The Glory of the Coming

We had found the draft outfit first. By the same token, if our original informant had been right, another negro regiment – of volunteers this time – would be found some fifteen miles to the eastward and northward of where we were; and this latter unit was the one whose whereabouts we mainly desired to discover, since, if it turned out to be the regiment we thought it must be, its colonel would be a personal friend of all three of us and his adjutant would be a former copy reader who had served on the staff of the same evening newspaper years before, with two of us.

We halted a while to pay our respects to the commander of these strapping big black men – a West Pointer, still in his thirties and inordinately proud of the outfit that was under him. He had cause to be. I used to think that sitting down was the natural gait of the tidewater darky; but here, as any one who looked might see, were soldiers who bore themselves as smartly, who were as snappy at the salute and as sharp set at the drill as any of their lighter-skinned fellow Americans in service anywhere. Most of the officers were Southern-born men, they having been purposely picked because of a belief that they would understand the negro temperament. That the choosing of Southern officers had been a sane choosing was proved already, I think, by what we saw as well as by things we heard that day. For example, one of the majors – a young Tennesseean – told us this tale, laughing while he told us:

“We’ve abolished two of our sentry posts in this town. Right over yonder, beyond what’s left of the village church, is what’s left of the village cemetery. I’ll take you to see it if you care to go, though it’s not a very pleasant sight. For a year or more back in 1914 and 1915 shells used to fall in it pretty regularly and rip open the graves and scatter the bones of those poor folks who were buried there – you know the sort of thing you’re likely to find in any of these little places that have been under heavy bombardment. Well, when we moved here a week and a half ago and got settled a delegation from the ranks waited on the C. O. They told him that they had come over here to fight the Germans and that they were willing to fight the Germans and anxious to start the job right away, but that, discipline or no discipline, war or no war, orders or no orders, they just naturally couldn’t be made to hang round a cemetery after dark.

“‘Kernul, suh,’ the spokesman said, ‘ef you posts any of us cullud boys ‘longside dat air buryin’ ground, w’y long about midnight somethin’ll happen an’ you’s sartain shore to be shy a couple of niggers when de mawnin’ comes. Kernul, suh, we don’t none of us wanter be shot fur runnin’ ‘way, but dat’s perzactly whut’s gwine happen ef ary one of us has to march back an’ fo’th by dat place w’en de darkness of de night sets in.’ And the colonel understood, and he took mercy on ‘em, so that’s why if the Germans should happen to arrive at night by way of the graveyard they could march right among us, probably without having a shot fired at them.

“But don’t think our boys are afraid,” the young major added with pride in his voice. “I’d take a chance on going anywhere with these black soldiers at my back. So would any of the rest of the officers. We haven’t had any actual fighting experience yet – that’ll come in a week or two when we relieve a French regiment that’s just here in front of us holding the front lines – but we are not worrying about what’ll happen when we get our baptism of fire. Only I’m afraid we’re going to have a mighty disappointed regiment on our hands in about two months from now, when these black boys of ours find out that even in the middle of August watermelons don’t grow in Northern France.”

As we left the regimental headquarters, which was a half-shattered wine shop with breaches in the wall and less than half a roof to its top floor, the young major went along with us to our car to give our chauffeur better directions touching on a maze of cross roads along the last lap of the run.

En route he enriched my notebook with a lovely story, having the merit moreover – a merit that not all lovely stories have – of being true.

“Day before yesterday,” so his narrative ran, “we began drilling the squads in grenade throwing – with live grenades. Up until then we’d exercised them only on dummy grenades, but now they were going to try out the real thing. We had batches of the new grenades – the kind that are exploded by striking the cap at the lower end upon something hard. You probably know how the drill is carried on: At the call of ‘One’ from the squad commander the men strike the cap ends against a stone or something; at ‘Two’ they draw back the thing full arm length, and at ‘Three’ they toss it with a stiff overhand swing. There’s plenty of time of course for all this if nobody fumbles, because the way the fuses are timed five seconds elapse between the striking of the cap and the explosion. If you fling your grenade too soon a Heinie is liable to pick it up and throw it back at you before it goes off. If you hold it too long you’re apt to lose an arm or your life. That’s why we are so particular about timing the movements.

