The Glory of the Coming

Another day the philanthropic lieutenant colonel rode his saddle horse and turned over to me his side car, the same being a sort of combination of tin bathtub and individual bootblack stand, hitched onto a three-wheeled motor cycle. What with impedimenta and all, rather overflowed its accommodations, but from the bottoms of my blistered feet to the topmost lock of my wind-tossed hair I was grateful to the donor as we went scudding along, the steersman and I, at twenty-five miles an hour.

On a third day I hired a venerable mare and an ancient two-wheeled covered cart, with a yet more ancient Norman farmer to drive the outfit, and under the vast poke-bonnet hood of the creaking vehicle the twain of us journeyed without stopping, from early breakfast time until nearly sunset time. The old man did not know a word of English, but mile after mile as we plodded along, now overtaking the troops who had started their hike at dawn, and now being overtaken by them as the antique mare lost power in her ponderous but rheumatic legs, he conversed at me – not with me, but steadily at me – in his provincial patois, which was the same as Attic Greek to me, or even more so, inasmuch as the only French I have is restaurant French, which begins with the hors d’oeuvres and ends just south of the fromages among the standard desserts.

Nevertheless, I deemed it the part of politeness to show interest by making a response from time to time when he was pausing to take a fresh breath. So about once in so often I would murmur “Yes,” with the rising inflection, or “No,” or “Is that so?” or “Can such things really be?” as the spirit moved me. And always he seemed perfectly satisfied with my observations, which he could not hear – I should have stated before now that among other things he was stone-deaf – and wouldn’t have been able to understand even if he had heard them. And then he would go right on talking some more. From his standpoint, I am convinced, it was a most enjoyable journey and a highly instructive one besides.

Along toward sunset we ambled with the utmost possible deliberation into our destination. It was like the average small town of Northwestern France in certain regards. At a little distance it seemed to be all gable ends jumbled together haphazard and anyhow, as is the way of village architecture in this corner of the world; and following an almost universal pattern the houses scraped sides with one another in a double file along the twisting main street, only swinging back to form a sort of irregular square in the centre.

Here, in the heart of things communal, the grey church reared its bulk above all lesser structures, with the school and the town hall facing it, flanked one side by the town pump and the town shrine and the other side by a public pond, where the horses and the cows watered, and grave, plump little French children played along the muddy brink. But this place had an air of antiquity which showed it antedated most of its fellows even in a land where everything goes back into bygone centuries.

Indeed, the guidebook in peace days, when people used guidebooks, gave it upward of a page of fine print – not so much for what it now was, but for what once upon a time it had been. Julius Cæsar had founded it and named it – and certain of the ruins of the original battlement still stood in massy but shapeless clumps, while other parts had been utilised to form the back ends of houses and barns and cowsheds. One of the first of those pitiable caravans of innocents that swelled the ranks of the Children’s Crusade had been recruited here; and through the ages this town, inconsequential as it had become in these latter times, gave to France and to the world a great chronicler, a great churchman and at least one great warrior.

What a transformation the mere coming of our troops had made! In the public pond a squad of supply-trainsmen were sluicing down four huge motor trucks that stood hub deep in the yellow water – “bathing the elephants” our fellows called this job. Over rutted paving stones that once upon a time had bruised the bare feet of captured Frankish warriors Missouri mules were yanking along the baggage wagons, and their dangling trace chains clinked against the cobbles just as the fetters on the ankles of the prisoners must have clinked away back yonder.

In a courtyard where Roman soldiers may have played at knucklebones a portable army range sent up a cloud of pungent wood smoke from its abbreviated stack, and with the smell of the fire was mingled a satisfying odour of soldier-grub stewing. Plainly there would be something with onions in it – probably “Mulligan” – for supper this night.

Under a moss-hung wall against which, according to tradition, Peter the Hermit stood with the cross in his hand calling the crusaders to march with him to deliver the sepulchre of the Saviour out of the impious hands of the heathen, a line of tired Yankee lads were sprawled upon the scanty grass doing nothing at all except resting. There were wooden signs lettered in English – “Regimental Headquarters,” and “Hospital,” and “Intelligence Offices” – fastened to stone door lintels which time had seamed and scored with deep lines like the wrinkles in an old dame’s face. Khaki-clad figures were to be seen wherever you looked.

