PIONEERS, OH, PIONEERS
The man on sentry duty on that section of the huge unfinished wharf was
in a bad humor. He was in a very bad humor. If a stray cat or dog had
appeared on the wharf at that moment he would probably have kicked it.
As it was a woman in the khaki-colored uniform of a war correspondent,
the sentry contented himself with roaring a challenge that brought her
up standing. Having produced her pass, he stood aside with a scowl,
shouldered the rifle which had been pointed at her most menacingly, and
made a gesture with his head which meant, “Well, then, move on.”
But the correspondent--I was the correspondent--did not move on. I
stopped and said, mildly: “You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself
to-day. What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter?” he repeated furiously. “Every darn thing is the
matter. What did I leave my business for, what did I leave my wife and
kids for? Why, to come over here and fight the boche. And what am I
doing? Roustabout work on a blasted line of docks, miles away from the
front. Been here five months in this hole, working like a subway digger.
“Look at the town back there where we go for a bit of amusement when
the day’s over. Worse than any slum back home. Talk about the horrors
of the trenches. I’d swap the mud we live in for any trench. Talk about
Fritz’s poison gas. When the wind’s right the fumes from that picric
acid factory up the river blow down and choke the lungs out of us.”
“Do you get these spells often?” I asked. Whereupon he grinned a little
and relaxed his scowl. I asked him where he lived and he named a
thriving town in western Kansas. He had a real estate business in town,
but his folks still lived on the big farm which his father had proved
up on forty years ago. It was a fine place, yielding a big income,
enough to keep the old people in comfort for the rest of their lives,
and to support his young family while he was at the war.
I came from the prairies myself, and I could just see that farm and
the old folks who had gone out to Kansas in their lusty youth to take
up government land. They had built a sod house, turned up the tough
prairie grass, plowed and sowed and cultivated under the burning sun,
performed the terrible labor to get their first meager corn crops.
They had fought drought and grasshoppers, lived through blizzards and
cyclones, endured poverty and privations untold. They were pioneers. Of
such is the greatness and the virtue of our America.
I sat down on a nail keg and talked to that lonely, homesick, aggrieved
soldier about the pioneers. From England first, and later from every
other country in the world they had come, moved by the divine unrest
of ambitious spirits, to the United States.
They had crossed the plains in rough wagons, daring weather, starvation
and thirst, hostile Indians. They had leveled forests, they had built
homes with no tools but axes and hand saws. They had farmed arid lands.
They had lived in caves and dugouts. They had raised corn that some
years they had been forced to burn for fuel because there was no market
for it. But they lived, and won out, and built homes for their children.
And now, once more the Americans are pioneering. They are pioneering
in France. They are building an army and doing it, as their fathers
before them, from the ground up. “If you were not building these miles
of docks and warehouses, if we didn’t have hundreds of thousands of
men constructing ice plants, storage warehouses, railroads, barracks,
bakeries, hangars, hospitals, how would the men in the trenches get
food and ammunition and clothes and medical supplies and everything
else they have to have before they can win the war?” I put it to him
straight, and he turned an uncomfortable pink.
“Of course, you are right,” he said. “But we have to blow off once in a
while. You see we didn’t know anything about it before we came. We drew
our numbers in the draft, and most of us were mighty glad of it. We had
the time of our lives in training camp, and we thought we were going
right into the big show.
“We thought the engineers would be right up at the front building
railroads for the artillery. Instead of that we are kept down here,
hundreds of miles from the fighting, doing the kind of hard labor some
of us have money enough to hire done at home.
“Why, do you know,” he continued, “that in----,” naming a near-by
engineering camp, where immense seaplane hangars were being built,
“there is one company of two hundred and fifty men, every one a
graduate of a university or a technical school? All of those men are in
overalls, doing day labor.”
I did know those men. I had seen them, or some of them, the day before
at the noon hour smoking short pipes and cigarettes, sitting or
sprawling on their backs beside the road. And a fine, husky, happy lot
they were, too. Nothing in their university careers ever did for them
what this rough job of pioneering was doing.
There was one man there who had put in a magnificent water system in
his home town. When he went to France the newspapers gave him a great
send-off, described his work, and said that no doubt he would be called
on to take charge of the water system in one of the large French
cities. When I met him he was acting as water boy to a railroad tie
carrying squad.
