BEFORE CANTIGNY
It is strange how sleep can come at the front in surroundings not unlike
the interior of a boiler factory, but it does. I heard of no man who
slept in the cellars beneath the ruins of Serevilliers that night being
disturbed by the pounding of the shells and the jar of the ground, both
of which were ever present through our dormant senses. Stranger still
was the fact that at midnight when the shelling almost ceased, for small
intervals, almost every sleeper there present was aroused by the sudden
silence. When the shelling was resumed, sleep returned.
"When I get back on the farm outside of Chicago," said one officer, "I
don't believe I will be able to sleep unless I get somebody to stand
under my window and shake a thunder sheet all night."
It is also remarkable how the tired human, under such conditions, can
turn off the switch on an energetic imagination and resign himself
completely to fate. In those cellars that night, every man knew that one
direct hit of a "two ten" German shell on his particular cellar wall,
would mean taps for everybody in the cave. Such a possibility demands
consideration in the slowest moving minds.
Mentalities and morale of varying calibre cogitate upon this matter at
varying lengths, but I doubt in the end if there is much difference in
the conclusion arrived at. Such reflections produce the inevitable
decision that if one particular shell is coming into your particular
abode, there is nothing you can do to keep it out, so "What the hell!"
You might just as well go to sleep and forget it because if it gets you,
you most probably will never know anything about it anyway. I believe
such is the philosophy of the shelled.
It must have been three o'clock in the morning when a sputtering motor
cycle came to a stop in the shelter of our cellar door and a gas guard
standing there exchanged words with some one. It ended in the sound of
hobnails on the stone steps as the despatch rider descended, lighting
his way with the yellow shaft from an electric pocket lamp.
"What is it?" inquired the Major, awakening and rolling over on his
side.
"Just come from regimental headquarters," said the messenger. "I'm
carrying orders on to the next town. Adjutant gave me this letter to
deliver to you, sir. The Adjutant's compliments, sir, and apologies for
waking you, but he said the mail just arrived and the envelope looked
important and he thought you might like to get it right away."
"Hmm," said the Major, weighing the official looking envelope in one
hand and observing both the American stamps in one corner and numerous
addresses to which the missive had been forwarded. He tore off one end
and extracted a sheet which he unfolded and read while the messenger
waited at his request. I was prepared to hear of a promotion order from
Washington and made ready to offer congratulations. The Major smiled and
tossed the paper over to me, at the same time reaching for a notebook
and fountain pen.
"Hold a light for me," he said to the messenger as he sat on the edge of
the bed and began writing. "This is urgent and I will make answer now.
You will mail it at regimental headquarters." As his pen scratched
across the writing pad, I read the letter he had just received. The
stationery bore the heading of an alumni association of a well-known
eastern university. The contents ran as follows:
"Dear Sir: What are you doing for your country? What are you doing
to help win the war? While our brave boys are in France facing the
Kaiser's shell and gas, the alumni association has directed me as
secretary to call upon all the old boys of the university and invite
them to do their bit for Uncle Sam's fighting men. We ask your
subscription to a fund which we are raising to send cigarettes to
young students of the university who are now serving with the
colours and who are so nobly maintaining the traditions of our Alma
Mater. Please fill out the enclosed blank, stating your profession
and present occupation. Fraternally yours, ---- Secretary."
The Major was watching me with a smile as I concluded reading.
"Here's my answer," he said, reading from a notebook leaf:
"Your letter reached me to-night in a warm little village in France.
With regard to my present profession, will inform you that I am an
expert in ammunition trafficking and am at present occupied in
exporting large quantities of shells to Germany over the air route.
Please find enclosed check for fifty francs for cigarettes for
youngsters who, as you say, are so nobly upholding the sacred
traditions of our school. After all, we old boys should do something
to help along the cause. Yours to best the Kaiser. ----, Major.
---- Field Artillery, U. S. A. On front in France."
"I guess that ought to hold them," said the Major as he folded the
letter and addressed an envelope. It rather seemed to me that it would
but before I could finish the remark, the Major was back asleep in his
blankets.
By daylight, I explored the town, noting the havoc wrought by the shells
that had arrived in the night. I had thought in seeing refugees moving
southward along the roads, that there was little variety of articles
related to human existence that they failed to carry away with them. But
one inspection of the abandoned abodes of the unfortunate peasants of
Serevilliers was enough to convince me of the greater variety of things
that had to be left behind. Old people have saving habits and the French
peasants pride themselves upon never throwing anything away.