“Well, one squad lined up out here in a field with their eyes bulging out like china door knobs. They were game enough but they weren’t very happy. The moment the word ‘One’ was given a little stumpy darky in my battalion that we call Sugar Foot flung his grenade as far as he could.

“When the rest of the grenades had been thrown the platoon commander jumped all over Sugar Foot. He said to him: ‘Look here, what did you mean by throwing that grenade before these other boys threw theirs? Don’t you know enough to wait for “Three” before you turn loose?’

“‘Yas, suh, lieutenant,’ says Sugar Foot; ‘but I jes’ natchelly had to th’ow it. W’y, lieutenant, I could feel dat thing a-swellin’ in my hand.’”

It may have been the same Sugar Foot – assuredly it was the likes of him – who gave us the salute so briskly as we sped out of the village on the far side from the side on which we entered it. Followed then a swift coursing through a French-held sector wherein at each unfolding furlong of chalky-white highway we beheld sights which, being totted up, would have made enough to write a book about, say three years back. But three years back is ancient history in this war, and what once would have run into chapters is now worth no more than a paragraph, if that much.

At the end of this leg of the journey we were well out of the static zone and well into the active one. And so, after going near where sundry French batteries ding-donged away with six-inch shells – shrapnel, high explosives and gas in equal doses – at a German position five miles away, we emerged from the protecting screenage of forest after the fashion stated in the opening sentences of this chapter, and learned that we had landed where we had counted on landing when we started out.

It was the regiment we were looking for, sure enough. Its colonel, our friend, having been apprised by telephone from two miles rearward at one of his battalion headquarters that we were approaching, had sent word per runner that he waited to welcome us down at his present station just behind the forward observation posts.

So we climbed aboard the one piece of rolling stock that was left astride the metals of a road over which, until August of 1914, transcontinental trains had whizzed, and the ginger-colored humourist slapped the sloping withers of his steed and that patient brute flinched a protesting flinch that ran through his frame from neck to flanks, and we were off for the front trenches by way of the Fifty-ninth Street cross-town line on as unusual a journey as I, for one, have taken since coming over here to this war-worn country, where the unusual thing is the common thing these days. Off with an ex-apartment-house doorman from San Juan Hill, New York City, for our steersman; a creaking small flat car for a chariot; a homegrown mule for motive power; a Yankee second lieutenant and a French liaison officer for added passengers; and for special scenic touches alongside the bramble-grown cut through which we jogged, machine guns so mounted as to command aisles chopped through the thickets, and three-inch guns plying busily at an unseen objective. To this add the whewful remarks let fall in passing by the big ones from farther back as they conversed among themselves on their way over to annoy the Him, and at intervals aërial skirmishes occurring away up overhead – ‘twas a braw and a bonny day for aërial fighting, as a stage Scotchman might say – and you will have a fairly complete picture of the ensemble in your own mind, I trust. But don’t forget to stir in the singing of birds and the buzzing of insects.

The negro troopers we encountered now, here in the copses, sometimes singly or oftener still in squads and details, were dissimilar physically as well as in certain temperamental respects to their fellows of the draft regiment we had seen a little while before. They were apt to be mulattoes or to have light-brown complexions instead of clear black; they were sophisticated and town wise in their bearing; their idioms differed from those others, and their accents too; for almost without exception they were city dwellers and many of them had been born North, whereas the negroes from Dixie were rural products drawn out of the heart of the Farther South. But for all of them might be said these things: They were soldiers who wore their uniforms with a smartened pride; who were jaunty and alert and prompt in their movements; and who expressed, as some did vocally in my hearing, and all did by their attitude, a sincere and heartfelt inclination to get a whack at the foe with the shortest possible delay. I am of the opinion personally – and I make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all of the Southerner’s inherited and acquired prejudices touching on the race question – that as a result of what our black soldiers are going to do in this war, a word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness – but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart – is going to have a new meaning for all of us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling the word American.

