The Glory of the Coming

For guests of honour there were our four, and for hosts there were sixty or seventy members of Night Bombing Squadron Number – .

It so happened that this particular group of picked and sifted young daredevils represented every main division of the empire’s domain. As we were told, there were present Englishmen, Cornishmen, Welshmen, Scots and Irishmen; also Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, an Afrikander or two, and a dark youngster from India; as well as recruits gathered in from lesser lands and lesser colonies where the Union Jack floats in the seven seas that girdle this globe.

The ranking officer – a major by title, and he not yet twenty-four years old – bore the name of a Highland clan, the mere mention of which set me to thinking of whanging claymores and skirling pipes. His next in command was the nephew and namesake of a famous Home Ruler, and this one spoke with the soft-cultured brogue of the Dublin collegian. We were introduced to a flyer bred and reared in Japan, who had hurried to the mother isle as soon as he reached the volunteering age – a shy, quiet lad with a downy upper lip, who promptly effaced himself; and to a young Tasmanian of Celtic antecedents, who, curiously enough, spoke with an English accent richer and more pronounced than any native Englishman in the company used.

I took pains to ascertain the average age of the personnel of the squadron. I am giving no information to the enemy that he already does not know – to his cost – when I state it to be twenty-two and a half years. With perfect gravity veteran airmen of twenty-three or so will tell you that when a fellow reaches twenty-five he’s getting rather a bit too old for the game – good enough for instructing green hands and all that sort of thing, perhaps, but generally past the age when he may be counted upon for effective work against the Hun aloft. And the wondrous part of it is that it is true as Gospel. ‘Tis a man’s game, if ever there was a man’s game in this world; and it’s boys with the peach-down of adolescence on their cheeks that play it best.

Well, we had dinner; and a very good dinner it was, served in the mess hall adjoining, with fowls and a noble green salad, and good honest-to-cow’s butter on the table. But before we had dinner a thing befell which to me was as simply dramatic as anything possibly could be. What was more, it came at a moment made and fit for dramatics, being as deftly insinuated by chance into the proper spot as though a skilled playmaster had contrived it for the climax of his second act.

Glasses had been charged all round, and we were standing to drink the toast of the British aviator when, almost together, two small things happened: The electric lights flickered out, leaving us in the half glow of the crackling flames in the brazier, its tints bringing out here a ruddy young face and there a buckle of brass or a button of bronze but leaving all the rest of the picture in flickering shadows; right on top. of this a servant entered, saluted and handed to the squadron commander a slip of paper bearing a bulletin just received by telephone from the headquarters of a sister squadron in a near-by sector. The young major first read it through silently and then read it aloud:

“Eight machines of squadron – made a day-light raid this afternoon. The operation was successfully carried out.” A little pause. “Three of the machines failed to return.”

That was all. Three of the machines failed to return – six men, mates to these youngsters assembled here and friends to some of them, had gone down in the wreckage of their aircraft, probably to death or to what was hardly less terrible than death – to captivity in a German prison camp.

Well, it was all in the day’s work. No one spoke, nor in my hearing did any one afterward refer to it. But the glasses came up with a jerk, and at that, as though on a signal from a stage manager, the lights flipped on, and then together we drank the airman’s toast, which is:

“Happy landings!”

I do not profess to speak for the others, but for myself I know I drank to the memory of those six blithe boys – riders in the three machines that failed to return – and to a happy landing for them in the eternity to which they had been hurried long before their time.

The best part of the dinner came after the dinner was over, which was as a dinner party should be. We flanked ourselves on the four sides of the fire, and tobacco smoke rose in volume as an incense to good fellowship, and there were stories told and limericks offered without number. And if a story was new we all laughed at it, and if it was old we laughed just the same. Presently a protesting lad was dragooned for service at the piano. The official troubadour, a youth who seemed to be all legs and elbows, likewise detached himself from the background. Instead of taking station alongside the piano he climbed gravely up on top of it and perched there above our heads, with his legs dangling down below the keys. Touching on this, the Young-un, who sat alongside of me, made explanation:

“Old Bob likes to sit on the old jingle box when he sings, you know. He says that then he can feel the music going up through him and it makes him sing. He’ll stay up there singing like a bloomin’ bullfinch till some one drags him down. He seems to sort of get drunk on singin’ – really he does. Extraordinary fancy, isn’t it?”

I should have been the last to drag Old Bob down. For, employing a wonderful East Ender whine, Old Bob sang a gorgeous Cockney ballad dealing with the woeful case of a simple country maiden, and her smyle it was sublyme, but she met among others the village squire, and the rest of it may not be printed in a volume having a family circulation; but anyway it was a theme replete with incident and abounding in detail, with a hundred verses more or less and a chorus after every verse, for which said chorus we all joined in mightily.

From this beginning Old Bob, beating time with both hands, ranged far afield into his repertoire. Under cover of his singing I did my level best to draw out the Young-un – who it seemed was the Young-un more by reason of his size and boyish complexion than by reason of his age, since he was senior to half his outfit – to draw him out with particular reference to his experiences since the time, a year before, when he quit the line, being then a full captain, to take a berth as observer in the service of the air.

It was hard sledding, though. He was just as inarticulate and just as diffident as the average English gentleman is apt to be when he speaks in the hated terms of shop talk of his own share in any dangerous or unusual enterprise. Besides, our points of view were so different. He wanted to hear about the latest music-hall shows in London; he asked about the life in London with a touch in his voice of what I interpreted as homesickness. Whereas I wanted to know the sensations of a youth who flirts with death as a part of his daily vocation. Finally I got him under way, after this wise: “Oh, we just go over the line, you know, and drop our pills and come back. Occasionally a chap doesn’t get back. And that’s about all there is to tell about it… Rummiest thing that has happened since I came into the squadron happened the other night. The boche came over to raid us, and when the alarm was given every one popped out of his bed and made for the dugout. All but Big Bill over yonder. Big Bill tumbled out half dressed and more than half asleep. It was a fine moonlight night and the boche was sailing about overhead bombing us like a good one, and Big Bill, who’s a size to make a good target, couldn’t find the entrance to either of the dugouts. So he ran for the woods just beyond here at the edge of the flying field, and no sooner had he got into the woods than a wild boar came charging at him and chased him out again into the open where the bombs were droppin’. Almost got him, too – the wild boar, I mean. The bombs didn’t fall anywhere near him. Extraordinary, wasn’t it, havin’ a wild boar turn up like that just when he was particularly anxious not to meet any wild boar, not being dressed for it, as you might say? He was in a towerin’ rage when the boche went away and we came out of the dugouts and only laughed at him instead of sympathisin’ with him.”

He puffed at his pipe.

“Fritz gets peevish and comes about to throw things at us quite frequently. You see, this camp isn’t in a very good place. We took it over from the French and it stands out in the open instead of being in the edge of the forest where it should be. Makes it rather uncomfy for us sometimes – Fritzie does.”

All of which rather prepared me for what occurred perhaps five minutes later when for the second time that night the electric lights winked out.

Old Bob ceased from his carolling, and the mess president, a little sandy Scotchman, spoke up:

“It may be that the boche is coming to call on us – the men douse the lights if we get a warning; or it may be that the battery has failed. At any rate I vote’ we have in some candles and carry on. This is too fine an evening to be spoiled before it’s half over, eh?”

A failed battery it must have been, for no boche bombers came. So upon the candles being fetched in, Old Bob resumed at the point where he had left off. He sang straight through to midnight, nearly, never minding the story telling and the limerick matching and the laughter and the horse play going on below him, and rarely repeating a song except by request of the audience. If his accompanist at the piano knew the air, all very well and good; if not, ‘Old Bob sang it without the music.

