And they thought we wouldn't fight Part 25

"A year ago January, before we came into the war, I was stationed at San Antonio. Another officer friend of mine was stationed there and one day he received orders to report for duty at Honolulu. He had a girl in San Antonio and didn't want to leave her and he knew I didn't have a girl and didn't give a d.a.m.n where I went, or was sent, so long as it was with the army. He put up the proposition of mutual exchange being permitted under regulations.

"He wanted to take my place in San Antonio and give me his a.s.signment in Honolulu, which I must say looked mighty good in those days to anybody who was tired of Texas. I didn't think then we'd ever come to war and besides it didn't make much difference to me one way or the other where I went. But instead of accepting the proposition right off the reel, I told Jim we'd flip a coin to decide.

"If it came tails, he would go to Honolulu. If it came heads, I would go to Honolulu. He flipped. Tails won. I'm in France and poor Jim is out there in Honolulu tending the Ukulele crop with prospects of having to stay there for some time. Poor devil, I got a letter from him last week.

"Do you know, man knows no keener joy in the world than that which I have to-night. Here I am in France at the head of two hundred and fifty men and horses and the guns and we're rolling up front to kick a dent in history. The poor unfortunate that ain't in this fight has almost got license to shoot himself. Life knows no keener joy than this."

It was a long speech for our captain, but his words expressed not only the feeling of our battery, but our whole regiment, from the humblest wagon driver up to the colonel who, by the way, has just made himself most unpopular with the regiment by being promoted to a Brigadier Generals.h.i.+p. The colonel is pa.s.sing upward to a higher command and the regiment is sore on losing him. One of his humblest critics has characterised the event as the "first rough trick the old man ever pulled."

Midnight pa.s.sed and we were still wheeling our way through sleeping villages, consulting maps under rays of flashlights, gathering directions some of the time from mile posts and wall signs, and at other times gaining knowledge of roads and turns and hills from sleepy heads in curl wrappers that protruded from bedroom chambers and were over-generous in advice.

The animals were tired. Rain soaked the cigarettes and made them draw badly. Above was drizzle and below was mud. There were a few grumbles, but no man in our column would have traded places with a brother back home even if offered a farm to boot.

It was after three in the morning when we parked the guns in front of a chateau, brought forward some lagging combat wagons and discovered the rolling kitchen had gone astray. In another hour the animals had been unhitched but not unharnessed, fed and watered in darkness and the men, in utter weariness, prepared to lie down and sleep anywhere. At this juncture, word was pa.s.sed through the sections that the battery would get ready to move immediately. Orders were to clear the village by six o'clock. Neither men nor horses were rested, but we moved out on time and breakfasted on the road.

The way seemed long, the roads bad and the guns heavy. But we were pa.s.sing through an Eden of beauty--green fields and rolling hills crested by ancient chateaux. At times, the road wound down through hillside orchards, white and pink with apple blooms. Fatigue was heavy on man and beast, but I heard one walking cannoneer singing, "When It's Apple Blossom-time in Normandie." Another rider in the column recalled the time when his father used to give him ten cents for standing on the bottom of an upturned tin basin and reciting, "Over the mountains winding down, horse and foot into Frederickstown."

"The jar of these guns as they grind over the gravel is enough to grind the heart out of you," said a sweating cannoneer who was pressing a helping shoulder to one of the heavies as we negotiated a steep hill.

"What in h.e.l.l you kicking about," said the man opposite. "Suppose you was travelling with one of them guns the Germans are using on Paris--I mean that old John J. Longdistance. You'd know what heavy guns are then.

They say that the gun's so big and takes so many horses to haul it, that the man who drives the lead pair has never spent the night in the same town with the fellow who rides wheel swing."

A young reserve lieutenant with mind intensely on his work, combined for my benefit his impressions of scenery with a lesson in artillery location. His characterisation of the landscape was as technical as it was unpoetical.

"A great howitzer country," was the tenor of his remarks. "Look at the bottom of that slide. Fine position for one fifty-five. Take that gully over there. That's a beaut of a place. No use talking. Great howitzer country."

During the afternoon, a veterinarian turned over two horses to a French peasant. One was exhausted and unable to proceed, and the other suffered a bad hoof, which would require weeks for healing. News that both animals were not going to be shot was received with joy by two men who had ridden them. I saw them patting the disabled mounts affectionately on the neck and heard one of them say,

"'Salright, old timer--'salright. Frenchy here is going to take care of you all right. Uncle Sam's paying the bill and I am coming back and get you soon's we give Fritzie his b.u.mps."

