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The A. E. F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

by Heywood Broun · English · Gutenberg #39072 · 327,714 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The A. E. F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

Author: Heywood Broun


        
Release date: March 7, 2012 [eBook #39072]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE A. E. F.: WITH GENERAL PERSHING AND THE AMERICAN FORCES ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Internet Archive.)








THE A. E. F.




THE A. E. F.

WITH GENERAL PERSHING
AND THE AMERICAN FORCES

BY

HEYWOOD BROUN

[Illustration: colophon]

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

1918

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

TO

RUTH HALE




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                    PAGE

I. THE BIG POND                                               1

II. THE A. E. F.                                             11

III. LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILÀ                                   25

IV. THE FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON                            36

V. WITHIN SOUND OF THE GUNS                                  56

VI. SUNNY FRANCE                                             74

VII. PERSHING                                                92

VIII. MEN WITH MEDALS                                       102

IX. LETTERS HOME                                            115

X. MARINES                                                  126

XI. FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS                               136

XII. OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS                          147

XIII. HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS                               164

XIV. WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY                               177

XV. VERDUN                                                  192

XVI. WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY                              200

XVII. BACK FROM PRISON                                      221

XVIII. FINISHING TOUCHES                                    227

XIX. THE AMERICAN ARMY MARCHES TO THE TRENCHES              250

XX. TRENCH LIFE                                             260

XXI. THE VETERANS RETURN                                    281

Some of the material in this book is reprinted through the courtesy of
the _New York Tribune_.




THE A. E. F.




CHAPTER I

THE BIG POND


"Voilà un sousmarin," said a sailor, as he stuck his head through the
doorway of the smoking room. The man with aces and eights dropped, but
the player across the table had three sevens, and he waited for a
translation. It came from the little gun on the afterdeck. The gun said
"Bang!" and in a few seconds it repeated "Bang!" I heard the second shot
from my stateroom, but before I had adjusted my lifebelt the gun fired
at the submarine once more.

A cheer followed this shot. No Yale eleven, or even Harvard for that
matter, ever heard such a cheer. It was as if the shout for the first
touchdown and for the last one and for all the field goals and long
gains had been thrown into one. There was something in the cheer, too,
of a long drawn "ho-old 'em."

I looked out the porthole and asked an ambulance man: "Did we get her
then?"

"No, but we almost did," he answered. "There she is," he added. "That's
the periscope."

Following the direction of his finger I found a stray beanpole thrust
somewhat carelessly into the ocean. It came out of a wave top with a
rakish tilt. Probably ours was the angle, for the steamer was cutting
the ocean into jigsaw sections as we careened away for dear life, now
with a zig and then with a zag, seeking safety in drunken flight. When I
reached the deck, steamer and passengers seemed to be doing as well as
could be expected, and even better.

The periscope was falling astern, and the three hundred passengers,
mostly ambulance drivers and Red Cross nurses, were lined along the
rail, rooting. Some of the girls stood on top of the rail and others
climbed up to the lifeboats, which were as good as a row of boxes. It
was distinctly a home team crowd. Nobody cheered for the submarine. The
only passenger who showed fright was a chap who rushed up and down the
deck loudly shouting: "Don't get excited."

"Give 'em hell," said a home town fan and shook his fist in the
direction of the submarine. The gunner fired his fourth shot and this
time he was far short in his calculation.

"It's a question of whether we get her first or she gets us, isn't it?"
asked an old lady in about the tone she would have used in asking a
popular lecturer whether or not he thought Hamlet was really mad. Such
neutrality was beyond me. I couldn't help expressing a fervent hope that
the contest would be won by our steamer. It was the bulliest sort of a
game, and a pleasant afternoon, too, but one passenger was no more than
mildly interested. W. K. Vanderbilt did not put on a life preserver nor
did he leave his deck chair. He sat up just a bit and watched the whole
affair tolerantly. After all the submarine captain was a stranger to
him.

Our fifth and final shot was the best. It hit the periscope or
thereabouts. The shell did not rebound and there was a patch of oil on
the surface of the water. The beanpole disappeared. The captain left the
bridge and went to the smoking room. He called for cognac.

"Il est mort," said he, with a sweep of his right hand.

"He says we sunk her," explained the man who spoke French.

The captain said the submarine had fired one torpedo and had missed the
steamer by about ninety feet. The U-boat captain must have taken his eye
off the boat, or sliced or committed some technical blunder or other,
for he missed an easy shot. Even German efficiency cannot eradicate the
blessed amateur. May his thumbs never grow less!

We looked at the chart and found that our ship was more than seven
hundred miles from the nearest land. It seemed a lonely ocean.

One man came through the crisis with complete triumph. As soon as the
submarine was sighted, the smoking room steward locked the cigar chest
and the wine closet. Not until then did he go below for his lifebelt.

Reviewing my own emotions, I found that I had not been frightened quite
as badly as I expected. The submarine didn't begin to scare me as much
as the first act of "The Thirteenth Chair," but still I could hardly lay
claim to calm, for I had not spoken one of the appropriate speeches
which came to my mind after the attack. The only thing to which I could
point with pride was the fact that before putting on my lifebelt I
paused to open a box of candy, and went on deck to face destruction, or
what not, with a caramel between my teeth. But before the hour was up I
was sunk indeed.

It was submarine this and sousmarin that in the smoking room. The
U-boats lurked in every corner. One man had seen two and at the next
table was a chap who had seen three. There was the fellow who had
sighted the periscope first of all, the man who had seen the wake of the
torpedo, and the littlest ambulance driver who had sighted the submarine
through the bathroom window while immersed in the tub. He was the man
who had started for the deck with nothing more about him than a lifebelt
and had been turned back.

"I wonder," said a passenger, "whether those submarines have wireless?
Do you suppose now that boat could send messages on ahead and ask other
U-boats to look after us?" And just then the gun on the forward deck
went "Bang."

It was the meanest and most inappropriate sound I ever heard. It was an
anti-climax of the most vicious sort. It was bad form, bad art, bad
everything. I felt a little sick, and one of the contributing emotions
was a sort of fearfully poignant boredom. I tried to remember just what
the law of averages was and to compute as rapidly as possible the
chances of the vessel to complete two more days of travel if attacked by
a submarine every hour.

"The ocean is full of the damn things," said the man at the next table
petulantly.

This time the thing was a black object not more than fifty yards away.
The captain signaled the gunner not to fire again and he let it be known
that this was nothing but a barrel. Later it was rumored that it was a
mine, but then there were all sorts of rumors during those last two days
when we ran along with lifeboats swung out. There was much talk of a
convoy, but none appeared.

Many passengers slept on deck and some went to meals with their
lifebelts on. Everybody jumped when a plate was dropped and there was
always the possibility of starting a panic by slamming a door. And so we
cheered when the steamer came to the mouth of the river which leads to
Bordeaux. We cheered for France from friendship. We cheered from
surprise and joy when the American flag went up to the top of a high
mast and we cheered a little from sheer relief because we had left the
sea and the U-boats behind us.

They had been with us not a little from the beginning. Even on the first
day out from New York the ship ran with all lights out and portholes
shielded. Later passengers were forbidden to smoke on deck at night and
once there was a lifeboat drill of a sort, but the boats were not swung
out in the davits until after we met the submarine.

Early in the voyage an old lady complained to the purser because a young
man in the music room insisted on playing the Dead March from "Saul."
There was more cheerful music. The ambulance drivers saw to that. We had
an Amherst unit and one from Leland Stanford and the boys were nineteen
or thereabouts. It is well enough to say that all the romance has gone
out of modern war, but you can't convince a nineteen-year-older of that
when he has his first khaki on his back and his first anti-typhoid
inoculation in his arm. They boasted of these billion germs and they
swaggered and played banjos and sang songs. Mostly they sang at night on
the pitch black upper deck. The littlest ambulance driver had a nice
tenor voice and on still nights he did not care what submarine commander
knew that he "learned about women from her." He and his companions
rocked the stars with "She knifed me one night." Daytimes they studied
French from the ground up. It was the second day out that I heard a
voice from just outside my porthole inquire "E-S-T--what's that and how
do you say it?" Later on the littlest ambulance driver had made marked
progress and was explaining "Mon oncle a une bonne fille, mais mon père
est riche."

Romance was not hard to find on the vessel. The slow waiter who limped
had been wounded at the Marne, and the little fat stewardess had spent
twenty-two days aboard the German raider _Eitel Friedrich_. There were
French soldiers in the steerage and one of them had the Croix de Guerre
with four palms. He had been wounded three times.

But when the ship came up the river the littlest ambulance driver--the
one who knew "est" and women--summed things up and decided that he was
glad to be an American. He looked around the deck at the Red Cross
nurses and others who had stood along the rail and cheered in the
submarine fight, and he said:

"I never would have thought it of 'em. It's kinda nice to know American
women have got so much nerve."

The littlest ambulance driver drew himself up to his full five feet four
and brushed his new uniform once again.

"Yes, sir," he said, "we men have certainly got to hand it to the girls
on this boat." And as he went down the gangplank he was humming: "And I
learned about women from her."




CHAPTER II

THE A. E. F.


The dawn was gray and so was the ship, but the eye picked her out of the
mist because of two broad yellow stripes which ran the whole length of
the upper decks. As the ship warped into the pier the stripes of yellow
became so many layers of men in khaki, each motionless and each gazing
toward the land.

"Say," cried a voice across the diminishing strip of water, "what place
is this anyhow?" The reply came back from newspapermen whose only
companions on the pier were two French soldiers and a little group of
German prisoners.

"Well," said the voice from the ship, "this ought to be better than the
Texas border."

The American regulars had come to France.

The two French soldiers looked at the men on the transport and cheered,
flinging their caps in the air. The Germans just looked. They were
engaged in moving rails and after lifting one they would pause and gaze
into space for many minutes until the guards told them to get to work
again. But now the guards were so interested that the Germans prolonged
the rest interval and stared at the ship. News that ships were in was
carried through the town and people came running to the pier. There were
women and children and old men and a few soldiers.

Nobody had known the Americans were coming. Even the mayor was surprised
and had to run home to get his red sash and his high hat. Children on
the way to school did not go further than the quay, for back of the
ship, creeping into the slip, were other ships with troops and torpedo
boat destroyers and a cruiser.

Just before the gangplank was lowered the band on the first transport
played "The Star Spangled Banner." The men on the ship stood at
attention. The crowds on shore only watched. They did not know our
national anthem yet. Next the band played "The Marseillaise," and the
hats of the crowd came off. As the last note died away one of the
Americans relaxed from attention and leaned over the rail toward a small
group of newspapermen from America.

"Do they allow enlisted men to drink in the saloons in this town?" he
asked.

Somebody else wanted to know, "Is there any place in town where a fellow
can get a piece of pie?" A sailor was anxious to rent a bicycle or a
horse and "ride somewhere." Later the universal question became, "Don't
any of these people speak American?"

The men were hustled off the ship and marched into the long street which
runs parallel with the docks. They passed within a few feet of the
Germans. There was less than the length of a bayonet between them but
the doughboys did credit to their brief training. They kept their eyes
straight ahead.

"How do they look?" one of the newspapermen asked a German sergeant in
the group of prisoners.

"Oh, they look all right," he said professionally, "but you can't tell
yet. I'd want to see them in action first."

"They don't lift their knees high enough," he added and grinned at his
little joke.

A French soldier came up then and expostulated. He said that we must not
talk to the Germans and set his prisoners back to their task of lifting
rails. There were guards at both ends of the street, but scores of
children slipped by them and began to talk to the soldiers. There were
hardly half a dozen men in the first regiment who understood French.
Veterans of the Mexican border tried a little bad Spanish and when that
didn't work they fell back to signs. The French made an effort to meet
the visitors half way. I saw a boy extend his reader to a soldier and
explain that a fearfully homely picture which looked like a caterpillar
was a "chenille." The boy added that the chenille was so ugly that it
was without doubt German and no good. Children also pointed out familiar
objects in the book such as "Chats" and "Chiens," but as one soldier
said: "I don't care about those things, sonny: haven't you got a roast
chicken or an apple pie in that book?"

Some officers had tried to teach their men a little French on the trip
across, but not much seemed to stick. The men were not over curious as
to this strange language. One old sergeant went to his lieutenant and
said: "You know, sir, I've served in China and the Philippines and Cuba.
I've been up against this foreign language proposition before and I know
just what I need. If you'll write down a few words for me and tell me
how they're pronounced I won't have to bother you any more. I want 'Give
me a plate of ham and eggs. How much? What's your name?' and 'Do you
love me, kid?'"

The vocabulary of the officers did not seem very much more extensive
than that of the men. While the troops were disembarking officers were
striving to get supplies started for the camp several miles outside the
city. All the American motor trucks had been shipped on the slowest
steamer of the convoy but the French came to our aid. "I have just one
order," said the French officer, who met the first unit of the American
Expeditionary Army, "there is no American and no French now. There is
only ours."

Although the officer was kind enough to make ownership of all available
motor trucks common, he could not do as much for the language of the
poilus who drove them. I found the American motor truck chief hopelessly
entangled.

"Have you enough gasoline to go to the camp and back?" he inquired of
the driver of the first camion to be loaded. The Frenchman shrugged his
shoulders to indicate that he did not comprehend. The officer smiled
tolerantly and spoke with gentle firmness as if to a wayward child.
"Have you enough gasoline?" he said. Again the Frenchman's shoulders
went up. "Have you enough gasoline?" repeated the officer, only this
time he spoke loudly and fiercely as if talking to his wife. Even yet
the Frenchman did not understand. Inspiration came to the American
officer. Suddenly he gesticulated with both hands and began to imitate
George Beban as the French waiter in one of the old Weber and Fields
shows. "'Ave you enough of ze gaz-o-leene?" he piped mincingly. Then an
interpreter came.

After several companies had disembarked the march to camp began, up the
main street and along the fine shore road which skirts the bay. The band
struck up "Stars and Stripes Forever" and away they went. They did not
march well, these half green companies who had rolled about the seas so
long, but they held the eyes of all and the hearts of some. They
glorified even cheap tunes such as "If You Don't Like Your Uncle Sammy
Go Back to Your Home Across the Sea," and Sousa seemed a very master of
fire when the men paraded to his marches. These American units did not
give the impression of compactness which one gets from Frenchmen on the
march. The longer stride gives the doughboy an uneven gait. He looks
like a man walking across a plowed field and yet you cannot miss a sense
of power. You feel that he will get there even if his goal is the red
sun itself at the back of the hills.

There was no long drawn cheer from the people who lined the streets to
see the Americans pass. Even crowds in Paris do not cheer like that.
Instead individuals called out phrases of greeting and there was much
handclapping. Although mixed in point of service the men ran to type as
far as build went. They amazed the French by their height, although some
of the organizations which followed the first division are better
physically. Of course these American troops are actually taller than the
French and in addition they are thin enough to accentuate their height.
It was easy to pick out the youngsters, most of whom found their packs a
little heavy. They would stand up straighter though when an old sergeant
moved alongside and growled a word or two. It was easy to see that these
sergeants were of the old army. They were all lank men, boiled red from
within and without. They had put deserts and jungles under foot and no
distance would seem impossible for them along the good roads of France.

As ship after ship came in more troops marched to camp. The streets were
filled with the clatter of the big boots of doughboys throughout the
morning and well into the afternoon. There were American army mules,
too, and although the natives had seen the animal before in French
service, he attracted no end of attention. In his own particular army
the mule seems more picturesque. He has never learned French. It seems
to break his spirit, but he pranced and kicked and played the very devil
under the stimulus of the loud endearments of the American mule drivers.

The French were also interested in a company of American negroes
specially recruited for stevedore service. The negroes had been
outfitted with old cavalry overcoats of a period shortly after the Civil
War. They were blue coats with gold buttons and the lining was a
tasteful but hardly somber shade of crimson. Nor were the negroes
without picturesque qualities even when they had shed their coats and
gone to work. Their working shirts of white were inked all over with
pious sentences calculated to last through the submarine zone, but piety
was mixed. One big negro, for instance, had written upon his shirt:
"The Lord is my shepherd," but underneath he had drawn a large starfish
for luck. A few daring ones had ornamented themselves with skulls and
crossbones. To the negroes fell the bitterest disappointment of the
American landing in France. Two Savannah stevedores caught sight of a
black soldier in the French uniform and rushed up to exchange greetings.
The Senegalese shrugged his shoulders and turned away from the flood of
English.

"That," said one of the American darkies, "is the most ignorantest and
stuck up nigger I ever did see." They were not yet ready to believe that
the negro race had let itself in for the amazing complications of a
foreign language.

Later in the day the town was full of the eddies which occur when two
languages meet head on, for almost all the soldiers and sailors received
leave to come to town. They wanted beer and champagne and cognac,
chocolate, cake, crackers, pears, apples, cherries, picture postcards,
sardines, rings, cigarettes, and books of French and English phrases.
The phrase books were usually an afterthought, so commerce was
conducted with difficulty. A few of the shopkeepers equipped themselves
with dictionaries and painstakingly worked out the proper reply for each
customer. Signs were much more effective and when it came to purchase,
the sailor or soldier simply held out a handful of American money and
the storekeeper took a little. To the credit of the shopkeepers of the
nameless port, let it be said that they seemed in every case to take no
more than an approximation of the right amount. Fortunately the late
unpleasantness at Babel was not absolutely thoroughgoing and there are
words in French which offer no great difficulty to the American. The
entente cordiale is furthered by words such as "chocolat," "sandwich,"
"biere" and "bifstek." The difficulties of "vin" are not insurmountable
either.

"A funny people," was the comment of one doughboy, "when I ask for
'sardines' I get 'em all right, but when I say 'cheese' or 'canned
peaches' I don't get anything."

Another complained, "I don't understand these people at all. They spell
some of their words all right, but they haven't got the sense to say 'em
that way." He could see no reason why "vin" should sound like "van."

Another objection of the invading army was that the townsfolk demanded
whole sentences of French. Mixtures seemed incomprehensible to them and
the officer who kept crying out, "Madame, where are my oeufs?" got no
satisfaction whatever.

Late in the afternoon phrase books began to appear, but they did not
help a great deal because by the time the right phrase had been found
some fellow who used only sign language had slipped in ahead of the
student. Then, too, some of the books seemed hardly adapted for present
conditions. One officer was distinctly annoyed because the first
sentence he found in a chapter headed war terms was, "Where is the grand
stand?" But the book which seemed to fall furthest short of promise was
a pamphlet entitled, "Just the French You Want to Know."

"Look at this," said an indignant owner. "Le travail assure la santé et
la bien-être, il élève et fortifie l'âme, il adoucit les souffrances,
chasse l'ennui, et plaisir sans pareil, il est encore le sel des autres
plaisirs. Go on with it. Look at what all that means--'Work assures
health and well being, it elevates and fortifies the soul, drives away
ennui, alleviates suffering, and, a pleasure without an equal, it is
still the salt of all other pleasures'--what do you think of that? Just
the French you want to know! I don't want to address the graduating
class, I want to tell a barber to leave it long on top, but trim it
pretty close around the edges."

The happy purchaser of the book did not throw it away, however, until he
turned to the chapter headed "At the Tailor's" and found that the first
sentence set down in French meant, "The bodice is too tight in front,
and it is uncomfortable under the arms. It is a little too low-necked,
and the sleeves are not wide enough."

