And they thought we wouldn't fight Part 17

Things were going fine when the door opened at about nine thirty, and there stood two members of the American Provost Guard. They carried with them two orders. One instructed Madame, the proprietress, to dispense no more red ink or beer to American soldiers that night, and the other was a direction to all Americans around the table to get back to their billets for the night.

The bunch left with reluctance but without a grumble. It was warm and comfortable within the _bar Parisian_ and Madame's smiles and red wine and beer and Camembert cheese composed the Broadway of many recent dreams. But they left without complaint.

They made their rollicking departure, returning Madame's parting smiles, gallantly lifting their steel helmets and showering her with vociferous "bong swore's." And--well it simply must be told. She kissed the last one out out the door and, turning, wiped away a tear with the corner of her ap.r.o.n. Madame had seen youth on the way to the front before.

The billets were comfortable. Some were better than others. Picket line details slept in their blankets in the hay over the stables. Gun crews drew beds and pallets on the floor in occupied houses. In these homes there was always that hour before retirement for the night when the old men and remaining women of the French household and their several military guests billeted in the place, would gather about the fireplace in the kitchen and regale one another with stories, recounted by the murder of French and English languages and a wealth of pantomime.

Louise, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the town-crier--he who daily beat the drum in front of the Hotel de Ville and read lengthy bulletins, was interested in the workings of Gunner Black's colt automatic. Gunner Black, most anxious to show her, demonstrated the action of the pistol but, forgetting that inevitable sh.e.l.l in the chamber, shot himself in the arm.

It was only an incident. The noise scared Louise, but not the wound. She had seen too many Americans get shot in the moving pictures.

The captain and I were quartered in the house of the Cure of the cathedral. The old housekeeper of the place made the captain blush when she remarked her surprise that there were such young captains in the American army. Her name was Madame Dupont, and she was more than pleased to learn from the captain that that had been the maiden name of his mother.

The captain's room had the interior dimensions and heavy decorations of the mystic inner sanctum of some secret grand lodge. Religious paintings and symbols hung from the walls, which were papered in dark red to match the heavy plush hangings over the ever closed windows.

Two doors in the blank wall swung open revealing a hermetically sealed recess in which a bed just fitted. This arrangement, quite common in France, indicated that the device now popular in two-room sleeping apartments in America, must have been suggested by the sleeping customs of mediaeval times.

Early the next morning, our battery pulled out for the front. We were bound for the line. We took the roads out of Saint Nicolas to the east, making our way toward that part of the front that was known as the Luneville sector. Our way lay through the towns of Dombasle, Sommerviller, Maixe, Einville, Valhey, Serres, to the remains of the ruined village of Hoeville.

The sector runs almost along the border between France and old Lorraine, occupied by the Germans since 1870. Even the names of the old French towns beyond the border had been changed to German in the effort of the Prussians to Germanise the stolen province.

It was in this section during the few days just prior to the outbreak of the war that France made unwise demonstration of her disinclination toward hostilities with Germany. Every soldier in France was under arms, as was every soldier in Europe. France had military patrols along her borders. In the French chamber of deputies, the socialists had rushed through a measure which was calculated to convince the German people that France had no intentions or desire of menacing German territory. By that measure every French soldier was withdrawn from the Franco-German border to a line ten miles inside of France. The German appreciation of this evidence of peacefulness was manifested when the enemy, at the outbreak of the war, moved across the border and occupied that ten-mile strip of France.

France had succeeded in driving the enemy back again in that part of Lorraine, but only at the cost of many lives and the destruction of many French towns and villages. Since the close of the fighting season of 1914, there had been little or no progress on either side at this point.

The opposing lines here had been stationary for almost three years and it was known on both sides as a quiet sector.

The country side was of a rolling character, but very damp. At that season of the year when our first American fighting men reached the Western front, that part of the line that they occupied was particularly muddy and miserable.

Before nine o'clock that morning as we rode on to the front, the horse-drawn traffic, including our battery, was forced to take the side of the road numerous times to permit the pa.s.sage of long trains of motor trucks loaded down with American infantrymen, bound in the same direction.

Most of the motor vehicles were of the omnibus type. A number of them were worthy old double-deckers that had seen long years of peaceful service on the boulevards of Paris before the war. Slats of wood ran lengthwise across the windows of the lower seating compartment and through these apertures young, sun-burned, American faces topped with steel helmets, peered forth.