They didn’t in the least want us to leave when the time came for us to leave, vowing that the fun was only just starting and that it would be getting better toward daylight. But ahead of us we had a long ride, without lights, over pitchy-dark roads, so we got into our car and departed. First, though, we must promise to come back again very soon, and must join them in a nightcap glass, they toasting us with their airmen’s toast, which seemed so well to match in with their buoyant spirits.

When next I passed by that road the hangars were empty of life and the barracks had been tom down. The great offensive had started the week before, and on the third day of it, as we learned from other sources, our friends of Night Bombing Squadron Number – , obeying an order, had climbed by pairs into their big planes and had gone winging away to do their share in the air fighting where the fighting lines were locked fast.

There was need just then for every available British aëroplane – the more need because each day showed a steadily mounting list of lost machines and lost airmen. I doubt whether many of those blithesome lads came out of that hell alive, and doubt very much, too, whether I shall ever see any of them again.

So always I shall think of them as I saw them last – their number being sixty or so and the average age twenty-two and a half – grouped at the doorway of their quarters, with the candlelight and the firelight shining behind them, and their glasses raised, wishing to us “Happy landings!”

CHAPTER XI. TRENCH ESSENCE

WHEN our soldiers arrive on foreign soil, almost invariably, so it has seemed to me watching them, they come ashore with serious faces and for the most part in silence. Their eyes are busy, but their tongues are taking vacation. For the time being they have lost that tremendous high-powered exuberance which marks them at home, in the camps and the cantonments, and which we think is as much a part of the organism of the optimistic American youth as his hands and his legs are.

I noticed this thing on the day our ship landed at an English port. We came under convoy in a fleet made up almost entirely of transports bearing troops – American volunteers, Canadian volunteers, and aliens recruited on American soil for service with the Allies. A Canadian battalion, newly organised, marched off its ship and out upon the same pier on which the soldiers who had crossed on the vessel upon which I was a passenger were disembarking. The Canadians behaved like schoolboys on a holiday.

It was not what the most consistent defender of the climate of Great Britain would call good holidaying weather either. A while that day it snowed, and a while it rained, and all the while a shrewish wind scolded shrilly in the wireless rig and rampaged along the damp and drafty decks. Nevertheless, the Canadians were not to be daunted by the inhospitable attitude of the elements.

One in three of them, about, carried a pennant bearing the name of his home town or his home province, or else he carried a little flag mounted on a walking stick. Nine out of ten, about, were whooping. They cheered for the ship they were leaving; they cheered for the sister ship that had borne us overseas along with them; they cheered to feel once more the solid earth beneath their feet; they cheered just to be cheerful, and, cheering so, they traversed the dock and took possession of the train that stood on a waterside track waiting to bear them to a rest camp. I imagine they were still cheering when they got there.

Now if you knew the types we had aboard our packet you might have been justified in advance for figuring that our outfit would be giving those joyous Canadian youngsters some spirited competition in the matter of making noises. We carried a full regiment of a Western division, largely made up, as to officers and as to men, of national guardsmen from the states of Colorado, Wyoming and Washington. They were cow-punchers, ranch hands, lumbermen, fruit growers, miners – outdoor men generally. Eighty men in the ranks, so I had learned during the voyage, were full-blooded Indians off of Northwestern reservations. We had men along who had won prizes for bronco-busting and bull-dogging at Frontier Day celebrations in Cheyenne and in California; also men who had travelled with the Wild West shows as champion ropers and experts at rough-riding. Never before, I am sure, had one vessel at one time borne in her decks so many wind-tanned, bow-legged, hawk-faced, wiry Western Americans as this vessel had borne.

