The glory of the coming; what mine eyes have seen of Americans in action in this year of grace and allied endeavor

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

BY IRVIN S. COBB

FICTION

THOSE TIMES AND THESE

LOCAL COLOR

OLD JUDGE PRIEST

FIBBLE, D. D.

BACK HOME

THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM

THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE

WIT AND HUMOR

"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS-
EUROPE REVISED
ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
COBB'S BILL OF FARE
COBB'S ANATOMY

MISCELLANY

THE GLORY OF THE COMING
PATHS OF GLORY
"SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS —

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK

THE GLORY OF
THE COMING

WHAT MINE EYES; HAVE SEEN OF AMERICANS

IN ACTION IN THIS YEAR OF GRACE

AND ALLIED ENDEAVOR

BY

IRVIN S. COBB

AUTHOR OF "BACK HOME,'

"OLD JUDGE PRIEST,"

ETC., ETC.

NEW ^iar YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

570

CSS

COPTBIGHT, 1918,
BT GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1918. BT THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

GEORGE H. BURR, ESQUIRE

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are

stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,

His Truth is marching on."

— Battle Hymn of the Republic

FOREWORD

This book is made up of articles written
abroad in the spring and summer of 1918 and
cabled or mailed back for publication at home.
For convenience in arrangement, a few of these
papers have been broken up into sectional sub-
divisions with new chapter headings inserted;
otherwise the matter is here presented practic-
ally in its original form.

It has been given to the writer to behold
widely dissimilar aspects of the Great War.
As a neutral observer, hailing from a neutral
country, I was a witness, in Belgium, in north-
ern France, in Germany and in England, to
some of its first stages. That was back in 1914
when I was for awhile with the British, then for
a period with the Belgian forces afield, then for
a much longer period with the German armies
and finally with the British again. I was of like
mind then with all my professional brethren serv-
ing publications in non-belligerent countries, ex-
cepting one or two or three of a more discerning
vision than the rest. Behind the perfection of
the German fighting machine I did not see the
hideous malignant brutality which was there.
tk]

FOREWORD

In the first half of this present year, as a
partisan on the side of my country and its fed-
erated associates, I visited England and for a
space of months travelled about over France,
with two incursions into that small corner of
Flanders which at this time remained in the
hands of the Allies.

I have seen the Glory of the Coming. I
have watched the American Expeditionary
Force grow from a small thing into a mighty
thing — the mightiest thing, I veritably believe,
that since conscious time began, has been un-
dertaken by a free people entering upon a war
on foreign shores with nothing personally to
gain except a principle, with nothing to main-
tain except honour, with nothing to keep ex-
cept their national self-respect. In this war
our only spoils out of the victory will be the
establishment of the rights of other peoples to
rule themselves, our only territorial enlarge-
ments will be the graves where our fallen dead
sleep on alien soil, our only tangible reward for
all that we are giving in blood and treasure and
effort and self-denial, will be the knowledge
that in a world crisis, when the liberties of the
world were imperilled, we, as a world-power
and as perhaps the most conspicuous example
in the world, of a democracy, did our duty by
ourselves, by our republican neighbours over-
seas and by our children and their children and
their children's children.

No longer ago than last March, it was a
[x]

FOREWORD

small thing we had done, as viewed in the light
of our then visible performances in France and
an even smaller thing as viewed in the light of
what our public men, many of them, and our
newspapers, some of them, had promised on
our behalf nearly a year earlier when we came
into the war. At the beginning there was an
army to be created; there was a navy to be
built up; there was a continent to be crossed
and an ocean to be traversed if we meant to
link up all the States of our Union with all our
plans; there was a military establishment to
be started from the grass roots; there were
ninety millions of us to be set from the ways of
peace into the ways of war. But because some
of our politicians professed to believe that by
virtue of our resources, our energy and our so-
called business efficiency we could do the im-
possible in an impossibly brief time, and more
especially because, among the masses of Con-
tinental Europe there was a tendency to look
upon us as a race of miracle- workers living in a
magic-land and accomplishing unutterable won-
ders at will, and finally because these same
masses accepted the words of our self-appoint-
ed, self-anointed prophets as they might accept
Gospel-writ, a profound disappointment over
the seeming failure of America to produce her
legions on European soil, followed hard upon
txie exaltation which had prevailed among our
Allies immediately after we broke with the
common enemy of mankind. In France I know
[xi]

FOREWORD

this to have been true; in other countries I have
reason to believe it was true. As month after
month passed until nearly a twelvemonth had
gone by and still the armed millions from Amer-
ica did not materialise, I think it only natural
and inevitable that, behind their hands and
under their breaths, the Poilus called our sol-
diers "Boy Scouts" and spoke of our effort as
"The Second Children's Crusade." For thanks
be to a few men among us who worked with
their mouths rather than with their hands, the
French populace had been led to expect so very
much of us in so short a space of time and yet
there now was presented before their eyes, so
very little as the tangible proofs of our voiced
determination to offer all that we had and all
that we were, in the fight for decency and for
humanity.