The engineers in this part of France publish a monthly magazine called
_The Spiker_. They love to get hold of these newspapers notices and to
publish them with comments. From a San Francisco paper they gleaned
that “Willie ----, the cotillion leader of last season’s younger set,
leaves for France shortly with the Blankth Engineers to take charge, it
is understood, of the construction of a telephone system contemplated
by the government to facilitate the hauling of troops to the front.”
The comment records that the erstwhile cotillion leader, Private ----,
is now on the business end of a No. 2 shovel.
Well, what of it? The shovel work has to be done just as the prairie
sod had to be turned. The men growl about it sometimes, but mostly
they grin. They chalk “P. G.” on the backs of their jumpers, the same
letters appearing in white on the vivid green uniforms of the German
captives at work in many camps.
They mean _Prisonnier de Guerre_, war prisoner, and when the weather is
cold and rainy and letters from home are delayed, and spirits sink, you
can hardly blame the men from feeling at times a little like prisoners.
They had expected excitement and perhaps some glory, and hard work and
isolation is their lot.
But what they are doing, tedious enough day by day, is in the aggregate
splendid and invaluable to the success of our army. The like of it was
never done before by any army in the world. When the Germans see it, as
they will some day through their newspapers, they will be aghast at the
hugeness of it.
They had sneered at the idea of the Americans sending a large army to
France. How could they send an army? An army can’t swim, nor can it
fly, and the Americans had no ships. Even if they found ships and sent
men enough, how could they feed, clothe and equip them? How could they
keep up their supplies?
The Americans could and did perform all these miracles because they had
in them the blood of pioneers, of men and women whom no difficulties
could afright, no obstacles turn back. Our soldiers have proved
themselves in countless army camps abroad to be worthy sons of the
breed.
I remember one big aviation camp which was built in a few months out
of short lengths of boards because the colonel and his staff couldn’t
get any better lumber. They were told that they couldn’t buy any lumber
at all, that there was none available in that part of France. But they
did get it, and they built the camp. The men lived in tents during the
coldest weeks of winter with icy winds blowing over the barren plain.
All aviation camps are built on big plains.
In spite of the cold the men had no stoves furnished them. No doubt
stoves were contemplated, but they did not reach the camp. But you
can’t freeze pioneers. Those boys just went to work and built stoves,
built them out of mud, brick and stones, oil cans and biscuit tins and
any other old junk they could find lying around. They made stovepipes
out of condensed milk cans, and they kept warm.
I met and talked with half a dozen of those engineers who were caught
in that German counter-drive near Cambrai in November, 1917. The
men, it will be remembered, were engaged in peaceful labor behind
the British front, linking up railroad communications and forwarding
supplies needed by the English soldiers farther up the line. No one
supposed that the engineers were in any danger, and the squads went out
without any firearms.
But unexpectedly the Germans swept over the British lines and the
American engineers suddenly found themselves in the middle of a battle.
Some of them seized arms from fallen men and sailed in to the fight
like seasoned soldiers. Others had no chance to get hold of guns, but
did they retreat? Not so that you could notice it. They went for the
Germans with their picks and shovels, and what they did to them was
epic. In describing their work the British general in command said it
was futile to bestow praise on the Americans. What they did was beyond
praise.
When I met these men they were just finishing up a piece of
construction work at a camp in central France. It was not an especially
interesting work, just day labor. But when the big push began in March
these men, being free to move, were sent up to the front to build more
railroads.
“Aren’t they the lucky stiffs?” groaned a man in another labor group.
“But our turn will come, I’ll bet you.”
The lucky stiffs agreed that they were lucky, but they refrained out of
politeness from saying too much about it. Of course, every man hopes
to get up into the big show. But the work behind the lines has to be
done. That is the spirit of the army, except on occasions when the men
have to blow off steam.
Bidding the lucky ones good-by, I expressed a hope that they would be
allowed to carry weapons when next they went near a fighting line. They
said that they were going to carry side arms, but one man said:
“What’s the matter with a good sharp pick when you meet up with Heinie?
He knows what a gun will do to him and he is game. But a Yankee guy
with a pick has got him backed off of the map. Jim here killed two and
chased two more with nothing in his hands but a shovel. I had a pick
and I was better off than him.”
Which was his modest way of telling that he and his pick had accounted
for three German soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets. Thus had his
grandfather fought wolves in some western forest, or killed rattlers in
prairie grass. Pioneers! You can’t beat them.