A Volunteer Poilu Part 1

A Volunteer Poilu.

by Henry Sheahan.

Preface

I have ventured to call this book A Volunteer Poilu princ.i.p.ally because we were known to the soldiers of the Bois-le-Pretre as "les Poilus Americains." Then, too, it was my ambition to do for my comrades, the French private soldiers, what other books have done for the soldiers of other armies. The t.i.tle chosen, however, was more than complimentary; it was but just. In recognition of the work of the Section during the summer, it was, in October, 1915, formally adopted into the French army; a French officer became its administrative head, and the drivers were given the same papers, pay, and discipline as their French comrades.

I wish to thank many of my old friends of Section II, who have aided me in the writing of this book.

HENRY SHEAHAN

A Volunteer Poilu

Chapter I

The Rochambeau S'en Va-t-en Guerre

Moored alongside a great two-storied pier, with her bow to the land, the cargo and pa.s.senger boat, Rochambeau, of the Compagnie Generale was being loaded with American supplies for the France of the Great War. A hot August sun struck spots and ripples of glancing radiance from the viscous, oily surface of the foul basin in which she lay inert; the air was full of sounds, the wheezing of engines, the rattling of cog-checks, and the rumble of wheels and hoofs which swept, in sultry puffs of noise and odor, from the pavements on the land. Falling from the exhausts, a round, silvery-white cascade poured into the dark lane between the wharf and the deck, and sounded a monotonous, roaring underchord to the intermingled dins. At the sun-bathed bow, a derrick gang lowered bags of flour into the open well of the hold; there were commands in French, a chugging, and a hissing of steam, and a giant's clutch of dusty, hundred-kilo flour-bags from Duluth would swing from the wharf to the Rochambeau, sink, and disappear. In some way the unfamiliar language, and the sight of the thickset, French sailor-men, so evidently all of one race, made the Rochambeau, moored in the shadow of the sky-sc.r.a.pers, seem mysteriously alien. But among the workers in the hold, who could be seen when they stood on the floor of the open hatchway, was a young, red-headed, American longsh.o.r.eman clad in the trousers part of a suit of brown-check overalls; sweat and grime had befouled his rather foolish, freckled face, and every time that a bunch of flour-bags tumbled to the floor of the well, he would cry to an invisible somebody--"More dynamite, Joe, more dynamite!"

Walking side by side, like ushers in a wedding procession, two of the s.h.i.+p's officers made interminable rounds of the deck. Now and then they stopped and looked over the rail at the loading operations, and once in low tones they discussed the day's communique. "Pas grand' chose"

(nothing of importance), said he whom I took to be the elder, a bearded, seafaring kind of man. "We have occupied a crater in the Argonne, and driven back a German patrol (une patrouille Boche) in the region of Nomeny." The younger, blond, pale, with a wispy yellow mustache, listened casually, his eyes fixed on the turbulence below. The derrick gang were now stowing away cl.u.s.ters of great wooden boxes marked the Something Arms Company. "My brother says that American bullets are filled with powder of a very good quality" (d'une tres bonne qualite), remarked the latter. "By the way, how is your brother?" asked the bearded man. "Very much better," answered the other; "the last fragment (eclat) was taken out of his thigh just before we left Bordeaux." They continued their walk, and three little French boys wearing English sailor hats took their places at the rail.

As the afternoon advanced, a yellow summer sun, sinking to a level with the upper fringes of the city haze, gave a signal for farewells; and little groups retired to quieter corners for good-byes. There was a good deal of worrying about submarines; one heard fragments of conversations--"They never trouble the Bordeaux route"--"Absolutely safe, je t'a.s.sure"; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice, "Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund, snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for "the success of his business." Two young Americans with the same identical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black Frenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth, paraded lonelily. A middle-aged French woman, rouged and dyed back to the thirties, and standing in a nimbus of perfume, wept at the going of a younger woman, and ruined an elaborate make-up with grotesque traceries of tears. "Give him my love," she sobbed; "tell him that the business is doing splendidly and that he is not to buy any of Lafitte's laces next time he goes to Paris en permission." A little later, the Rochambeau, with slow majesty, backed into the channel, and turned her bow to the east.

The chief interest of the great majority of her pa.s.sengers was commercial; there were American drummers keen to line their pockets with European profits; there were French commis voyageurs who had been selling articles of French manufacture which had formerly been made by the Germans; there were half-official persons who had been on missions to American ammunition works; and there was a diplomat or two. From the sample trunks on board you could have taken anything from a pair of boots to a time fuse. Altogether, an interesting lot. Palandeau, a middle-aged Frenchman with a domed, bald forehead like Socrates or Verlaine, had been in America selling eau-de-cologne.

"Then you are getting out something new?" I asked.

"Yes, and no," he answered. "Our product is the old-fas.h.i.+oned eau-de-cologne water with the name 'Farina' on it."

"But in America we a.s.sociate eau-de-cologne with the Germans," said I.

"Doesn't the bottle say 'Johann Maria Farina'? Surely the form of the name is German."

"But that was not his name, monsieur; he was a Frenchman, and called himself 'Jean Marie.' Yes, really, the Germans stole the manufacture from the French. Consider the name of the article, 'eau-de-cologne,' is not that French?"

"Yes," I admitted.