The cottage rooms were littered with the discarded clothing of all ages,
discarded but saved. Old shoes and dresses, ceremonial high hats and
frock coats, brought forth only for weddings or funerals, were mixed on
the floor with children's toys, prayer books and broken china. Shutters
and doors hung aslant by single hinges. In the village _estaminet_ much
mud had been tracked in by exploring feet and the red tiled floor was
littered with straw and pewter measuring mugs, dear to the heart of the
antiquary.
The ivory balls were gone from the dust covered billiard table, but the
six American soldiers billeted in the cellar beneath had overcome this
discrepancy. They enjoyed after dinner billiards just the same with
three large wooden balls from a croquet court in the garden. A croquet
ball is a romping substitute when it hits the green cushions.
That afternoon we laid more wire across fields to the next town to the
north. Men who do this job are, in my opinion, the most daring in any
organisation that depends for efficiency upon uninterrupted telephone
communication. For them, there is no shelter when a deluge of shells
pours upon a field across which their wire is laid. Without protection
of any kind from the flying steel splinters, they must go to that spot
to repair the cut wires and restore communication. During one of these
shelling spells, I reached cover of the road side _abri_ and prepared to
await clearer weather.
In the distance, down the road, appeared a scudding cloud of dust. An
occasional shell dropping close on either side of the road seemed to add
speed to the apparition. As it drew closer, I could see that it was a
motor cycle of the three wheeled bathtub variety. The rider on the cycle
was bending close over his handle bars and apparently giving her all
there was in her, but the bulky figure that filled to overflowing the
side car, rode with his head well back.
At every irregularity in the road, the bathtub contraption bounced on
its springs, bow and stern rising and falling like a small ship in a
rough sea. Its nearer approach revealed that the giant torso apparent
above its rim was encased in a double breasted khaki garment which might
have marked the wearer as either the master of a four in hand or a
Mississippi steamboat of the antebellum type. The enormous shoulders,
thus draped, were surmounted by a huge head, which by reason of its
rigid, backward, star-gazing position appeared mostly as chin and double
chin. The whole was topped by a huge fat cigar which sprouted upward
from the elevated chin and at times gave forth clouds like the forward
smoke-stack on the _Robert E. Lee_.
I was trying to decide in my mind whether the elevated chin posture of
the passenger was the result of pride, bravado or a boil on the Adam's
apple, when the scudding comet reached the shelter of the protecting
bank in which was located the chiselled dog kennel that I occupied. As
the machine came to halt, the superior chin depressed itself ninety
degrees, and brought into view the smiling features of that smile-making
gentleman from Paducah--Mr. Irvin S. Cobb. Machine, rider and passenger
stopped for breath and I made bold to ask the intrepid humourist if he
suffered from a too keen sense of smell or a saw edge collar.
"I haven't a sensitive nose, a saw edge collar or an inordinate
admiration for clouds," the creator of Judge Priest explained with
reference to his former stiff-necked pose, "but George here," waving to
the driver, "took a sudden inspiration for fast movement. The jolt
almost took my head off and the wind kept me from getting it back into
position. George stuck his spurs into this here flying bootblack stand
just about the time something landed near us that sounded like a kitchen
stove half loaded with window weights and window panes. I think George
made a record for this road. I've named it Buh-Looey Boulevard."
When the strafing subsided we parted and I reached the next deserted
town without incident. It was almost the vesper hour or what had been
the allotted time for that rite in those parts when I entered the yard
of the village church, located in an exposed position at a cross roads
on the edge of the town. A sudden unmistakable whirr sounded above and I
threw myself on the ground just as the high velocity, small calibre
German shell registered a direct hit on the side of the nave where roof
and wall met.
While steel splinters whistled through the air, an avalanche of slate
tiles slid down the slanting surface of the roof, and fell in a
clattering cascade on the graves in the yard below. I sought speedy
shelter in the lee of a tombstone. Several other shells had struck the
churchyard and one of them had landed on the final resting place of the
family of Roger La Porte. The massive marble slab which had sealed the
top of the sunken vault had been heaved aside and one wall was
shattered, leaving open to the gaze a cross section view of eight heavy
caskets lying in an orderly row.