Sundown sent most of the soldiers scurrying back to camp, but the port
lacked no life that night, for sailors came ashore in increasing numbers
and American officers were everywhere. The two hotels--the Grand and
the Grand Hotel des Messageries, known to the army as the Grand and
Miserable Hotel--were thronged. Generals and Admirals rushed about to
conferences and in the middle of all the confusion a young second
lieutenant sat at the piano in the parlor of the Grand and played
Schumann's "Warum" over and over again as if his heart would break for
homesickness. The sailors and a few soldiers who seemed to have business
in the town had no trouble in making themselves at home.

"Mademoiselle, donnez moi un baiser, s'il vous plait," said one of the
apt pupils to the pretty barmaid at the Café du Centre.

But she said: "Mais non."

Crowds began to collect just off the main street. I hurried over to one
group of sailors, convinced that something important was going on, since
French soldiers and civilians stood about six deep. History was being
made indeed. For the first time "craps" was being played on French
soil.




CHAPTER III

LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILÀ


The navy was the first to take Paris. While the doughboys were still at
the port crowding themselves into camp, lucky sailors were on their way
to let the French capital see the American uniform. I came up on the
night train with a crowd of them. Their pockets bulged with money, tins
of salmon, ham and truffled chicken. They had chocolate in their hats
and boxes of fancy crackers under their arms, while cigars and
cigarettes poked out of their blouses. They would have nothing to do
with French tobacco, but favored a popular American brand which sells
for a quarter in New York and twice as much over here. One almost
expected each sailor to produce a roast turkey or a pheasant from up his
sleeve at meal time, but it was pretty much all meal time for these men
who were making their shore leave an intensive affair. One was a very
new sailor and he was rejoicing to find land under his feet again.

"Oh, boy!" he said, when I asked him about his ship, "that old tub had
two more movements than a hula dancer."

The little group in my compartment was sampling some champagne which
hospitable folk at the port had given them. It was not real champagne,
to be sure, but a cheaper white wine with twice as many bubbles and at
least as much noise. It sufficed very well, since it was ostentation
rather than thirst which spurred the sailors on and they spread their
hospitality throughout the train. A few French soldiers headed back for
the trenches were the traveling companions of the Americans. The poilus
were decidedly friendly but somewhat amazed at the big men who made so
much noise with their jokes and their songs. Of course the French were
called upon to sample the various tinned and bottled goods which the
sailors were carrying. It was "have a swig of this, Froggy" or "get
yourself around that, Frenchy." The Americans were still just a bit
condescending to their brothers in arms. They had not yet seen them in
action. Of course there was much comparison of equipment and the sailors
all tried on the trench helmets of the French and found them too small.
The entente grew and presently there was an allied concert. The sailors
sang, "What a Wonderful Mother You'd Make," and the French replied with
the Verdun song, "Ils Ne Passeront Pas," and later with "Madelon."

I heard that song many times afterwards and it always brings to mind a
picture of dusty French soldiers marching with their short, quick, eager
stride. They are always dusty. All summer long they wear big overcoats
which come below the knee. Dust settles and multiplies and if you see a
French regiment marching in the spring rainy season, it will still be
dusty. Perhaps their souls are a little dusty now, but it is French
dust. And as they march they sing as the men sang to the newly arrived
Americans in the train that night:

    For all the soldiers, on their holidays,
    There is a place, just tucked in by the woods,
    A house with ivy growing on the walls--
    A cabaret--"Aux Toulourous"--the goods!
    The girl who serves is young and sweet as love,
    She's light as any butterfly in Spring,
    Her eyes have got a sparkle like her wine.
    We call her Madelon--it's got a swing!
    The soldiers' girl! She leads us all a dance!
    She's only Madelon, but she's Romance!

    When Madelon comes out to serve us drinks,
    We always know she's coming by her song!
    And every man, he tells his little tale,
    And Madelon, she listens all day long.
    Our Madelon is never too severe--
    A kiss or two is nothing much to her--
    She laughs us up to love and life and God--
    Madelon! Madelon! Madelon!

    We all have girls for keeps that wait at home
    Who'll marry us when fighting time is done;
    But they are far away--too far to tell
    What happens in these days of cut-and-run.
    We sigh away such days as best we can,
    And pray for time to bring us nearer home,
    But tales like ours won't wait till then to tell--
    We have to run and boast to Madelon.
    We steal a kiss--she takes it all in play;
    We dream she is that other--far away.
    A corp'ral with a feather in his cap
    Went courting Madelon one summer's day,
    And, mad with love, he swore she was superb,
    And he would wed her any day she'd say.
    But Madelon was not for any such--
    She danced away and laughed: "My stars above!
    Why, how could I consent to marry you,
    When I have my whole regiment to love?
    I could not choose just one and leave the rest.
    I am the soldiers' girl--I like that best!"

    When Madelon comes out to serve us drinks,
    We always know she's coming by her song!
    And every man, he tells his little tale,
    And Madelon, she listens all day long.
    Our Madelon is never too severe--
    A kiss or two is nothing much to her--
    She laughs us up to love and life and God--
    Madelon! Madelon! Madelon!

When the train came into Paris early the next morning the sailors were
singing the chorus with the poilus. They parted company at the quai
d'Orsay. The soldiers went to the front; the sailors turned to Paris. It
was a Paris such as no one had ever seen before. The "bannière etoilée"
was everywhere. We call it the Stars and Stripes. Little flags were
stuck rakishly behind the ears of disreputable Parisian cab horses;
bigger flags were in the windows of the shops and on top of buildings,
but the biggest American flag of all hung on the Strassburg monument
which shed its mourning when the war began.

Two days later all the flags were fluttering, for on the morning of the
third of July the doughboys came to Paris. It made no difference that
they were only a battalion. When the French saw them they thought of
armies and of new armies, for these were the first soldiers in many
months who smiled as they marched. The train was late, but the crowd
waited outside the Gare d'Austerlitz for more than two hours. French Red
Cross nurses were waiting at the station, and the doughboys had their
first experience with French rations, for they began the long day with
"petit déjeuner." Men brought up on ham and eggs and flapjacks and
oatmeal and even breakfast pie, found war bread and coffee a scant
repast, but the ration proved more popular than was expected when it was
found that the coffee was charged with cognac. It was a stronger
stimulant, though, which sent the men up on the tips of their toes as
they swung down the street covering thirty-two inches with each stride.
For the first time they heard the roar of a crowd. It was not the steady
roar such as comes from American throats. It was split up into "Vive les
Etats Unis!" and "Vive l'Amérique!" with an occasional "Vive le
President Wilson!" This appearance was only a dress rehearsal and the
troops were hurried through little frequented streets to a barracks to
await the morning of the Fourth.

Paris began the great day by waking Pershing with music. The band of the
republican guard was at the gate of his house a little after eight
o'clock. The rest of Paris seemed to have had no trouble in arousing
itself without music, for already several hundred thousand persons were
crowded about the General's hotel. First there were trumpets; then
brasses blared and drums rumbled. The General proved himself a light
sleeper and a quick dresser. Before the last note of the fanfare died
away he was at the window and bowing to the crowd. This time there was a
solid roar, for everybody shouted "Vive Pershing." The band cut through
the din. There were a few strange variations and uncertainties in the
tune, but it was unmistakably "The Star Spangled Banner." Only a handful
in the crowd knew the American National anthem, but they shouted
"Chapeau, chapeau" so hard that everybody took up the cry and took off
his hat. There was a fine indefinite noisy roar which would have done
credit to a double header crowd at the Polo Grounds when Pershing left
his hotel for the "Invalides," where the march of the Americans was to
begin. It was pleasant to observe at that moment that our commander has
as straight a back as any man in the allied armies can boast.

At least four hundred thousand people were crowded around the
"Invalides." They had plenty of chance to shout. They were able to keep
their enthusiasm within bounds when first Poincaré appeared and then
Painlevé. The next celebrity was Papa Joffre and hats went into the air.
There was an interval of waiting then and a bit of a riot. An old man
who found the elbows of his neighbors disagreeable, exclaimed: "Oh, let
me have peace!" Somebody who heard the word "peace" shouted: "He's a
pacifist," and people near at hand began to hit at him. He was saved by
the coming of the American soldiers. "Vive les Teddies," shouted the
crowd and forgot the old man.

The crowd made way for the Americans as they marched toward the
"Invalides" and into the court yard where the trophies won from the
Germans are displayed. "You will bring more from the Boche," shouted a
Frenchman. French and American flags floated above the guns and
aeroplanes and minenwerfers. During the short ceremony the American
soldiers looked about curiously at the trophies and up at the dome above
the tomb of Napoleon. Many knew him by reputation and some had heard
that he was buried there.

After a short ceremony the Americans marched out of the "Invalides" and
toward the Picpus cemetery. The crowds had increased. It was hard
marching now. French children ran in between the legs of the soldiers.
French soldiers and civilians crowded in upon them. It was impossible to
keep ranks. Now the men in khaki were just a little brown stream
twisting and turning in an effort to get onward. People threw roses at
the soldiers and they stuffed them into their hats and in the gun
barrels. It was reported from several sources that one or two soldiers
who were forced out of ranks were kissed, but no one would admit it
afterwards. The youngsters in the ranks tried their best to keep a
military countenance. They endeavored to achieve an expression which
should be polite but firm, an air of having been through the same
experience many times before. Only one or two old sergeants succeeded.
The rest blushed under the cheers and entangling interest of the crowd
and they could not keep the grins away when people shouted "Vive les
Teddies" or threw roses at them. On that morning it was great to be
young and a doughboy.

On and on they went past high walls and gardens to the edge of the city
to a cemetery. There were speeches here and they were mostly French.
Ribot spoke and Painlevé and Pershing. His was English and he said: "I
hope, and I would like to say it that here on the soil of France and in
the school of the French heroes, our American soldiers may learn to
battle and to vanquish for the liberty of the world."

But the speech which left the deepest impression was the shortest of
all. Colonel Stanton stood before the tomb of Lafayette and made a
quick, sharp gesture which was broad enough to include the youngsters
from Alabama and Texas and Massachusetts and Ohio and the rest.
"Lafayette, we're here!" he said.




CHAPTER IV

THE FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON


The day after the Americans marched in Paris one of the French
newspapers referred to the doughboys as "Roman Cæsars clad in khaki."
The city set itself to liking the soldiers and everything American and
succeeded admirably. Even the taxicab drivers refrained from
overcharging Americans very much. School children studied the history of
America and "The Star Spangled Banner." There were pictures of President
Wilson and General Pershing in many shops and some had framed
translations of the President's message to Congress. In fact, so eager
were the French to take America to their hearts that they even made
desperate efforts to acquire a working knowledge of baseball.
_Excelsior_, an illustrated French daily, carried an action picture
taken during a game played between American ambulance drivers just
outside of Paris. The picture was entitled: "A player goes to catch the
ball, which has been missed by the catcher," and underneath ran the
following explanation: "We have given in our number of yesterday the
rules of baseball, the American national game, of which a game, which is
perhaps the first ever played in France, took place yesterday at
Colombes between the soldiers of the American ambulances. Here is an
aspect of the game. The pitcher, or thrower of balls, whom one sees in
the distance, has sent the ball. The catcher, or 'attrapeur,' who should
restrike the ball with his wooden club, has missed it, and a player
placed behind him has seized it in its flight."

The next day _L'Intransigeant_ undertook the even more hazardous task of
explaining American baseball slang. During the parade on the Fourth of
July some Americans had greeted the doughboys with shouts of "ataboy." A
French journalist heard and was puzzled. He returned to his office and
looked in English dictionaries and various works of reference without
enlightenment. Several English friends were unable to help him and an
American who had lived in Paris for thirty years was equally at sea. But
the reporter worked it out all by himself and the next day he wrote:
"Parisians have been puzzled by the phrase 'ataboy' which Americans are
prone to employ in moments of stress or emotion. The phrase is
undoubtedly a contraction of 'at her boy' and may be closely
approximated by 'au travail, garçon.'" The writer followed with a brief
history of the friendly relations of France and America and paid a
glowing tribute to the memory of Lafayette.

The name for the American soldiers gave the French press and public no
end of trouble. They began enthusiastically enough by calling them the
"Teddies," but General Pershing, when interviewed one day, said that he
did not think this name quite fitting as it had "no national
significance." The French then followed the suggestion of one of the
American correspondents and began to call the soldiers "Sammies," or as
the French pronounce it, "Sammees." Although this name received much
attention in French and American newspapers it has never caught the
fancy of the soldiers in the American Expeditionary Army. Officers and
men cordially despise it and no soldier ever refers to himself or a
comrade as a "Sammy." American officers have not been unmindful of the
usefulness of a name for our soldiers. Major General Sibert, who
commanded the first division when it arrived in France, posted a notice
at headquarters which read: "The English soldier is called Tommy. The
French soldier is called poilu. The Commanding General would like
suggestions for a name for the American soldier." At the end of the week
the following names had been written in answer to the General's request:
"Yank, Yankee, Johnnie, Johnny Yank, Broncho, Nephew, Gringo, Liberty
Boy, Doughboy."

Now Doughboy is a name which the soldiers use, but strictly speaking, it
refers only to an infantryman. The origin of the name is shrouded in
mystery. One officer, probably an infantryman, has written, that the
infantrymen are called doughboys because they are the flower of the
army. Another story has it that during some maneuvers in Texas an
artilleryman, comfortably perched on a gun, saw a soldier hiking by in
the thick sticky Texas mud. The mud was up to the shoetops of the
infantryman and the upper part which had dried looked almost white.
"Say," shouted the artilleryman, "what've you been doing? Walking in
dough?" And so the men who march have been doughboys ever since.

Paris did not let the lack of a name come between her and the soldiers.
The theaters gave the Americans almost as much recognition as the press.
No musical show was complete without an American finale and each
soubrette learned a little English, "I give you kees," or something like
that, to please the doughboys. The vaudeville shows, such as those
provided at the Olympia or the Alhambra, gave an even greater proportion
of English speech. The Alhambra was filled with Tommies and doughboys on
the night I went. Now and again the comedians had lapses of language and
the Americans were forced to let jokes go zipping by without response.
It was a pity, too, for they were good jokes even if French. Presently,
however, a fat comedian fell off a ladder and laughter became general
and international. The show was more richly endowed with actresses than
actors. The management was careful to state that all the male performers
had fulfilled their military obligations. Thus, under the picture of
Maurice Chevalier, a clever comedian and dancer, one read that Mons.
Chevalier was wounded at the battle of Cutry, when a bullet passed
between his lungs. The story added that he was captured by the Germans
and held prisoner for twenty-six months before he escaped. It did not
seem surprising therefore that Chevalier should be the gayest of funny
men. Twenty-six months of imprisonment would work wonders with ever so
many comedians back home.

And yet we Americans missed the old patter until there came a breath
from across the sea. A low comedian came out and said to his partner in
perfectly good English: "Well, didja like the show?" His partner said he
didn't like the show. "Well, didja notice the trained seals?" persisted
the low comedian and the lower comedian answered: "No, the wind was
against 'em." Laughter long delayed overcame us then, but it was mingled
with tears. We felt that we were home again. The French are a wonderful
people and all that, of course, but they're so darn far away.

Later there was a man who imitated Eddie Foy imperfectly and a bad
bicycle act in which the performers called the orchestra leader
"Professor" and shouted "Ready" to each other just before missing each
trick. This bucked the Americans up so much that a lapse into French
with Suzanne Valroger "dans son repertoire" failed to annoy anybody very
much. The doughboys didn't care whether she came back with her
repertoire or on it. Some Japanese acrobats and a Swedish contortionist
completed the performance. There are two such international music halls
in Paris as well as a musical comedy of a sort called "The Good Luck
Girl." The feature of this performance is an act in which a young lady
swings over the audience and invites the soldiers to capture the shoe
dangling from her right foot. The shoe is supposed to be very lucky and
soldiers try hard to get it, standing up in their seats and snatching as
the girl swings by. An American sergeant was the winner the night I went
to the show, for he climbed upon a comrade's shoulder and had the
slipper off before the girl had time to swing out very far. Later, when
he went to the trenches, the sergeant took the shoe with him and he says
that up to date he has no reason to doubt the value of the charm.

The most elaborate spectacle inspired by the coming of the Americans was
at the Folies Bergères which sent its chorus out for the final number
all spangled with stars. The leader of the chorus was an enormous woman,
at least six feet tall, who carried an immense American flag. She almost
took the head off a Canadian one night as he dozed in a stage box and
failed to notice the violent manner in which the big flag was being
swung. He awoke just in time to dodge and then he shook an accusing
finger at the Amazon. "Why aren't you in khaki?" he said.

Restaurants as well as theaters were liberally sprinkled with men in the
American uniform. The enlisted men ate for the most part in French
barracks and seemed to fare well enough, although one doughboy, after
being served with spinach as a separate course, complained: "I do wish
they'd get all the stuff on the table at once like we do in the army. I
don't want to be surprised, I want to be fed." A young first lieutenant
was scornful of French claims to master cookery. "Why, they don't know
how to fry eggs," he said. "I've asked for fried eggs again and again
and do you know what they do? They put 'em in a little dish and bake
'em."

Yet, barring this curious and barbarous custom in the cooking of eggs,
the French chefs were able to charm the palates of Americans even in a
year which bristled with food restrictions. There were two meatless days
a week, sugar was issued in rations of a pound a month per person and
bread was gray and gritty. The French were always able to get around
these handicaps. The food director, for instance, called the ice cream
makers together and ordered them to cease making their product in order
to save sugar.

"We have been using a substitute for sugar for seven months," replied
the merchants.

"Well, then," said the food director, "it will save eggs."

"We have hit upon a method which makes eggs unnecessary," replied the
ice cream makers.

"At any rate," persisted the food director, "my order will save
unnecessary consumption of milk."

"We use a substitute for that, too," the confectioners answered, and
they were allowed to go on with their trade.

The cooks are even more ingenious than the confectioners. As long as
they have the materials with which to compound sauces, meat makes little
difference. War bread might be terrapin itself after a French chef has
softened and sabled it with thick black dressing. Americans found that
the French took food much more seriously than we do in America. Patrons
always reviewed the _carte du jour_ carefully before making a selection.
It was not enough to get something which would do. The meal would fall
something short of success if the diner did not succeed in getting what
he wanted most. No waiter ever hurried a soldier who was engaged in the
task of composing a dinner. He might be a man who was going back to the
trenches the next day and in such a case this last good meal would not
be a matter to be entered upon lightly. After all, if it is a last
dinner a man wants to consider carefully, whether he shall order
_contrefilet à la Bourguignon_ or _poulet roti à l'Espagnol_.

Whatever may be his demeanor while engaged in the business of making war
or ordering a meal, the Frenchman makes his permission a real vacation.
He talks a good deal of shop. The man at the next table is telling of a
German air raid, only, naturally, he calls them Boches. A prison camp,
he explains, was brilliantly illuminated so that the Boche prisoners
might not escape under the cover of darkness. One night the enemy
aviators came over that way and mistook the prison camp for a railroad
station. They dropped a number of bombs and killed ten of their
comrades. Everybody at the soldier's table regarded this as a good joke,
more particularly as the narrator vivified the incident by rolling his
war bread into pellets and bombarding the table by way of illustration,
accompanied by loud cries of "Plop! Plop!"

Practically every man on permission in Paris is making love to someone
and usually in an open carriage or at the center table of a large
restaurant. Nobody even turns around to look if a soldier walks along a
street with his arm about a girl's waist. American officers, however,
frowned on such exhibitions of demonstrativeness by doughboys and in one
provincial town a colonel issued an order: "American soldiers will not
place their arms around the waists of young ladies while walking in any
of the principal thoroughfares of this town."