"Alors," said Palandeau; "the blocus has simply given us the power to reclaim trade opportunities justly ours. Therefore we have printed a new label telling the truth about Farina, and the Boche 'Johann Maria' is 'kapout.'"

"Do you sell much of it?"

"Quant.i.ties! Our product is superior to the Boche article, and has the glamour of an importation. I await the contest without uneasiness."

"What contest?"

"When Jean Marie meets Johann Maria--apres la guerre," said Palandeau with a twinkle in his eye.

In the deck chair next to mine sat a dark, powerfully built young Iowan with the intensely masculine head of a mediaeval soldier. There was a bit of curl to the dark-brown hair which swept his broad, low forehead, his brown eyes were devoid of fear or imagination, his jaw was set, and the big, aggressive head rested on a short, muscular neck. He had been a salesman of machine tools till the "selling end" came to a standstill.

"But didn't the munitions traffic boom the machine-tool industry?" I asked.

"Sure it did. You ought to have seen what people will do to get a lathe.

You know about all that you need to make sh.e.l.ls is a machine lathe. You can't get a lathe in America for love or money--for anything"--he made a swift, complete gesture--"all making sh.e.l.ls. There isn't a junk factory in America that hasn't been pawed over by guys looking for lathes--and my G.o.d! what prices! Knew a bird named Taylor who used to make water pipes in Utica, New York--had a stinking little lathe he paid two hundred dollars for, and sold it last year for two thousand. My firm had so many orders for months ahead that it didn't pay them to have salesmen--so they offered us jobs inside; but, G.o.d, I can't stand indoor work, so I thought I'd come over here and get into the war. I used to be in the State Cavalry. You ought to have seen how sore all those Iowa Germans were on me for going," he laughed. "Had a h.e.l.l of row with a guy named Schultz."

Limping slightly, an enormous, grizzled man approached us and sat down by the side of the ex-machinist. Possibly a yellow-gray suit, cut in the bathrobe American style, made him look larger than he was, and though heavily built and stout, there was something about him which suggested ill health. One might have thought him a prosperous American business man on his way to Baden-Baden. He had a big nose, big mouth, a hard eye, and big, freckled hands which he nervously opened and closed.

"See that feller over there?" He pointed to a spectacled individual who seemed lost in melancholy speculation at the rail--"Says he's a Belgian lieutenant. Been over here trying to get cloth. Says he can't get it, the firms over here haven't got the colors. Just think of it, there isn't a pound of Bernheim's blue in the whole country!"

"I thought we were beginning to make dyes of our own," said the Iowan.

"Oh, yes, but we haven't got the hang of it yet. The product is pretty poor. Most of the people who need dyes are afraid to use the American colors, but they've got to take what they can get. Friend of mine, Lon Seeger, of Seeger, Seeger & Hall, the carpet people in Hackensack, had twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats spoiled on him last week by using home dyes."

The Belgian lieutenant, still standing by the rail, was talking with another pa.s.senger, and some fragments of the conversation drifted to our ears. I caught the words--"My sister--quite unexpected--barely escaped--no doubt of it--I myself saw near Malines--perfectly dreadful--tout-a-fait terrible."

"Twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats all spoiled, colors ran, didn't set, no good. This war is raising the devil with the United States textiles. Maybe the Germans won't get a glad hand when they come back. We hear that they're going to flood the market with good, low-priced dyes so as to bust up the new American plants. Haven't you heard them hollerin' for tariff protection? I'm going over to look up a new green dye the French are getting out. We hear it's pretty good stuff. What are you boys doing, looking for contracts?"

The Iowan replied that he hoped to get into an English cavalry regiment, and I mentioned the corps I had joined.

"Well, don't get killed," exclaimed the dye-stuffs agent paternally, and settled down in his chair for a nap.

It was the third day out; the ocean was still the salty green color of the American waters, and big, oily, unrippled waves were rising and falling under the August sun. From the rail I saw coming toward us over the edge of the earth, a small tramp steamer marked with two white blotches which, as the vessel neared, resolved themselves into painted reproductions of the Swedish flag. Thus pa.s.sed the Thorvald, carrying a mark of the war across the lonely seas.

"That's a Swedish boat," said a voice at my elbow.

"Yes," I replied.

A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a downy face, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me. There was something psychologically wrong with his face; it had that look in it which makes you want to see if you still have your purse.

"We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota," he continued.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Oscar Petersen," he answered.

"Going over to enlist?" I hazarded.

"You bet," he replied--and an instant later--"Are you?"

I told him of my intention. Possibly because we were in for the same kind of experience he later became communicative. He had run away from home at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth year in a reform school, and the rest of his time as a kind of gangster in Chicago. I can't imagine a more useless existence than the one he revealed. At length he "got sick of the crowd and got the bug to go to war," as he expressed it, and wrote to his people to tell them he was starting, but received no answer. "My father was a Bible cuss," he remarked cheerfully,--"never got over my swiping the minister's watch."

A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a "story" about his going to enlist in the Foreign Legion--"popular young man very well known in the--th ward," said the article. He showed me, too, an extraordinary letter he had received via the newspaper, a letter written in pencil on the cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled note-paper, and enclosing five dollars. "I hope you will try to avenge the Lusitania," it said among other things. The letter was signed by a woman.

"Do you speak French?" I asked.

"Not a word," he replied. "I want to be put with the Americans or the Swedes. I speak good Swedish."