Up the twisting and hilly street toiled a company belonging to my particular regiment, and as they came into the billeting place and I new the march was over, the wearied and burdened boys started singing the Doughboys’ Song, which with divers variations is always sung in any infantry outfit that has a skeleton formation of old Regular Army men for its core, as this outfit had, and which to the extent of the first verse runs like this:

Here come the doughboysWith dirt behind their ears!Here come the doughboys —Their pay is in arrears.The cavalree, artilleree, and the lousy engineers —They couldn’t lick the doughboysIn a hundred thousand years.

To the swinging lilt of the air the column angled past where my cart was halted; and as it passed, the official minstrel of the company was moved to deliver himself of another verse, evidently of his own composition and dealing in a commemorative fashion with recent sentimental experiences. As I caught the lines and set them down in my notebook they were:

Here go the doughboys —Good-bye, you little dears!Here go the doughboys —The girls is all in tears!The june ferns and the gossongsAnd the jolly old mong peres —Well, they wont fur git the doughboysFor at least a hundred years!

The troubadour with his mates rounded the outjutting corner of the church beyond the shrine, and I became aware of a highly muddied youngster who sat in a cottage doorway with his legs extending out across the curbing, engaged in literary labours. From the facts that he balanced a leather-backed book upon one knee and held a stub of a pencil poised above a fair clean page I deduced that he was posting his diary to date. Lots of the American privates keep war diaries – except when they forget to, which is oftener than not.

Three months before, or possibly six, the boy in the doorway would have been a strange figure in a strange setting. About him was scarce an object, save for the shifting figures of his own kind, to suggest the place whence he hailed. The broom that leaned against the wall alongside him was the only new thing in view. It was made of a sheaf of willow twigs bound about a staff. The stone well curb ten feet away was covered with the slow lichen growth of centuries. The house behind him, to judge by the thickness of its thatched and wattled roof and by the erosions in its three-foot walls of stone, had been standing for hundreds of years before the great-granddaddies of his generation fought the Indians for a right to a home site in the wilderness beyond the Alleghanies.

But now he was most thoroughly at home – and looked it. He spoke, addressing a companion stretched out upon the earth across the narrow way, and his voice carried the flat, slightly nasal accent of the midwestern corn-lands:

“Say, Murf, what’s the name of this blamed town, anyhow?”

“Search me. Maybe they ain’t never named it. I know you can’t buy a decent cigarette in it, ‘cause I’ve tried. The ‘Y’ ain’t opened up yet and the local shops’ve got nothin’ that a white man’d smoke, not if he never smoked again. What difference does the name make, anyway? All these towns are just alike, ain’t they?”

With the sophisticated eyes of a potential citizen of, say, Weeping Willow, Nebraska, the first speaker considered the wonderfully quaint and picturesque vista of weathered, slant-ended cottages stretching away down the hill, and then, as he moistened the tip of his pencil with the tip of his tongue:

“You shore said a mouthful – they’re all just alike, only some’s funnier-lookin’ than others. I wonder why they don’t paint up and use a little whitewash once in a while. Take that little house yonder now!” He pointed his pencil toward a thatched cottage over whose crooked lines and mottled colours a painter would rave. “If you was to put a decent shingle roof on her and paint her white, with green trimmin’s round the doors and winders, she wouldn’t be half bad to look at. Now, would she? No cigarettes, huh? Nor nothin’!” Inspiration came to him as out of the skies and he grinned at his own conceit. “Tell you what – I’ll jest put it down as ‘Nowhere in France’ and let it go at that.”

On the following day my friend, the lieutenant colonel, brought to the noonday mess a tale which I thought carried a distinct flavour of the Yankee trench essence. There was a captain in the regiment, a last year’s graduate of the Academy, who wore the shiniest boots in all the land round about and the smartest Sam Browne belt, and who owned the most ornate pair of riding trousers, and by other signs and portents showed he had done his best to make the world safe for some sporting-goods emporium back in the States. This captain, it seemed, had approached a sergeant who was in charge of a squad engaged in policing the village street, which is army talk for tidying up with shovel and wheelbarrow.