Do you remember when, on or about the be-
ginning of the last week of March, General
Pershing offered to the Allied command the
available mobile strength of the army under
him, for service to aid the British, the French,
the Belgians and the Portuguese in stemming
the great German offensive which had been
launched on the twenty -first day of that month?
Pershing made the offer in all good faith and in
all good faith it was accepted. But at that
moment all he could spare out of the trenches
and send across France from the East to the
West to go into the line in threatened Picardy
was one division of considerably less than forty
[xii]

FOREWORD

thousand men; a puny handful as they measure
fighting forces these times; and that division
was stayed in part on French rations, equipped
in part with borrowed French ordnance and
provided in large part with French munitions.
Without French aid it probably could not have
gone forward at all; without French aid it
could not have maintained itself after it had
taken over the Normandy sectors to which
Foch assigned it. It was not the fault of our
military leaders abroad, perhaps it was not the
fault of our people at home that, fifty weeks
after entering the war, we were able to render
only so small a share of immediate help in this
most critical juncture of the entire war. But
it was the fault of those who had boasted, those
who had bragged, those who had preached at
home what they did not practice, that the
French people were beginning to think — and
to whisper — that the United States had failed
to live up to its pledges. These people had no
way of knowing what we were accomplishing
over here; they must judge by what they might
see for themselves over there.

The great awakening came, though, before
the first of June. Over-night, it almost seemed,
our army began to function as an army. The
sea became alive with our transports, the land
became alive with our troops. Instead of two
hundred and some odd thousands of men on
French soil, we had half a million, then a mil-
lion, then a million and a half. No longer were
[xiii]

FOREWORD

our forces without tanks of American manu-
facture, without machine-guns of American
manufacture, without a proper and adequate
equipment of heavy guns of American manu-
facture. There was even hope that our aero-
plane production, up until then the most ghast-
ly and pitiable failure of all, might by autumn,
begin to measure up, in some degree at least, to
the sanguine press-notices of the year before—
1917. We who in France could see the growth
of this thing came to feel that perhaps all of
our dollar-a-year commercial giants were not
being grossly overpaid and we came proudly to
realise that our country now was responding
with all its strength to the responsibilities it
had assumed. The Yanks were no longer on
the way; they were here — here in number suf-
ficient to enable us to lend a strong and ever-
strengthening hand in the turning-back of the
enemy and in bringing closer the certainty of
a complete triumph over him. It was the
Glory of the Coming. Moreover it should not
be forgotten in the reckoning-up of causes and
results that the lodging of the allied command
in the hands of one captain — the most power-
ful single factor in inspiring victory — was
brought about largely through American in-
sistence upon the election of a single leader
and a unified leadership for all the forces of the
confederated nations in the field of the western
theatre of the war.

I sometimes think the most splendid thing I
[xiv]

FOREWORD

have seen in this war was not some individual
act of heroism, or devotion, or resolution —
glorious though it may have been. I sometimes
think the most splendid thing I have seen was
the making-over of nations, literally before my
eyes, in the fiery furnace of this war. I have
seen little Belgium wearing the marks of her
transcendent sacrifice and her unutterable suf-
fering, as the Redeemer of Man wore the nail-
marks of His Crucifixion; I have seen Britain
transformed from the fat, contented, slothful,
old grandmother of the nations, sitting by the
chimney-piece and feeding herself torpid on her
plenty, into the militant Britain of yore that
has put so many millions of her sons into khaki
and so many of the ladies of Germany into
mourning; I have seen France become an in-
comparably glorious model, before all the world
for all time, of the heights to which a free peo-
ple may rise in defence of national pledges,
national integrity and national existence; and I
have seen my own country taking her proper
place, in the most desperate emergency that
ever confronted civilisation, as a people united,
determined, valiant and steadfast — the spirit
of the New World binding herself with steel
grapples to the best that is in the Old World
and inevitably taking the first steps in the
long-delayed campaign of understanding and
conciliation and renewed affection vwith our
kinspeople and our brethren of the British Isles
who speak the same mother-tongue which we
[xv]

FOREWORD

speak and with whom we are joint inheritors of
Runnymede and Agincourt.

As I write these lines, victory appears to be
very near. Seemingly, it is coming one year
sooner than we, who were in France and Bel-
gium in the first months of 1918, thought it
would come. And speaking for my fellow-
American correspondents as well as for myself,
I make so bold as to say that all of us are de-
voutly hopeful that our leaders will make it a
complete, not a conditional victory. For sure-
ly those who are without mercy themselves
cannot appreciate and do not deserve mercy
from others. To our way of thinking, the van-
quished must be made to drink the cup of de-
feat to its bitterest lees, not because of any
vengeful desire on our part to inflict unneces-
sary punishment and humiliation upon him,
but because he who had no other argument than
force, can be cured of his madness only by
force. We who have seen what he has wrought
by the work of his hands among his helpless
victims in other lands believe this with all our
hearts.

