And they thought we wouldn't fight Part 27

"Prune juice" is not slang. It is a veritable expression and anybody who thinks that the favourite of the boarding house table cannot produce a fermented article that is _tres fort_ in the way of a throat burner, is greatly mistaken. In France the fermented juice of the prune is called "water of life," but it carries a "dead to the world" kick. The simple prune, which the army used to call "native son" by reason of its California origin, now ranks with its most inebriating sisters of the vine.

The flow of _eau de vie_ must have been dammed at the inn. On the road the next day, I saw a mule driver wearing a sixteen candle power black eye. When I inquired the source of the lamp shade, he replied:

"This is my first wound in the war of movement. Me and the cop had an offensive down in that town that's spelt like Sissors but you say it some other way." I knew he was thinking of Gisors.

The third and fourth day's march brought us into regions nearer the front, where the movement of refugees on the roads seemed greater, where the roll of the guns came constantly from the north, where enemy motors droned through the air on missions of frightfulness.

There was a major in our regiment whose knowledge of French was confined to the single affirmative exclamation, "Ah, oui." He worked this expression constantly in the French conversation with a refugee woman from the invaded districts. She with her children occupied one room in the cottage. When the major started to leave, two days later, the refugee woman addressed him in a reproving tone and with tears. He could only reply with sympathetic "Ah, oui's," which seemed to make her all the more frantic.

An interpreter straightened matters out by informing the major that the woman wanted to know why he was leaving without getting her furniture.

"What furniture?" replied the puzzled major.

"Why, she says," said the interpreter, "that you promised her you would send three army trucks to her house back of the German lines and bring all of her household goods to this side of the line. She says that she explained all of it to you and you said, 'Ah, oui.'"

The major has since abandoned the "ah, oui" habit.

At one o'clock one morning, orders reached the battalion for reconnaissance detail; each battery to be ready to take road by daylight. We were off at break of day in motor trucks with a reel cart of telephone wire hitched on behind. Thirty minutes later we rumbled along roads under range of German field pieces and arrived in a village designated as battalion headquarters to find that we were first to reach the sector allotted for American occupation. The name of the town was Serevilliers.

Our ears did not delude us about the activity of the sector, but I found that officers and men of the detail were inclined to accept the heavy sh.e.l.ling in a non-committal manner until a French interpreter attached to us remarked that artillery action in the sector was as intense as any he had experienced at Verdun.

If the ever present crash of sh.e.l.ls reminded us that we were opposite the peak of the German push, there was plenty of work to engage minds that might otherwise have paid too much attention to the dangers of their location. A chalk cellar with a vaulted ceiling and ventilators, unfortunately opening on the enemy side of the upper structure, was selected as the battalion command post. The men went to work immediately to remove piles of dirty billeting straw under which was found gla.s.s, china, silverware and family portraits, all of which had been hurriedly buried by the owners of the house not two weeks before.

While linemen planned communications, and battery officers surveyed gun positions, the battalion commander and two orienting officers went forward to the frontal zone to get the first look at our future targets and establish observation posts from which our firing could be directed. I accompanied the small party, which was led by a French officer familiar with the sector. It was upon his advice that we left the roads and took cuts across fields, avoiding the path and road intersections and taking advantage of any shelter offered by the ground.

Virgin fields on our way bore the enormous craters left by the explosion of poorly directed German sh.e.l.ls of heavy calibre. Orders were to throw ourselves face downward upon the ground upon the sound of each approaching missile. There is no text book logic on judging from the sound of a sh.e.l.l whether it has your address written on it, but it is surprising how quick that education may be obtained by experience.

Several hours of walking and dropping to the ground resulted in an attuning of the ears which made it possible to judge approximately whether that oncoming, whining, unseen thing from above would land dangerously near or ineffectively far from us. The knowledge was common to all of us and all of our ears were keenly tuned for the sounds. Time after time the collective judgment and consequent prostration of the entire party was proven well timed by the arrival of a sh.e.l.l uncomfortably close.