However, that is getting in the moral of my tale before I am anywhere near its proper conclusion. The reader consenting, we’ll go back to the place where we were just now, when we rode over the one-mule traffic line to the greeting that had been organised for us two miles away. By chance we had chosen a most auspicious moment for our arrival. For word had just been received touching on the honours which the French Government had been pleased to confer upon two members of the regiment, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, to wit, as follows: For each the War Cross and for each a special citation before the whole French Army, and in addition a golden palm, signifying extraordinary valour, across the red-and-green ribbon of Johnson’s decoration. So it was shortly coming to pass that a negro, almost surely, would be the first private of the American Expeditionary Forces to get a golden palm along with his Croix de Guerre. It might be added, though the statement is quite superfluous in view of the attendant circumstances, that he earned it.

Through the cable dispatches which my companions straightway sent, they being correspondents for daily papers, America learned how Johnson and Roberts, two comparatively green recruits, were attacked at night in a front-line strong point by a raiding party estimated to number between twenty and twenty-five; and how after both had been badly wounded and after Roberts had gone down with a shattered leg he, lying on his back, flung hand grenades with such effect that he blew at least one of the raiders to bits of scrap meat; and how Johnson first with bullets, then with his clubbed rifle after he had emptied it, and finally with his bolo gave so valiant an account of himself that the attacking party fled back to their own lines, abandoning most of their equipment and carrying with them at least five of their number, who had been either killed outright or most despitefully misused by the valiant pair. If ever proof were needed, which it is not, that the colour of a man’s skin has nothing to do with the colour of his soul these twain then and there offered it in abundance.

The word of what the French military authorities meant to do having been received, it had spread, and its lesson was bearing fruit.

So we found out when the colonel took us on a journey through the forward trenches. Every other private and every other noncom. we ran across had his rifle apart and was carefully oiling it. If they were including the coloured boys now when it came to passing round those crosses he meant to get one too, and along with it a mess of Germans – Bush-Germans, by his way of expression. The negro soldier in France insists on pronouncing boche as Bush, and on coupling the transmogrified word to the noun German, possibly because the African mind loves mouth-filling phrases or perhaps just to make all the clearer that, according to his concepts, every boche is a German and every German is a boche.

As we passed along we heard one short and stumpy private, with a complexion like the bottom of a coal mine and a smile like the sudden lifting of a piano lid, call out to a mate as he fitted his greased rifle together:

“Henry Johnson, he done right well, didn’t he? But say, boy, effen they’ll jes gimme a razor an’ a armload of bricks an’ one half pint of bust-haid licker I kin go plum to Berlin.”

CHAPTER XVIII. “LET’S GO!”

THE most illuminating insight of all, into the strengthened ambition which animated the rank and file of the Old Fifteenth was vouchsafed to us as we three, following along behind the tall shape of the Colonel, rounded a corner of a trench and became aware of a soldier who sat cross-legged upon his knees with his back turned to us and was so deeply intent upon the task in hand that he never heeded our approach at all. On a silent signal from our guide we tiptoed near so we could look downward over the bent shoulders of the unconscious one and this, then, was what we saw:

A small, squarely built individual, of the colour of a bottle of good cider-vinegar, who balanced upon his knees a slab of whitish stone – it looked like a scrap of tombstone and I am inclined to think that is what it was – and in his two hands, held by the handle, a bolo with a nine-inch blade. First he would anoint the uppermost surface of the white slab after the ordained fashion of those who use whetstones, then industriously he would hone his blade; then he would try its edge upon his thumb and then anoint and whet some more. And all the while, under his breath, he crooned a little wordless, humming song which had in it some of the menace of a wasp’s petulant buzzing. He was making war-medicine. A United States soldier whose remote ancestors by preference fought hand to hand with their enemies, was qualifying to see Henry Johnson and go him one better. The picture was too sweet a one to be spoiled by breaking in on it. We slipped back out of sight so quietly the knife-sharpener could never have suspected that spying eyes had looked in upon him as he engaged in these private devotions of his.