7. S. C.

New York, November, 1918.

[xvi]

CONTENTS

PAGE

I WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS 21

II "ALLAMURIKIN — OUT TO THEM WIRES" ... 35

III HELL'S FIRB FOR THE HUNS 58

IV ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE 82

V SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY .... 98

VI THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR .... 102

VII AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT 114

VIII A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE .... 129

IX ACES UP! 139

X HAPPY LANDINGS 152

XI TRENCH ESSENCE 164

XII BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED 195

XIII LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT .... 210

XIV THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA 217

XV WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR 235

XVI CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION .... 265

XVII YOUNG BLACK JOE 270

XVIII "LET'S Go!" 298

XIX WAR AS IT ISN'T . . 308

XX THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO 330

XXI PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES 345

XXII THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE 354

XXIII BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW 375

XXIV FEOM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK . 398

[xvii]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

CHAPTER I
WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

BECAUSE she was camouflaged with
streaky marks and mottlings into the
likeness of a painted Jezebel of the seas,
because she rode high out of the water,
and wallowed as she rode, because during all
those days of our crossing she hugged up close
to our ship, splashing through the foam of our
wake as though craving the comfort of our
company, we called her things no self-respect-
ing ship should have to bear. But when that
night, we stood on the afterdeck of our ship,
we running away as fast as our kicking screw
would take us, and saw her going down, taking
American soldier boys to death with her in
alien waters, we drank toasts standing up to
the poor old Tuscania.

I was one of those who were in at the death
of the Tuscania. Her sinking was the climax
of the most memorable voyage I ever expect
to take. Five days have elapsed since she was
torpedoed, and even though these words are
being cabled across from London to the home

[21]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

side of the ocean, at least three weeks more
must elapse before they can see printer's ink.
So to some this will seem an old story; but
the memory of what happened that night off
the Irish coast is going to abide with me while
I live. It was one of those big moments in a
man's life that stick in a man's brain as long
as he has a brain to think with.

Transatlantic journeys these days aren't
what they used to be before America went
into the war. Ours began to be different even
before our ship pulled out from port. It is
forbidden me now to tell her name, and anyhow
her name doesn't in the least matter, but she
was a big ship with a famous skipper, and in
peacetimes her sailing .would have made some
small stir. There would have been crowds of
relations and friends at the pier bidding fare-
well to departing travellers; and steamer baskets
and steamer boxes would have been coming
aboard in streams. Beforehand there would
have been a pleasant and mildly exciting
bustle, and as we drew away from the dock
and headed out into midstream and down the
river for our long hike overseas, the pierhead
would have been alive with waving handker-
chiefs, and all our decks would have been
fringed with voyagers shouting back farewells
to those they had left behind them. Instead
we slipped away almost as if we had done
something wrong. There was no waving of
hands and handkerchiefs, no good-byes on the

[22]

WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

gang-planks, no rush to get back on land when
the shore bell sounded. To reach the dock we
passed through trochas of barbed-wire en-
tanglements, past sentries standing with fixed
bayonets at entryways. When we got inside
the pier our people bade us farewell at a guarded
gate. None but travellers whose passports
read straight were allowed beyond that point.
So alone and unescorted each one of us went
soberly up the side of the ship, and then sun-
dry hours later our journey began, as the ship,
like a big grey ghost, slid away from land, as
quietly as might be, into the congenial grey
fog which instantly swallowed her up and left
her in a little grey world of sea mist that was
all her own. After this fashion, then, we
started.

As for the first legs of the trip they were
much like the first legs of almost any sea trip
except that we travelled in a convoy with sun-
dry other ships, with warcraft to guard us on
our way. Our ship was quite full of soldiers —
officers in the first cabin, and the steerage
packed with khakied troopers — ninety per cent
of whom had never smelled bilge water before
they embarked upon their great adventure
overseas. There were fewer civilians than one
formerly might have found on a ship bound
for Europe. In these times only those civilians
who have urgent business in foreign climes
venture to go abroad.

I sat at the purser's table. His table was

[23]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

fairly typical of the ship's personnel. With
me there sat, of course, the purser, likewise
two Canadian officers, two members of a
British Commission returning from America,
and an Irish brewer. There were not very
many women on our passenger list. Of these
women half a dozen or so were professional
nurses, and two were pretty Canadian girls
bound for England to be married on arrival
there to young Canadian officers. There were
only three children on board, and they were
travelling with their parents in the second
class.