We gained a wooded hillside that bristled with busy French seventy-fives, which the German tried in vain to locate with his howitzer fire. We mounted a forest plateau, in the centre of which a beautiful white chateau still held out against the enemy's best efforts to locate it with his guns. One sh.e.l.l addressed in this special direction fortunately announced its coming with such unmistakable vehemence that our party all landed in the same sh.e.l.l hole at once.

Every head was down when the explosion came. Branches and pieces of tree trunk were whirled upward, and the air became populated with deadly b.u.mble bees and humming birds, for such is the sound that the sh.e.l.l splinters make. When I essayed our sh.e.l.l hole afterward, I couldn't fathom how five of us had managed to accommodate ourselves in it, but in the rush of necessity, no difficulty had been found.

Pa.s.sing from the woods forward, one by one, over a bald field, we skirted a village that was being heavily sh.e.l.led, and reached a trench on the side of the hill in direct view of the German positions. The enemy partially occupied the ruined village of Cantigny not eight hundred yards away, but our gla.s.ses were unable to pick up the trace of a single person in the debris. French sh.e.l.ls, arriving endlessly in the village, shot geysers of dust and wreckage skyward. It was from this village, several days later, that our infantry patrols brought in several prisoners, all of whom were suffering from sh.e.l.l shock. But our men in the village opposite underwent the same treatment at the hands of the German artillery.

It was true of this sector that what corresponded to the infantry front line was a much safer place to be in than in the reserve positions, or about the gun pits in villages or along roads in our back area. Front line activity was something of minor consideration, as both sides seemed to have greater interests at other points and, in addition to that, the men of both sides were busy digging trenches and shelters. There were numerous machine gun posts which swept with lead the indeterminate region between the lines, and at night, patrols from both sides explored as far as possible the holdings of the other side.

Returning to the battalion headquarters that night by a route apparently as popular to German artillery as was the one we used in the forenoon, we found a telephone switchboard in full operation in the sub-cellar, and mess headquarters established in a clean kitchen above the ground.

Food was served in the kitchen and we noticed that one door had suffered some damage which had caused it to be boarded up and that the plaster ceiling of the room was full of fresh holes and rents in a dozen places.

At every shock to the earth, a little stream of oats would come through the holes from the attic above. These falling down on the officer's neck in the midst of a meal, would have no effect other than causing him to call for his helmet to ward off the cereal rain.

We learned more about the sinister meaning of that broken door and the ceiling holes when it became necessary later in the evening to move mess to a safer location. The kitchen was located just thirty yards back of the town cross roads and an unhealthy percentage of German sh.e.l.ls that missed the intersection caused too much interruption in our cook's work.

We found that the mess room was vacant by reason of the fact that it had become too unpleasant for French officers, who had relinquished it the day before. We followed their suite and were not surprised when an infantry battalion mess followed us into the kitchen and just one day later, to the hour, followed us out of it.

Lying on the floor in that chalk cellar that night and listening to the pound of arriving sh.e.l.ls on nearby cross roads and battery positions, we estimated how long it would be before this little village would be completely levelled to the ground. Already gables were disappearing from houses, st.u.r.dy chimneys were toppling and stone walls were showing jagged gaps. One whole wall of the village school had crumbled before one blast, so that now the wooden desks and benches of the pupils and their books and papers were exposed to view from the street. On the blackboard was a penmans.h.i.+p model which read:

"Let no day pa.s.s without having saved something."

An officer came down the dark stone steps into the cellar, kicked off his boots and lay down on some blankets in one corner.

"I just heard some sh.e.l.ls come in that didn't explode," I remarked. "Do you know whether they were gas or duds?"

"I don't know whether they were gas or not," he said, "but I do know that that horse out in the yard is certainly getting ripe."

The defunct animal referred to occupied an uncovered grave adjoining our ventilator. Sleeping in a gas mask was not the most unpleasant form of slumber.

CHAPTER XII

BEFORE CANTIGNY

It is strange how sleep can come at the front in surroundings not unlike the interior of a boiler factory, but it does. I heard of no man who slept in the cellars beneath the ruins of Serevilliers that night being disturbed by the pounding of the sh.e.l.ls and the jar of the ground, both of which were ever present through our dormant senses. Stranger still was the fact that at midnight when the sh.e.l.ling almost ceased, for small intervals, almost every sleeper there present was aroused by the sudden silence. When the sh.e.l.ling was resumed, sleep returned.