Still it was not possible to regulate romance entirely out of existence.
"There was a girl used to pass my car every morning," said a sergeant
chauffeur, "and she was so good looking that I got a man to teach me
_'bon jour,'_ and I used to smile at her and say that when she went by
and she'd say _'bon jour'_ and smile back. One morning I got an apple
and I handed it to her and said '_pour vous_' like I'd been taught. She
took it and came right back with, 'Oh, I'm ever so much obliged,' and
there like a chump I'd been holding myself down to '_bon jour_' for two
weeks."

There could be no question of the devotion of Paris to the American
army. Indeed, so rampant was affection that it was occasionally
embarrassing. One officer slipped in alighting from the elevator of his
hotel and sprained his ankle rather badly. He was hobbling down one of
the boulevards that afternoon with the aid of a cane when a large
automobile dashed up to the curb and an elderly French lady who was the
sole occupant beckoned to him and cried: "_Premier blessé_." The officer
hesitated and a man who was passing stepped up and said: "May I
interpret for you?" The officer said he would be much obliged. The
volunteer interpreter talked to the old lady for a moment and then he
turned and explained: "Madame is desirous of taking you in her car
wherever you want to go, because she says she is anxious to do something
for the first American soldier wounded on the soil of France."

The devotion of Paris was so obvious that it palled on one or two who
grew fickle. I saw a doughboy sitting in front of the Café de la Paix
one bright afternoon. He was drinking champagne of a sort and smoking a
large cigar. The sun shone on one of the liveliest streets of a still
gay Paris. It was a street made brave with bright uniforms. Brighter
eyes of obvious non-combatants gazed at him with admiration. I was
sitting at the next table and I leaned over and asked: "How do you like
Paris?"

He let the smoke roll lazily out of his mouth and shook his head. "I
wish I was back in El Paso," he said.

I found another soldier who was longing for Terre Haute. Him I came upon
in the lounging room of a music hall called the Olympia. Two palpably
pink ladies sat at the bar drinking cognac. From his table a few feet
away the American soldier looked at them with high disfavor. Surprise,
horror and indignation swept across his face in three waves as the one
called Julie began to puff a cigarette after giving a light to Margot.
He looked away at last when he could stand no more, and recognizing me
as a fellow countryman, he began his protest.

"I don't like this Paris," he said. "I'm in the medical corps," he
continued. "My home's in Terre Haute. In Indiana, you know. I worked in
a drug store there before I joined the army. I had charge of the biggest
soda fountain in town. We used to have as many as three men working
there in summer sometimes. Right at a good business corner, you know. I
suppose we had almost as many men customers as ladies."

"Why don't you like Paris?" I interrupted.

"Well, it's like this," he answered. "Nobody can say I'm narrow. I
believe in people having a good time, but----" and he leaned nearer
confidentially, "I don't like this Bohemia. I'd heard about it, of
course, but I didn't know it was so bad. You see that girl there, the
one in the blue dress smoking a cigarette, sitting right up to the bar.
Well, you may believe it or not, but when I first sat down she came
right over here and said, 'Hello, American. You nice boy. I nice girl.
You buy me a drink.' I never saw her before in my life, you understand,
and I didn't even look at her till she spoke to me. I told her to go
away or I'd call a policeman and have her arrested. I've been in Paris a
week now, but I don't think I'll ever get used to this Bohemia business.
It's too effusive, that's what I call it. I'd just like to see them try
to get away with some of that business in Terre Haute."

Some of the visiting soldiers took more kindly to Paris as witness the
plaint of a middle-aged Franco-American in the employ of the Y. M. C.
A.:

"I'm a guide for the Young Men's Christian Association here in Paris,"
he said, "but I'm a little bit afraid I'm going to lose my job. They
make up parties of soldiers at the Y. M. C. A. headquarters every day
and turn them over to me to show around the city. Well, Monday I started
out with twelve and came back with five and today I finished up with
three out of eight. I can't help it. I've got no authority over them,
and if they want to leave the party, what can I do? But it makes trouble
for me at headquarters. Now, today, for instance, I took them first of
all to the Place Vendome. There were seven infantrymen and an
artilleryman. They seemed to be interested in the column when I told
them that it was made out of cannon captured by Napoleon. They wanted to
know how many cannon it took and what caliber they were and all that.
Everything went all right until we started for the Madeleine. We passed
a café on the way and one of the soldiers asked: 'What's this "vin" I
see around on shops?' I told him that it was the French word for wine
and that it was pronounced almost like our word 'van' only a little bit
more nasal. They all looked at the sign then, and another soldier said:
'I suppose that "bières" there is "beers," isn't it?'

"I told him that it was and another guessed that 'brune ou blonde' must
mean 'dark or light.' When I said that it did, he wanted to know if he
couldn't stop and have one. I told him that I couldn't wait for him, as
the whole trip was on a schedule and we had to be at the Madeleine at
three o'clock. 'Well,' he said, 'I guess it'll be there tomorrow,' and
he went into the café. Another soldier said: 'Save a "blonde" for me,'
and followed him, and that was two gone.

"After I had showed the rest the Madeleine I told them that I was going
to take them to St. Augustin. The artilleryman wanted to know if that
was another church. I said it was and he said he guessed he'd had enough
for a day. I tried to interest him in the paintings in the chapel by
Bouguereau and Brisset, but he said he wasn't used to walking so much
anyway. He was no doughboy, he said, and he left us. We lost another
fellow at Maxim's and the fifth one disappeared in broad daylight on the
Boulevard Malesherbes. He can count up to twenty in French and he knows
how to say: 'Oú est l'hotel St. Anne?' which is army headquarters, so I
guess he's all right, but I haven't an idea in the world what became of
him."

The high tide in the American conquest of Paris came one afternoon in
July. I got out of a taxicab in front of the American headquarters in
the Rue Constantine and found that a big crowd had gathered in the
Esplanade des Invalides. Now and again the crowd would give ground to
make room for an American soldier running at top speed. One of them
stood almost at the entrance of the courtyard of "Invalides." His back
was turned toward the tomb of Napoleon and he was knocking out flies in
the direction of the Seine. Unfortunately it was a bit far to the river
and no baseball has yet been knocked into that stream. It was a new
experience for Napoleon though. He has heard rifles and machine guns and
other loud reports in the streets of Paris, but for the first time there
came to his ears the loud sharp crack of a bat swung against a baseball.
Since he could not see from out the tomb the noise may have worried the
emperor. Perhaps he thought it was the British winning new battles on
other cricket fields. But again he might not worry about that now. He
might hop up on one toe as a French caricaturist pictured him and cry:
"Vive l'Angleterre."

One of the men in the crowd which watched the batting practice was a
French soldier headed back for the front. At any rate he had his steel
helmet on and his equipment was on his back. His stripes showed that he
had been in the war three years and he had the croix de guerre with two
palms and the medaille militaire. His interest in the game grew so high
at last that he put down his pack and his helmet and joined the
outfielders. The second or third ball hit came in his direction. He ran
about in a short circle under the descending ball and at the last moment
he thrust both hands in front of his face. The ball came between them
and hit him in the nose, knocking him down.

His nose was a little bloody, but he was up in an instant grinning. He
left the field to pick up his trench hat and his equipment. The
Americans shouted to him to come back. He understood the drift of their
invitation, but he shook his head. "C'est dangéreux," he said, and
started for the station to catch his train for the front.




CHAPTER V

WITHIN SOUND OF THE GUNS


The men had traveled to Paris in passenger coaches, but when it came
time to move the first division to its training area in the Vosges our
soldiers rode like all the other allied armies in the famous cars upon
which are painted "Hommes 36; chevaux en long, 8." And, of course,
anybody who knows French understands the caption to mean that the horses
must be put in lengthwise and not folded. No restrictions are mentioned
as to the method of packing the "hommes."

The journey lay through gorgeous rolling country which was all a sparkle
at this season of the year. Presently the vineyards were left behind and
the hills became higher. Now and again there were fringes of pine trees.
At one point it was possible to see a French captive balloon floating
just beyond the hilltops, but we could not hear the guns yet. French
soldiers in troop trains and camps near the track cheered the Americans
and even a few of the Germans inside a big stockade waved at the men who
were moving forward to study war. The trains stopped at a little town
which lay at the foot of a hill. It was a mean little town, but on the
hill was the fine old tower of a castle which had once dominated the
surrounding country.

From this town, which was chosen as divisional headquarters, regiments
were sent northeast and northwest into tiny villages which were no more
than a single line of houses along the roadway. A few one-story wooden
barracks had been built for the Americans, but ninety per cent. of the
men went into billets. They were quartered in the lofts of barns of the
better sort. The billeting officers would not consider sheds where
cattle had been kept. Few troops had been quartered in this part of the
country previously and so the barns were moderately clean.

The effort to make cleanliness and sanitation something more than
relative terms was the first thing which really threatened
Franco-American amity. The decision of American officers that all manure
piles must be removed from in front of dwelling houses met a startled
and universal protest. Elderly Frenchwomen explained with great feeling
that the manure piles had been there as long as they could remember and
that no one had ever come to any harm from them. The American officers
insisted, and at last a grudging consent was forced. I saw one old lady
almost on the point of tears as she watched the invaders demolish her
manure pile. At last she could stand no more. "They make a lot of dust,"
she said critically, and went into the house.

A few days after the Americans arrived in camp came their instructors. A
crack division of Alpine Chasseurs was chosen to teach the Americans.
Nobody called these men froggies. They called them "chassers." It was
enough to see them march to know that they were fighting men. Their
stride was short and quick. Each step was taken as if the marcher was
eager to have it over and done with so that he could take another. Even
their buglers won admiration, for they had a trick of throwing their
instruments in the air and catching them again that brought envy to the
heart of every American band. Indeed, a good deal of friendly rivalry
developed from the beginning and in the early days, at least, the French
had all the better of it. They could lift heavier weights than our men,
who averaged much younger. Little Frenchmen standing five feet three or
four would seize a rifle close to the end of the bayonet and slowly
raise it with stiff arm to horizontal and down again. American farmer
boys tried and failed. Of course, this was a crack French division which
drew its men from various organizations, while our division was just the
average lot and perhaps not quite that since there was a larger
percentage of recruits than is usually found in the regular army.

Although our men were somewhat outclassed by their instructors in these
early days, they were game in their effort to keep up competition.
Almost the first work to which the troops were set was trench digging.
This is one of the most important arts of war and also the most
tiresome. Somebody has said of the Canadians: "They will die in the last
ditch, but they won't dig it." The Americans have a similar aversion for
work with pick and shovel, but trench digging came to them as a
competition. I saw a battalion of the chasseurs and a battalion of
marines set to work in a field where every other blow of the pick hit a
rock. There was no chance to loaf, for when a marine looked over his
shoulder he could see the French picks going for dear life down at the
other end of the trench. At four-thirty the men were told to call it a
day. The chasseurs leaped out of their trench; threw down their tools,
and began to sing at top voice a popular Parisian love ditty entitled
"Il faut de l'amour." One of the French officers told me afterwards that
it was the invariable custom of his men to sing at the end of work, but
the marines thought the "chassers" were merely showing off the excellent
nature of their wind. More slowly the Americans clambered out of their
trench, but they were ready when the last French note died away and
piped up somewhat breathlessly: "Hail! Hail! the gang's all here!"

American company commanders were quick to appreciate the value of
organized singing in the training of troops, and for the next few days
the doughboys were drilled to lift their voices as well as their picks.
Most of all, music was appreciated in the long hikes of the early
training period. A good song did much to make a marching man forget that
he had a fifty-pound pack on his back.

"I know I'm beginning to get a real company now," one captain told me,
"because whenever they're beginning to feel tired they start to sing and
freshen up." "No," he said, in reply to a question, "they didn't just
start. It needed a little fixing. I noticed that when the Frenchmen
stopped work they always started back to camp singing. 'We can do that,'
I told my men when we started back. 'Let's hear a little noise.' Nothing
happened. Nobody wanted to begin. They were scared the others would
laugh at them. I can't carry a tune two feet, but I just struck up
'We'll hang the damned old Kaiser to a sour apple tree' to the tune of
'John Brown's Body.' A few joined in, but most of them wouldn't open
their mouths. I told 'em, 'I'm just going to keep on marching this
company until everybody's in on the song. I don't care if we have to
march all night.' That got 'em going. Now they like it. They're thinking
up new songs every day. I can save my voice now."

One of the reasons for sending the men into the Vosges for training was
to get them within sound of the guns, but it was almost a week before we
heard any of the doings at the front. It was at night time that we first
heard the guns. It was a still, windless night and along about eight
o'clock they began. You couldn't be quite sure whether you heard them or
felt them, but something was stirring. It felt or sounded a good deal as
if some giant across the hills had slammed the door of his castle as he
left home to take the morning train for business. Up at the northern end
of the training area the sound of the guns was much more distinct. In
fact, they were loud enough some nights to become identified in the mind
as events and not mere rumblings. A Sammy up in that village stopped
our car one morning and asked if we couldn't give him a newspaper.

"I suppose you want to know how the baseball games are coming out,"
somebody suggested.

"To hell with baseball, I want to know about the war," said the soldier.
"I'm with these mules," he said, pointing to half a dozen animals
tethered on the bank of a canal. "I've been with them right from the
beginning. I came over on the same steamer with 'em. I rode up with 'em
in the train from ---- and here we are again. I don't hear nothing. They
could capture Berlin and nobody'd tell me about it. All I do is feed
these damned mules. 'Big Bill,' that one on the end, is sick, and I've
got to hang around and give him a pill every six hours. I wish he'd
choke. I don't like him as well as the rest of the mules and I hate 'em
all.

"It'll be fine, won't it, when somebody asks me: 'Daddy, what did you do
in the great war?' and I say: 'Oh, I sat up with a sick mule.'"

Back of the hills from some indefinite distance came the sound of big
guns. They raged persistently for ten minutes and then quit. "Big Bill"
began to rear around and kick. The soldier cursed him.

"Those guns were going like that all night, but mostly around two
o'clock," he said. "Nobody around here knows anything about it. I wish I
could get hold of an American paper and find out something about that
fight. I've sent to Memphis for _The News Scimitar_, but somehow it
don't seem to get here. I wish those guns was near enough to drop
something over here on the mules, especially 'Big Bill,' but I'm out of
luck."

The nearest approach of the war was in the air. It wasn't long before
German planes began to scout over the territory occupied by the
Americans. One battalion almost saw an air fight. It would have seen it
if the Major hadn't said "Attention!" just then. The battalion was
drilling in a big open meadow when there came from the East first a
whirr and then a machine. The machine, flying high, circled the field.
The soldiers who were standing at ease stared up at the visitor, but it
was too high to see the identifying marks. Soon there was no doubt that
the machine was German, for little white splotches appeared in the sky.
It looked as if Charlie Chaplin had thrown a cream pie at heaven and it
had splattered. An anti-aircraft gun concealed in a woods several miles
away was firing at the Boche. Presently the firing ceased and there was
a whirr from the West. A French plane flew straight in the direction of
the German, who climbed higher and higher. As the planes drew nearer it
was possible to see machine gun flashes, but just then the Major called
his men to attention. Regulations provide that eyes must look straight
ahead, but it was a hard test for recruits and there may have been one
or two who stole a glance up there where the planes were fighting. In
each case an officer was on the culprit like a flash.

"Keep your head still," shouted a lieutenant. "That's a private fight.
It's got nothing to do with you."

Soon the German turned and flew back in the direction of his own lines
and when the necks of the doughboys were unfettered and they could look
up again the sky was clear. Even the cream puff splotches were gone.

On another afternoon a Boche plane flew over the entire American area.
It circled a field in divisional headquarters where a baseball game was
in progress and flew home.

"I know why that German flew home after he reached ----," an officer
explained. "Don't you see? He was trying to find out if we were
Americans and that baseball game proved it to him."

The greatest aerial display occurred on a morning when a French officer
was instructing an American company in the art of trench digging. He
spoke no English, but an interpreter of a sort was making what shift he
could. The doughboys tried to look interested and didn't succeed. It was
harder when out from behind a cloud came one aeroplane, then another and
another. When half a dozen had appeared from behind the cloud one
doughboy could stand the strain no longer.

"Look," he shouted, "they're hatching them up there."

The French instructor finally granted a recess of ten minutes but
before the time was up the planes had maneuvered out of sight. In spite
of all the German activity in the air only one attempt was made to bomb
the Americans during the summer. A single bomb was dropped on a village
where the marines were stationed, but it did no damage.

The second week in the training area found the doughboys increasing
their curriculum to include bombs and machine guns. It had not been
possible to do much in the finer arts of war previously because of the
absence of interpreters. A number of these had been mobilized now but
they varied in quality. As one American officer put it, "Interpreters
may be divided into three classes: those who know no English; those who
know no French; and those who know neither."

However, the Americans managed to get their instruction in some way or
other. No interpreters were needed with the machine guns. Instead each
American company was divided up into little groups and a chasseur placed
at the head of each group. I watched the instruction and found that
little language was needed. The Frenchman would take a machine gun or
automatic rifle apart and holding up each part give its French name. The
Americans paid no particular attention to the outlandish terms which the
French used for their machine gun parts, but they were alert to notice
the manner in which the gun was put together and in the group in which I
was standing two Americans were able to put the gun together without
having any parts left over after a single demonstration.

Of course, a little language was used. Some of the marines had picked up
a little very villainous French in Hayti and they made what shift they
could with that. A few French Canadians and an occasional man from New
Orleans could converse with the chasseurs and one or two phrases had
been acquired by men hitherto entirely ignorant of French.
"Qu'est-ce-que c'est?" was used by the purists as their form of
interrogation, but there were others who tried to make "combien" do the
work. "Combien," which we pronounced "come bean," was stretched for many
purposes. I have heard it used and accepted as an equivalent for
"whereabouts," "what did you say," "why," "which one" and "will you
please show us once more how to put that machine gun together."

Not only did the Americans show an aptitude for getting the hang of the
mechanism of the machine gun and the automatic rifle, but they shot well
with them after a little bit of practice.

The first man I watched at work with the automatic rifle was green. He
had taken the gun apart and put it together again with an occasional
"regardez" and bit of demonstration from one of the Frenchmen, but the
weapon was not yet his pal. He picked the gun up somewhat gingerly and
aimed at the line of targets a couple of hundred yards away. Then he
pulled the trigger and the bucking thing, which seemed to be intent on
wriggling out of his arms, sprayed the top of the hill with bullets. The
French instructor made a laughing comment and an American who spoke the
language explained, "He says you ought to be in the anti-aircraft
service."

The next man to try his luck was a non-commissioned officer long in the
army. He patted the gun and wooed it a little in whispers before he
shot. It was a French gun, to be sure, but the language of firearms is
international. "Behave, Betsy," he said and she did. He sprayed shots
along the line of targets at the bottom of the hill as the gun clattered
away with all the clamor of a riveting machine at seven in the morning.
When they looked at the targets they found he had scored thirty hits out
of thirty-four and some were bull's-eyes. The French instructor was so
pleased that he stepped forward as if to hug the ancient sergeant but
the veteran's look of horror dissuaded him.

Bombing proved the most popular part of training and particularly as
soon as it was possible to work with the live article. First of all
dummy bombs were issued. A French officer carefully explained that the
bomb should be thrown after four moves, counting one, two, three, four,
as he posed something like a shot putter before he let the bomb go with
an overhand, stiff, armed fling. He illustrated the method several
times, but the first American to throw sent the bomb spinning out on a
line just as if he were hurrying a throw to first from deep short. The
Frenchman reproved him and explained carefully that, although it might
be possible to throw a bomb a long way in the manner in which a baseball
is thrown, it was necessary for a bomber to hurl many missiles and that
he must preserve his arm. He also pointed out that the bomb would never
land in the trenches of the enemy unless it was thrown with a
considerable arc.