An hour later, a young cannoneer gave in to fatigue and ignored orders to the extent of reclining on gun trail and falling asleep. A rut in the road made a stiff jolt, he rolled off and one ponderous wheel of the gun carriage pa.s.sed over him. One leg, one arm and two ribs were broken and his feet crushed, was the doctor's verdict as the victim was carried away in an ambulance.

"He'll get better all right," said the medico, "but he's finished his bit in the army."

The column halted for lunch outside of a small town and I climbed on foot to the hilltop castle where mediaeval and modern were mixed in mute melange. A drawbridge crossed a long dry moat to cracked walls of rock covered with ivy. For all its well preserved signs of artistic ruin, it was occupied and well fitted within. From the topmost parapet of one rickety looking tower, a wire stretched out through the air to an old, ruined mill which was surmounted by a modern wind motor, the tail of which incongruously advertised the words "Ideal power," with the typical conspicuity of American salesmans.h.i.+p.

Near the base of the old mill was another jumble of moss-covered rocks, now used as a summer house, but open on all sides. At a table in the centre of this open structure, sat a blond haired young American soldier with black receivers clamped to either ear. I approached and watched him jotting down words on a paper pad before him. After several minutes of intent silence, he removed the harness from his head and told me that he belonged to the wireless outfit with the artillery and this station had been in operation since the day before.

"Seems so peaceful here with the sun streaming down over these old walls," he said.

"What do you hear out of the air?" I asked.

"Oh, we pick up a lot of junk," he replied, "I'm waiting for the German communique now. Here's some Spanish stuff I just picked up and some more junk in French. The English stations haven't started this afternoon. A few minutes ago I heard a German aeroplane signalling by wireless to a German battery and directing its fire. I could tell every time the gun was ordered to fire and every time the aviator said the shot was short or over. It's kinder funny to sit back here in quiet and listen in the war, isn't it?" I agreed it was weird and it was.

In darkness again at the end of a hard day on the road, we parked the guns that night in a little village which was headquarters for our regiment and where I spent the night writing by an old oil lamp in the Mayor's office. A former Chicago bellhop who spoke better Italian than English and naturally should, was sleeping on a blanket roll on the floor near me. On the walls of the room were posted numerous flag-decked proclamations, some now yellow with the time that had pa.s.sed over them since their issue back in 1914. They pertained to the mobilisation of the men of the village, men whose names remain now only as a memory.

But in their place was the new khaki-clad Chicago bellhop snoring there on the floor and several thousand more as st.u.r.dy and ready as he, all billeted within a stone's throw of that room. They were here to finish the fight begun by those village peasants who had marched away four years before when the Mayor of the town posted that bulletin. These Americans stood ready to go down to honoured graves beside them.

Our division was under the French high command and was buried in the midst of the mighty preparations then on foot. Our ranks were full, our numbers strong, our morale high. Every officer and man in the organisation had the feeling that the eyes of das.h.i.+ng French comrades-in-arms and hard fighting British brothers were on them. Our inspiration was in the belief that the attention of the Allied nations of the world and more particularly the hope and pride of our own people across the sea, was centred upon us. With that sacred feeling, the first division stood resolute to meet the test.

Some of the disquieting news then prevalent in the nervous civilian areas back of the lines, reached us, but its effect, as far as I could see, was nil. Our officers and men were as unconcerned about the reports of enemy successes as though we were children in the nursery of a burning house and the neighbourhood was ringing with fire alarms. German advances before Amiens, enemy rushes gaining gory ground in Flanders, carried no shock to the high resolve that existed in the Allied reserves of which we were a part.

Our army knew nothing but confidence. If there was other than optimism to be derived from the current events, then our army was inclined to consider such a result as gratifying, because it could be calculated to create a greater measure of speed and a.s.sistance from the slowly functioning powers in America. The reasoning was that any possible pessimism would hurry to the wheel every American shoulder that had failed to take up its individual war burden under the wave of optimism.

The army had another reason for its optimism. Our officers knew something about the dark days that had preceded the first battle at the Marne. They were familiar with the gloomy outlook in 1914 that had led to the hurried removal of the French government from Paris to Bordeaux.

Our men recalled how the enemy was then overrunning Belgium, how the old British "Contemptibles" were in retreat, and how the German was within twenty miles of the French capital.

In that crisis had come the message by Foch and the brilliant stroke with which he backed it up. What followed was the tumble and collapse of the straddling German effort and the forced transformation in the enemy's plans from a war of six weeks to a war of four years.

Our army knew the man who turned the trick at the Marne. We knew that we were under his command, and not the slightest doubt existed but that it was now our destiny to take part in another play of the cards which would call and cash the German hand. Our forces in the coming engagements were staking their lives, to a man, on Foch's ace in the hole.