"When I get back on the farm outside of Chicago," said one officer, "I don't believe I will be able to sleep unless I get somebody to stand under my window and shake a thunder sheet all night."

It is also remarkable how the tired human, under such conditions, can turn off the switch on an energetic imagination and resign himself completely to fate. In those cellars that night, every man knew that one direct hit of a "two ten" German sh.e.l.l on his particular cellar wall, would mean taps for everybody in the cave. Such a possibility demands consideration in the slowest moving minds.

Mentalities and morale of varying calibre cogitate upon this matter at varying lengths, but I doubt in the end if there is much difference in the conclusion arrived at. Such reflections produce the inevitable decision that if one particular sh.e.l.l is coming into your particular abode, there is nothing you can do to keep it out, so "What the h.e.l.l!"

You might just as well go to sleep and forget it because if it gets you, you most probably will never know anything about it anyway. I believe such is the philosophy of the sh.e.l.led.

It must have been three o'clock in the morning when a sputtering motor cycle came to a stop in the shelter of our cellar door and a gas guard standing there exchanged words with some one. It ended in the sound of hobnails on the stone steps as the despatch rider descended, lighting his way with the yellow shaft from an electric pocket lamp.

"What is it?" inquired the Major, awakening and rolling over on his side.

"Just come from regimental headquarters," said the messenger. "I'm carrying orders on to the next town. Adjutant gave me this letter to deliver to you, sir. The Adjutant's compliments, sir, and apologies for waking you, but he said the mail just arrived and the envelope looked important and he thought you might like to get it right away."

"Hmm," said the Major, weighing the official looking envelope in one hand and observing both the American stamps in one corner and numerous addresses to which the missive had been forwarded. He tore off one end and extracted a sheet which he unfolded and read while the messenger waited at his request. I was prepared to hear of a promotion order from Was.h.i.+ngton and made ready to offer congratulations. The Major smiled and tossed the paper over to me, at the same time reaching for a notebook and fountain pen.

"Hold a light for me," he said to the messenger as he sat on the edge of the bed and began writing. "This is urgent and I will make answer now.

You will mail it at regimental headquarters." As his pen scratched across the writing pad, I read the letter he had just received. The stationery bore the heading of an alumni a.s.sociation of a well-known eastern university. The contents ran as follows:

"Dear Sir: What are you doing for your country? What are you doing to help win the war? While our brave boys are in France facing the Kaiser's sh.e.l.l and gas, the alumni a.s.sociation has directed me as secretary to call upon all the old boys of the university and invite them to do their bit for Uncle Sam's fighting men. We ask your subscription to a fund which we are raising to send cigarettes to young students of the university who are now serving with the colours and who are so n.o.bly maintaining the traditions of our Alma Mater. Please fill out the enclosed blank, stating your profession and present occupation. Fraternally yours, ---- Secretary."

The Major was watching me with a smile as I concluded reading.

"Here's my answer," he said, reading from a notebook leaf:

"Your letter reached me to-night in a warm little village in France.

With regard to my present profession, will inform you that I am an expert in ammunition trafficking and am at present occupied in exporting large quant.i.ties of sh.e.l.ls to Germany over the air route.

Please find enclosed check for fifty francs for cigarettes for youngsters who, as you say, are so n.o.bly upholding the sacred traditions of our school. After all, we old boys should do something to help along the cause. Yours to best the Kaiser. ----, Major.

---- Field Artillery, U. S. A. On front in France."

"I guess that ought to hold them," said the Major as he folded the letter and addressed an envelope. It rather seemed to me that it would but before I could finish the remark, the Major was back asleep in his blankets.

By daylight, I explored the town, noting the havoc wrought by the sh.e.l.ls that had arrived in the night. I had thought in seeing refugees moving southward along the roads, that there was little variety of articles related to human existence that they failed to carry away with them. But one inspection of the abandoned abodes of the unfortunate peasants of Serevilliers was enough to convince me of the greater variety of things that had to be left behind. Old people have saving habits and the French peasants pride themselves upon never throwing anything away.