“They’re all like that buddy with the bolo, and some of them are even more so,” said the colonel after we had tramped back again to the dugout in a chalk cliff, which he temporarily occupied as a combination parlour, boudoir, office, breakfast room and headquarters. “We were a pretty green outfit when they brought us over here. Why, even after we got over to France some of my boys used to write me letters tendering their resignations, to take effect immediately. They had come into the service of their own free will – as volunteers in the National Guard – so when they got tired of soldiering, as a few of them did at first, they couldn’t understand why they shouldn’t go out of their own free wills.

“They used us on construction work down near one of the ports for a while after we landed. Then here a couple of weeks ago they sent us up to take over this sector. The men are fond of saying that all they had by way of preparation for the job was four days’ drilling and a haircut.

“Did I say just now that we were green? Well, that doesn’t half describe it, let me tell you. This sector was calm enough, as frontline sectors go, when we took it over. But the first night my fellows had hardly had time enough to learn to find their way about the trenches when from a forward rifle pit a rocket of a certain colour went up, ‘signifying: ‘We are being attacked by tanks.’

“It gave me quite a shock, especially as there had been no artillery preparation from Fritz’s side of the wire, and besides there is a swamp between the lines right in front of where that rifle pit is, so I didn’t exactly see how tanks were going to get across unless the Germans ferried them over in skiffs. So before calling out the regiment I decided to make a personal investigation. But before I had time to start on it two more rockets went up from another rifle pit at the left of the first one, and according to the code these rockets meant: ‘Lift your barrage – we are about to attack in force.’ Since we hadn’t been putting down any barrage and there was no reason for an attack and no order for one this gave me another shock. So I put out hot-foot to find out what was the matter.

“It seemed a raw recruit in the first pit had found a box of rockets. Just for curiosity, I suppose, or possibly because he wished to show the Bush-Germans that he regarded the whole thing as being in the nature of a celebration, or maybe because he just wanted to see what would happen afterward, he touched off one of them. And then a fellow down the line seeing this rocket decided, I guess, that a national holiday of the French was being observed and so he touched off two. But it never will happen again.

“The very next night we had a gas alarm two miles back of here in the next village, where one of my battalions is billeted. It turned out to be a false alarm, but all through the camp the sentries were sounding their automobile horns as a warning for gas masks. But Major Blank’s orderly didn’t know the meaning of the signals, or if he did know he forgot it in the excitement of the moment. Still he didn’t lose his head altogether. As he heard the sound of the tootings coming nearer and nearer he dashed into the major’s billet – the major is a very sound sleeper – and grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him right out of his blankets. “‘Wake up, major!’ he yelled, trying to keep on shaking with one hand and to salute with the other. ‘Fur Gawd’s sake, suh, wake up. The Germans is comin’ – in automobiles!’

“Oh yes, they were green at the start; but they are as game as any men in this man’s Army are. You take it from me, because I know. They weren’t afraid of the cold and the wet and the terrific labour when they worked last winter down near the coast of France on as mean a job of work as anybody ever tackled. They were up to their waists in cold water part of the time – yes, most of the time they were – but not a one of them flinched. And believe me there’s no flinching among them now that we are up against the Huns! You don’t need the case of Johnson and Roberts to prove it. It is proved by the attitude of every single man among them. It isn’t hard to send them into danger – the hard part is to keep them from going into it on their own accord. They say the dark races can’t stand the high explosives – that their nerves go to pieces under the strain of the terrific concussion. If that be so the representatives of the dark races that come from America are the exceptions to the rule. My boys are getting fat and sassy on a fare of bombings and bombardments, and we have to watch them like hawks to keep them from slipping off on little independent raiding parties without telling anybody about it in advance. Their real test hasn’t come yet, but when it does come you take a tip from me and string your bets along with this minstrel troupe to win.