The men then kept to the exercises laid down by the instructor, but just
before they stopped one or two could not resist the temptation of again
"putting something on to it" and letting the bomb sail out fast. One
lefthander who had pitched for a season in the Southern League was
anxious to make some experiments to see if he couldn't throw a bomb with
an out curve but he was informed that such an accomplishment would have
no military utility.

The first American wounded in France was the victim of a bombing
accident. A soldier threw a live bomb more than thirty meters from a
trench. When the bomb burst a fragment came whirling back in some
curious manner and fell into a box of grenades upon which a lieutenant
was sitting. The fragment cut the pin of one of the bombs and the whole
box went off with a bang. The lieutenant received only a slight cut on
his forehead, but a French interpreter thirty yards away was knocked
unconscious and lost the sight of his right eye. This Frenchman had
spent two years under fire at Verdun without being scratched and here
was his first wound come upon him on a quiet afternoon in a meadow miles
from the lines.

The men threw bombs from deep trenches and they were instructed to keep
cover closely after hurling a grenade just as if there was a German
trench across the way. But curiosity was too strong for them. Each
wanted to see where his particular bomb hit and how much earth it would
tear up. The bombs made only small scars in the earth, but they sent
fragments of steel casing flying in all directions and several men were
cut about the face by splinters.

The seeming inability of the American to visualize battle conditions in
training retards his progress in spite of his aptitude in other
directions. A French officer was directing a platoon of Americans one
day in skirmishing. They were to fire a round, run forward twenty paces,
throw themselves flat and run forward again. One doughboy would raise
himself up on his elbows and look about. The Frenchman, very much
excited, ran over to him and said, "You must keep your head down or you
will get shot. You must remember that bullets are flying all about you."

As soon as the instructor's back was turned the soldier was up on his
elbows again. "Hell," he said, "there ain't any bullets."

In later phases of training the inferiority of the American to the
French in imagination showed clearly. French veterans or recruits for
that matter could work themselves up to a frenzy in sham battles and
dash into an empty trench with a shout as if it were filled with
Germans. Americans could not do that. They found it difficult to forget
that practice was just practice.




CHAPTER VI

SUNNY FRANCE


Later on "Sunny France" became a mocking byword uttered by wet and muddy
men, but during the early days in the training area no one had any just
complaint about the weather. Come to think of it there wasn't anything
very wrong with those early days in rural France. Five o'clock was
pretty early for getting up but the sun could do it and keep cheerful.
It was glorious country with hills and forests and plowed fields and red
roofed villages and smooth white roads. The country people didn't throw
their hats in the air like Parisians, but they were kindly though calm.

"Down in ----," said a little doughboy who came from an Indiana farm,
"everybody you meet says 'bon jour' to you whether they know you or not.
That means 'good morning.' I was in Chicago once and they don't do it
there."

It wasn't Eden though. There was the tobacco situation against that
theory. To a good many soldiers, pleasant weather and kindly folk and
ample rations meant nothing much. These were minor things. The
quartermaster had no Bull Durham. When the supply of American tobacco
and cigarettes ran out the men tried the French products but not for
long. "So they call these Grenades," muttered a soldier as he examined a
popular French brand of cigarettes, "I guess that's because you'd better
throw 'em away right after you set 'em going."

French matches were less popular than French tobacco. The kind they sold
in our town and thereabouts were all tipped with sulphur and usually
exploded with a blue flame maiming the smoker and amusing the
spectators. Political economists and others interested in the law of
supply and demand may be interested to know that when the tobacco famine
was at its height a package of Bull Durham worth five cents in America
was sold by one soldier to another for five francs. This shortage has
since been relieved from several sources, but there has never been more
tobacco than the soldiers could smoke.

Reading matter was also ardently desired during the early months in the
Vosges. An enterprising storekeeper in one town sent a hurry call to
Paris for English books and a week later she proudly displayed the
following volumes on her shelves: "The Life of Dean Stanley," "Sermons
by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon," "The Jubilee Book of Cricket," "The
Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins (Lord of Brampton)," and "The
Recollections of the Rt. Hon. Sir Algernon West."

A few companies had libraries of their own. I wonder who made the
selection of titles. The volumes I picked out at random in one village
were: "The Family Life of Heinrich Heine," "Fourteen Weeks in
Astronomy," "Recollections and Letters of Renan," "Education and the
Higher Life," "Bible Stories for the Young," and "Henry the Eighth and
His Six Wives." The librarian said that the last was the most popular
book in the collection although several readers admitted that it did
not come up to expectations. Just as I was going out the top sergeant
came in to return a book. I asked him what it was. He said, "It's a book
called 'When Patty Went to College.'"

Our town was big and had moving pictures twice a week, but up the line
in the little villages there was no such source of amusement. After the
men had been in training for a week or more, a French Red Cross outfit
stopped at one of the villages with a traveling movie outfit and
announced that they would show a picture that night. According to the
announcement the picture was "Charlot en 'Le Vagabond.'" It sounded
foreign and forbidding. The doughboys anticipated trouble with the
titles and the closeups of what the heroine wrote and all the various
printed words which go to make a moving picture intelligible. Still they
were patient when the title of the picture was flashed on the screen and
they tried to look interested. The first scene was a road winding up to
a distant hill and down the highway with eccentric gait there walked a
little man strangely reminiscent. He drew nearer and nearer and as the
figure came into full view the soldier in front of me could stand the
strain no longer. He jumped to his feet.

"I'm a son of a gun," he shouted, "if it isn't Charlie Chaplin."

Recognition upon the part of the audience was instantaneous and
enthusiasm unbounded. If the Americans go out tomorrow and capture
Berlin they cannot possibly show more joy than they did at the sight of
Charlie Chaplin in France. Never again will the French be able to fool
them by disguising him as "Charlot."

After a bit the soldiers learned to entertain themselves and several
companies developed a number of talented performers. The first company
show I attended mixed boxing and music. They began with boxing. There
was a short intermission during which the first tenor fixed up a bloody
nose. He had received a bit the worst of it in the heavyweight bout. The
other members of the quartet gave him cotton and encouragement. Finally
he put on his shirt and hitching up his voice, began, "Naught but a few
faded roses can my sweet story tell." His comrades joined him at "My
heart was ever light," and they finished the ballad in perfect
alignment.

Almost all the songs were sentimental and many were old. They had
"Dearie," and "Where the River Shannon Flows," and that one about
Ireland falling out of Heaven (just as if the devil himself had not done
the very same thing). Later there were "Mother Machree" and "Old
Kentucky Home." Patriotism was not neglected. "When I Get Back Home
Again to the U.S.A." was the favorite among the recent war songs. The
only savor of army life in the program on this particular evening was in
a couple of Mexican songs brought up from the border by men who went to
get Villa. They brought back "Cucaracha" with all its seventeen obscene
Spanish verses. There was also one parody inspired by this war and sung
to the tune of "My Little Girl, I'm Dreaming of You." It went something
like this:

    America, I'm dreaming of you
    And I long for you each day
    America, I'm fighting for you
    Tho' you're many miles away
    We'll knock the block right off the Kaiser
    And we'll drive them 'cross the Rhine--
    And then we'll sail back home to you, dear
    To the tune of "Wacht am Rhein"!

The American soldier does not seem to be much of a song maker. Songs by
soldiers and for soldiers are not common with us yet. We have nothing as
close to the spirit of the trenches as the British ditty "I want to go
home," which always leaves the auditor in doubt as to whether he should
take it seriously and weep or humorously and laugh. Possibly there is
something of both elements in the song. The mixture has been typical of
the British attitude toward the war. Here is the song:

    I want to go 'ome
    I want to go 'ome
    The Maxims they spit
    And the Johnsons they roar
    I don't want to go to the front any more
    Oh take me over the seas
    Where the Alley-mans can't get at me
    Oh my; I don't want to die,
    I want to go 'ome.

The American army is still looking for a song. None of the new ones has
achieved universal popularity. However the many who heard the quartet of
Company L sing on this particular evening seemed to have no objection to
the old songs. In fact they were new to many in the audience for as the
concert went on French soldiers joined the audience and townspeople hung
about the edges of the crowd. They listened politely and applauded,
though indeed one must get a strange impression of America if his
introduction is through our popular songs. Such a foreigner is in danger
of believing that ours is a June land in which the moon is always
shining upon a young person known as "little girl." Yet the French
expressed no astonishment at the songs. Only one feature puzzled them
profoundly. At the end of a particularly effective song the captain
said, "Those men sang that very well. Bring 'em each a glass of water."

No villager could quite understand why a man who had committed no more
palpable crime than tenor singing should be forced to partake of a
drink which is cold, tasteless and watery.

Most the villages in our part of France had only one dimension. They
consisted of a line of houses on either side of the roadway and they
were always huddled together. Land is too valuable in France to waste it
on lawns and suchlike. Some of the villages were tiny and shabby, but
none was too small or too mean to be without its little café. It took
the doughboys some little time to get over their interest in the
startling fact that champagne was within the reach of the working man,
but they went back to beer in due course and now champagne is among the
things which shopkeepers must not sell to American soldiers. The
prohibition of the sale of cognac and champagne is all that the army
needs. Beer and light wines are not a menace to the health or behavior
of our army. Beer is by far the most popular drink and it would be an
ambitious man indeed who would seek the slightest deviation from
sobriety in the thin war beer of France. He might drown.

Absolute prohibition for the army in France would be well nigh
impossible. It would mean that every inn and shop and railroad station
and farmhouse would have to be classed as out of bounds. In fact
prohibition could not be enforced unless our soldiers were ordered never
to venture within four walls. Wine is to be had under every roof in
France and you can get it also in not a few places where the roof has
been shot to pieces. The French are interested in temperance just now.
On many walls posters are exhibited showing a German soldier and a black
bottle with the caption, "They are both the enemies of France," but when
a Frenchman talks of temperance or prohibition or the abolition of the
liquor traffic he never thinks of including wine or beer. The civil
authorities of France would not be much use in helping the American army
enforce a bone-dry order. They simply wouldn't understand it.

There was some excessive drinking when the army first came to France but
it has been checked. A number of influences have made for discretion.
One of the most potent is the opportunity for promotion in an army in
the field. Officers have been quick to point this out to their men. One
captain called his company together in the early days and said, "Some of
the men in this company are going out and getting pinko, stinko, sloppy
drunk. Any man who gets drunk goes in the guard house of course and more
than that he will get no promotion from me. I'm going to pick my
sergeants from the fellows that have got sense. You may notice that some
of the men who drink are old soldiers. Don't take an example from that.
Remember that's why they're old soldiers. There isn't any sense in
blowing all your money in for booze. Now if I took my pay in a lump at
the end of a month I could buy every café in this town and I could stay
drunk for a year. That would be fine business, wouldn't it?"

"I guess maybe I exaggerated a little about the length of time I could
stay drunk," the captain told me afterwards, "but do you know that talk
seems to have done the trick."

One factor which worked for temperance was the French fashion of making
drinking deliberate and social. When an American can be induced to sit
down to his potion he is comparatively safe. These little village cafés
did no harm after the first brief period when the American soldier had
his fling and they served the good purpose of encouraging fraternization
between doughboy and poilu.

The contact with French soldiers brought no great vocabulary to our men
but if they learned few words they did get the hang of making their
wants understood. In a week or two innkeepers or women in shops had no
trouble at all in attending to the wants of Americans. Probably the
French people made somewhat faster linguistic progress than the
soldiers. The Americans were willing to be met at least halfway. When I
asked one doughboy, "How do you get along with the French? Can you make
them understand you?" he said, "Why, they're coming along pretty well. I
think most of 'em will pick it up in time."

But there was one French word the soldiers had to learn. That was
"fineesh." The children forced that word upon them. They were always at
the heels of the American soldiers. They galloped the doughboys up and
down the village streets in furious piggyback charges. They borrowed jam
from company cooks and rode in the supply trucks. Of course there had to
be an end to the rides, sometimes, and even to the jam and the only way
to convince the children of France that an absolute unshakable limit had
been reached was to thrust two hands aloft and cry "fineesh." The old
women liked the doughboys too because they would draw water from the
wells for them and occasionally lend a hand in moving wood or wheat or
fodder. Nor do I mean to imply that the younger women of the little
villages did not esteem the doughboys. "Tell 'em back home that there
aren't any good looking women in France," was the message that ever so
many soldiers asked me to convey to anxious individuals in America. I
hand the message on but must refuse to pass upon its sincerity.

American officers got along well with the French but they never reached
the same degree of chumminess that the men did. They met French officers
at more or less formal luncheons and had to go through a routine of
speeches largely concerned with Lafayette and Rochambeau and Washington.
Poilus and doughboys did not go so far back for their subjects of
conversation. The American enlisted man had a great advantage over his
officer in the matter of language. He might know less French, but he was
much more ready to experiment. An officer did not like to make mistakes.
His was defensive French, a weapon to be used guardedly in cases of
extreme need. When a visiting officer hurled a compliment at him he
replied, but he seldom took the initiative. After all he was an American
officer and he feared to make himself ridiculous by poor pronunciation
and worse grammar. The soldier had no such scruples. He saw no reason
why he should be any more abashed by French grammar than by English and
as for pronunciation he followed the advice of a little pamphlet called
"The American in France" which was rushed out by some French firm for
sale to the American army. In the matter of pronunciation the book said,
"Since pronunciation is the most difficult part of any language the
publishers of this book have decided to omit it." The soldiers were
ready to adopt this method and only wished that it could be extended to
other things. To trench digging for instance.

The most daring man in the use of an unfamiliar language was not a
soldier but a second lieutenant. He took great pride in his talent for
pantomime and asserted that his vocabulary of some thirty words and his
gestures filled all his needs. He was somewhat startled though on an
afternoon when he went into a shop to purchase "B.V.D.'s" and found the
store in charge of the young daughter of the proprietor. Pantomime
seemed hardly the thing and so he paused long to think up a word for the
garment he wanted or some approximation. At last he smiled and exclaimed
brightly, "Chemise pour jambes, s'il vous plait."

Stores were not the strong point of our bit of France. We soon came to
regard our town as a metropolis because people journeyed there to make
"shopping tours." One afternoon I marked fifteen visiting soldiers with
their eyes glued against a shop window which displayed half a dozen
electric flashlights, two quarts of champagne, a French-English
dictionary and a limited assortment of postcards. These, of course, were
barred from the mail by censorship but the soldiers collected them to be
taken home after the war.

"These French postcards aren't exactly what some of the boys back home
are going to expect," one soldier admitted. "I went to three shops now
but the others have been ahead of me and all I could get was these two.
One's a picture called 'l'eglise' and the other's 'la maison de Jeanne
d'Arc.'"

The shops had hard work in keeping up with more commodities than picture
postcards. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for canned peaches
and sardines. Somehow or other men who have been on a long march simply
crave either sardines or canned peaches. The doughboys did a good deal
of eating at their own expense. Army food was plentiful and moderately
varied. Beans and corned beef hash were served a good many times
perhaps, but there was no lack of fresh meat and there was plenty of jam
and of carrots and onions and heavy gravy. Food, however, was an outlet
for spending money and in some villages the men got so eager that they
would buy anything. Little traveling shops in wagons came through the
smaller villages in the northern part of the training area loaded with
all sorts of gimcracks intended for the peasant trade. The peddlers had
no time to put in a special line for the soldiers. They found that it
was not necessary. Desperate men with pockets full of money would
purchase even the imitation tortoise shell sidecombs which the itinerant
merchants had to sell.

The purchasing capacity of the soldier was not limited to his pay alone.
The villagers were wildly excited about the white bread issued to the
American army. It was the first they had seen since the second year of
the war. One old lady seized a loaf which was presented to her and
crying "il est beau," sat down upon a doorstep and began to eat the
bread as if it were cake. The rate of exchange fluctuated somewhat but
there were days when a loaf of white bread could be exchanged for a
whole roast chicken.

The eagerness of the American soldier to spend his money had the result
of tempting French storekeepers to raise their prices and as the cost of
living mounted the civilian population began to complain. Even the
soldiers had suspicions at last that they were being charged too much in
some stores and the American officers took over price control as another
of their many responsibilities.

"I went to the mayor," one town major explained, "and I said, 'Look
here, Bill, I don't mind 'the shopkeepers putting a little something
over. All I ask is that they just act reasonable. They'll get all the
money in time anyhow, and so I wish you'd tip them off not to be in so
much of a hurry.' He couldn't talk any English, that mayor couldn't, but
the interpreter told him about it and he went right to the front for us.
From that day to this we've had only one complaint about anything in our
village. That came from an old lady who had some doughboys billeted in a
barn next to the shed where she kept her sheep. She came to me and said
the soldiers talked so much at night that the sheep couldn't sleep."




CHAPTER VII

PERSHING


Nobody will ever call him "Papa" Pershing. He is a stepfather to the
inefficient and even when he is pleased he says little. In the matter of
giving praise the General is a homeopath. For that reason he can gain
enormous effect in the rare moments when he chooses to compliment a man
or an organization. Pershing believes that discipline is the foundation
of an army.

"I think," said one young American officer, "that his favorite military
leader is Joshua because he made the sun and the moon stand at
attention." In other words Pershing is a soldiers' soldier. No man can
strike such hard blows as he does and leave no scars. There are men here
and there in the army who do not love him but their criticism almost
invariably ends, "but I guess I'll have to admit that he's a good
soldier."

Pershing is not a disciplinarian merely for the sake of discipline but
he believes that it is the gauge of the temper of any military
organization. His interest in detail is insatiable. He can read a man's
soul through his boots or his buttons. Next to the Kaiser, Pershing
hates nothing so much as rust and dust and dirt. Perhaps round shoulders
should go in the list as well, and pockets. Certainly he makes good the
things he preaches. There is no finer figure in any army in Europe. The
General is fit from the tip of his glistening boots to his hat top. We
saw him once after he had walked through a front line trench on a rainy
day. There were sections of that trench where the mud was over a man's
shoetops and the back area which had to be crossed before the trench
system was reached was a great lake of casual water fed at its fringes
by roaring rain torrents. And yet the general came out of the trench
without a speck of mud on his boots in spite of the fact that he had
plunged along with no apparent regard for his footing.

There was dust behind him, though, on the afternoon he first came to
the training area to see his men. News reached our town that the general
was up in the northern end of the training zone and moving fast. An
officer passing by gave me a lift in his car and when we arrived at the
next village half a dozen soldiers who were sitting on a bench jumped up
for dear life and jarred themselves to the very heels with the stiffest
of military salutes.

The officer grinned. "Pershing's in town," he said and so he was.

We found him in a kitchen talking about onions to a cook. He asked each
soldier in turn what sort of food he was getting. Some were too
frightened to do more than mumble an inaudible answer. A few said, "Very
good, sir." And one or two had complaints. The General listened to the
complaints attentively and in each case pressed his questions so as to
make the soldier be absolutely concrete in his answers. Next he turned
upon an officer and wanted to know just what the sewage system of the
town was. The officer was a dashing major and he seemed ill at ease when
Pershing asked how many days a week he inspected the garbage dump.

"That isn't enough," said the General when the major answered. "I want
you to pay more attention to those things."

From the kitchen he went into every billet in the village. In two he
climbed up the ladders to see what sort of sleeping quarters the men had
in their lofts. In one billet a soldier stole a look over his shoulder
at the General as he passed. Pershing turned immediately.

"That's not the way to be a soldier," he said. "You haven't learned the
first principle of being a soldier." He turned to a second lieutenant.
"This man doesn't stand at attention properly," he explained. "I want
you to make him stand at attention for five minutes."

The next offender was a captain who had one hand in his pocket while
giving an order. The General spoke to him just as severely as he had to
the enlisted man. Then he was into his car and away to the next village.

Pershing is always on the move. One of his aides told me that he never
had more than five minutes' notice of where the General was going or
how long he would stay. No man in the army has covered so much territory
as Pershing. He has been in practically every village occupied by the
American troops. He has inspected every hospital and every training
camp. One day he will be at a port looking at the accommodations which
are being made for incoming vessels and on the next he will have jumped
from the base to a front line trench. He has been on all the Western
fronts except the Italian. His French and British and Belgian hosts find
him a most ambitious guest. He wants to see everything. Once while
observing a French offensive he expressed a desire to go forward and see
a line of trenches which had just been captured from the Germans. The
French tried to dissuade him but the General complained that he could
not see just how things were going from any other position and so into
the German trench he went.

Pershing has developed in France. Like every other man in the American
army he has had to study modern warfare, but more than that he has
caught something of the spirit of the French. He has acquired some of
their ability to put a gesture into command, to utilize personality in
the inspiration of troops. He is not yet the equal of the French in this
respect. Joffre, for instance, fully realized the military usefulness of
his enormous popularity and capitalized it. It was not mere luck that he
became a tradition. Pétain, while by no means the equal of Joffre on the
personal side, knows how to talk to soldiers and to townsfolk and to
make himself a big human force.

While he is still a homeopath, General Pershing realizes more than he
ever did before the value of a pat on the back given at the right time.
I saw him do one of those little gracious things in a base hospital
which was caring for the first American wounded. A youthful doughboy was
lying flat on his back wondering just how long it was going to be before
supper time came round when all of a sudden there was a clatter at the
door. The doughboy was afraid it was going to be some more nurses and
doctors. They had bothered him a lot by bandaging up his arm every
little while and it hurt, but when he looked up at the foot of his bed
there stood the man with four stars on his shoulders. The little
doughboy grinned a bit nervously. He thought it was funny that he should
be lying on his back and General Pershing standing up.

The General was somewhat nervous and embarrassed, too. He still lacks a
little of the French feeling for the dramatic in the doing of these
little things. He had to clear his throat once and then he said, "I want
to congratulate you. I envy you. There isn't a man in the army who
wouldn't like to be in your place. You have brought home to the people
of America the fact that we are in the war."

The doughboy didn't say anything, but the nurse who made the rounds that
evening wondered why a patient who was doing so well should have a pulse
hitting up to ninety-six.

Earlier in the summer General Pershing encountered some far more
embarrassing tests. He had to handle bouquets. The donor was usually a
French girl and a very little one. When Pershing and Pétain made a joint
trip through the American army zone there were two little girls and two
bouquets in each village. General Pétain, after receiving his bouquet,
would bend over gracefully and kiss the little girl, adding one or two
kindly phrases immediately following "ma petite." General Pershing began
by patting the little girls on the head, but he realized it was not
enough and after a bit he began to kiss them, too; only once or twice he
got tangled up in their hats and found it hard to maintain military
dignity. He handled the flowers gingerly. He seemed to regard each
bouquet as a bomb which would explode in five seconds but each time
there was some aide ready to step forward and relieve him.

The attitude of the average West Pointer towards his men is generally
speaking the same as that of General Pershing. Some observers think the
West Point attitude too strict, but I was inclined to believe that the
men from the academy handled men better than the reserve officers. They
are strict, it is true, but at the same time they have been trained to
look after the needs of their men closely. The trouble with the average
reserve officer is that he has not had time to learn how much he must
father his men and mother them, too, for that matter. He does not know
probably just how dependent the average soldier is upon his officer.

Perhaps the strictest officer of all is the man who was once a non-com.
The former doughboy knows the tricks of the enlisted man and he is
determined that nobody shall put anything over on him. He is often just
a little bit afraid that the soldiers are going to trade on the fact
that he was once an enlisted man. I once saw a soldier offer some cigars
to two officers. One of the officers was a West Pointer and he laughed
and took a cigar but the former non-com. refused very sternly. He could
not afford to be indebted to an enlisted man.

I do not wish to imply that the men who come up from the ranks do not
make good officers. As a matter of fact they are among the best, once
their preliminary self-consciousness has worn off. The transition from
stripes to bars is perfect torture to some of them. One company had a
crack soldier who had been a sergeant for seven years. He was
recommended for promotion and was sent to an officers' training school
in France. He did very well but just a week before he was to receive his
commission he succeeded in gaining permission to be dropped from the
school and go back to his old company as sergeant. At the last minute he
had decided that he did not want to be an officer.

I watched him put a company through its drill two days after his return.
They moved with spirit and precision under his commands but when it was
all over I found one reason why he didn't want to be an officer.

"That was very good today," he said. "You done well."

The first lieutenant smiled. He had a right to smile, too, for the
return of the sergeant to his company had almost cut his work in half.
He knew his value well enough.

"The best I can do is teach the men," he said. "It takes an old sergeant
to learn them."




CHAPTER VIII

MEN WITH MEDALS


General Pétain was the first of many famous Frenchmen who came to see
the American troops in training. He also had the additional object of
reviewing the chasseurs and of distributing medals, for this crack
division had been withdrawn from one of the most active sectors to
instruct the doughboys. General Pershing accompanied Pétain. The blue
devils were drawn up in formation in the middle of a big meadow cupped
within hills. The seven men who were to be honored stood in a line in
front of the division. Six were officers and they awaited the pleasure
of the general with their swords held at attention. The seventh man who
stood at the right of the little line was an old sergeant with a great
flowing gray and white mustache. The rifle which he held in front of him
overtopped him by at least a foot.

The ceremony began with a fanfare by the trumpeters. As the last notes
came tumbling back from the hills Pétain moved forward. We found that he
was not so tall as Pershing nor quite as straight. The French leader is
also a little gray and about his waist there is just a suggestion of the
white man's burden. But he is soldierly for all that and his eyes are
marvelously keen and steady. His tailor deserved a decoration. The
general wore only one medal, but that was as large as the badge of a
country sheriff. It was a great silver shield hung about his neck and
indicated that he was a commander of the Legion of Honor. He stopped in
front of the first officer in the little line waiting to be honored and
spoke to him for a moment. Then he pinned a red ribbon on his coat and
kissed the man first on the left cheek and then on the right. The
doughboys looked on in amazement.

"Well, I'll be damned," said one under his breath, "it's true."

Four men received the red ribbons, but the other three were down only
for the military medal which is a high decoration but less esteemed
than the Legion of Honor. No kisses went with the green and yellow
ribbons of the military medal but only handshakes. Pétain stopped in
front of the old sergeant at the end of the line and looked at him for a
minute without speaking. Then he called an orderly.

"This man has three palms on his croix de guerre," said Pétain.

Now a palm means that soldier has been cited for conspicuous bravery in
the report of the entire army.

"The military medal is not enough for this man," continued Pétain. "Step
forward," he said.

The old sergeant trembled a little as he stood a tiny, solitary gray
figure in front of the whole division.

"Bring back the trumpets," Pétain commanded and for the lone poilu the
fanfare was sounded again.

"I make you a chevalier of the Legion of Honor," said the commander in
chief of the French army to the old sergeant, and after he had pinned
the red ribbon to his breast he added a hug to the conventional two
kisses. The poilu moved back to the ranks steadily, but as soon as the
general had turned his back the sergeant pulled out his handkerchief and
wept. The soldiers greeted their comrade with cheers and laughter.

"Now," said Pétain turning to Pershing, "let's take it easy for a little
while. I've seen plenty of reviews."

The French general walked across the space cleared for the review and
began to talk with people in the fringe of spectators gathered around
the edge of the meadow. He talked easily without any seeming
condescension.

"How are you, my little man?" he said, patting a boy on the head. "In
what military class are you?"

Encouraged by his father the boy said that he was in the class of 1928.

"Oh," said the general, "that's a long time off. We shall have beaten
the Boches before then."

Next it was a peasant girl who attracted his attention.

"Where have you come from?" he inquired with as much apparent interest
as if he were talking with a soldier just back from Berlin. "That was a
long walk just to see soldiers," he said when the girl told him that she
lived in a little village about ten miles distant. "But we are glad to
have you here," he added.

And so he moved on down the line with handshakes for the grownups, pats
on the head for little boys and kisses for little girls. He turned back
to his reviewing station then and the French troops swept by with brave
display: They were very smart and brisk, horse, foot and artillery, but
Pétain found a few things to criticize although he mingled praise
generously with censure. He told the officers to know their men and to
get on such terms with them that the soldiers would not be afraid to
speak freely. He told of reforms which he planned to introduce in the
French army. He favored longer leaves from the front, he said, and
better transportation for the poilus.

"I shall have time tables made for the men on leave," he said and then
for an instant he became the shrewd French business man rather than the
dashing general.

"I have figured out," he explained, "that the army can afford to sell
these time tables for five sous. It wouldn't do to give them away.
Nobody would value them then."

A week later we had another visitor. French generals and all their
resplendent aides clicked their heels together and stood at attention as
this civilian passed by. He was a short stoutish man in blue serge
knickerbockers and a dark yachting cap. His tailor deserved no
decoration for this seemed a secondary sort of costume and headgear in a
group loaded down with gold braid and valor medals. But their swords
flashed for the man in the yachting cap and a great general saw him into
his car, for the stoutish visitor was the President of the French
Republic. Generals Pétain and Pershing accompanied Poincaré in his car
up to the drill ground. It was an American division which marched this
morning. In fact it was the same unit which had marched through the
streets of the port only a few months before. They had grown browner and
straighter since that day and they looked taller. Group consciousness
had dawned in them now. The only lack of discipline was shown by the
mules. It must be admitted that the mule morale left much to be desired.
Many were new to the task of dragging machine guns and those that did
not sulk tried to run away. Strong arms and stronger words prevailed
upon them.

"Remember," the driver would plead, "you have a part in making the world
safe for democracy," and in a trice all the evil would flee from the
eyes and the heels of the unruly animals.

A number of bands helped to keep the men swinging into the face of a
driving rain. The French officers who accompanied Pétain and Poincaré
were somewhat surprised when one regiment went by to the tune of
"Tannenbaum," but General Pershing explained that it had been played in
America for years under the name of "Maryland, My Maryland." He had a
harder task some minutes later when a band struck up a regimental hymn
called "Happy Heinie," which borrows largely from "Die Wacht am Rhein"
for its chorus.

As soon as the troops marched by, General Pershing sent orders for all
the officers to assemble. They gathered in a great half circle before
the French President who spoke to them slowly and with much earnestness.
Indeed, he spoke so slowly that fair scholars could follow his
discourse. Even those who could grasp no more than such words as
"Lafayette" and "President Wilson" and "la guerre" listened with
apparent interest. M. Poincaré called attention to the fact that the day
was the anniversary of the Battle of the Marne and also the birthday of
Lafayette. These days, he said, linked together the two nations which
were making a common cause in the struggle for civilization and he ended
with a dramatic sweep of his arm as he exclaimed, "Long live the free
United States." However, he called it Les Etats Unis which made it more
difficult.

"What did he say?" a group of doughboys asked a sergeant chauffeur who
had been stationed near enough to hear the speech. "I didn't get it
all," said the sergeant, "but it sounded a good deal like 'give 'em
hell.'"

The President and his party spent the rest of the afternoon inspecting
the billets of the Americans. In one barn Poincaré insisted on climbing
up a ladder to see the quarters at close range and as he climbed slowly
and clumsily it came to my mind that the presidential waist line, the
knickerbockers and the yachting cap were all symbols of the fact that
France even in war was still a civil democracy.

Still it must be admitted that the next civilian we saw was more warlike
than any of the soldiers. The only military equipment worn by Georges
Clemenceau was a pair of leather puttees which didn't quite fit, but he
had eyes and eyebrows and a jaw which all combined to suggest pugnacity.
He was not then premier and indeed he had been in political retirement
for some time, but he made a greater impression on the soldiers than any
of our visitors because he spoke in English. It was on September 16,
1917, that Clemenceau saw American soldiers, but he had seen them once
before and that was in Richmond in 1864 when Grant marched into the
city. Clemenceau was then a school teacher in America. The old Frenchman
watched the sons and grandsons of those dead and gone fighters and
expressed the wish that he might see American troops once again when
they marched into Berlin.

The doughboys he saw in France were not the seasoned troops which swung
by him on those dusty Virginia roads so many years ago, but in their
hands were new weapons which might have turned the tide at Bull Run and
changed Gettysburg from victory into a rout. Certainly Pickett would
have never swept up to the Union lines if there had been machine guns
such as those with which the rookies blistered the targets for the
edification of the distinguished guests and the bombs which sent the
pebbles sky high might have given pause even to Stonewall Jackson.

There were sports as well as military exercises in the program arranged
for Clemenceau. There were footraces and a tug of war and boxing
matches. In one of these American blood was freely shed on French soil
for a middleweight against whom the tide of battle was turning butted
his opponent and cut his forehead.

I did not see Joffre when he paid a visit to the army zone and reviewed
the troops but he left a glamor for us all in our messroom where he had
dinner with General Pershing. It was a reporterless dinner so it meant
less to us than to Henriette who served the dinner for the two generals.
Nothing much had ever happened to Henriette before. She looked like
Jeanne d'Arc, but the only voices she ever heard cried, "L'eau chaude,
Henriette," or "Hot water" or "OEufs" or "Eggs." And if they were not
wanted right away they must be had "toute de suite."

It was Henriette who brushed the boots and cleaned the dishes and swept
the floors and every night she waited on peasants and peddlers and
reporters. Once she had a major in the reserve corps. He was attached to
the quartermaster's department. But on the historic night she stood at
the right elbow of General Joffre and the left elbow of General
Pershing. I was away at the time and the correspondents were telling me
about it before dinner. While we were talking she came into the room
with the roast veal and I said, "Henriette, they tell me that while I
was away you waited upon Marshal Joffre and General Pershing."

One of the men at the table made a warning gesture, but it was too late.
Henrietta put the hot veal down to cool on a side table and pointed to
the seat nearest the window. A large man from a press association sat
there but she looked through him and saw the hero of the Marne.
"Maréchal Joffre là," said Henriette. She turned to a nearer seat and
pointing to the shrinking representative of the Chicago _Tribune_
explained, "General Pearshing ici."

One of the men rose from the table then and got the veal. Something was
said about fried potatoes, but Henriette remained to tell me about the
historic dinner. She admitted that she was very nervous at first. That
was increased by the fact that General "Pearshing" ate none of his
pickled snails. The Maréchal had fifteen. The soup went well, Henriette
said, and General Pearshing cheered her up enormously by his conduct
with the mutton. The chicken was also a success. After the chicken the
generals held their glasses in the air and stood up. Henriette noticed
that when Maréchal Joffre stood up he was "gros comme une maison."

As he left the room Maréchal Joffre pinched her cheek but the mark was
gone before she could show it to the cook. For all that Henriette had
something to show that she waited upon generals at the famous dinner.
She opened a new locket which she wore around her neck and took out a
small piece of gilt paper. She would not let me touch it, but when I
looked closely I saw that it had printed upon it "Romeo and Juliet."

"It's the band off the cigar Pershing smoked at the dinner," explained
one of the correspondents. Henriette put the treasure back in her locket
and sighed. "Je suis très contente," she said.




CHAPTER IX

LETTERS HOME


The British army tells a story of a soldier who had been at the front
for a year and a half without ever once writing home. This state of
affairs was called to the attention of his officer who summoned the
soldier and asked him if he had no relatives. The Tommy admitted that he
had a mother and an aunt.

"I want you to go back to quarters," said the captain, "and stay there
until you've written a letter. Then bring it to me."

The soldier was gone for two hours and then he returned and handed the
officer a single sheet of letter paper. His note read, "Dear Ma--This
war is a blighter. Tell auntie. With love--Alfred."

It was different in the American army. The doughboys wrote to their
families to the second and third cousin. One soldier turned fifty-two
letters over to his lieutenant for censorship in a single day. The men
hardly seemed to need the suggestion posted on the wall of every
Y.M.C.A. hut: "Remember to write to mother today." Of course it was not
always mother. I came upon a couple of lieutenants one afternoon hard at
work on an enormous batch of letters. It was originally intended that
the chaplain should censor all the mail for the regiment but it was
found that the task would be far beyond the powers of any one man. In
time the job came to absorb a large part of the energy of the junior
officers.

"This," said one of the officers, "is the fifth soldier who's written
that 'our officers are brave, intelligent and kind!' I know I'm brave
and intelligent, but I'm not so damned kind," and he ripped out half a
page of over faithful description of the country.

"The man I have here," said the second officer, "has got a joke. He
says, 'If I ever get home the Statue of Liberty will have to turn round
if she ever wants to see me again.' It was all right the first time, but
now I've got to his tenth letter and he's still using it."

It has been found that more than fifty per cent. of the mail sent home
consists of love letters. The fact that they have to be censored does
not cramp the style of the writers in the least. One letter was so
ardent as to arouse admiration. "This man writes the best love letter I
ever read," said a lieutenant, looking up. "The only trouble is that
he's writing to five girls at once and he uses the same model every
time. Two of the girls live in the same town at that."

Most of the letters were cheerful. Some courageously so. One man who was
near death from tuberculosis wrote home once a day recounting imaginary
events which had happened outside the walls of his hospital. In his
letters he would send himself on long marches over the hills of France
and describe the woods and meadows and plowed fields as they looked to
him on bright mornings. He described in detail work which he was doing
in bombing and the only complaint he ever made was on a day when he had
coughed himself to such weakness that he could hardly finish his daily
letter. He wrote to his mother then and asked her to excuse the
briefness of his note. He explained that he was pretty well fagged out
from a long afternoon of bayonet drill.

The soldiers frequently commented on the kindliness of the French people
and they were also fond of boasting, with perhaps doubtful
justification, that they were already proficient in the French language.
A few were desirous of giving the folk back home a thrill. One man
working as company cook at a port in France, some three or four hundred
miles from the firing line, wrote a weekly letter describing all sorts
of war activities. He made up air raids and heavy bombardments and
fairly tore up the village in which he was living. Curiously enough he
never made himself conspicuous in these actions. According to the
letters he was just there with the rest taking the "strafing" as best he
could.

The officer who censored his first warlike letter cut out all the
imaginative flights, but two days later the soldier wrote another letter
even more thrilling. He complained that it was difficult to write
because the explosion of big shells nearby made the house rock.

The lieutenant called him up then and said, "You're writing a lot of
lies home, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir," said the soldier.

"Well, what are you doing it for?" continued the officer.

The soldier shifted about in embarrassment and then he said, "Well, you
see, sir, those letters are to my father. He went into the Union army
when he was sixteen and fought all through the last two years of the
war. He lives in a little town in Ohio and the people there call him
'Fighting Bill' on account of what he did in the Civil War. Well, when I
went away to this war he began to go round town and tell everybody that
I was going to do fighting that would make 'em all forget about the
Civil War. He used to say that I came of fighting stock and that I'd
make 'em sit up and take notice. It would be pretty tough for him, sir,
if I had to write home and say that I was cooking down in a town where
you can't even hear the guns."

"That's all right," said the lieutenant, "but some of the people who've
got sons in this regiment will be doing a lot of worrying long before
they have any need to."

"No, sir," said the soldier, "my father don't know what regiment I'm
with. I was transferred when I got over here and the only address he's
got is the military post office number."

"I don't know what to say in that case," replied the lieutenant. "It's a
cinch you're not giving away any military information and I can't see
how you're giving, any aid and comfort to the enemy. I guess you can go
on with that battle stuff. Make the bombardments just as hard as you
like, but keep the casualties light."

In contrast to the attitude of the veteran back in Ohio was a letter
which a captain received from the mother of one of his men.

"My son is only nineteen," she wrote. "He has never been away from home
before and it breaks my heart that he should be in France. It may sound
foolish but I want to ask you a favor. When he was a little boy I used
to let him come into the kitchen and bake himself little cakes. I think
he would remember some of that still. Can't you use him in the bakery or
the kitchen or some place so he won't have to be put in the firing line
or in the trenches? I will pray for you, captain, and I pray to God we
may have peace for all the world soon."

The captain read the letter and then he burned it up. "If the rest of
the men in the company heard of that they would jolly the life out of
that boy," he said. But he sat down and wrote to the mother, "Your boy
is well and I think he is enjoying his work. I cannot promise to do what
you ask because your son is one of the best soldiers in my company. We
are all in this together and must share the dangers. I pray with you
that there may be peace and victory soon."

No complete story of America's part in the war will ever be written
until somebody has made a collection and read thousands of the letters
home. The doughboy is strangely inarticulate. He can't or he won't tell
you how he felt when he first landed in France, or heard the big guns
or went to the trenches. He is afraid to be caught in a sentimental pose
but this fear leaves him when he writes. In his letters he will pose at
times. This is not uncommon. Many a man who would never think of saving
anything about "saving France" will write about it in rounded sentences.
His deepest and frankest thoughts will come out in letters.

Of course the censors stand between these makers of history and
posterity. We must wait for our chronicles of the war because of the
censor. The newspaper stories about our troops in France on their
tremendous errand should ring like the chronicle of an old crusade, but
it is hard for the chronicler to bring a tingle when he must write or
cable "Richard the deleted hearted."

When a censor wants to kill a story he usually says, "Don't you know
that your story may possibly give information to the Germans?" The
correspondent then withdraws his story in confusion. Of course what he
should answer is, "Very well, that story may give information to the
Germans, but it will also give information to the Americans and just
now that is much more important."

There are certain military reasons for not naming units and not naming
individuals, but the war is not being fought by the army alone. If the
country is to be enlisted to its fullest capacity it must have names.
The national character cannot be changed in a few months or a year. The
newspapers have brought us up on names. It is too much to expect that
the folk back home can keep up on their toes if the men they know go
away into a great silence as soon as they cross the ocean and are not
heard of again unless their names appear in casualty lists. We can't do
less for our war heroes than we have done for Ty Cobb and Christy
Mathewson and Smokey Joe Wood. That is not only for the sake of the
people back home, but for those at the front as well. They like to know
that people are hearing about them. It is not encouraging to them to
receive papers and learn that "certain units have done something." Just
as soon as possible they want to see the name of their regiment and of D
company and K and F and H. The English name their units after a battle
and so must we. And we must have plenty of names. It helped Ty Cobb not
a little in the business of being Ty that thousands of columns of
newspaper space had built up a tradition behind him. When Joe Wood got
in a hole it is more than probable that he realized that he must and
would get himself out again because he was "Smokey Joe." We must do as
much for private Alexander Brown and corporal James Kelly, and for
sergeants and major generals, too. We are not a folk who thrive on
reticence. It is true that we like to blow our own horn but it must be
remembered that Joshua brought down a great fortress in that manner. The
trumpets are needed for America. We cannot fight our best to the sound
of muffled drums.

The man abroad who is sending back the stories of the war must deal with
the French censor as well as the American, and that reminds us of
Pétain's mustache. When the great general came to our camp all the
newspaper stories about his visit were sent to the French military
censor. All were allowed to pass in due course except one. The
correspondent concerned went around to find out what was wrong.

"I'm sorry," said the censor, "but I cannot allow this cable message to
go in its present form. You have spoken of General Pétain's white
mustache. I might stretch a point and allow you to say General Pétain's
gray mustache, but I should much prefer to have you say General Pétain's
blonde mustache."

"Make it green with small purple spots, if you like," said the
correspondent, "but let my story go."




CHAPTER X

MARINES


"They tell me," said a young marine in his best confidential and earnest
manner, "that the Kaiser isn't afraid of the American army, but that he
is afraid of the marines."

The youngster was hazy as to the source of his information, but he never
doubted that it was accurate. He felt sure that the Kaiser had heard of
the marines. Weren't they "first to fight"? And if he didn't fear them
yet, he would. At least he would when Company D got into action.

No unit in the American army today has the group consciousness of the
marines. It is difficult to understand just how this has happened.
Everybody knows that once a regiment, or a division, or even an army,
has acquired a tradition, that tradition will live long after every man
who established it has gone. There is, for instance, the Foreign Legion
of the French army. Thousands and thousands of men have poured through
this organization. Sickness and shrapnel, the exigencies of the service
and what not have swept the veterans away again and again, but it is
still the Foreign Legion. Some of its new recruits will be negro
horseboys who have missed their ships at one of the ports through
overprotracted sprees; there will be a gentleman adventurer or two, and
a fine collection of assorted ruffians. But in a month each will be a
legionary.

I saw an American negro in a village of France who had been a legionary
until a wound had stiffened a knee too much to permit him to engage in
further service. He was a shambling, shuffling, whining, servile negro,
abjectly sure that some kind white gentleman would give him a pair of
shoes, or at least a couple of francs. But he had the Croix de Guerre
and the Medaille Militaire. He had not cringed while he was a legionary.

The tradition of this organization, however, is based on battle service.
The Legion has seen all the hardest fighting. The tradition of our
marines rests on something else. They have seen service, of course, but
it has not been considerable. Their group feeling was at first sheerly
defensive. There was a time when the marine was a friend of no one in
the service. He was neither soldier nor sailor. Many of the marine
officers were men who had been unable to get appointments at West Point
or Annapolis, or, having done so, had failed to hold the pace at the
academies. And so the spirit of the officers and the men was that they
would show the army and the navy of just what stuff a marine was made.
And they have. It is true that the army and the navy have ceased long
since to look down upon the marine, but the pressure of handicap has
been maintained among the marines in France just the same.

It is largely accidental. For instance, when the American troops were
first billeted in the training area the marines were placed at the upper
end of the triangle miles further from the field of divisional maneuvers
than any of their comrades. And so, if Joffre, or Pétain, or
Clemenceau, or Poincaré, or any of the others came to review the first
American expeditionary unit, the marines had to march twenty-two miles
in a day in addition to the ground which they would cover in the review.
Curiously enough, this did not inspire them with a hatred of the
reviews, nor did they complain of their lot. They merely took the
attitude that a few miles more or less made no difference to a marine.

I remember a story a young officer told me about his first hike with the
marines in France. They had eleven miles to do in the morning and as
many more in the afternoon, after a brief review. The young officer
appeared with a pair of light shoes with a flexible sole.

"Look here," said the major, "you'd better put on heavier shoes."

"I think these will suffice, sir," said the young lieutenant. "You see,
they're modeled on the principle of an Indian moccasin--full freedom for
the foot, you know."

The major grinned. "Come around and see me this evening," he said, "and
tell me what you think of the Indians." The man with the moccasin style
shoe did well enough until the company was in sight of the home village.
Unfortunately, a halt was called at a point where a brook ran close to
the road.

The sight of the cool stream made the lieutenant's feet burn and ache
worse than ever. "I had just about made up my mind to turn my men over
to the sergeant and limp home, after a crack at the brook," said the
lieutenant, "when I heard one of the men say that he was tired. There
was an old sergeant on him like a flash. He was one of the oldest men in
the regiment. He had never voted the prohibition ticket and rheumatism
was only one of his ailments, but he hopped right on the kid who said he
was tired. 'Where do you get off to be a marine?' he said. 'Why, we
don't call a hike like this marching in the marines. Look here.' And the
old fellow did a series of jig steps to show that the march was nothing
to him.

"Well," said the young officer, "I didn't turn the men over to the
sergeant and I didn't bathe my feet in the brook. I marched in ahead of
them. You see, I thought to myself, I guess my feet will drop off all
right before I get there, but I can't very well stop. After all, I'm a
marine."

Even the Germans did their best to make the marines feel that they were
troops apart from the others. Only one raid was attempted during the
summer and then it was the village of the marines upon which a bomb was
dropped. It injured no one and did ever so much to increase the pride of
marines, who would remark to less fortunate organizations in the
training area: "What do you know about aeroplanes?"

When it came time to dig practice trenches, other regiments were content
to put in the better part of the morning and afternoon upon the work,
but the marines went to the task of digging in day and night shifts.
There was a Sunday upon which Pershing announced that he would inspect
the American troops in their billets. Through some mistake or other he
arrived in the camp of the marines eight hours behind schedule, but the
men were still standing under arms without a sign of weariness when he
arrived. Historical tradition lent itself to maintaining the morale of
the marines, for their village was once the site of a famous Roman camp
and one of the men in digging a trench one day came across a segment of
green metal that the marines assert roundly was part of a Roman sword.
In a year or two it will be sure to be identified as Cæsar's.

The marines were exclusive and original even in the matter of mascots.
The doughboys had dogs and cats and a rather mangy lion for pets but no
other fighting organization in the world has an anteater. The marines
picked Jimmy up at Vera Cruz and he began to prove his worth as a mascot
immediately. He was with them when the city was taken. Later he stopped
off at Hayti and aided in subduing the rebels. He is said to be the only
anteater who has been through two campaigns. Army life has broadened
Jimmy. He has learned to eat hardtack and frogs and cornbeef and pie and
beetles and slum and omelettes. As a matter of fact Jimmy will eat
almost anything but ants. Of course he wouldn't refuse some tempting
morsel simply because of the presence of ants, but he no longer finds
any satisfaction in making an entire meal of the pesky insects. He won't
forage for them. Things like hardtack and pie, Jimmy finds, will stand
still and give a hungry man a chance. Lack of practice has somewhat
impaired the speed of Jimmy and even if he wanted to revert to type it
is probable that he could catch nothing but the older and less edible
ants. Of course he does not want to go back to an ant diet. He feels
that it would be a reflection on the hospitality of his friends, the
marines.

The marines are equally tactful. In spite of his decline as an
entomologist Jimmy remains by courtesy an anteater and is always so
termed when exhibited to visitors. He has two tricks. He will squeal if
his tail is pulled ever so gently and he will demolish and put out
burning cigars or cigarettes. The latter trick is his favorite. He
stamps out the glowing tobacco with his forepaws and tears the cigar or
cigarette to pieces. The stunt is no longer universally popular. The
marine who dropped a hundred franc note by mistake just in front of
Jimmy says that teaching tricks to anteaters is all foolishness.

However, Jimmy has picked up a few stunts on his own account. It is not
thought probable that any marine ever encouraged him in his habit of
biting enlisted men of the regular army and reserve officers. There is a
belief that Jimmy works on broad general principles, and many marines
fear that they will no longer be immune from his teeth if the
distinctive forest green of their organization is abandoned for the
conventional khaki of the rest of the army.

Some little time before the American troops first went into the
trenches, the marines were scattered into small detachments for police
duty. Many of them have since been brought together again. There is, of
course, a good deal of stuff and nonsense in stories about soldiers
saying, "We want to get a crack at them," and all that, but it is
literally and exactly true that the marines, both officers and men, were
deeply disappointed when they could not go to the front with the others.
Their professional pride was hurt.

Still they did not whine, but went about their traditional police work
with vigor. I was in a base hospital one day when a doughboy came in all
gory about the head. "What happened to you?" a doctor asked. "A marine
told me to button up my overcoat," said the doughboy, "and I started to
argue with him."

There are not many American army songs yet, but the marines did not wait
until the war for theirs. Most of it I have forgotten, but one of the
stunning couplets of the chorus is:

    If the army or the navy ever gaze on heaven's scenes
    They will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.




CHAPTER XI

FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS


War seemed less remote in the artillery camp than in any other section
of the American training area for the roar of the guns filled the air
every morning and they sounded just as ominous as if they were in
earnest. They were firing in the direction of Germany at that, but it
was a good many score of miles out of range. Just the same the French
were particular about the point. "We always point the guns toward
Germany even in practice if we can," said a French instructing officer,
"it's just as well to start right."

The camp consisted of a number of brick barracks and the soldiers and
officers were well housed. It was located in wild country, though, where
it was possible to find ranges up to twelve thousand yards. Scrubby
woods covered part of the ranges and the observation points towered up
a good deal higher than would be safe at the front. We went through the
woods the morning after our arrival and heard a perfect bedlam of fire
from the guns. There was the sharp decisive note of the seventy-five
which speaks quickly and in anger and the more deliberate boom of the
one hundred and fifty-five howitzer. This was a colder note but it was
none the less ominous. It had an air of premeditated wrath about it. The
shell from the seventy-five might get to its destination first but the
one hundred and fifty-five would create more havoc upon arrival. A
sentry warned us to take the left hand road at a fork in the woods and
presently we came upon one of the observation towers. It was crammed
with officers armed with field glasses. Every now and then they would
write things on paper. They seemed like so many reporters at a baseball
game recording hits and errors. When we got to the top of the tower we
found that large maps were part of the equipment as well as field
glasses. These were wonderfully accurate maps with every prominent tree
and church spire and house top indicated. The officers were ranging
from the maps. The French theory of artillery work was not new to the
American officers, but this was almost the first chance they had ever
had to work it out for we have no maps in America suitable for ranging.

According to theory the battery should first fire short and then long
and then split the bracket and land upon the target or thereabouts. The
men had not been working long and they were still a little more
proficient in firing short or long than in splitting the bracket. Later
the American artillery gave a very good account of itself at the school.
The French instructors told one particular battery that they were able
to fire the seventy-five faster than it had ever been fired in France
before. Perhaps there was just a shade of the over-statement of French
politeness in that, but it was without doubt an excellent battery. In
the lulls between fire could be heard the drone of aeroplanes for a
number of officers were flying to learn the principles of aerial
observation in its uses for fire control. Turning around we could also
see a large captive balloon. All the junior officers were allowed to
express a preference as to which branch of artillery work they preferred
and, although observation is the most dangerous of all, fully
seventy-five per cent, of the men indicated it as their choice.

Some American officers in other sections of the training area came to
the conclusion in time that we should go to the English for instruction
in some of the phases of modern warfare. We did in fact turn to the
English finally for bayonet instruction and a certain number of officers
thought that the English would also be useful to us in bombing, but I
never heard any question raised but that we must continue to go to the
French for instruction in field artillery until such time as we had
schools of our own.

The difference in language made occasional difficulties of course. "It
took us a couple of days to realize that when our instructor spoke of a
'rangerrang' he meant a 'range error,'" said one American officer, "but
now we get on famously."

We left the men in the tower with their maps and their glasses and went
down to see the guns. Our guide took us straight in front of the one
hundred and fifty-fives while they were firing, which was safe enough as
they were tossing their shells high in the air. It was better fun,
though, to stand behind these big howitzers, for by fixing your eye on a
point well up over the horizon it was possible to see the projectile in
flight. The shell did not seem to be moving very fast once it was
located. It looked for all the world as if the gunners were batting out
flies and this was the baseball which was sailing along.

The French officer who was showing us about said that he could see the
projectile as it left the mouth of the gun, but though the rest of us
tried, we could see nothing but the flash. Later we stood behind the
seventy-fives but since their trajectory is so much lower it is not
possible to see the shell which they fire. They seemed to make more
noise than the bigger guns. Fortunately it is no longer considered bad
form to stick your fingers in your ears when a gun goes off. Most of the
officers and men in this particular battery were as careful to shut out
the sound of the cannon as schoolgirls at a Civil War play. Not only did
they stuff their fingers in their ears, but they stood up on their toes
to lessen the vibration.

Guns have changed, however, since Civil War days. They are no longer
drab. Camouflage has attended to that. The guns we saw were streaked
with red and blue and yellow and orange. They were giddy enough to have
stood as columns in the Purple Poodle or any of the Greenwich Village
restaurants.

Before we left the camp we met Major General Peyton C. March, the new
chief of staff, who was then an artillery officer. We agreed that he was
an able soldier because he told us that he did not believe in
censorship. Regarding one slight phase of the training he bound us to
secrecy, but for the rest he said: "You may say anything you like about
my camp, good or bad. I believe that free and full reports in the
American newspapers are a good thing for our army."

We traveled many miles from the field gun school before we came to the
camp of the heavies. This, too, was a French school which had been
partially taken over by the Americans. The work was less interesting
here, for the men were not firing the guns yet, but studying their
mechanism and going through the motions of putting them in action. Many
of the officers attached to the heavies were coast artillerymen and
there was a liberal sprinkling of young reserve officers who had come
over after a little preliminary training at Fortress Monroe. The General
in charge of the camp told us that these new officers would soon be as
good as the best because the most important requirement was a technical
education and these men had all had college scientific training or its
equivalent. Just then they were all at school again cramming with all
the available textbooks about French big guns. They did not need to
depend on textbooks alone, for the camp contained types of most styles
of French artillery.

The pride of the contingent was a monster mounted on railroad trucks. It
fired a projectile weighing 1800 pounds. After the French custom, the
big howitzer had been honored by a name. "Mosquito" was painted on the
carriage in huge green letters.

"We call her mosquito," explained a French officer, "because she
stings."

"Mosquito" had buzzed no less than three hundred times at Verdun, but
she had a number of stings left. The Americans detailed with the gun
were loud in its praises and asserted that it was the finest weapon in
the world. There were other guns, though, which had their partisans.
Some swore by "Petite Lulu," a squat howitzer, which could throw a shell
high enough to clear Pike's Peak and still have something to spare.
There were champions also of "Gaby," a long nosed creature which
outranged all the rest. Marcel could talk a little faster than any gun
in camp, but her words carried less weight.

All the menial work about the camp was done by German prisoners. I was
walking through the camp one day when I saw a little tow-headed soldier
sitting at the doorstep of his barracks watching a file of Germans
shuffle by. They were men who had started to war with guns on their
shoulders, but now they carried brooms.

"Do you ever speak to the German prisoners?" I asked the soldier.

"Oh, yes," said the youngster; "some of them speak English, and they say
'Hello' to me and I say 'Hello' back to them. I feel sorry for them."

The little soldier looked at the shabby procession again and then he
leaned over to me confidentially and said with great earnestness as if
he had made up the phrase on the spot: "You know I have no quarrel with
the German people."

When we got home after our trips to the artillery camps we found an old
man in a French uniform eagerly waiting to see us. He told us that he
was an American, and more than that, a Californian. His name was George
La Messneger and he was sixty-seven years old. He was French by birth
and had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, but the next year he went to
California and lived in Los Angeles until the outbreak of the great war.
Although more than sixty, La Messneger was accepted by a French
recruiting officer and he was in Verdun two weeks after he arrived in
France. Three days later he was wounded and when we met him he had added
to his adventures by winning a promotion to sous-lieutenant and gaining
the croix de guerre and the medaille militaire.

Old George came to be a frequent visitor, but though we urged him on he
would never tell us much about the war. He wanted to talk about
California.

"I tell the men in my regiment," George would begin, "that out in Los
Angeles we cut alfalfa five times a year, but they won't believe me."

Gently we tried to lead George back to the war and his experiences. "How
did you get the military medal, lieutenant?" somebody asked.