Except for a touch of seriousness about the
daily lifeboat drill, and except that regimental
discipline went forward, with the troops drill-
ing on the open deck spaces when the weather
and the sea permitted, there was at first noth-
ing about this voyage to distinguish it from
any other midwinter voyage. Strangers got
acquainted one with another and swapped
views on politics, religion, symptoms and Ger-
mans; flirtations started and ripened furiously;
concerts were organized and took place, proving
to be what concerts at sea usually are. Twice
a day the regimental band played, and once a
day, up on the bridge, the second officer took
the sun, squinting into his sextant with the
deep absorption with which in happier times a
certain type of tourist was wont to stare through
an enlarging device at a certain type of Parisian
photograph. At night, though, we were in a
[24]

WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

darkened ship, a gliding black shape upon
black waters, with heavy shades over all the
portholes and thick draperies over all the
doors, and only dim lights burning in the
passageways and cross halls, so that every odd
corner on deck or within was as dark as a coal
pocket. It took some time to get used to being
in the state in which Moses was when the light
went out; but then, we had time to get used
to it, believe me! Ocean travel is slower these
days, for obvious reasons. Personally, I re-
tired from the ship's society during three days
of the first week of the trip. I missed only
two meals, missing them, I may add, shortly
after having eaten them; but at the same time
I felt safer in my berth than up on deck — not
happier, particularly, but safer. The man who
first said that you can't eat your cake and
have it too had such cases as mine in mind, I
am sure of that. I can't and I don't — at least
not when I am taking an ocean voyage. I
have been seasick on many waters, and I have
never learned to care for the sensation yet.

When I emerged from semiretirement it was
to learn that we had reached the so-called dan-
ger zone. The escort of warcraft for our
transport had been augmented. Under orders
the military men wore their life jackets, and
\;aduring all their waking hours they went about
with cork flaps hugging them about their
necks fore and aft, so that they rather suggested
Chinese malefactors with their heads incased

[25]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

in punishment casques. By request the civilian
passengers were expected to carry their life
preservers with them wherever they went; but
some of them forgot the injunction. I know I
did frequently. Also, a good many of them
turned in at night with most of their outer
clothing on their bodies; but I followed the old
Southern custom and took most of mine off
before going to bed.

Our captain no longer came to the saloon
for his meals. He lived upon the bridge — ate
there and, I think, slept there too — what
sleeping he did. Standing there all muffled in
his oilskins he looked even more of a squatty
and unheroic figure than he had in his naval
blue presiding at the head of the table; but
by repute we knew him for a man who had
gone through one torpedoing with great credit
to himself and through numbers of narrow es-
capes, and we valued him accordingly and put
our faith in him. It was faith well placed, as
shall presently transpire.

I should not say that there was much fear
aboard; at least if there was it did not mani-
fest itself in the manner or the voice or the
behaviour of a single passenger seen by me;
but there was a sort of nagging, persistent sense
of uneasiness betraying itself in various small
ways. For one thing, all of us made more
jokes about submarines, mines and other perils
of the deep than was natural. There was
something a little forced, artificial, about this
[26]

WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

gaiety — the laughs came from the lips, but
not from points farther south.

We knew by hearsay that the Tuscania was
a troopship bearing some of our soldiers over
to do their share of the job of again making
this world a fit place for human beings to live
in. There was something pathetic in the
fashion after which she so persistently and
constantly strove to stick as closely under our
stern as safety and the big waves would permit.
It was as though her skipper placed all reliance
in our skipper, looking to him to lead his ship
out of peril should peril befall. Therefore, we
of our little group watched her from our after-
decks, with her sharp nose forever half or
wholly buried in the creaming white smother
we kicked up behind us.

It was a crisp bright February day when we
neared the coasts of the British Empire. At
two o'clock in the afternoon we passed, some
hundreds of yards to starboard, a round, dark,
bobbing object which some observers thought
was a floating mine. Others thought it might
be the head and shoulders of a human body
held upright in a life ring. Whatever it was,
our ship gave it a wide berth, sheering off
from the object in a sharp swing. Almost at
the same moment upon our other bow, at a
distance of not more than one hundred yards
from the crooked course we were then pur-
suing, there appeared out through one of the
swells a lifeboat, oarless, abandoned, empty,
[27]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

except for what looked like a woman's cloak
lying across the thwarts. Rising and falling to
the swing of the sea it drifted down alongside
of us so that we could look almost straight
down into it. We did not stop to investigate
but kept going, zigzagging as we went, and that
old painted-up copy cat of a Tuscania came
zigzagging behind us. A good many persons
decided to tie on their life preservers.

Winter twilight was drawing on when we
sighted land — Northern Ireland it was. The
wind was going down with the sun and the
sharp crests of the waves were dulling off, and
blunt oily rollers began to splash with greasy
sounds against our plates. Far away some-
where we saw the revolving light of a light-
house winking across the face of the waters
like a drunken eye. That little beam coming
and going gave me a feeling of security. I
was one of a party of six who went below to
the stateroom of a member of the group for
a farewell card game.

Perhaps an hour later, as we sat there each
intently engaged upon the favoured indoor
American sport of trying to better two pairs,
we heard against our side of the ship a queer
knocking sound rapidly repeated — a sound
that somehow suggested a boy dragging a
stick along a picket fence.

"I suppose that's a torpedo rapping for admis-
sion," said one of us, looking up from his cards
and listening with a cheerful grin on his face.