“My men have a catch phrase that has come to be their motto and their slogan. Tell any one of them to do a certain thing and as he gets up to go about it he invariably says, ‘Let’s go!’ Tell a hundred of them to do a thing and they’ll say the same thing. I hear it a thousand times a day. The mission may involve discomfort or the chance of a sudden and exceedingly violent death. No matter – ‘Let’s go!’ that’s the invariable answer. Personally I think it makes a pretty good maxim for an outfit of fighting men, and I’ll stake my life on it that they’ll live up to it when the real trial comes.”

Two days we stayed on there, and they were two days of a superior variety of continuous black-face vaudeville. There was the evening when for our benefit the men organised an impromptu concert featuring a quartet that would succeed on any man’s burlesque circuit, and a troupe of buck-and-wing dancers whose equals it would be hard to find on the Big Time. There was the next evening when the band of forty pieces serenaded us. I think surely this must be the best regimental band in our Army. Certainly it is the best one I have heard in Europe during this war. On parade when it played the Memphis Blues the men did not march; the music poured in at their ears and ran down to their heels, and instead of marching they literally danced their way along. As for the dwellers of the French towns in which this regiment has from time to time been quartered, they, I am told, fairly go mad when some alluring, compelling, ragtime tune is played with that richness of syncopated melody in it which only the black man can achieve; and as the regiment has moved on, more than once it has been hard to keep the unattached inhabitants of the village that the band was quitting from moving on with it.

If I live to be a hundred and one I shall never forget the second night, which was a night of a splendid, flawless full moon. We stood with the regimental staff on the terraced lawn of the chief house in a half-deserted town five miles back from the trenches, and down below us in the main street the band played plantation airs and hundreds of negro soldiers joined in and sang the words. Behind the masses of upturned dark faces was a ring of white ones where the remaining natives of the place clustered, with their heads wagging in time to the tunes.

And when the band got to Way Down Upon the Swanee River I wanted to cry, and when the drum major, who likewise had a splendid barytone voice, sang, as an interpolated number, Joan of Arc, first in English and then in excellent French, the villagers openly cried; and an elderly peasant, heavily whiskered, with the tears of a joyous and thankful enthusiasm running down his bearded cheeks, was with difficulty restrained from throwing his arms about the soloist and kissing him. When this type of Frenchman feels emotion he expresses it moistly.

Those two days we heard stories without number, all of them true, I take it, and most of them good ones. We heard of the yellow youth who beseeched his officer to send him with a “dang’ous message” meaning by that that he craved to go on a perilous mission for the greater glory of the A. E. F. and incidentally of himself; and about the jaunty individual who pulled the firing wire of a French grenade and catching the hissing sound of the fulminator working its way toward the charge exclaimed: “That’s it – fry, gosh dem you, fry!” before he threw it. And about how a sergeant on an emergency trench-digging job stuck to the task, standing hip-deep in icy water and icy mud, until from chill and exhaustion he dropped unconscious and was like to drown in the muck into which he had collapsed head downward, only his squad discovered him up-ended there and dragged him out; and about many other things small or great, bespeaking fortitude and courage and fidelity and naïve Afric waggery.

Likewise into my possession came copies of two documents, both of which I should say are typical just as each is distinctive of a different phase of the negro temperament. One of them, the first one, was humorous. Indeed to my way of thinking it was as fine an example of unconscious humour as this war is likely to produce. The other was – well, judge for yourself.

Before the regiment moved forward for its dedication to actual warfare it was impressed upon the personnel in the ranks that from now on, more even than before, a soldier in his communications with his superior officer must use the formal and precise language of military propriety. The lesson must have sunk in, because on the thrillsome occasion when a certain private found himself for the first time in a forward rifle pit and for the first time heard German rifle bullets whistling past his ears he called to him a runner and dispatched to the secondary lines this message, now quoted exactly as written except that the proper names have been changed: