branches and pieces of tree
trunk were whirled upward, and the air became populated with deadly
bumble bees and humming birds, for such is the sound that the shell
splinters make. When I essayed our shell hole afterward, I couldn't
fathom how five of us had managed to accommodate ourselves in it, but in
the rush of necessity, no difficulty had been found.
Passing from the woods forward, one by one, over a bald field, we
skirted a village that was being heavily shelled, and reached a trench
on the side of the hill in direct view of the German positions. The
enemy partially occupied the ruined village of Cantigny not eight
hundred yards away, but our glasses were unable to pick up the trace of
a single person in the debris. French shells, arriving endlessly in the
village, shot geysers of dust and wreckage skyward. It was from this
village, several days later, that our infantry patrols brought in
several prisoners, all of whom were suffering from shell shock. But our
men in the village opposite underwent the same treatment at the hands of
the German artillery.
It was true of this sector that what corresponded to the infantry front
line was a much safer place to be in than in the reserve positions, or
about the gun pits in villages or along roads in our back area. Front
line activity was something of minor consideration, as both sides seemed
to have greater interests at other points and, in addition to that, the
men of both sides were busy digging trenches and shelters. There were
numerous machine gun posts which swept with lead the indeterminate
region between the lines, and at night, patrols from both sides explored
as far as possible the holdings of the other side.
Returning to the battalion headquarters that night by a route apparently
as popular to German artillery as was the one we used in the forenoon,
we found a telephone switchboard in full operation in the sub-cellar,
and mess headquarters established in a clean kitchen above the ground.
Food was served in the kitchen and we noticed that one door had suffered
some damage which had caused it to be boarded up and that the plaster
ceiling of the room was full of fresh holes and rents in a dozen places.
At every shock to the earth, a little stream of oats would come through
the holes from the attic above. These falling down on the officer's neck
in the midst of a meal, would have no effect other than causing him to
call for his helmet to ward off the cereal rain.
We learned more about the sinister meaning of that broken door and the
ceiling holes when it became necessary later in the evening to move mess
to a safer location. The kitchen was located just thirty yards back of
the town cross roads and an unhealthy percentage of German shells that
missed the intersection caused too much interruption in our cook's work.
We found that the mess room was vacant by reason of the fact that it had
become too unpleasant for French officers, who had relinquished it the
day before. We followed their suite and were not surprised when an
infantry battalion mess followed us into the kitchen and just one day
later, to the hour, followed us out of it.
Lying on the floor in that chalk cellar that night and listening to the
pound of arriving shells on nearby cross roads and battery positions, we
estimated how long it would be before this little village would be
completely levelled to the ground. Already gables were disappearing from
houses, sturdy chimneys were toppling and stone walls were showing
jagged gaps. One whole wall of the village school had crumbled before
one blast, so that now the wooden desks and benches of the pupils and
their books and papers were exposed to view from the street. On the
blackboard was a penmanship model which read:
"Let no day pass without having saved something."
An officer came down the dark stone steps into the cellar, kicked off
his boots and lay down on some blankets in one corner.
"I just heard some shells come in that didn't explode," I remarked. "Do
you know whether they were gas or duds?"
"I don't know whether they were gas or not," he said, "but I do know
that that horse out in the yard is certainly getting ripe."
The defunct animal referred to occupied an uncovered grave adjoining our
ventilator. Sleeping in a gas mask was not the most unpleasant form of
slumber.