[28]

WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

I think it was not more than five minutes
after that when an American officer opened the
stateroom door and poked his head in.

"Better come along, you fellows," he said;
"but come quietly so as not to give alarm or
frighten any of the women. Something has
happened. It's the Tuscania — she's in trouble !"

Up we got and hurried aft down the decks,
each one taking with him his cork jacket and
adjusting it over his shoulders as he went. We
came to the edge of the promenade deck aft.
There were not many persons there, as well
as we could tell in the thick darkness through
which we felt our way, and not many more
came afterward — in all I should say not more
than seventy-five.

All the rest were in ignorance of what had
occurred — a good many were at dinner. Ac-
counts of the disaster which I have read since
my arrival in London said that the torpedo
from the U-boat thudded into the vitals of the
Tuscania, disarranged her engines, and left her
in utter darkness for a while until her crew
could switch on the auxiliary dynamo. I think
this must have been a mistake, for at the
moment of our reaching the deck of our ship
the Tuscania was lighted up all over. Her
illumination seemed especially brilliant, but
that, I suppose, was largely because we had
become accustomed to seeing our fellow trans-
ports as dark bulks at night. I should say she
was not more than a mile from us, almost
[29]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

except for what looked like a woman's cloak
lying across the thwarts. Rising and falling to
the swing of the sea it drifted down alongside
of us so that we could look almost straight
down into it. We did not stop to investigate
but kept going, zigzagging as we went, and that
old painted-up copy cat of a Tuscania came
zigzagging behind us. A good many persons
decided to tie on their life preservers.

Winter twilight was drawing on when we
sighted land — Northern Ireland it was. The
wind was going down with the sun and the
sharp crests of the waves were dulling off, and
blunt oily rollers began to splash with greasy
sounds against our plates. Far away some-
where we saw the revolving light of a light-
house winking across the face of the waters
like a drunken eye. That little beam coming
and going gave me a feeling of security. I
was one of a party of six who went below to
the stateroom of a member of the group for
a farewell card game.

Perhaps an hour later, as we sat there each
intently engaged upon the favoured indoor
American sport of trying to better two pairs,
we heard against our side of the ship a queer
knocking sound rapidly repeated — a sound
that somehow suggested a boy dragging a
stick along a picket fence.

"I suppose that's a torpedo rapping for admis-
sion," said one of us, looking up from his cards
and listening with a cheerful grin on his face.
[28]

WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

I think it was not more than five minutes
after that when an American officer opened the
stateroom door and poked his head in.

"Better come along, you fellows," he said;
"but come quietly so as not to give alarm or
frighten any of the women. Something has
happened. It's the Tuscania — she's in trouble !"

Up we got and hurried aft down the decks,
each one taking with him his cork jacket and
adjusting it over his shoulders as he went. We
came to the edge of the promenade deck aft.
There were not many persons there, as well
as we could tell in the thick darkness through
which we felt our way, and not many more
came afterward — in all I should say not more
than seventy-five.

All the rest were in ignorance of what had
occurred — a good many were at dinner. Ac-
counts of the disaster which I have read since
my arrival in London said that the torpedo
from the U-boat thudded into the vitals of the
Tuscania, disarranged her engines, and left her
in utter darkness for a while until her crew
could switch on the auxiliary dynamo. I think
this must have been a mistake, for at the
moment of our reaching the deck of our ship
the Tuscania was lighted up all over. Her
illumination seemed especially brilliant, but
that, I suppose, was largely because we had
become accustomed to seeing our fellow trans-
ports as dark bulks at night. I should say she
was not more than a mile from us, almost
[29]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

due aft and a trifle to the left. But the dis-
tance between us visibly increased each passing
moment, for we were running away from her
as fast as our engines could drive us. We
could feel our ship throb under our feet as she
picked up speed. It made us feel like cowards.
Near at hand a ship was in distress, a ship
laden with a precious freightage of American
soldier boys, and here were we legging it like
a frightened rabbit, weaving in and out on
sharp tacks.

We knew, of course, that we were under or-
ders to get safely away if we could in case one
of those sea adders, the submarines, should
attack our convoy. We knew that guardian
destroyers would even now be hurrying to the
rescue, and we knew land was not many miles
away; but all the same, I think I never felt
such an object of shame as I felt that first
moment when the realisation dawned on me
that we were fleeing from a stricken vessel
instead of hastening back to give what succour
we could.

As I stood there in the darkness, with silent,
indistinct shapes all about me, it came upon
me with almost the shock of a physical blow
that the rows of lights I saw yonder through
the murk were all slanting slightly downward
toward what would be the bow of the disabled
steamer. These oblique lines of light told the
story. The Tuscania had been struck forward
and was settling by the head.
[30]

WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

Suddenly a little subdued "Ah! Ah!" burst
like a chorus from us all. A red rocket — a
rocket as red as blood — sprang up high into
the air above those rows of lights. It hung
aloft for a moment, then burst into a score
of red balls, which fell, dimming out as they
descended. After a bit two more rockets fol-
lowed in rapid succession. I always thought
a rocket to be a beautiful thing. Probably
this belief is a heritage from that time in my
boyhood when first I saw Fourth-of-July fire-
works. But never again will a red rocket fired
at night be to me anything except a reminder
of the most pitiable, the most heart-racking
thing I have ever seen — that poor appeal for
help from the sinking Tuscania flaming against
that foreign sky.