"Oh, that was at Verdun," replied the old man.

"It must have been pretty hot up there," said another correspondent.

"Yes," said George, and he began to muse. We imagined that he was
thinking of those hot days in February when all the guns, big and
little, were turned loose.

"Yes," said George, "it was pretty hot," and we drew our chairs closer.
"You know," continued the old man, "a lot of people will tell you that
Los Angeles is hot. Don't pay any attention to them. I've lived there
forty years, and I've slept with a blanket pretty much all the time. The
nights are always cool."

I had heard George before and I knew that he was gone for the evening
now. As I tiptoed out of the room the old soldier in French horizon blue
was just warming up to his favorite topic. "San Francisco's nothing,"
said George, dismissing the city with as much scorn as if it had been
Berlin or Munich. He talked with such vehemence that all his medals
rattled.

"We're nearer the Panama Canal," said George, "we're nearer China and
Japan, and as for harbors----"

But just then the door closed.




CHAPTER XII

OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS


At first the ace is low. Our young aviators who will be among the most
romantic heroes of them all begin humbly on the ground. The American
army now has the largest flying field in France for its very own, but
during summer and early autumn many of our men trained in the French
schools. There his groundling days try the aviator's dignity. He must
hop before he can fly and perhaps "hop" is too dignified a word. When we
visited one of the biggest schools, all the new pupils were practicing
in a ridiculous clipped wing Bleriot called a penguin. This machine was
a groundhog which scurried over the earth at a speed of twenty or thirty
miles an hour. It never left the grass tops and yet it provided a
certain amount of excitement for its pilot, or maybe rider would be
better.

The favorite trick of the penguin is to turn suddenly in a short half
circle and collapse on its side. It takes a good deal of skill to keep
it straight and when the aviator has learned that much he is allowed to
make a trip in a machine which leaps a little in the air every now and
then, only to flop to earth again. Then he is ready to fly a Bleriot,
though, of course, his first trips are made as a passenger. Very little
time is spent in flying. Staying up in the air is no great trick. It's
the coming down which gives the trouble. And so the student is eternally
trying landings. He smashes a good many machines and here the French
show their keen realization of the mental factor in flying.

"I made a bad landing one day," an American student named Billy Parker
told me, "and smashed my machine up good and proper. I thought I'd
killed myself, but they dragged me out from under the junk, picked the
pieces of wood and aluminum out of my head, stuffed some cotton into my
nose to check the bleeding and in fifteen minutes they had a new machine
out and had me up in the air again."

Parker said he felt a bit queer when he got up in the air again. "I had
a sort of feeling that I belonged down on the ground and not up there,"
he said. "That was peculiar because usually the air feels very stable
and friendly. You hate to come down, but this time I was anxious to get
back and after circling the field once I came down. My landing was all
right, too, and since then I've never had that scared feeling about the
air."

The French theory is that the mistake must be corrected immediately. The
man who has had a smash-up is apt to get air shy if he has a chance to
brood over his mishap for a day or two.

The last test of the preliminary school is a thirty mile flight with
three landings. After he has done that the student goes to Pau for his
test in acrobatics. The chief stunt set for him here is a vrille. The
student is required to put his machine into a spin at a height of about
8500 feet and bring it out again. The trick is not particularly
difficult if the man keeps his head, but the tendency is to turn on the
power which only accelerates the fall and some are killed at Pau. My
friend caught malaria as soon as he got there and was allowed to take
things easily for a week. Finally his test was set for Wednesday. On
Monday morning the man who slept in the cot to his left went out for his
test and was killed and on Tuesday the man from the right hand cot was
killed. Death came very close to the young American. He and a French
student arrived at the training ground at about the same time. Two
machines were ready. The instructor hesitated a second and then assigned
the American to the machine at the right. A few minutes later the
Frenchman was killed when a wing came off his machine as soon as he
began his vrille. Fortunately Parker did not know that until after he
had passed his own test. He saw one other man killed before he left Pau
and that horrified him more than the accident on the morning of his
trial.

"The judge who decided whether you passed your test was a little
Frenchman with a monocle," he said. "He sat in a rocking chair at the
edge of the field and you had to do the vrille straight in front of him
or it didn't count. He simply wouldn't turn to look at a flyer. I was
standing beside him when one fellow got rattled in the middle of a
vrille and put his power on. Even at that he almost lifted his machine
out but she came down too fast for him. There was a big smash-up and
people came running out to the wreck. They sent for a doctor and then
for a priest, but the terrible little man never moved from his chair.
'You see,' he cried to me, 'he was stupid! stupid!' This flying test had
come to seem nothing more than an examination bluebook to him. A fellow
passed or he flunked and that was all there was to it."

Luck plays its biggest part in a flier's early days at the front. He has
a lot to learn after he gets there, but the French do not nurse him
along much. He has to take his chances. It may be that he will get in
some very tight place before he has learned the fine points and a future
star will be lost at the outset of his career. On the other hand he may
come up against German fliers as green as himself and gradually gain a
technique before he is called upon to face an enemy ace or a superior
combination of planes. At the front as in the schools the French pay
keen attention to the mental state of the fliers.

"There was always champagne at mess and they kept the graphophone
playing all through dinner any night a man from our squadron didn't come
back," an aviator said to me. "One afternoon we lost two men and before
dinner they took a leaf out of the table. Our commander didn't want us
to notice any empty seats or the extra space."

It is difficult to say which nation has the most daring aviators, but
that honor probably belongs to the English. I asked a Frenchman about it
and he said: "The English do most of the things you would call stunts.
There was one, for instance, that made a landing on a German aviation
field and after firing a few rounds at the aerodrome flew away again.
That was a stunt. But we think the English are fools with their
sportsmanship and all that. It doesn't work now. We look at it a little
differently. We cannot take fool chances. If you take a fool chance you
are very likely to get killed. That is not nice, of course. We do not
like to be killed, but more than that, it is one less man for France. We
must wait until there is a fair show."

"And when is that?" I asked.

"When there are not more than four Germans against you," said the
careful Frenchman.

The warlike spirit of the French aviators extended even to the servants
at the preliminary school which we visited. The Americans there were all
quartered in one big room and their general man of all work was a little
Annamite from French-Indo-China. Hy seemed the most peaceful member of a
peace-loving race as he moved about the barracks just before dawn every
morning waking up the students with a smiling "Bon jour" and an equally
good-natured "Café." One day he had a holiday and after borrowing a
uniform he went to a photographer's in the nearest town. From the
photographer he borrowed a rifle, a cutlass and a pistol. He thrust the
cutlass into his belt and shouldered the other two weapons. After he had
assumed a fighting face the picture was taken.

The next day Hy varied the routine. He began with "Bon jour" as usual,
but before he said "Café" he drew from behind his back the photograph,
and pointing to it proudly, exclaimed, "brave soldat."

We went from the French school to the big field where the American camp
was under construction. The bulk of the work was being done by German
prisoners. One of these, a sergeant, had been a well known architect in
Munich. The American workers consulted him now and then in regard to
some building problem and he always gave them good advice. He took
almost a professional pride in the growing buildings even if they were
designed to house the men who will one day be the eyes of the American
army. We asked another prisoner how he got along with the Americans and
he replied: "Oh, some of them aren't half bad." A third spoke to us in
meager broken English, although he said that he had lived five years in
Buffalo. "Are you going back to Germany after the war?" we asked him.
"Nein," he replied decisively, "Chicago."

Most prisoners professed to be confident that Germany would win the war
and they all based their faith on the submarine. As we started to go the
man from Buffalo suddenly held out his hand and said: "So long." Several
of the correspondents shook hands with him much to the horror of a young
American in the French flying corps who accompanied us.

"You mustn't do that," he explained. "Any Frenchman who saw you do that
would be very much shocked."

I remembered then that when I saw German prisoners in any of the large
towns the French inhabitants took great pains to ignore them. I never
heard French people jeer at their prisoners. Their attitude was one of
complete aloofness. Once I saw prisoners in a big railroad station and
the crowds swept by on either side without a glance as if these men from
Prussia had been so many trunks or trucks or benches.

If the young Americans at the school had not been so busy learning the
business of flying they could have formed a cracker jack nine or eight
or eleven, as the squad included some of the most famous of our college
athletes.

We also visited an English aerodrome which was not far from our
headquarters. This was a camp from which planes started for raids into
Germany. The men who were carrying on this work were all youngsters. I
saw no one who seemed to be more than twenty-five. Just the day before
we arrived the Germans had discovered their whereabouts and had raided
the hangars. One man had been killed and two planes wrecked. Machine gun
bullets had left holes in all the buildings about the place. The English
officer smiled when we looked about. "Oh, yes," he said, "the Hun was
over last night and gave us a bit of a bounce." His slang was fluent but
puzzling. He was explaining why he and his fellow aviators flew at a
certain height on raids. "You see," he said, "the Hun can't get his hate
up as far as that."

The bombing machines of the squadron were huge, powerful planes, but
they all had pet names painted upon them such as "Bessie" and "Baby" and
"Winifred" which had been twice to Stuttgart. These English fliers were
a quiet, reticent crowd who became fearfully embarrassed if anybody
tried to draw them out on the subject of their exploits. One of them
went over to an American Red Cross hospital nearby a few days after our
visit and played bridge with three American doctors there. He had been a
rather frequent visitor and a keen and eager player, so they were
somewhat surprised when he told them at nine o'clock that he would have
to go. He was three francs behind and started to fumble around in his
pockets to find the change. "Oh, never mind," said one of the doctors.
"Some other night will do. You'll be over here again pretty soon, I
hope."

"Oh, no," said the young Englishman, "I'd rather pay up now. Sorry to
toddle off so early. Beastly nuisance, you know, but I've got to go over
and bomb Metz to-night."

Much more would be heard of the flying exploits of the English if their
individual reticence were not combined with a governmental policy of not
announcing the names of the fliers who bring down enemy planes.
Unfortunately, the American army seems prepared to follow this example.
One of the high officers in the American air service in France said that
he did not intend to treat aviators like prima donnas. He added that he
thought it was a big mistake to advertise aces. However, the Germans
play up their star airmen in the newspapers and on the moving picture
screen and it must be admitted that they have not made many mistakes
from a purely military point of view.

Inevitably, however, the status of the flier is changing. Nobody regrets
this more than the aviators of France. The French army used to have a
saying, "all aviators are a little crazy," and nobody believed it so
thoroughly as the aviators. They took great pride in being unlike other
people in a war which was all cramped up into schedule. An aviator got
up when he felt like it and flew when the mood was on. If he felt
depressed, or unlucky, or out of sorts, he rolled over and went to sleep
again. Nobody said anything about it. When he fought the battle was a
duel with an opponent who was also a knight and sportsman although a
Boche.

But there was no keeping efficiency out of the air. The German brought
it there. He discovered that two planes were better than one and three
even better. He introduced teamwork and the lone French errants of the
air began to be picked off by groups of Germans who would send one
machine after another diving down on a single foe. The Flying Circus and
other aerial teams of the Germans have not only driven chivalry from the
air, but they have taken a good deal of the joy out of flying. Very
reluctantly the French have adopted squadron flying and the airman now
finds himself obeying commands just as if he were an infantryman or an
artillerist. Even the civilian population has begun to show that it
realized the change in the status of the aviator. There was, for
instance, poor Navarre, the finest flier in the army, who was sent to
prison because he came to Paris on a spree and ran down three gendarmes
with his racing auto. French aviators cannot see the sense of punishing
Navarre. I only heard one aviator who had any excuse to offer for the
civilian authorities.

"After all," he said, "they showed a little judgment. They did not
arrest Navarre until he had run down three gendarmes."

Although many men in the army have longer lists of fallen Germans to
their credit, no Frenchman has ever flown with the grace and skill of
Navarre. The great Guynemer was only a fair flier and owed his success
to his skill as a gunner. But Navarre was master of all the tricks. Upon
one occasion he bet a companion that he could make a landing on an army
blanket. The blanket was duly fastened in the middle of the field and
away flew the aviator. His preliminary calculation was just a bit off
and at the last minute he nosed sharply down and wrecked the machine.
But he hit the blanket and won the bet.

Next to Germany, America has done most to take romance out of the air,
so the Frenchmen say. The American air student attends lectures and
learns about meteorology and physics. He learns how to take a motor
apart and put it together again. In fact, he is versed in all the theory
of flying long before he is allowed to venture in the air. Of course
this is the best system. It would be the system of any nation which had
the opportunity of taking its time, yet the scholarly approach cannot
fail to dim adventure a little bit. Launcelot would have been a somewhat
less dashing knight if he had begun his training in chivalry by learning
the minimum number of foot pounds necessary to unhorse an opponent or
the relative resilience of chain mail and armor. Yet not all the
training in the world can take the stunt spirit out of the young
American aviator. One who shipped as a passenger with a Frenchman bound
for a bombing raid, paid for his passage by crawling out along the
fuselage of the machine to release a bomb which had stuck. But it was a
little incident back of the lines which gave me the best insight into
the character of the American aviator. I know a young aviator of
twenty-five who is already a major and the commander of a squadron. He
wasn't particularly old for his years, either. I remember he told us
with great glee how he and another young aviation officer had nailed the
purser in his cabin one night during the trip across. Yet he could be
stern upon occasion. He was walking along the field one day when he saw
a plane looping. He was surprised because the French instructor attached
to the squadron had told them that the type of machine which they were
using would not do the loop the loop. It didn't have sufficient power,
he said, nor would it stand the strain.

"It made five loops," said the major in telling the story, "and they
were dandies, too, as good as I ever saw. I thought it was the
Frenchman, of course, but I asked somebody and he said, 'No, it's
Harry.' When he came down I bawled him out. 'You were told not to do
that, weren't you?' I asked him. He said, 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, what did
you do it for?' I asked him. 'I guess it was because the Frenchman told
me it was impossible,' he said. I told him that he would have to turn
his machine over to another man and that other disciplinary measures
would be applied. He's in disgrace still and I suppose I've got to keep
it up for a while. That's all right, good discipline and all that sort
of thing, you know, but there's one thing I can't take away from him,
and nobody else can. He's the only man in France that ever looped that
type of machine. He did it. By golly, I envy him, but I don't dare let
him know it."




CHAPTER XIII

HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS


Some of the compliments the mannerly French poured out upon the army
left the Americans feeling that they didn't quite deserve them. Others
they could take standing. Well to the front of the second lot were all
the good words for the medical corps. A leading writer for a big
Parisian afternoon paper took the first three columns of his first page
to say with undisguised emotion that the French government not merely
could, with profit, but should and must pattern after the American Army
Medical Service.

One good army hospital in France is like another and so let it be the
New York Post Graduate unit which was picked at random for the purpose
of a visit. We straggled off the train with two old peasant women whose
absorbed faces under their peaked white caps did not encourage us to
ask our way of them, and one poilu, bent under the astonishing
miscellany of the home-going French soldier. He lost his chance to
escape us by eyeing us with frank if friendly curiosity. Could he direct
us to the American Army Hospital, we asked, and he wrinkled his weather
worn nose. No, he hadn't been home since the Americans had come to war,
but, of course, there was only one building in town big enough and new
enough to be used by the Americans. If we should turn to the left and
then to the right and then to the left again we would come to the school
and there he thought we would find the Americans. We did. To the far end
of the little town we trudged till we came to a low stone building, gray
and white, of good stout masonry. We knew it was the American hospital
because over the arched entrance there hung a "bannière etoilée."

We neared the entrance to the tune of some trumpet blasts, not very well
played, and we peered from arch to inner court yard just in time to see
a swarm of khaki-half-clad soldiers running out from barracks. By the
time they reached the mess door they were khaki-clad. The officer who
came to take us about explained that on Sunday mornings everybody slept
late and dressed on the way to breakfast and that discipline was better
on week days. Then he told us that of all the privates in that unit not
one had ever been a soldier before. They had been picked for medical
service first and military service at such time as the officers had
learned enough to teach it to them. I remember later that one of the
soldiers objected privately to being drilled by a dentist.

Nine-tenths of the men were fresh out of college, the officer told us,
and half the other tenth were freshmen or sophomores. Many of the
enlisted men, we were told, had left incomes in the tens of thousands
and a few in the hundreds of thousands. The enlisted personnel included
one matinee idol, one young New York dramatic critic, two middling well
known young authors, a composer of good but saleable music, and a golfer
who gets two in the national rating.

The wards were not very different from those of a New York hospital
back home, except that they housed a strange mixture of patients. About
half were American soldiers and the rest were civilians from the country
round about. The French civilians were convinced that though the
American doctors might cure them with their marvelous medicines and
speckless cleanliness they would surely kill them with air. This
particular base hospital was fulfilling two functions for the civilian
population. It was seeking to take out adenoids and let in air. A great
New York specialist was attending to the adenoids and making progress.
It was not always possible to convince the patient that it would do him
any good to have his adenoids removed, but if the operation gave the
kind American doctor any pleasure he was willing to let him go ahead.
The air campaign was making slower progress. Dislike of air is centuries
old in France and it has become an instinct with the race. I rode in a
railroad car with a French aviator on a balmy day of early autumn and
his first act upon entering the compartment was to close both windows.
Everybody in this part of France has his bed placed inside a closet and
at night he closes the doors.

Worst of all were the extra precautions against air which the French
peasants took in case of illness. The young French doctors were at the
front and the old men who remained always began the treatment of a case
by advising the patient's relatives to close all the windows and start a
fire.

At the call of sick babies and old folk of the countryside came
aristocrats of the New York medical profession whose fees at home would
have bought the house in which the patient lived. Later, of course, the
doctors of the hospital will be more rushed by the necessities of the
soldiers.

"This is hardly more than a germ of what we plan," a doctor explained to
us. "Do you see those tents?" He pointed across a small field. "Those
are American engineers and they're going to do nothing for the next few
months but build additions to this hospital. Every time I go 'way for a
day I come back to find that they've added a thousand beds to the
capacity we're planning for. We will extend all the way across the
fields over to that road before they're done with us." He spoke in a
joyful voice as if nothing in the world was quite so inspiring as a huge
hospital filled with patients. That was the professional touch. I
remember the story one of the doctors told us about a young surgeon who
was sent up to the French front to help handle the cases after a big
drive. One of his first patients was a German prisoner who had been shot
just above the elbow and bayoneted in the stomach. The doctor had no
great trouble with the elbow and he did what he could for the abdominal
wound.

"I could save that man all right if it wasn't for that bayonet wound,"
he said to another American doctor close at hand, and then he added in a
reproachful voice as he pointed to the gash: "That's an awful dangerous
place to stab a man."

There were no wounded at the hospital at the time of our visit, but some
of the soldiers in the medical ward were very sick. There was one boy
there, who has since mended and gone away, whose recovery seemed
hopeless. The doctor in charge saw that something was troubling the
young soldier and so he came to him and told him that he was aggravating
his illness by this worry or desire.

"Whatever this thing is, you must tell me," said the doctor.

"Do you think I'm going to die?" the boy asked anxiously.

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," the doctor answered a little evasively.

"I knew I was pretty sick," said the boy, catching the evasiveness of
the doctor's tone, "and if you think I'm going to die and won't ever get
back home again, there's just one thing I want to ask you to do for me."

"What's that?" said the doctor.

"Couldn't you fix it up for me just once to have ham and eggs and apple
pie for breakfast?"

The most important thing in the case of all the sick men was to keep
them from brooding about home. The doctors made a point of getting
around and talking to the patients to cheer them up. One of them
complained of homesickness.