Nearby were fresh mounds of yellow earth, surmounted by now unpainted
wooden crosses on which were inscribed in pencil the names of French
soldiers with dates, indicating that their last sacrifice for the
tri-colour of la Patria had been made ten days prior. In the soil at the
head of each grave, an ordinary beer bottle had been planted neck
downward, and through the glass one could see the paper scroll on which
the name, rank and record of the dead man was preserved. While I
wondered at this prosaic method of identification, an American soldier
came around the corner of the church, lighted a cigarette and sat down
on an old tombstone.
"Stick around if you want to hear something good," he said, "That is if
that last shell didn't bust the organ. There's a French poilu who has
come up here every afternoon at five o'clock for the last three days and
he plays the sweetest music on the organ. It certainly is great. Reminds
me of when I was an altar boy, back in St. Paul."
We waited and soon there came from the rickety old organ loft the
soothing tones of an organ. The ancient pipes, sweetened by the
benedictions of ages, poured forth melody to the touch of one whose
playing was simple, but of the soul. We sat silently among the graves as
the rays of the dying sun brought to life new colouring in the leaded
windows of stained glass behind which a soldier of France swayed at the
ivory keyboard and with heavenly harmony ignored those things of death
and destruction that might arrive through the air any minute.
My companion informed me that the poilu at the organ wore a uniform of
horizon blue which marked him as casual to this village, whose French
garrisons were Moroccans with the distinctive khaki worn by all French
colonials in service. The sign of the golden crescent on their collar
tabs identified them as children of Mahomet and one would have known as
much anyway upon seeing the use to which the large crucifix standing in
what was the market place had been put.
So as not to impede traffic through the place, it had become necessary
to elevate the field telephone wires from the ground and send them
across the road overhead. The crucifix in the centre of the place had
presented itself as excellent support for this wire and the sons of the
prophet had utilised it with no intention of disrespect. The uplifted
right knee of the figure on the cross was insulated and wired. War, the
moderniser and mocker of Christ, seemed to have devised new pain for the
Teacher of Peace. The crucifixion had become the electrocution.
At the foot of the cross had been nailed a rudely made sign conveying to
all who passed the French warning that this was an exposed crossing and
should be negotiated rapidly. Fifty yards away another board bore the
red letters R. A. S. and by following the direction indicated by arrows,
one arrived at the cellar in which the American doctor had established a
Relief Aid Station. The Medico had furnished his subterranean apartments
with furniture removed from the house above.
"Might as well bring it down here and make the boys comfortable," he
said, "as to leave it up there and let shells make kindling out of it.
Funny thing about these cellars. Ones with western exposure--that is,
with doors and ventilators opening on the side away from the enemy seem
scarcest. That seems to have been enough to have revived all that talk
about German architects having had something to do with the erection of
those buildings before the war. You remember at one time it was said
that a number of houses on the front had been found to have plaster
walls on the side nearest the enemy and stone walls on the other side.
There might be something to it, but I doubt it."
Across the street an American battalion headquarters had been
established on the first floor and in the basement of the house, which
appeared the most pretentious in the village. Telephone wires now
entered the building through broken window panes, and within maps had
been tacked to plaster walls and the furniture submitted to the hard
usage demanded by war. An old man conspicuous by his civilian clothes
wandered about the yard here and there, picking up some stray implement
or nick-nack, hanging it up on a wall or placing it carefully aside.
"There's a tragedy," the battalion commander told me. "That man is mayor
of this town. He was forced to flee with the rest of the civilians. He
returned to-day to look over the ruins. This is his house we occupy. I
explained that much of it is as we found it, but that we undoubtedly
have broken some things. I could see that every broken chair and window
and plate meant a heart throb to him, but he only looked up at me with
his wrinkled old face and smiled as he said, 'It is all right, Monsieur.
I understand. _C'est la guerre._'"
The old man opened one of his barn doors, revealing a floor littered
with straw and a fringe of hobnailed American boots. A night-working
detail was asleep in blankets. A sleepy voice growled out something
about closing the door again and the old man with a polite,
"_Pardonnez-moi, messieurs_," swung the wooden portal softly shut. His
home--his house--his barn--his straw--_c'est la guerre_.
An evening meal of "corn willy" served on some of the Mayor's remaining
chinaware, was concluded by a final course of fresh spring onions. These
came from the Mayor's own garden just outside the door. As the cook
affirmed, it was no difficulty to gather them.
"Every night Germans drop shells in the garden," he said. "I don't even
have to pull 'em. Just go out in the morning and pick 'em up off the
ground."
I spent part of the night in gun pits along the road side, bordering the
town. This particular battery of heavies was engaged on a night long
programme of interdiction fire laid down with irregular intensity on
cross roads and communication points in the enemy's back areas. Under
screens of camouflage netting, these howitzers with mottled bores
squatting frog-like on their carriages, intermittently vomited flame,
red, green and orange. The detonations were ear-splitting and cannoneers
relieved the recurring shocks by clapping their hands to the sides of
their head and balancing on the toes each time the lanyard was pulled.
Infantry reserves were swinging along in the road directly in back of
the guns. They were moving up to forward positions and they sang in an
undertone as they moved in open order.
"Glor--ree--us, Glor--ree--us!
One keg of beer for the four of us.
Glory be to Mike there are no more of us,
For four of us can drink it all alone."
Some of these marchers would come during an interval of silence to a
position on the road not ten feet from a darkened, camouflaged howitzer
just as it would shatter the air with a deafening crash. The suddenness
and unexpectedness of the detonation would make the marchers start and
jump involuntarily. Upon such occasions, the gun crews would laugh
heartily and indulge in good natured raillery with the infantrymen.
"Whoa, Johnny Doughboy, don't you get frightened. We were just shipping
a load of sauerkraut to the Kaiser," said one ear-hardened gunner.
"Haven't you heard the orders against running your horses? Come down to
a gallop and take it easy."
"Gwan, you leatherneck," returns an infantryman, "You smell like a
livery stable. Better trade that pitchfork for a bayonet and come on up
where there's some fighting."
"Don't worry about the fighting, little doughboy," came another voice
from the dark gun pit. "This is a tray forte sector. If you don't get
killed the first eight days, the orders is to shoot you for loafing.
You're marching over what's called 'the road you don't come back on.'"
A train of ammunition trucks, timed to arrive at the moment when the
road was unoccupied, put in appearance as the end of the infantry column
passed, and the captain in charge urged the men on to speedy unloading
and fumed over delays by reason of darkness. The men received big shells
in their arms and carried them to the roadside dumps where they were
piled in readiness for the guns. The road was in an exposed position and
this active battery was liable to draw enemy fire at any time, so the
ammunition train captain was anxious to get his charges away in a hurry.
His fears were not without foundation, because in the midst of the
unloading, one German missile arrived in a nearby field and sprayed the
roadway with steel just as every one flattened out on the ground. Five
ammunition hustlers arose with minor cuts and one driver was swearing at
the shell fragment which had gone through the radiator of his truck and
liberated the water contents. The unloading was completed with all
speed, and the ammunition train moved off, towing a disabled truck. With
some of the gunners who had helped in unloading, I crawled into the
chalk dugout to share sleeping quarters in the straw.
"What paper do you represent?" one man asked me as he sat in the straw,
unwrapping his puttees. I told him.
"Do you want to know the most popular publication around this place?" he
asked, and I replied affirmatively.
"It's called the _Daily Woollen Undershirt_," he said. "Haven't you seen
everybody sitting along the roadside reading theirs and trying to keep
up with things? Believe me, it's some reading-matter, too."
"Don't let him kid you," said the section chief, "I haven't had to read
mine yet. The doctor fixed up the baths in town and yesterday he passed
around those flea charms. Have you seen them?"
For our joint inspection there was passed the string necklace with two
linen tabs soaked in aromatic oil of cedar, while the section chief
gave an impromptu lecture on personal sanitation. It was concluded by a
peremptory order from without for extinction of all lights. The candle
stuck on the helmet top was snuffed and we lay down in darkness with the
guns booming away on either side.
* * * * *
Our positions were located in a country almost as new to war as were the
fields of Flanders in the fall of '14. A little over a month before it
had all been peaceful farming land, far behind the belligerent lines.
Upon our arrival, its sprouting fields of late wheat and oats were
untended and bearing their first harvest of shell craters.
The abandoned villages now occupied by troops told once more the mute
tales of the homeless. The villagers, old men, old women and children,
had fled, driving before them their cows and farm animals even as they
themselves had been driven back by the train of German shells. In their
deserted cottages remained the fresh traces of their departure and the
ruthless rupturing of home ties, generations old.
On every hand were evidences of the reborn war of semi-movement. One day
I would see a battery of light guns swing into position by a roadside,
see an observing officer mount by ladder to a tree top and direct the
firing of numberless rounds into the rumbling east. By the next morning,
they would have changed position, rumbled off to other parts, leaving
beside the road only the marks of their cannon wheels and mounds of
empty shell cases.
Between our infantry lines and those of the German, there was yet to
grow the complete web of woven wire entanglements that marred the
landscapes on the long established fronts. Still standing, silent
sentinels over some of our front line positions were trees, church
steeples, dwellings and barns that as yet had not been levelled to the
ground. Dugouts had begun to show their entrances in the surface of the
ground and cross roads had started to sprout with rudely constructed
shelters. Fat sandbags were just taking the places of potted geraniums
on the sills of first floor windows. War's toll was being exacted daily,
but the country had yet to pay the full price. It was going through that
process of degeneration toward the stripped and barren but it still held
much of its erstwhile beauty.
Those days before Cantigny were marked by particularly heavy artillery
fire. The ordnance duel was unrelenting and the daily exchange of shells
reached an aggregate far in excess of anything that the First Division
had ever experienced before.
Nightly the back areas of the front were shattered with shells. The
German was much interested in preventing us from bringing up supplies
and munition. We manifested the same interest toward him. American
batteries firing at long range, harassed the road intersections behind
the enemy's line and wooded places where relief troops might have been
assembled under cover of darkness. The expenditure of shells was
enormous but it continued practically twenty-four hours a day. German
prisoners, shaking from the nervous effects of the pounding, certified
to the untiring efforts of our gunners.
The small nameless village that we occupied almost opposite the German
position in Cantigny seemed to receive particular attention from the
enemy artillery. In retaliation, our guns almost levelled Cantigny and a
nearby village which the enemy occupied. Every hour, under the rain of
death, the work of digging was continued and the men doing it needed no
urging from their officers. There was something sinister and emphatic
about the whine of a "two ten German H. E." that inspired one with a
desire to start for the antipodes by the shortest and most direct route.
The number of arrivals by way of the air in that particular village
every day numbered high in the thousands. Under such conditions, no
life-loving human could have failed to produce the last degree of
utility out of a spade. The continual dropping of shells in the ruins
and the unending fountains of chalk dust and dirt left little for the
imagination, but one officer told me that it reminded him of living in a
room where some one was eternally beating the carpet.
This taste of the war of semi-movement was appreciated by the American
soldier. It had in it a dash of novelty, lacking in the position warfare
to which he had become accustomed in the mud and marsh of the Moselle
and the Meuse. For one thing, there were better and cleaner billets than
had ever been encountered before by our men. Fresh, unthrashed oats and
fragrant hay had been found in the hurriedly abandoned lofts back of the
line and in the caves and cellars nearer the front.
In many places the men were sleeping on feather mattresses in
old-fashioned wooden bedsteads that had been removed from jeopardy above
ground to comparative safety below. Whole caves were furnished, and not
badly furnished, by this salvage of furniture, much of which would have
brought fancy prices in any collection of antiques.
Forced to a recognition solely of intrinsic values, our men made prompt
utilisation of much of the material abandoned by the civilian
population. Home in the field is where a soldier sleeps and after all,
why not have it as comfortable as his surroundings will afford? Those
caves and vegetable cellars, many with walls and vaulted ceilings of
clean red brick or white blocks of chalk, constituted excellent shelters
from shell splinters and even protected the men from direct hits by
missiles of small calibre.
Beyond the villages, our riflemen found protection in quickly scraped
holes in the ground. There were some trenches but they were not
contiguous. "No Man's Land" was an area of uncertain boundary. Our
gunners had quarters burrowed into the chalk not far from their gun
pits. All communication and the bringing up of shells and food were
conducted under cover of darkness. Under such conditions, we lived and
waited for the order to go forward.
Our sector in that battle of the Somme was so situated that the opposing
lines ran north and south. The enemy was between us and the rising sun.
Behind our rear echelons was the main road between Amiens and Beauvais.
Amiens, the objective of the German drive, was thirty-five kilometres
away on our left, Beauvais was the same distance on our right and two
hours by train from Paris.
We were eager for the fight. The graves of our dead dotted new fields in
France. We were holding with the French on the Picardy line. We were
between the Germans and the sea. We were before Cantigny.