There was silence among us as we watched.
None of us, I take it, had words within him to
express what he felt; so we said nothing at all,
but just stared out across the waters until our
eyeballs ached in their sockets. So quiet were
we that I jumped when right at my elbow a
low, steady voice spoke. Turning my head I
could make out that the speaker was one of
the younger American officers.

"If what I heard before we sailed is true," he
said, "my brother is in the outfit on that
boat yonder. Well, if they get him it will
only add a little more interest to the debt I
already- owe those damned Germans."

That was all he said, and to it I made no

[31]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

answer, for there was no answer to be made.

Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, then
twenty-five. Now instead of many small
lights we could make out only a few faint pin
pricks of light against the blackness to mark
the spot where the foundering vessel must be.
Presently we could distinguish but one speck
of light. Alongside this one special gleam a
red glow suddenly appeared — not a rocket this
time, but a flare, undoubtedly. Together the
two lights — the steady white one and the
spreading red one — descended and together
were extinguished. Without being told we
knew, all of us — landsmen and seamen alike —
what we had seen. We had seen the last of
that poor ship, stung to death by a Hunnish
sea-asp.

Still silent, we went below. Those of us
who had not yet dined went and dined. Very
solemnly, like men performing a rite, we or-
dered wine and we drank to the Tuscania and
her British crew and her living cargo of Amer-
ican soldiers.

Next morning, after a night during which
perilous things happened about us that may
not be described here and now, we came out
of our perils and into safety at an English port,
and there it was that we heard what made us
ask God to bless that valorous, vigilant little
pot-bellied skipper of ours, may he live for-
ever! We were told that the torpedo which
pierced the Tuscania was meant for us, that

[32]

WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

the U-boat rising unseen in the twilight fired
it at us, and that our captain up on the bridge
saw it coming when it was yet some way off,
and swinging the ship hard over to one side,
dodged the flittering devil-thing by a margin
that can be measured literally in inches. The
call was a close one. The torpedo, it was said,
actually grazed the plates of our vessel — it
was that we heard as we sat at cards — and
passing aft struck the bow of the Tuscania as
she swung along not two hundred yards be-
hind us. We heard, too, that twice within the
next hour torpedoes were fired at us, and again
a fourth one early in the hours of the morning.
Each time chance or poor aim or sharp sea-
manship or a combination of all three saved
us. We were lucky. For of the twelve ships
in our transport two, including the Tuscania,
were destroyed and two others, making four
in all, were damaged by torpedoes before
morning.

Next day, in London, I read that not a man
aboard the Tuscania, whether sailor or soldier,
showed weakness or fright. I read how those
Yankee boys, many of them at sea for the
first time in their lives, stood in ranks waiting
for rescue or for death while the ship listed and
yawed and settled under them; how the British
sang "God Save the King," and the Americans
sang to the same good Allied air, "My Country,
'Tis of Thee;" and how at last, descending over
the side, some of them to be drowned but more
[S3]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

of them to be saved, those American lads of
ours sang what before then had been a mean-
ingless, trivial jingle, but which is destined
forevermore, I think, to mean a great deal to
Americans. Perry said: "We have met the
enemy, and they are ours." Lawrence said:
"Don't give up the ship!" Farragut said:
"Damn the torpedoes, go ahead." Dewey said:
"You may fire, Gridley, when you are ready."
Our history is full of splendid sea slogans, but
I think there can never be a more splendid one
that we Americans will cherish than the first
line, which is also the title of the song now
suddenly freighted with a meaning and a mes-
sage to American hearts, which our boys sang
that black February night in the Irish Sea
when two hundred of them, first fruits of our
national sacrifice in this war, went over the
sides of the Tuscania to death: "Where do we
go from here, boys; where do we go from here?"

[34]

CHAPTER II

ALL AMURIKIN— OUT TO THEM
WIRES"

HE was curled up in a moist-mud
cozy corner. His curved back fitted
into a depression in the clay. His
feet rested comfortably in an ankle-
deep solution, very puttylike in its consistency,
and compounded of the rains of heaven and the
alluvials of France. His face was incredibly
dirty, and the same might have been said for
his hands. He had big buck teeth and sandy
hair and a nice round inquisitive blue eye.
His rifle, in good order, was balanced across
his hunched knees. One end of a cigarette
was pasted fast to his lower lip; the other end
spilled tiny sparks down the front of his
blouse.

Offhand you would figure his age to be half-
past nineteen. Just round the corner from
him a machine gun at intervals spoke in stut-
tering accents. At more frequent intervals
from somewhere up or down the line a rifle
whanged where an ambitious amateur Yankee
[35]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

sniper tried for a professional and doubtlessly
a bored German sniper across the way; or where
the German tried back.