Some of our men reposed languidly on the rear steps of the busses or on the tops. Most of the bus-loads were singing rollicking choruses. The men were in good spirits. They had been cheered in every village they had pa.s.sed through on the way from their training area.

"Howdy, bowleg," was the greeting shouted by one of these motoring mockers, who looked down on our saddled steeds, "better get a hustle on them hayburners. We're going to be in Berlin by the time you get where the front used to be."

"Yes, you will," replied one of the mounted artillerymen, with a negative inflection. "You'll get a h.e.l.l of a long ways without us. If you doughboys start anything without the artillery, you'll see Berlin through the bars of a prisoner's cage."

"Lucky pups--the artillery--nothing to do but ride," was the pa.s.sing shout of another taunter, perched high on a bus. This was an unanswerable revision of an old taunt that the artillery used to shout to pa.s.sing infantry in the days when a foot soldier was really a foot soldier. Then the easy-riding mounted troops, when pa.s.sing an infantry column on the road, would say, "Pretty soft for the doughboys--nothing to do but walk."

"Times certainly have changed," one of our battery drivers felt it necessary to remark to me in defence of his branch of the service. "But there ain't no spark plugs or carburetors to get out of order on our mounts.

"However, we do have our troubles. That runaway wheeler in No. 2 section broke away from the picket line last night and Kemball and I were detailed to hunt all over town for him.

"You know that dark, winding, narrow street, that winds down the hill back of the cathedral. Well, it was about midnight and blacker than the ace of spades, when Kemball and I pushed along there in the dark, looking for that onery animal.

"Suddenly, we heard a sharp clatter on the cobblestones half a block up the hill. It was coming our way full speed. 'Here he comes now,' said Kemball, 'and he's galloping like h.e.l.l. Jump into a doorway or he'll climb all over us.'

"We waited there pressed against the wall in the dark as the galloping came up to us and pa.s.sed. What dy'e s'pose it was? It wasn't that runaway horse at all. Just a couple of them French kids chasing one another in wooden shoes."

The road to the front was a populous one. We pa.s.sed numerous groups of supply wagons carrying food and fodder up to the front lines. Other wagons were returning empty and here and there came an ambulance with bulgy blankets outlining the figures of stretcher cases, piled two high and two wide. Occasionally a Y. M. C. A. runabout loaded down with coffee pots and candy tins and driven by helmeted wearers of the Red Triangle, would pa.s.s us carrying its store of extras to the boys up front.

We pa.s.sed through villages where manufacturing plants were still in operation and, nearer the front, the roads lay through smaller hamlets, sh.e.l.l torn and deserted, save for sentries who stood guard in wooden coops at intersections. Civilians became fewer and fewer, although there was not a village that did not have one or two women or children or old men unfit for uniform.

Finally the road mounted a rolling hill and here it was bordered by roadside screens consisting of stretched chicken wire to which whisps of straw and gra.s.s and bits of green dyed cloth had been attached. Our men riding behind the screen peered through apertures in it and saw the distant hills forward, from which German gla.s.ses could have observed all pa.s.sage along that road had it not been for the screen.

So we moved into position. It was late in the night of October 22nd, 1917, that our batteries of artillery and companies of infantry moved through the darkness on the last lap of their trip to the front. The roads were sticky and gummy. A light rain was falling. The guns boomed in front of us, but not with any continued intensity. Through streets paved with slippery cobbles and bordered with the bare skeletons of sh.e.l.l-wrecked houses, our American squads marched four abreast. Their pa.s.sing in the darkness was accompanied by the sound of the unhastened tread of many hobnailed boots.

At times, the rays of a cautiously flashed electric light would reveal our infantrymen with packs on back and rifles slung over their shoulders. A stiff wind whipped the rain into their faces and tugged the bottoms of their flapping, wet overcoats.

Notwithstanding the fact that they had made it on foot a number of miles from the place where they had disembarked from the motor trucks, the men marched along to the soft singing of songs, which were ordered discontinued as the marching columns got closer to the communicating trenches which led into the front line.

In the march were machine gun carts hauled by American mules and rolling kitchens, which at times dropped on the darkened road swirls of glowing red embers that had to be hurriedly stamped out. Anxious American staff officers consulted their wrist watches frequently in evidence of the concern they felt as to whether the various moving units were reaching designated points upon the scheduled minute.