“See here, sergeant,” demanded the young captain, “why don’t you keep your men moving properly?”

“I’m tryin’ to, sir,” answered the sergeant.

“Well, look at that man yonder,” said the captain, pointing toward a languid buck private who was leaning on his shovel. “I’ve been watching him and he hasn’t moved an inch, except to scratch himself, for the last five minutes. Now go over there and stir him up! Shoot it into him good and proper! I want to hear what you say to him.”

“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, saluting.

With no suspicion of a grin upon his face he charged down upon the delinquent.

“Here, you!” he shouted. “What do you mean, loafin’ round here doin’ nothin’? What do you think you are, anyhow – one of them dam’ West Pointers?”

Floyd Gibbons, who was subsequently so badly wounded, rode one day into a battery of heavy artillery on the Montdidier Front. A begrimed battery man hailed him from a covert of green sods and camouflage where a six-inch gun squatted: “You’re with the Chicago Tribune, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” answered Gibbons. “Why?”

“Well, I just thought I’d tell you that the fellows in this battery have got a favourite line of daily readin’ matter of their own, these days.”

“What do you call it?” inquired Gibbons. “We call it the Old Flannel Shirt,” answered the gunner. “Almost any time you can see a fellow round here goin’ through his copy of it for hours on a stretch. He’s always sure to find something interestin’ too. We may not be what you’d call bookworms in this bunch, but we certainly are the champion little cootie-chasers of the United States Army.”

Body vermin or wet clothes or bad billets or the chance of a sudden and a violent taking-off – no matter what it is – the American soldier may be counted upon to make a joke of it.

This ability to distil a laugh out of what would cause many a civilian to swear or weep or quit in despair serves more objects than one in our expeditionary forces. For one thing it keeps the rank and file of the Army in cheerful mood to have the mass leavened by so many youths of an unquenchable spirit. For another, it provides a common ground for fraternising when Americans and Britishers are brigaded together or when they hold adjoining sectors; for the Britisher in this regard is constituted very much as the American is, except that his humour is apt to assume the form of underestimation of a thing, whereas the American’s fancy customarily runs to gorgeous hyperbole and arrant exaggeration.

In a certain Canadian battalion that has made a splendid record for itself – though for that matter you could say the same of every Canadian battalion that has crossed the sea since the war began – there is a young chap whom we will call Sergeant Fulton, because that is not his real name. This Sergeant Fulton comes from one of the states west of the Great Divide, and he elected on his own account and of his own accord to get into the fighting nearly two years before his country went to war. In addition to being a remarkably handsome and personable youth, Sergeant Fulton is probably the best rifle shot of his age in the Dominion forces. This gift of his, which is so valuable a gift in trench fighting, was made apparent to his superior officers immediately after he crossed the Canadian line in 1915 to enlist, whereupon he very promptly was promoted from the ranks to be a non-com, and when his command got into action in France he was detailed for sniper duty.

At that congenial employment the youngster has been distinguishing himself ever since. Into the rifle pits young Fulton took something besides his ability to hit whatever he shot at, and his marvellous eyesight – he took a most enormous distaste for the institution of royalty; and this, too, in spite of the fact that when he joined up he swore allegiance to His Gracious Majesty George the Fifth. His ideas of royalty seemingly were based upon things he read in school histories. His conception of the present occupant of the English throne was a person mentally gaited very much like Henry the Eighth or Richard the Third, except with a worse disposition than either of those historic characters had. Apparently he conceived of the incumbent as rising in the morning and putting on a gold crown and sending a batch of nobles to the Tower, after which he enacted a number of unjust laws and, unless he felt better toward evening, possibly had a few heads off.

Acquaintance with his comrades at arms served to rid Sergeant Fulton of some of these beliefs, but despite broadening influences he has never ceased to wonder – generally doing his wondering in a loud clear voice – how any man who loved the breath of freedom in his nostrils found it endurable to live under a king when he might if he chose live under a President named Woodrow Wilson.

