OUR FOREIGN LEGION
“Do they really call you Sammies?” I asked one of the first soldiers I
met in France.
“They call us the foreign legion,” he laughed. “I don’t blame them,
either. They expected American soldiers to be American, and we handed
them an army made up of forty different nationalities. Come to think of
it, that is America.”
“I never realized it before,” joined in a young sergeant sitting near.
“My family has lived in Massachusetts for nearly three hundred years,
and I always thought of myself and others like me as the only real
Americans. The Italians, Greeks, Russians, and even the Irish, seemed
to me to be grafted stock. But I am in charge of a bunch of fellows,
not one of whom was born in the U. S. A., and I would back them as
straight Americans against any man in the ‘Descendants of John and
Priscilla Alden’ society.
“I’ve got two Czechs who ran away from their native land to avoid army
service in Austria. That was five years before we got into the war,
before there was a war. These boys hated army life and wouldn’t stay
in a country that had compulsory military service. But along comes a
chance to fight for the U. S. A. and these same fellows just pant for
it.”
The first soldier spoke again. “But what do you think of a Russian
who ran away from Russia during the war, and yet wanted to join the
American army? By the way, he wants to meet you. May I introduce him?”
“Yes, indeed,” I replied, whereupon the youth stood up and called out:
“Oh, Trotzky! Come on over, Trotzky!” And the Russian soldier thus
libeled came rather diffidently from an adjoining room. We were sitting
before an open fire in a Y. M. C. A. headquarters.
“Trotzky,” whose other name was Jeff Bramfford, turned out to be a
typical Russian in spite of his English name. His father, he said, was
English, but he had lived many years in Russia, first as an engineer
in an English-owned munitions factory in Petrograd, and later in Riga.
Jeff’s mother was a Russian.
The strange adventures of this young man began when he was twenty-one
years old, a date which corresponds with the outbreak of the world war.
Jeff was counted as a Russian citizen and was forced to join the army.
He saw service in the tragic campaign which ended in the Masurian Lakes
catastrophe. He escaped drowning in the swamps and also lived through
the disastrous retreat across East Prussia.
The Russians, he told me, fought well, their cavalry, one hundred
thousand strong, breaking the German line and taking many prisoners.
But the supporting artillery failed them; never came up at all. Mutiny
broke out, many of the men charging that their higher officers had
sold them out to the Germans. If this was so, then the Germans behaved
toward their friends with their customary treachery. At one halt these
Russian officers took possession of a German country house, obligingly
left open and well furnished. Very soon after they were installed, the
house blew up and killed every man in it. The place had been mined by
the Germans.
In the Russian retreat, Jeff was taken prisoner, and with many others
was sent first to Germany, where he was forced to slave at menial
labor. Later he was sent to Belgium.
“I never let them know that I was a skilled mechanic,” said he. “I
didn’t want to be set at munitions work, or to help them in any other
way to win the war.”
In Antwerp, Jeff, because he has a strong personality, was placed over
a gang of Russians who were repairing streets. This was at a time when
the British flyers were bombing Antwerp, and on one of their visits
some of the bombs fell in a quarter of the town where this labor group
was at work.
The German guards, to quote Jeff’s exact words, “beat it to hell” for
the nearest cellar, yelling to the prisoners to do the same. But Jeff
and fifteen other Russians seized their chance and beat it to the water
front. In the terror and excitement of the raid they were not stopped
anywhere, and they managed to get hold of a fishing boat and beat it
some more for the English Channel.
They had no food or water, but they thought they might be picked up,
and after twelve anxious hours they were picked up by a Norwegian
steamer. They were taken to London, and for a week or ten days were
lionized and made much of. But of course they were Russian soldiers and
had to be returned to their army. Jeff showed me the “paper” given him
by the Russian consul in London, a safe conduct to the port where he
was to embark for Norway and go from thence by rail to Russia.
Jeff kept the paper as a souvenir, but he had no intention of going
home. Instead, with the aid of a Russian whom he had met in London,
he went to quite another port and got a job as a stoker on a British
merchant vessel bound for Marseilles, and from there to New York. By
the time he reached New York he had eighty-five dollars in wages in his
pocket.
He knew some English, and with true Russian facility, soon picked up
more. He went to Coney Island one day, and there he scraped up an
acquaintance with two soldiers of our regular army.
“Why not enlist?” they suggested, and Jeff, who was tired enough by
this time to be tempted by an easy life and plenty to eat, consented.
This was before we entered the war.
When the war came, however, Jeff was quite rested and perfectly game.