"Yes," said the doctor, "I suppose we all have people back there that we
miss."

"You can just bet I do," said the sick soldier, "I've got the finest
wife in the world in Des Moines and two children and a Ford."

The health of the staff was excellent, but sometimes they felt homesick,
too. The enlisted men gave a show the night I was at the hospital and
during the course of the performance everybody wept or at least got
moist eyed because the play was about New York. It was laid in a year as
nameless as the place where the hospital is located. All the program
said was: "The bachelor apartments of Schuyler Van Allen on a fine June
night a few weeks after the end of the war." Schuyler had just come back
from Europe and he found his apartment with everything just as it was on
the night he had sailed for France. There was the daily paper he had
left behind with the date May 8, 1917, and he looked at the old sheet
and mused as he read some of the headlines:

"Kaiser Calls on Troops to Stand Firm," read Schuyler. "The Kaiser," he
said to himself, and then he added: "I wonder whatever became of him."

The audience laughed at that, but in a moment the doctors and the nurses
and the patients who weren't sick enough to stay in bed wept. It was all
because Schuyler looked out of the window and said to his friend: "Oh,
it's great to be on Fifth Avenue again. I want to see it in every light
and at every hour of the day. It was fairly blazing tonight with the
same old hurrying crowd jamming the traffic at Forty-second Street and
the same old mob pushing and shoving its way into the Grand Central
subway station." The mention of the subway was too much for the
audience. By this time the nurse who sat in front of me was dabbing
violently at her eyes with her pocket handkerchief. She was breaking my
heart and I leaned forward and asked: "What part of New York do you come
from?"

"I wasn't ever in New York," she said. "I come from Lima, Ohio."

Like the medical corps, the engineers were peculiarly American and
peculiarly efficient as well. We first came upon them when we saw a
tall, stringy man looking out of the window of a little locomotive which
pulled a train up to a point at the French front. We thought he was an
American because his jaws were moving back and forth slowly and
meditatively. Inquiry brought confirmation.

"Sure, I'm an American," said the man in the blue jumpers. "I guess I've
kicked a hobo off the train for every telegraph pole back on the old
Rock Island, but this is the toughest railroading job I've struck yet."

The man in the locomotive was a member of an American regiment of
railroad engineers which had taken over an important military road. They
had the honor to be the first American troops at the French front who
came under fire. The engineers were willing to admit that while washouts
and spreading rails were old stories to them, they did get a bit of a
thrill the first time they found their tracks torn up by shellfire. But
the aeroplanes were worse.

"One night," said our friend the engineer, "there was one of those
flying machines just followed along with us and every time we fired the
engine and the sparks flew up she'd drop a bomb on us or shoot at us
with her machine gun. We tried to hit it up a bit, but she kept right up
with us. They didn't hit us, but once they got so rough we just slowed
down and laid under the engine for a spell until they decided to quit
picking on us."

This regiment of railroad engineers was the huskiest outfit I saw in
France. It was carefully selected from the railroads running into
Chicago. Of the men originally selected only about one-seventh were
taken because the railroads found so many men who were eager to go. One
company boasted one hundred and twenty-five six-footers and all were
two-fisted fighters. The discipline of the regiment, of course, was not
that of an infantry unit. I watched an animated discussion between a
captain and his men as to where some material should be placed when the
regiment first moved into a new camp.

"You've got the wrong dope about that, Bill," said a private to his
captain very earnestly. The officer looked at him severely.

"I've told you before about this discipline business, Harry," he said.
"Any time you want to kick about my orders you call me mister." It is
hard for a railroad man to realize that a couple of silver bars have
changed a yardmaster into a captain.

The regiment set great store by the number thirteen. It was put into
service on a Friday the thirteenth and it left its American base in two
sections of thirteen cars each. The locomotives' headlight numbers each
totaled thirteen and the thirteenth of a month found the regiment
arriving at its European port of entry. The thirteenth of the next month
found the regiment starting for its French base and when the camp was
reached a group of interpreters was waiting.

"How many are you?" asked the colonel.

"Myself and twelve companions," replied one of the Frenchmen.

The regiment will never forget the first night at its French base. It
arrived at midnight but crowds thronged the darkened streets and gave
the big Americans an enthusiastic greeting, although it was forbidden to
talk above undertones. Since they could not hurrah for the soldiers,
the villagers hugged them, and from black windows roses were pelted on
shadowy figures who tramped up the street to the low rumble of a muffled
band.

"Great people, these French, so demonstrative," said a captain, who was
once a trainmaster in a Texas town.

"I was in the theater the other night," he said, "and a couple of
performers on the stage started to sing 'Madelon.' Well, I'd heard it
before and I knew the chorus, so when they got that far along I joined
in. Well, there was a young girl sitting next me and when she saw that I
knew the song she just threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

"And now," said the captain, "everybody in the regiment's after me to
teach 'em that song."




CHAPTER XIV

WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY


"The Germans haven't thrown a single shell into Rheims today," said our
conducting officer apologetically. "Yesterday," he continued more
cheerfully, "they sent more than five hundred big ones and they wounded
two of my officers."

We left the little inn at the fringe of the town and rode into the
square in front of the cathedral. At the door the officer turned us over
to the curator. The old man led us up the aisle to a point not far from
the altar. Here he stopped, and pointing to a great shell hole in the
floor said: "On this spot in the year 496 Clovis, the King of the
Franks, was baptized by the blessed St. Remi with oil which was brought
from heaven in a holy flask by a dove."

Something flew over the cathedral just then, but we knew it was not a
dove. It whistled like a strong wind, and presently the shop of a
confectioner some ten blocks away folded up with a ripping, smashing
sound. Clovis, with his fourteen centuries wrapped about him, was safe
enough. He had quit the spot in time. But a younger man ducked. The old
guide did not even look up.

"The first stone of the present cathedral was laid in May, 1212, by the
Archbishop Alberic de Humbert," he said.

Another big shell tore the sky, and this time the smash was nearer. It
seemed certainly no more than nine blocks away. The young man began to
calculate. He figured that he was seven centuries down, while the
Germans had nine blocks to go. That was something, but the guide failed
to keep up his pace through the centuries. There were no more happy
hiatuses.

"Scholars dispute," he continued, "as to who was the architect of the
cathedral. Some say it was designed by Robert de Coucy; others name
Bernard de Soissons, but certain authorities hold to Gauthier de Reims
and Jean d'Orbais." Two more shells crossed the cathedral. The
controversy seemed regrettable and the young man shifted constantly from
foot to foot. He appeared to feel that there was less chance of being
hit if he were on the wing, so to speak.

"One or two have named Jean Loups," said the guide, but he shook his
head even as he mentioned him. It was evident that he had no patience
with Loups or his backers. Indeed, the heresy threw him off his stride,
and the next smash which came during the lull was more significant than
any of the others. The crash was the peculiarly disagreeable one which
occurs when a large shell strikes a small hardware store. Even the guide
noticed this shell. It reminded him of the war.

"Since April," he said, "the Germans have been bombarding Rheims with
naval guns. All the shells which they fire now are .320 or larger. They
fire about 150 shells a day at the city, mostly in the afternoon, and
they usually aim at the cathedral or some place near by."

The young man noted by his watch that it was just half-past one.

"A week ago the Germans fired a .320 shell through the roof, but it did
not explode. I will show it to you, but first I must ask you to touch
nothing, not even a piece of glass, for we want to put everything back
again that we can after the war."

On the floor there was evidence that some patient hand had made a
beginning of seeking to fit together in proper sequence all the
available tiny glass fragments from the shattered rose windows. It was a
pitiful jigsaw puzzle, which would not work. The curator stepped briskly
up the nave, and at the end of a hundred paces he stopped.

"This is the most dangerous portion of the cathedral," he explained.
"Most of the big shells have come in here." And he pointed to three
great holes in the ceiling. Then he showed us the monstrous shell which
had not exploded and the fragments of others which had. Down toward the
west end of town fresh fragments were being made. Each hole in the
cathedral roof sounded a different note as the shells raced overhead.
But the old curator was musing again. He had forgotten the war, even
though the smashed and twisted bits of iron and stone from yesterday's
clean hit lay at his feet.

"The first stone of the present cathedral was laid in May, 1212, by the
Archbishop Alberic de Humbert," he said. "Alberic gave all the money he
could gather and the chapter presented its treasury, and all about the
clergy appealed for funds in the name of God. Kings of France and mighty
lords made contributions, and each year there was a great pilgrimage,
headed by the image of the Blessed Virgin, through all the villages. And
the building grew and sculptors from all parts of France came and
embellished it and in 1430 it was finished. You see, gentlemen," he
said, "it took more than two hundred years to build our cathedral."

We left the cathedral then and paused for a minute in the square before
the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, who brought her king to Rheims and had him
crowned. In some parts of France devout persons speak of the Jeanne
statue in Rheims as a miracle because, although the cathedral has been
scarred and shattered and every building round the square badly
damaged, the statue of Jeanne is untouched. I looked closely and found
the miracle was not perfect. A tiny bit of the scabbard of Jeanne had
been snipped off by a flying shrapnel fragment, but the sword of Jeanne,
which is raised high above her head, has not a nick in it.

Crossing the square we went into the office of _L'Eclaireur de l'Est_.
This daily newspaper has no humorous column, no editorials, no sporting
page and no dramatic reviews, and yet is probably the most difficult
journal in the world to edit. The chief reportorial task of the staff of
_L'Eclaireur_ is to count the number of shells which fall into the city
each day. That doesn't sound hard. The reporter can hear them all from
his desk and many he can see, for the cathedral just across the street
is still the favorite target of the Germans. Sometimes the reporter does
not have to look so far. The office of _L'Eclaireur_ has been hit eleven
times during the bombardment and three members of the staff have been
killed. One big shell fell in the composing room and so now the paper
is set by hand. It is a single sheet and the circulation is limited to
the three or four thousand civilians, who have stuck to Rheims
throughout the bombardment. One of the few who remain is a man who keeps
a picture postcard shop in a building next door to the newspaper office.
His roof has been knocked down about his head and his business is hardly
thriving. I asked him why he remained.

"I started to go away several months ago after one day when they put
some gas shells into the town," he said. "The very next morning I put
all my things into a cart and started up that street there. I had gone
just about to the third street when a shell hit the house behind me. It
killed my horse and wrecked the wagon and so I picked up my things and
came back. It seemed to me I wasn't meant to go away from Rheims."

The shelling increased in violence before we left the office of
_L'Eclaireur_. One shell was certainly not more than a hundred and fifty
yards away, but the work went on without interruption. The printers who
were setting ads never looked up. Mostly these advertisements were of
houses in Rheims which were renting lower than ever before. If there was
anyone in the visiting party who felt uncomfortable he was unwilling to
show it, for just outside the door of the newspaper office there sat an
old lady with a lapful of fancy work. A shell came from over the hills
and, in the seconds while it whistled and then smashed, the old lady
threaded her needle.

A day later, when some of us were willing to confess that of all
miserable sounds the whistling of a shell was the meanest, we found a
curious kink in the brain of everyone. It was the universal experience
that the slightest bit of cover, however inadequate, gave a sense of
safety out of all proportion to its utility. Thus we all felt much more
uncomfortable in the square than when we stood in the composing room of
the newspaper which was shielded by the remains of a glass skylight. The
same curious psychological twist can be found among soldiers at the
front. Again and again men will be found taking apparent comfort in the
fact that half an inch of tin roof protects them from the shells of the
Germans.

One is always taken from the cathedral of Rheims to the wine cellars.
The children of darkness are invariably wiser than the children of light
and the champagne merchants have not suffered as the churchmen have.
Their business places have been knocked about their heads, but their
treasures are underground deep enough to defy the biggest shells. In the
cellar of a single company which we visited there were 12,000,000 quarts
of wine. Even the German invasion at the beginning of the war failed to
deplete this stock. Hundreds of people live in these cellars, which are
laid out in avenues and streets. We came first to New York, a street
with tier upon tier of wine bottles; then to Boston, then to Buenos
Ayres, then to Montreal. One of the visitors explained that the street
named New York contained the wine destined to be shipped to that city,
while Buenos Ayres contained the consignment for the Argentine capital,
and so on. We nodded acceptance of the theory, but the next wine-laden
street was called Carnot and the next was Jeanne d'Arc.

From the cellars we made a journey to a battery of French .75's. It was
a peaceful military station, for so well were the guns concealed that
they seemed exempt from German fire, in spite of the fact that they had
been in place for half a year. The men sat about underground playing
cards and reading newspapers, but the commander of the battery was
unwilling that we should go with such a peaceful impression of his guns.
He brought his men to action with a word or two and sent six shells
sailing at the German first line trenches for our benefit. We left, half
deafened, but delighted.

No child could be more eager to show a toy than is a French officer to
let a visitor see in some small fashion how the war wags. We went from
the battery to a first line trench. It was slow work down miles and
miles of camouflaged road to the communicating trench, and all along the
line we were stopped by kindly Frenchmen, who wanted us to see how their
dugouts were decorated or the nature of their dining room or the first
aid dressing station or any little detail of the war with which they
were directly concerned. Much can be done with a dugout when a few back
numbers of _La Vie Parisienne_ are available. Still, this scheme of
decoration may be carried too far. I will never forget the face of a Y.
M. C. A. man who joined us at a French officers' mess one day. It was a
low ceilinged room, with pine walls, but not an inch of wall was
visible, for a complete papering of _La Vie Parisienne_ pictures had
been provided. Among the ladies thus drafted for decorative purposes
there was perhaps chiffon enough to make a single arm brassard.

Trenches, save in the very active sectors, give the visitor a sense of
security. Open places are the ones which try the nerves of civilians,
and it was pleasant to walk with a wall of earth on either hand, even if
some of us did have to stoop a bit. From the point where we entered the
communication trench to the front line was probably not more than half a
mile as the crow flies--if, indeed, he is foolish enough to travel over
trenches--but the sunken pathway turned and twisted to such an extent
that it must have been two miles before we struck even the third line.
Here we were held while ever so many dugouts and kitchens and gas alarm
stations and telephones were exhibited for us. They were all included in
the routine of war, but of a sudden romance popped up from underground.
The conducting officer paused at the entrance of a passage. "Another
dugout" we thought.

"Bring them up!" said the officer to a soldier, and the poilu scrambled
down the steps and came up with a bird cage containing two birds.

"These are the last resort," explained the officer. "We send messages
from the trenches by telephone, if we can. If the wires are destroyed we
use flashes from a light, but if that station is also broken and we must
have help the birds are freed."

Neither pigeon seemed in the least puffed up over the responsibility
which rested upon him.

The German trenches were just 400 yards away from the first lines of the
French. It was possible to see them by peering over the rim of the
trench, but we quickly ducked down again. Presently we grew less
cautious, and one or two tried to stare the Germans out of countenance.
If they could see that strangers were peeping at them they paid no
attention.

The French officer in charge seemed embarrassed. He explained that it
was an exceptionally quiet day. Only the day before the Germans had been
active with trench mortars, and he couldn't understand why they were
sulking now. Possibly the bombardment from the French .75's, which had
been going on all day, had softened them a bit. He looked about the
trench dejectedly. The soldiers of the front line were playing cards,
eating soup or modeling little grotesque figures out of the soft rock
which lined the walls of the trenches. He called sharply to a soldier,
who fetched a box of rifle grenades out of a cubbyhole and sent half a
dozen, one after the other, spinning at the German lines. Probably they
fell short, or perhaps the Germans were simply sullen. At any rate, they
paid no attention. They were not disposed into being prodded to show
off for American visitors.

The officer suddenly thought up a method to retrieve the lost reputation
of his trench. If we could only stay until dark he would send us all out
on a patroling party right up to the wire in front of the German first
line. We declined, and made some little haste to leave this ever so
obliging officer. In another moment we feared he would organize an
exhibition offensive for our benefit and reserve us places in the first
wave.

If things were quiet on the ground there was plenty of activity aloft.
It was a clear day, and both sides had big sausage balloons up for
observation. Once a German plane tried to attack a French sausage, but
it was driven off, and all day long the Germans sought without success
to wing the balloon with one of their long range guns. In that
particular sector on that particular day the French unquestionably had
the mastery of the air. We saw four of their 'planes in the air to every
one German, and once a fleet of five cruised over the German lines. The
Boche opened on them with shrapnel. It was a clear day, without a
breath of wind, and the white puffs clung to the sky at the point where
they broke. Presently the French planes swooped much lower, and the
Germans opened on them with machine guns. Somebody has said that machine
gun fire sounds as if a crazy carpenter was shingling a roof, and
somebody else has compared the noise to a typewriter being operated in
an upper room, but it is still more like a riveting machine. It has a
business-like, methodical sound to me. To my ear there is no malice in a
machine gun, but then I have never heard it from an aeroplane.

The officer in charge accompanied us to the end of the communicating
trench.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

We told him that we were going directly to Paris.

"Have a good time," he said, "but leave one dinner and one drink for
me."

"You are going to Paris?" we asked.

He looked over toward the German wire and smiled a little. "I may," he
said.




CHAPTER XV

VERDUN


From the hills around Verdun we saw the earth as it must have looked on
perhaps the fourth day of creation week. It was all frowsy mud and
slime. Man was down deep in the dust from which he will spring again
some day. There was not even a foothold for poppies on the hills around
Verdun, for mingled with the old earth scars were fresh ones, and there
will be more tomorrow.

The Germans have been pushed back of the edges of the bowl in which
Verdun lies, and now their only eyes are aeroplanes. Big naval guns are
required to reach the city itself, but the Germans are not content to
leave the battered town alone. They bang away at ruins and kick a city
which is down. They fire, too, at the citadel, but do no more than
scratch the top of this great underground fortress.

Our guide and mentor at Verdun was a distinguished colonel, very
learned in military tactics and familiar with every phase of the various
Verdun campaigns. The extent of his information was borne home to us the
first day of the trip, for he stood the party on top of Fort Souville
and carried on a technical talk in French for more than half an hour,
while German shells, breaking a few hundred yards away, sought in vain
to interrupt him.

From the top of Souville it was possible to see gun flashes and to spy,
now and again, aeroplanes which darted back and forth all day, but not a
soldier of either side was to be seen through the strongest glasses. On
no front have men dug in so deeply as at Verdun. They have good reason
to snuggle into the earth, for the French have a story that one of their
projectiles killed men in a dugout seventy-five feet below the surface.
They thought that this terrific penetration must have been due to the
fact that the shell hit fairly upon a crack in the concrete and wedged
its way through.

Barring plumbing, which is always an after thought in France, the French
make the underground dwellings of the soldiers moderately comfortable.
There are ventilating plants and electric lights, and in the citadel a
motion picture theater. In one underground stronghold we found the
telephone central for all the various positions around Verdun. We
wondered whether or not he was ever obliged to report, "Your party
doesn't answer."

We traveled far underground, and at last the colonel brought us out
again near the high, bare spot where the automobiles had been left. As
we walked down the road there was a particularly vicious bang some place
to our left.

"That wasn't very far away," said the colonel.

This was the first shell which had stirred him to interest or attention.
Presently there came another bang, and this seemed just as loud. The
colonel paused thoughtfully.

"Maybe one of their aeroplanes has seen us and spotted us for the
artillery," he said. "Tell the chauffeurs to turn the cars around at
once, and we'll go."

The chauffeurs turned the cars with commendable alacrity and the
colonel walked slowly toward them. But his roving glance rested for an
instant upon a little ridge across the valley to his left which brought
memories to his mind and he stopped in the middle of the road and began:
"In the Spring of 1915----" On and on he went in his bea

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