One morning just at daybreak a Canadian captain – who, by the way, told me this tale – crawled into a shell hole near the German lines where Sergeant Fulton and two other expert riflemen had been lying all night, like big-game hunters at a water hole, waiting for dawn to bring them their chance. One of Fulton’s mates was a Vancouver lad, the other a London Tommy – a typical East-ender, but a very smart sniper.

“Cap,” whispered Fulton, from where he lay stretched on his belly in the herbage at the edge of the crater, “you’ve got here just in time. Ever since it began to get light a Fritzie has been digging over there in their front trench. I’ve had him spotted for half an hour. He has to squat down to dig; and that’s telling on his back. Before long I figure he’s going to straighten up to get the crick out of himself. When he does he’ll show his head above the parapet, and that’s when I’m going to part his hair in the middle with a bullet. Take a squint, Cap, through the periscope and you’ll be able to locate him, dead easy. Then stay right there and you’ll see the surprise party come off.”

So the captain took a squint as informally requested. Sure enough, a hundred yards away, across the debatable territory, pocked with ragged shell pits and traversed by its two festering brown tangles of rusty barbed wire, he could see the flash of an uplifted shovel blade and see the brown clods flying over the lip of the enemy’s parapet. He kept watching. Presently for just a tiny fraction of time the round cap of a German infantryman appeared above the earthen protection. The sergeant had guessed right, and the sergeant’s gun spoke once. Once was enough – a greenhorn at this game would have known that much.

For there was a shriek over there, and a pair of empty outstretched hands were to be seen for one instant, with the fingers clutching at nothing; and then they disappeared, as their owner collapsed into the hole he had been digging.

Then, according to the captain, as the sergeant opened his rifle breach he turned toward the Cockney who crowded alongside him, and with a gratified grin on his face and a weight of sarcasm in his voice he said: “There goes another one, eh, bo, for King and Country?”

The Londoner answered on the instant, taking the same tone in the reply that the American had taken in the taunt. “My word,” he said, “but Gawge will be pleased w’en ‘e ‘ears wot you done fur ‘im!”

Three of us made a long trip by automobile to pay a visit to a coloured regiment, both trip and visit being described elsewhere in these writings. The results more than repaid us for the time and trouble. One of the main compensations was First Class Private Cooksey, who, because he used to be an elevator attendant in a Harlem apartment house, gave his occupation in his enlistment blank as “indoor chauffeur.” It was to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel of the regiment, seeing the expression on the other’s face when a Minenwerfer from a German mortar fell near by on the day the command moved up to the Front, and made a hole in the earth deep enough and wide enough and long enough to hide the average smokehouse in – it was, I repeat, to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel put this question:

“Cooksey, if one of those things drops right here alongside of us and goes off, are you going to stay by me?”

“Kurnal,” stated Private Cooksey with sincerity, “I ain’t goin’ tell you no lie. Ef one of them things busts clost to me I’ll jest natch-elly be obliged to go away frum here. But please, suh, don’t you set me down as no deserter. Jest put it in de books as ‘absent without leave,’ ‘cause I’ll be due back jest ez soon ez I kin git my brakes to work.”

“But what if the enemy suddenly appears in force without any preliminary bombardment?” pressed the colonel. “What do you think you and the rest of the boys will do then?”

“Kurnal,” said Cooksey earnestly, “we may not stick by you but we’ll shore render one service anyway: We’ll spread de word all over France ‘at de Germans is comin’!”

Nevertheless, when the Germans did advance it is of record that neither First Class Private Cooksey nor any of his black and brown mates showed the white feather or the yellow streak or the turned back. Those to whom the test came stayed and fought, and it was the Germans who went away.

It was a member of the Fifteenth who in all apparent seriousness suggested to his captain that it might be a good idea to cross the carrier pigeon with the poll parrot so that when a bird came back from the Front it would be able to talk its own message instead of bringing it along hitched to its shank.