But did one hear the lone-wolf howl as our fellows went filing down the gang-planks? Did one catch the exultant, shrill yip-yip-yip of the round-up or the far-carrying war yell of the Cheyenne buck? One most emphatically did not. If those three thousand and odd fellows had all been pallbearers officiating at the putting away of a dear departed friend they could not have deported themselves more soberly. Nobody carried a flag, unless you would except the colour bearers, who bore their colours furled about the staffs and protected inside of tarpaulin holsterings. Nobody waved a broad-brimmed hat either in salute to the Old World or in farewell to the ocean. Barring the snapped commands of the officers, the clinking in unison of hobbed and heavy boot soles, the shuffle of moving bodies, the creak of leather girthings put under strain, and occasionally the sharp clink and clatter of metal as some dangling side arm struck against a guard rail or some man shifted his piece, the march-off was accomplished without any noise whatsoever. It was interesting – and significant, too, I think – to spy upon those intent, set faces and those eager, steady eyes as the files went by and so away, bound, by successive stages of progress, with halts between at sessioning billets and at training barracks, for the battle fronts beyond the channel.

As between the Canadian and the United States soldiers I interpreted this striking difference in demeanour at the disembarking hour somewhat after this fashion: To a good many of the Dominion lads, no doubt, the thing was in the nature of a home-coming, for they had been born in England. A great many more of them could not be more than one generation removed from English birth. Anyhow and in either event, they as thoroughly belonged to and were as entirely part and parcel of the Empire as the islanders who greeted them upon the piers. One way or another they had always lived on British soil and under the shadow of the Union Jack. They were not strangers; neither were they aliens, even though they had come a far way; they were joint inheritors with native Englishmen of the glory that is England’s. The men they would presently fight beside were their own blood kin. Quite naturally therefore and quite properly they commemorated the advent into the parent land according to the manner of the Anglo-Saxon when he strives to cover up, under a mien of boisterous enthusiasm, emotions of a purer sentiment. I could conceive some of them as laughing very loudly because inside of themselves they wanted to cry; as straining their vocal cords the better to ease the twitch-ings at their heart cockles.

But the Americans, even if they wore names bespeaking British ancestry – which I should say at an offhand guess at least seventy-five per cent of them did – were not moved by any such feelings. Such ties as might link their natures to the breed from which they remotely sprang were the thinnest of ties, only to be revealed in times of stress through the exhibition of certain characteristics shared by them in common with their very distant English and Scotch and Irish and Welsh kinsmen. For England as England they had no affectionate yearnings. England wasn’t their mother; she was merely their great-great-grandmother, with whom their beloved Uncle Sam had had at least two serious misunderstandings. To all intents and purposes this was a strange land – certainly its physical characteristics had an alien look to them – and to it they had come as strangers.

I fancy, though, the chief reasons for their quiet seriousness went down to causes even deeper than this one. I believe that somehow the importance of the task to which they had dedicated themselves and the sense of the responsibility intrusted to them as armed representatives of their own country’s honour were brought to a focal point of realisation in the minds of these American lads by the putting of foot on European soil. The training they had undergone, the distances they had travelled, the sea they had crossed – most of them, I gathered, had never smelt salt water before in their lives – the sight of this foreign city with its foreign aspect – all these things had chemically combined to produce among them a complete appreciation of the size of the job ahead of them; and the result made them dumb and sedate, and likewise it rendered them aloof to surface sensations, leaving them insulated by a sort of noncommittal pose not commonly found among young Americans in the mass – or among older Americans in the mass for that matter.

Perhaps a psychologist might prove me wrong in these amateur deductions of mine. For proof to bolster up my diagnosis I can only add that on three subsequent occasions, when I saw American troops ferrying ashore at French ports, they behaved in identically this same fashion, becoming for a period to be measured by hours practically inarticulate and incredibly earnest. Correspondents who chanced to be with me these three several times were impressed as I had been by the phenomenon.

But the condition does not last; you may be very sure of that. If there exists a more adaptable creature than the American soldier he has not yet been tagged, classified and marked Exhibit A for identification. Once the newly arrived Yank has lost his sea legs and regained his shore ones; once the solemnity and incidentally the novelty of the ceremony of his entrance into Europe has worn away; once he has learned how to think of dollars and cents in terms of francs and centimes and how to speak a few words in barbarous French – he reverts to type. His native irreverence for things that are stately and traditional rises up within him, renewed and sharpened; and from that moment forward he goes into this business of making war against the Hun with an impudent grin upon his face, and in his soul an incurable cheerfulness that neither discomfort nor danger can alloy, and a joke forever on his lips. That is the real essence of the trenches – the humour that is being secreted there with the grimmest and ghastliest of all possible tragedies for a background.