It was after midnight that our men reached the front line. It was the morning of October 23rd, 1917, that American infantrymen and Bavarian regiments of _Landwehr_ and _Landsturm_ faced one another for the first time in front line positions on the European front.

Less than eight hundred yards of slate and drab-coloured soft ground, blotched with rust-red expanses of wire entanglements, separated the hostile lines.

There was no moon. A few cloud-veiled stars only seemed to accentuate the blackness of the night. There, in the darkness and the mud, on the slippery firing step of trench walls and in damp, foul-smelling dugouts, young red-blooded Americans tingled for the first time with the thrill that they had trained so long and travelled so far to experience.

Through unfortunate management of the Press arrangements in connection with this great historical event, American correspondents accredited by the War Department to our forces, were prevented from accompanying our men into the front that night. Good fortune, however, favoured me as one of the two sole exceptions to this circ.u.mstance. Raymond G. Carroll, correspondent of the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_, and myself, representing the Chicago _Tribune_ and its a.s.sociated papers, were the only two newspaper men who went into the line with the men that night.

For enjoying this unusual opportunity, we were both arrested several days later, not, however, until after we had obtained the first-hand story of the great event.

A mean drizzle of rain was falling that night, but it felt cool on the pink American cheeks that were hot with excitement. The very wetness of the air impregnated all it touched with the momentousness of the hour.

Spirits were high and the mud was deep, but we who were there had the feeling that history was chiselling that night's date into her book of ages.

Occasionally a sh.e.l.l wheezed over through the soggy atmosphere, seeming to leave an unseen arc in the darkness above. It would terminate with a sullen thump in some spongy, water-soaked mound behind us. Then an answering missive of steel would whine away into the populated invisibility in front of us.

French comrades, in half English and half French, gushed their congratulations, and shook us by the hand. Some of us were even hugged and kissed on both cheeks. Our men took the places of French platoons that were sent back to rest billets. But other French platoons remained shoulder to shoulder with our men in the front line. The presence of our troops there was in continuation of their training for the purpose of providing a nucleus for the construction of later contingents. Both our infantry and our artillery acted in conjunction with the French infantry and artillery and the sector remained under French command.

Our men were eager to ask questions and the French were ever ready to respond. They first told us about the difference in the sound of sh.e.l.ls.

Now that one that started with a bark in back of us and whined over our heads is a _depart_. It is an Allied sh.e.l.l on its way to the Germans.

Now, this one, that whines over first and ends with a distant grunt, like a strong wallop on a wet carpet, is an _arrivee_. It has arrived from Germany. In the dugouts, our men smoked dozens of cigarettes, lighting fresh ones from the half-consumed b.u.t.ts. It is the appet.i.te that comes with the progressive realisation of a long deferred hope. It is the tension that comes from at last arriving at an object and then finding nothing to do, now that you are there. It is the nervousness that nerveless youth suffers in inactivity.

The men sloshed back and forth through the mud along the narrow confines of the trench. The order is against much movement, but immobility is unbearable. Wet slickers rustle against one another in the narrow traverses, and equipment, princ.i.p.ally the French and English gas masks, hanging at either hip become entangled in the darkness.

At times a steel helmet falls from some unaccustomed head and, hitting perhaps a projecting rock in the trench wall, gives forth a clang which is followed by curses from its clumsy owner and an admonition of quiet from some young lieutenant.

"Olson, keep your d.a.m.n fool head down below the top of that trench or you'll get it blown off." The sergeant is talking, and Olson, who brought from Minnesota a keen desire to see No Man's Land even at the risk of his life, is forced to repress the yearning.

"Two men over in B Company just got holes drilled through their beans for doing the same thing," continued the sergeant. "There's nothing you can see out there anyhow. It's all darkness."

Either consciously or unconsciously, the sergeant was lying, for the purpose of saving Olson and others from a fool's fate. There was not a single casualty in any American unit on the line that first night.

"Where is the telephone dugout?" a young lieutenant asked his French colleague. "I want to speak to the battalion commander."

"But you must not speak English over the telephone," replied the Frenchman, "the Germans will hear you with the instruments they use to tap the underground circuit."

"But I was going to use our American code," said the front line novice; "if the Germans tap in they won't be able to figure out what it means."