Speaking of carrier pigeons reminds me of a yam that may or may not be true – it sounds almost too good to be true – that is being related at the Front. The version most frequently told has it that a half company of a regiment in the Rainbow Division going forward early one morning in a heavy fog for a raid across No Man’s Land carried along with the rest of the customary equipment a homing pigeon. The pigeon in its wicker cage swung on the arm of a private, who likewise was burdened with his rifle, his extra rounds of ammunition, his trenching tool, his pair of wire cutters, his steel helmet, his gas mask, his emergency ration and quite a number of other more or less cumbersome items.

It was to be a surprise attack behind the cloak of the fog, so there was no artillery preparation beforehand nor barrage fire as the squads climbed over the top and advanced into the mist-hidden beyond. Behind, in the posts of observation and in the post of command – “P.O.” and “P.C.” these are called in the algebraic terminology of modern war – the colonel and his aids and his intelligence officers waited for the sound of firing, and when after some minutes the distant rattle of rifle fire came to their ears they began calculating how long reasonably it might be before word reached them by one or another medium of communication touching on the results of the foray. But the ground telephone remained mute, and no runner returned through the fog with tidings. The suspense tautened as time passed.

Suddenly a pigeon sped into view flying close to the earth. With scores of pairs of eager eyes following it in its course the winged messenger circled until it located its portable cote just behind the colonel’s position, and fluttering down it entered its familiar shelter.

An athletic member of the staff hustled up the ladder. In half a minute he was tumbling down again, clutching in one hand the little scroll of paper that he had found fastened about the pigeon’s leg. With fingers that trembled in anxiety the colonel unrolled the paper and read aloud what was written upon it.

What he read, in the hurried chirography of a kid private, was the following succinct statement: “I’m tired of carrying this derned bird.” In London one night Don Martin, of the New York Herald, and I were crossing the Strand just above Trafalgar Square. In the murk of the unlighted street we bumped into a group of four uniformed figures. Looking close we made out that one was an American soldier, that one was a lanky Scot in kilts, slightly under the influence of something even more exhilarating than the music of the pipes, and that the remaining two were English privates. We gathered right away that an international discussion of some sort was under way. At the moment of our approach the American, a little dark fellow who spoke with an accent that betrayed his Italian nativity, had the floor, or rather he had the sidewalk. We halted in the half-darkness to listen.

“It’s lika thees,” expounded the Yanko-Italian, “w’en I say ‘I should worry’ it mean – it mean – why, it mean I shoulda not worry. You getta me, huh?”

He glanced about him, plainly pleased with the very clear and comprehensive explanation of this expressive bit of Americanism, which had come to him in a sudden burst of inspiration.

The others stared at him blankly. It was one of the Englishmen who broke the silence.

“You ‘ave nothin’ to worry habout hat all, and so you say that you hare worryin’ – his that hit?” he inquired. The American nodded. “Well, then, hall Hi can say his hit sounds like barmy Yankee nonsense to me.”

“Lusten here, laddie, to me,” put in the Scotchman. “If you’ve naught to worry about, why speak of it at all? That’s whut I would be pleased to know.”

“Hoh, never mind,” spoke up the second Englishman; “let’s go get hanother drink at the pub.”

“You’re too late,” stated his countryman in lachrymose tones. “While we’ve been chin-chinnin’ ‘ere the bloomin’ pub ‘as closed – it’s arfter hours for a drink.”

But the canny Scot already was feeling about with a huge paw in the back folds of his kilt. From some mysterious recess he slowly drew forth a flat flask.

“Lads,” he stated happily, “in the language of our American friend here, we should worry, because as it happens, thanks to me own forethought, we ha’ na need to concern ourselves wi’ worryin’ at all, d’ye ken? Ha’ the furst nip, Yank!”

This recital would not be complete did I fail to include in it a paragraph or so touching on the humorous proclivities of – guess who! – the commander of a German submarine, no less; a person who operated last winter mainly off the southernmost tip of Ireland with occasional incursions into the British Channel. This facetious Teuton was known to the crews of the British and American destroyers that did their best to sink him – and finally, it is believed, did sink him – as Kelly. Indeed in the derisive messages that this deep-sea joker used to send over the wireless to our stations he customarily signed himself by that name.