He went to France with one of the first divisions, and is now in the
artillery, which is showing the Huns something new and interesting,
and is thereby earning the admiration of France and England.
As a matter of fact, when I met him he was acting as instructor in one
of our big artillery camps. But he ached to get to the front, and by
this time he must be there.
“Why were you willing to fight for America when you were not ready to
go on fighting for Russia?” I asked him.
“In Russia the soldiers never get a square deal. In the American army
they do,” was the reply. “But that is not the only reason. There’s
something about America that makes you willing to do anything that is
necessary. I guess it’s because everybody feels free.”
“But our army was drafted,” I suggested. “Some people think that was an
offense against individual freedom.”
“Drafted, yes,” said this real American, “but drafted to defend their
individual freedom. Can’t they see that?”
Jeff would be perfectly happy fighting for freedom if he only knew what
fate had befallen his father and mother since the Russian upheaval. He
has had no word from them since then, and he fears they have fallen
victims to the bloody-handed Bolsheviki. His fine gray eyes filled with
tears when he spoke of his mother, whom he left when he was little more
than a boy. The chances are that he will never see her again.
We have thousands of Italian youths in our army. I talked with a
handsome Italian sergeant, a well educated young man who had been a
teller in an Italian bank in New York.
“You know what would make me the happiest man in the world?” he asked
me. “It would be to be transferred to the Italian front with my whole
company. I am a great admirer of the French and English, but of course
I love Italy, and it would be great if we could go there, and in
American uniforms, under the American flag, help to win back our Italia
Irredenta, our Alsace-Lorraine.
“There are only four men in my company who were not born in Italy.
Some of them were born in the lost provinces, and were naturalized as
Austrians. But they hate Austria even more than they hate Germany.
Think what it would mean to Italy to see her sons, who left her because
they were poor, come back with the American army to fight for freedom
on her soil.”
I sincerely hope that these soldiers will be given a chance to fight in
the land of their birth, under the flag that means freedom wherever it
waves. Nothing would put more enthusiasm into the Italian army, in my
opinion. Rightly or wrongly, the Italians, or some of them, have felt
that the allies have neglected them a bit. Of course, German propaganda
has worked overtime to make them feel that way, but there was, at one
time, a slight basis for the feeling. I want to see American troops in
Italy.
I want to see American troops on every front, and I particularly want
to see the Czechs, the Bohemians, of whom we have great numbers in our
army, fighting the Austrians. I saw some of these men, and they were
magnificent soldiers.
I think the most uproariously happy men I saw in France were the Poles
in our army. On the night I embarked at “a port in France” an American
transport came in carrying, besides our khaki clad men, the Polish
regiment recruited here last winter. They looked like the chorus of a
musical comedy, but if they can fight as well as they can yell, they
will add a chapter to the history of the war. They began to howl for
joy when the ship came into the harbor, and they streamed down the
gangplank singing and cheering like mad. I suppose their blue and
scarlet uniforms have been put in moth balls by now.
We have often called America the melting pot, but, seeing this great
multitude of foreign-born American soldiers, it occurred to me that
we had not, in former years, kept a good enough fire burning under
that pot. We didn’t try hard enough to melt that mass, to amalgamate
it with our Mayflower and Puritan descendants. Why is it that so many
naturalized American citizens, fighting under the Stars and Stripes,
speak no English, or very little? What have our public schools been
doing all these years? Why haven’t they extended their night school
work to include these young men?
Russians, Austrians, Greeks, Italians, Chinese, Syrians, Turks,
Africans (the American negro is just another immigrant), we have no
right to keep America away from them. We do wrong to consider them only
as “labor.” They are American citizens, and for many of them the draft
was the first time Uncle Sam ever called them son. The training camp
was the real melting pot for them. In coin more precious than gold,
those immigrant sons of America are paying us for our indifference.
They are giving their lives for American ideals.
Read the names in the casualty lists: Killed in action, Private
Alexandro Cassealeno, Private Mike Grba, Private Ole K. Arneson;
severely wounded, Constantine Poniaros, Tony Kaczor, Alexander
Mashewsky.
Many of these men were alone in America at the time of the draft. Their
families were behind in the old home, and from some of those villages,
those in the Austrian empire especially, no letters have come for more
than a year. When the rest of the regiment gets letters and packages
from home they get nothing. Remember that the next time they ask you to
subscribe to the Red Cross, the Library War Service or the Salvation
Army. You may think you haven’t anybody in the war, no near relatives.
But you are wrong, you have our foreign legion and you owe them
everything you can possibly afford to give.