The youth in the cozy corner paid small heed.
He was supposed to be getting his baptism of
fire. In reality he was reading a two-months-
old copy of a certain daily paper printed in a
certain small city in a certain Middle Western
state — to wit, the sovereign state of Ohio. He
belonged to a volunteer regiment, and in a larger
sense to the Rainbow Division. This was his
first day in the front-line trenches and already
he was as much at home there as though he
had been cradled to the lullaby of those big
guns grunting away in the distance. For a
fact he was at home — reading home news out
of the home paper and, as one might say, not
caring a single dern whatsoever.

"Say, Tobe," he called in the husky half
voice which is the prescribed and conventional
conversational tone on the forward edges of
No Man's Land; "Tobe, lissen!"

His mate, leaning against the slanted side
of the trench ten feet away, blowing little
smoke wisps up toward the pale-blue sky above
him, half turned his head to answer.

"Well, what?"

"Whatter you know about this? It says
here the New York Yanks is liable to buy Ty
Cobb off of Detroit. Say, what'll them Detroits
do without old Ty in there bustin' the fast ones
on the nose, huh?"

[36]

"ALL AMURIKIN — OUT TO THEM WIRES"

"With all the money they'll get for that guy
they should worry!"

The emphatic ker-blim of a rifle a hundred
yards off furnished a vocal exclamation point
to further accent the comment.

The reader shifted himself slightly in his
scooped niche and turned over to another
page. He was just the average kid private,
but to me he was as typical as type can be.
I figured him as a somewhat primitive, highly
elemental creature, adaptable and simple-
minded; appallingly green yet at this present
trade, capable though of becoming amazingly
competent at it if given experience and a
chance; temperamentally gaited to do heroic
things without any of the theatricalism of
planned heroics — in short and in fine, the in-
carnated youthful spirit of the youthful land
which bore him.

I came upon him with his cigarette and his
favourite daily and his mud-boltered feet at
the tail end of a trip along the front line of a
segment of a sector held by our troops, and
before I made his acquaintance sundry things
befel. I had been in trenches before, but they
were German trenches along the Aisne in the
fall of the first year of this war business, and
these trenches of our own people were quite
different from those of 1914. French minds
had devised them, with their queer twists and
windings, which seem so crazy and yet are so
sanely ordained; and French hands had dug
[37]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

them out of the chalky soil and shored them
up with timbers, but now Americans had taken
them over and, in common with all things
that Americans take over, they had become as
much and as thoroughly American as though
they had been Subway diggings in New York
City, which indeed they rather resembled; or
excavations for the foundations of the new
Carnegie Library in Gallipolis. Tis a way our
folks have. It may be a good way or a bad
way — since I came over here I think the
French neither understand it nor care deeply
for it — but all the same it is our way.

At the beginning we quit a wrecked town that
was a regimental headquarters. Its present
population was all military, French and Amer-
ican. The villagers who had once lived there
were gone to the last one of them, and had been
gone for years probably. But more than by the
shattered stone walls, or by the breached and
empty church with its spire shorn away, or by
the tiled roofs which were roofs no longer but
sieves and colanders, its altered character was
set forth and proved by the absence of any
manure heaps against the house fronts. In
this part of the world communal prosperity is
measured, I think, by the size and richness of
the manure heap. It is kept alongside the
homes and daily it is turned over with spades
and tormented with pitchforks, against the time
when it is carried forth to be spread upon the
tiny farm a mile or so away. The rank ammo-
[38]

niacal smell of the precious fertilizer which
keeps the land rich is the surest information
to the nose of the approaching traveller that
thrifty folk abide in the hamlet he is about
entering.

But this town smelled only of dust and
decay and the peculiar odour of rough-cast
plastering which has been churned by wheels
and hoofs and feet into a fine white silt like
powdered pumice, coating everything and every-
body in sight when the weather is dry, and when
the weather is wet turning into a slick and slimy
paste underfoot.

We came out of a colonel's billet in a narrow-
shouldered old two-story house, my companion
and I; and crossing the little square we passed
through what once upon a time had been the
front wall of the principal building in the
place. The front wall still stood and the door-
way was unscarred, but both were like parts
of stage settings, for beyond them was nothing
at all save nothingness — messed-about heaps of
crumbled masonry and broken shards of tiling.
From the inner side one might look through
the doorway, as though it had been a frame
for a picture, and see a fine scape beyond of
marshland and winding road and mounting
hills with pine trees growing in isolated groups
like the dumpings in a gentleman's park.