That was the deadly earnestness of our army's confidence in Foch. The capture of a hill top in Picardy or the loss of a village in Flanders had no effect upon that confidence. It found reinforcement in the belief that since March 21st, America had gained a newer and keener appreciation of her part in the war.

Our army began to feel that the American people, more than three thousand miles away from the battle fronts, would have a better understanding of the intense meaning that had been already conveyed in General Pers.h.i.+ng's words, "Confidence is needed but overconfidence is dangerous." In other words, our soldiers in the field began to feel that home tendencies that underrated the enemy's strength and underestimated the effort necessary to overcome him, had been corrected. The army had long felt that such tendencies had made good material for Billy Sunday's sermons and spread-eagle speeches, but they hadn't loaded guns or placed men in the front line.

We felt that this crisis had brought to America a better realisation of the fact that Germany had not been beaten and that she was yet to be beaten and that America's share in the administration of that beating would have to be greater and more determined than had heretofore been deemed necessary. It was the hope of the army that this realisation would reach the people with a shock. Shocks were known to make realisations less easy to forget. Forgetfulness from then on might have meant Allied defeat.

Lagging memories found no billet in the personnel of that First Division. Its records, registering five hundred casualties, kept in mind the fact that the division had seen service on the line and still had scores to settle with the enemy.

Its officers and men, with but few exceptions, had undergone their baptism in German fire and had found the experience not distasteful. The division had esprit which made the members of every regiment and brigade in it vie with the members of any other regiment and brigade.

If you had asked any enlisted man in the division, he would have told you that his company, battery, regiment or brigade "had it all over the rest of them."

That was the feeling that our division brought with them when we marched into Picardy to meet the German push. That was the spirit that dominated officers and men during the ten days that we spent in manoeuvres and preparations in that concentration area in the vicinity of the ancient town of Chaumont-en-Vexin in the department of the Oise. It was the feeling that made us anxious and eager to move on up to the actual front.

CHAPTER XI

UNDER FIRE

On the day before our departure for the front from the concentration area in Picardy, every officer in the division, and they numbered almost a thousand, was summoned to the temporary divisional headquarters, where General Pers.h.i.+ng addressed to them remarks which have since become known as the commander's "farewell to the First." We had pa.s.sed out from his command and from then on our orders were to come from the commander of the French army to which the division was to be attached.

General Pers.h.i.+ng stood on a mound at the rear of a beautiful chateau of Norman architecture, the Chateau du Jard, located on the edge of the town of Chaumont-en-Vexin. The officers ranged themselves in informal rows on the gra.s.s. Birds were singing somewhere above in the dense, green foliage, and sunlight was filtering through the leaves of the giant trees.

The American commander spoke of the traditions which every American soldier should remember in the coming trials. He referred to the opportunity then present for us, whose fathers established liberty in the New World, now to a.s.sist the Old World in throwing off its yoke of tyranny. Throughout this touching farewell to the men he had trained--to his men then leaving for scenes from which some of them would never return--the commander's voice never betrayed the depth of feeling behind it.

That night we made final arrangements for the morrow's move. I travelled with the artillery where orders were received for the reduction of all packs to the lightest possible as all men would be dismounted and the baggage wagons would be reserved for food, ammunition and officers' luggage only. Officers' packs, by the same order, had to shrink from one hundred and fifty pounds to twenty.

There were many misgivings that night as owners were forced to discard cherished belongings. c.u.mbersome camp paraphernalia, rubber bathtubs, pneumatic mattresses, extra blankets, socks, sweaters, etc., all parted company from erstwhile owners. That order caused many a heart-break and the abandonment of thousands of dollars' worth of personal equipment in our area.

I have no doubt that some of the village maidens were surprised at the remarkable generosity of officers and men who presented them with expensive toilet sets. Marie at the village _estaminet_ received five of them all fitted in neat leather rolls and inscribed with as many different sets of initials. The old men of the town gloried in the sweaters, woollen socks and underwear.

There was no chance to fudge on the slim baggage order. An officer, bound by duty, weighed each officer's kit as it reached the baggage wagons and those tipping the scales at more than the prescribed twenty pounds, were thrown out entirely. I happened to be watching the loading when it came turn for the regimental band to stow away its encased instruments in one wagon. It must be remembered that musicians at the front are stretcher bearers. The baggage judge lifted the case containing the ba.s.s horn.

"No horn in the world ever weighed that much," he said. "Open it up,"

was the terse command. The case was opened and the base horn pulled out.

The baggage officer began operations on the funnel. I watched him remove from the horn's interior two spare blankets, four pairs of socks, an extra pair of pants and a carton of cigarettes. He then inserted his arm up to the shoulder in the instrument's innards and brought forth two apples, a small tin of blackberry jam and an egg wrapped in an unders.h.i.+rt.