I wouldn’t call it exactly a new type of humour, because always humour has needed the contrast of dismalness and suffering to set it off effectively, but personally I am of the opinion that it is a kind of humour that is going to affect our literature and our mode of living generally after the war is ended.

Bairnsfather, the English sketch artist, did not invent the particular phase of whimsicality – the essentially distinctive variety of seriocomic absurdity – which has made the world laugh at his pictures of Old Bill and Bert and Alf. He did a more wonderful thing: he had the wit and the genius to catch an illusive atmosphere which existed in the trenches before he got there and to put it down in black on white without losing any part of its savoury qualities. In slightly different words he practically told me this when I ran across him up near the Front the other day while he was setting about his new assignment of depicting the humour of the American soldier as already he had depicted that of the British Tommy. He had, he said, made one discovery already – that there was a tremendous difference between the two schools.

This is quite true, and if some talented Frenchman – it will take a Frenchman, of course – succeeds in making sketches that will reflect the wartime humour of the French soldier as cleverly as Bairnsfather has succeeded at the same job with the British high private for his model it will no doubt be found that the poilu’s brand of humour is as distinctively his own as the American soldier’s is or the English soldier’s is.

There is an indefinable something, yet something structurally French, I think, in the fact that when Captain Hamilton Fish – called Ham Fish for short – arrived in France a few weeks before this was written the French soldiers with whom his command was brigaded immediately rechristened him Le Capitaine Jambon Poisson, and under this new Gallicised name he is to-day one of the best-known personages among the French in the country.

Likewise there is a certain African individuality, or rather an Afro-American individuality, in the story now being circulated through the expeditionary forces, of the private in one of our negro regiments who bragged at his company mess of having taken out a life-insurance policy for the full amount allowed a member of the Army, under the present governmental plan.

“Whut you wan’ do dat fur?” demanded a comrade. “You ain’t married an’ you ain’t got no fambly. Who you goin’ leave all dat money to ef you gits killed?”

“I ain’t aimin’ to git killed,” stated the first darky. “Dat’s de very reason I taken out all dat insho’ence.”

“How come you ain’t liable to git killed jes’ de same ez ary one of de rest of us is?”

“W’y, you pore ign’ant fool, does you s’pose w’en Gin’el Pershing finds out he’s got a ten-thousand-dollar nigger in dis man’s Army dat he’s gwine take any chances on losin’ all dat money by sendin’ me up to de Front whar de trouble is? Naw suh-ree, he ain’t!”

From a commingling of memories of recent events there stands out a thing of which I was an eye-and-ear-witness back in April, when the first of our divisions to go into the line of the great battle moved up and across France from a quieter area over in Lorraine, where it had been holding a sector during the early part of the spring. Each correspondent was assigned to a separate regiment for the period of the advance, being quartered in the headquarters mess of his particular regiment and permitted to accompany its columns as it moved forward toward the Picardy Front. That is to say, he was permitted to accompany its columns, but it devolved upon him to furnish his own motive power. Baggage trains and supply trains had been pared to the quick in order to expedite fast marching; no provision for transporting outsiders had been made, nor would any such provision have been permitted. A colonel was lucky if he had an automobile to himself and his adjutant; generally he had to carry a French liaison officer or two along with him in addition to his personal equipment.

I had been added to the personnel of an infantry regiment, which meant I could not steal an occasional ride while moving from one billet to another on the jolting limber of a field gun. Such boons were vouchsafed only to those more fortunate writers who belonged for the time being to the artillery wing. One day I walked. I was lucky in that I did not have to carry my bedding roll and my haversack; these a kindly disposed ambulance driver smuggled into his wagon, rules and regulations to the contrary notwithstanding.