Visualizing "over there"--Camping out in France--Unimportance of
the leaders--Adopting "Jake"--America finding maturity--Playing the
game--The coating of propaganda.
If one by one all the sounds at the front from the thunders of the
artillery to the rumble of the columns of motor-trucks were to pass
from my recollection, the last to go would be that of the rasping beat
of the infantry's hobnails upon the roads in the long stretches of the
night, whether in the vigor of a rested division, in rhythmic step
going forward into line, or of an exhausted division in dragging steps
coming out of line. It was mechanical and yet infinitely human, this
throbbing of the pulse of a country's man-power.
Whether or not the draft boards were always impartial, whether or not
favoritism provided safe berths for certain sons, I know that the
fathers or friends who kept a young man of fighting age out of uniform
or away from France did him an ill turn. He had missed something which
those who went to training camps or to France were to gain: something
not to be judged in terms of medals or bank balances.
When the men returned from overseas, people wondered at their
inarticulateness over their experiences. Subscribing to Liberty
Loans and War Savings Stamps, eating war bread, making innumerable
sacrifices, relatives and friends had been living in their habitual
world, traversing the same streets or fields in their daily work, and
meeting the same people,--and sleeping in their accustomed beds. The
war news that they had read came through the censorship, speaking in
the assuring voice of propaganda, which had men cheering and singing
in battle. Their sons and brothers had been in another world, whose
wonders, agony, and drudgery had become the routine of existence in the
face of death, which was also routine. They had seen the realities of
war behind the curtain, which had offered the pictures of war as it was
designed to be seen by the public. There was so much to say that they
found themselves saying nothing to auditors who did not know that the
Meuse-Argonne was a greater battle than Château-Thierry, or that the
S. O. S. was the Services of Supply, or the difference between rolling
kitchens and the ammunition train. Some finally worked up a story which
was the kind that friends liked to hear. Only when they had their
American Legion gatherings would they be able to find a common ground
where all their fundamental references would be understood.
Much was written about the democratic results of millionaire and
bootblack, farmer's son and son of the tenements, day laborer and
cotton-wool youth, fastidious about his cravats, mixing together in
the ranks. At the training camps our soldiers were on the background
of home, and they were not facing death together. They knew their own
country by railroad journeys and by living with men from different
States; but some observers think that one does not really know his own
country until he has seen other countries. The training camp had become
a kind of home. Its discipline was modest beside that of France; there
were no hardships except the hard drill and routine. In France our
soldier had no home. He was always changing his boarding place, though
never his task as a fighting man.
He did not see France as the tourist saw it, from a car spinning past
finished old landscapes, between avenues of trees along roads that
linked together red-tile-roofed villages, while his chauffeur asked
him, after he had had a good dinner at an inn, at what time he wanted
his car in the morning. He marched these roads under his pack, often
all night long, while he was under orders not to strike a match to
light a cigarette. He was drenched with winter rain when he was
conducted to a barn door and told to crawl up into the hayloft, or
conducted to a house door where he stretched himself on the floor in a
room that had no heat.
He was billeted in villages where the people had been billeting
soldiers for four years. They wanted the privacy of their homes again
as surely as he wanted to be back in his own home. The roads over which
he marched he had to help repair, in winter rains, when old cathedral
spires lacked the impressiveness which they had to the tourists because
they looked as cold as everything else, and when picturesque, winding
canals merely looked wet when everything was wet.
He knew other roads which were swept by the blasts of hell; he saw the
beautiful landscapes through the mud of trenches and from the filthy
fox-holes where he waited in hourly expectation of an attack; he knew
the beautiful woods which fleck the rolling landscape with their
patches of green as the best possible places for being gassed.
The hand of authority was on him even in his holidays--he, the free
American. He might not go beyond certain limits when he went for
a walk, for otherwise all our soldiers within walking distance of
the largest town would spend the day there, to the discomfiture of
discipline and French regulations. If he secured leave, it was not to
the Paris of which he dreamed, but to the area which the army had
prescribed. For months and months our men fought and marched, going and
coming past Paris, without a glimpse of the city of their desire. That
Paris was not good for them all the high authorities agreed; besides,
their services were too valuable to be spared for sight-seeing.
From the day of their arrival they were under the whip of a great
necessity: first, of keeping the Germans from winning the war, and then
of winning the war before Christmas came. In the last stages of the
war, they bore more than American soldiers have ever borne--more than
the British, in their own limited sector with its settled appointments
a day's travel from England; more than the French, fighting in their
own country with leave to go to their homes--their own homes--once in
four months. Our men had a real rest only when they were wounded or ill
and were sent back to the hospitals and rest camps.
When a soldier was not fighting, somebody was lecturing to him. His
education was never complete. There was some new gas which he must
avoid, some new wrinkle in fighting machine-guns which he must learn.
As he had so much lecturing on the drill-ground and on the march and
in billets about making sure that he did not destroy any property or
take a piece of wood or use a tool that did not belong to him, the
orators who came from the United States to tell him how to be "good"
though a soldier, and how all the country admired him and depended
upon him, were not so popular as they might have been, because he knew
the character of his job by very bitter experience. How little such
visitors knew of him--in his own world!
As distinguished from the officers of commissioned rank, we spoke of
the privates as the men; also as the "doughboys," a name which long ago
the cavalry, looking down haughtily from their saddles, applied to the
infantry, as kneaders of mud. There was a gulf between officers and
privates, settled in old military customs, which at least at the front
grew narrower as the old influences were dissolved in the crucible
of fire. Many of the privates were superior to their officers. Many
won their commissions in the training-camp of battle. I preferred
always to think of the whole of generals, colonels, "kid" lieutenants,
and privates as men. It was the whole that was majestic; manhood as
manhood, which was supreme.
Officers, whether with one bar or two stars on their shoulders, were
only the nails holding the structure of manhood together. They might
be promoted and demoted; prune themselves on their rank; but the
mighty current of soldiery was elemental as the flow of a river. Never
had the part of any high commander been relatively less important
than in this war; in no army was this so true probably as in ours. By
running through a list of names in this age of universal ability, you
might find a score of leaders for corps or army who might be better
than those in the field; but fresh divisions of infantry were not in
such easy call. The names of officers who commanded more men than
Napoleon or Wellington had at Waterloo, Meade or Lee at Gettysburg,
were unknown to the public. Never had a single human being, no matter
how many orders on his breast, appeared more dispensable than in this
machine war with its enormous masses of troops. We had two million men
in France. Every officer and man counted as one unit in the machine,
according, not to rank, but to the giving of all that he had in him.
Manhood and not soldiering was glorified.
It was the great heart of our men, beating as the one heart of a great
country--simple, vigorous, young, trying out its strength--on the
background of old Europe, which appealed to me. It was the spontaneous
incidents of emotion breaking out of routine which revealed character.
One day on a path across the fields near headquarters town, I met a
soldier with a wound stripe who had been invalided back from the front.
He was thick-set, bow-legged, with a square, honest face, and eyes
slightly walled, and he was leading a bow-legged sturdy child of four
years, whose one visible eye showed a cast resembling the soldier's
own. The other eye was hidden by a drooping wool Tam-o'-Shanter about
four sizes too large for the child's head, while his wool sweater and
wool leggings were not more than two sizes too large. It was evident
that a man and not a woman had bought his wardrobe, having in mind that
the child was to be kept warm at any cost. The pair aroused my interest.
"I heard all about adopting French war orphans through the societies,"
the soldier said, "and I concluded, when they sent me here, to pick
out my own orphan. So I adopted Jake. Yes, I calls him Jake. You see,
his father was killed by the boche and his mother croaked. He hadn't
anybody to look after him, so I took over the job. Didn't I, Jake?"
Jacob looked up with an eye that seemed to consider this a wonderful
world created by the soldier, and removed his finger from his mouth
long enough to say "Yep," which he had learned in the place of "Oui."
"I'm going to take Jake home with me, and make him an American, ain't
I, Jake? You're learning English too, ain't you, Jake?"--with Jake
taking up his cue to prove that he was by responding "Yep!" again.
When they started on, I paused to look after them, with something
catching in my throat, and as the soldier paused I overheard him saying:
"I'm going to take you home. Don't you worry--I'm sticking to that,
Jake. The French regulations will say that they ain't going to let you
leave France when they're so short of kids over here, and the American
regulations will say there ain't no room for kids on transports, and
probably the censor will lip in too--but I'll bring you after the war
if I can't now. You and me's fixed up a life pardnership, ain't we?
You'll make a hit with my mother, all right. All you've got to do is
look up at her just the way you're looking up at me and say 'Yep.'
Oh, it'll be all right over there--no more of this war and regulation
stuff!"
"Speaking a few words of French" could only open a chink in the
barrier of language between our men and the French people. Wherever
two Americans met they could begin talking without waiting on an
interpreter. The common bond of language promoted the family feeling
of the A. E. F. In all their relations our men saw with fresh eyes,
in the light of foreign surroundings, how like they were, not only in
uniform and equipment and ways of thought, but how distinctly American
even the European born and the sons of European parents had become. Old
differences disappeared in this new sense of a fundamental similarity.
Men from the different parts of the United States came together not
only in the combat divisions but around the docks and railway yards and
wherever they labored in the Services of Supply. Kansas, Oregon, and
Maine had adjoining beds at a hospital, while a doctor from Pittsburgh
or Oskaloosa, or a nurse from New York or Cheyenne, looked after them.
Reserve officers who had been lawyers, merchants, engineers, gang
foremen, bakers, bankers, manufacturers, lived and worked together in
keeping the army fed with shells and food.
"The gang's all here," was as expressive of the soldier's feeling in
the Great War as "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight" in
the little war with Spain. To all in whom there was the germ from which
it could develop, the stern fighting and effort brought a sense of
personal power, quiet, observant, undemonstrative; and their sense of
the presence there in France of two millions of Americans--scattered
far and wide, omnipresent in their energy, welded into one mighty
organization, pulsing with the heart of the home country three thousand
miles away, as California looked Maine in the eye in that common
family--brought a new sense of national power. It occurred to me that
the A. E. F. symbolized how a great overgrown boy of a nation, with a
puzzled feeling about its expanding physique, had suddenly become a
dignified, poised, self-respecting adult.
The men knew why they were in France, even if they did not express it
in the phrases of oratory or propaganda. Their logic was as cold as
their steel, as vivid as gun flashes. They were in France to beat the
Germans. The period for argument had passed for them. They had the
business in hand. Their bitterness toward the foe was not as great as
that at home. Why waste words on him when you had bullets and shells to
fire at him? He was taken for granted no less than burglary and murder:
a positive material force to be overcome.
Whether college graduates or street-sweepers, the privates were a guild
as exclusive in its way--as it always has been--as a regular mess. They
had voted themselves into their task. It was the will of the majority
of their country that we go to France. The majority rules; general and
other officers may act as legatees for the majority. The thing was to
"play the game." Those who rebelled found that there was nothing else
to do. They were in the machine's grip. "Play the game!" No phrase
better expressed their attitude than this. It was a wicked, filthy,
dangerous game. They had signed on for it; they would see it through.
Given this conviction, and no soldier will endure more hardship than
the American. It was the bedrock of adherence to that rigid discipline
which in our western democracy surprised Europeans. We saluted on all
occasions--what a punctiliously saluting army we were!--and followed
all the rules of etiquette that the experts said were necessary, and
learned to take "bawlings out" with soldierly philosophy. As children
know their parents, the men knew their officers' characters; a fresh
replacement lieutenant was promptly "sized up," but final judgment was
reserved until he had led them under fire, where he must stand the real
test. It was a relief to them that they did not have to add an extra
salute for every grade of an officer's rank. One salute would do for
a general as well as a second lieutenant. Generals passed them on the
road in cars; generals inspected them. They did not take much interest
in generals, who were also a part of the game to them. Company and
battalion commanders alone could make their personal leadership felt.
They were the "heroes" when they were good, and rightly so.
Officers made strange guesses sometimes as to what their men were
thinking. The men were wiser than many officers knew; for they were
the mass intelligence of America. They understood that the Stars and
Stripes was propaganda; but it was interesting. They read it with
avidity. Propaganda was one of the parts of the mysterious, ugly game.
I have heard it compared to the coaching from the bleachers at a league
game. The men smiled over the communiqué's records of actions in which
they participated. Communiqués were a part of the game, helping
propaganda to coach from the side lines. It would not do to say that
a company had been sent by mistake into interlocking machine-gun fire
to take a town which the survivors had to yield. When the men read the
home papers, there was no mention of their losses or their suffering.
One might think from the accounts that they were enjoying themselves
immensely, and were quite comfortable in the fox-holes. This, too, was
a part of the game.
They were there to see the game through. The sooner it was through,
the sooner they would go home. Veterans who had spent one winter in
France did not want to spend another; those who had not did not care to
try the experience. They had no more reason for liking France than a
man who sleeps on the ground in Central Park in December, eating cold
rations, under machine-gun fire, has for liking New York City. "I want
to get back to the cactus!" as an Arizona man said. All were fighting
to reach home and be free men again; freedom having a practical
application for them. The longer they were in France, the more they
felt that they were fighting for America. As Americans they were on
their mettle. Such was the spirit that carried them as Americans
through the Meuse-Argonne, which was the American army's battle.