In what had been the garden behind the
principal house the colonel's automobile was
waiting. We climbed into it and rode for up-

[39]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

ward of a mile along a seamed and rutted
highway that wound up and over the abbre-
viated mountain of which we held one side and
the Germans the other. For the preceding
three days there had been a faint smell of
spring in the air; now there was a taste of it.
One might say that spring no longer was coming
but had actually come. The rushes which
grew in low places were showing green near
their roots and the switchy limbs of the pollard
willows bore successions of tiny green buds
along their lengths. Also many birds were
about. There were flocks of big corbie crows
in their prim notarial black. Piebald French
magpies were flickering along ahead of us, al-
ways in pairs, and numbers of a small starling-
like bird, very much like our field lark in look
and habit, whose throat is yellowish and
tawny without and lined with pure gold within,
were singing their mating songs. Bursts of
amorous pipings came from every side, and as
the male birds mounted in the air their breast
feathers shone in the clear soft afternoon sun-
shine like patches of burnished copper.

Undoubtedly spring was at hand — the spring
which elsewhere, in the more favoured parts of
this planet, meant reawakening life and fecund-
ity, but which here meant only opportunity
for renewed offensives and for more massacres,
more suffering, more wastings of life and
wealth and of all the manifold gifts of Nature.
The constant sound of guns on ahead of us

[40]

somewhere made one think of a half-dormant
giant grunting as he roused. Indeed it was what
it seemed — War emerging from his hibernation
and waking up to kill again. But little more
than a year before it had been their war; now
it was our war too, and the realisation of this
difference invested the whole thing for us with
a deeper meaning. No longer were we onlookers
but part proprietors in the grimmest, ghastliest
proceeding that ever was since conscious time
began.

We whizzed along the road for the better part
of a mile, part of the time through dips, the
contour of which kept us hidden from spying
eyes in the hostile observation pits across the
ridge to the eastward, and part of the time
upon the backbone of this Vosges foothill.
These latter places were shielded on their dan-
gerous side by screens of marsh grasses woven
in huge sheets ten feet high and swinging be-
tween tall poles set at six-yard intervals.
There were rips and tears in these rude valances
to show where chance shots from German guns
had registered during the preceding few days
of desultory artillery fire.

On the way we passed one full company of
French infantry coming out of the front line
for rest, and one contingent of our own sol-
diers. The Frenchmen were hampered, as
French foot soldiers on the move always are,
by enormous burdens draped upon them,
back, flank and front; and under the dirt and

[41]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

dust their faces wore weary drawn lines. Laden
like sumpter mules, they went by us at the
heavy plodding gait of their kind, which is so
different from the swaggering, swinging route
step of the Yankee, and so different from the
brisk clip at which the Britisher travels, even
in heavy-marching order, but which all the
same eats up the furlongs mighty fast.

The Americans were grouped on a little green
breast of sod. At the peak of the small rounded
elevation was a smaller terrace like a nipple, and
from this rose one of those stone shrines so
common in this corner of Europe — a stone base
with a rusted iron cross bearing a figure of the
Christ above it. There were a dozen or more
of our boys lying or squatted here resting.

We came to a battalion headquarters, which
seemed rather a high-sounding name for a col-
lection of thatched dugouts under a bank.
Here leaving the car we were turned over to a
young intelligence officer, who agreed to pilot
us through certain front-line defences, which our
people only two days before had taken over
from the French. But before we started each
of us put on his iron helmet, which, next only
to the derby hat of commerce, is the homeliest
and the most uncomfortable design ever fash-
ioned for wear in connection with the human
head; and each one of us hung upon his breast,
like a palmer's packet, his gas mask, inclosed
in its square canvas case.

Single file then the three of us proceeded

[42]

along a footpath that was dry where the sun
had reached it and slimy with mud where it
had lain in shadow, until we passed under an
arbour of withered boughs and found ourselves
in the mouth of the communication trench. It
was wide enough in some places for two men
to pass each other by scrouging, and in other
places so narrow that a full-sized man bearing
his accoutrements could barely wriggle his way
through. Its sides were formed sometimes of
shored planking set on end, but more often
of withes cunningly wattled together. It is
wonderful what a smooth fabric a French
peasant can make with no material save bundles
of pliant twigs and no tools save his two hands.
Countless miles of trenches are lined with this
osier work. Some of it has been there for
years, but except where a shell strikes it stays
put.

In depth the trench ranged from eight feet
to less than six. In the deeper places we
marched at ease, but in the shallow ones we
went forward at a crouch, for if we had stood
erect here our heads would have made fair
targets for the enemy, who nowhere was more
than a mile distant, and who generally was
very much closer. Sometimes .we trod on
"duck boards" as the Americans call them, or
"bath mats" in the Britisher's vernacular,
laid end to end. A duck board is fabricated
by putting down two scantlings parallel and
eighteen inches apart and effecting a permanent

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

union between them by means of many cross
strips of wood securely nailed on, with narrow
spaces between the strips so that the foothold
is securer upon these corrugations than it would
be on an uninterrupted expanse. It somewhat
resembles the runway by which ducks advance
from their duck pond up a steep bank; hence
one of its names. It looks rather less the
other thing for which it is named.

The duck board makes the going easier in
miry places but it is a treacherous friend.
Where it is not firmly imbedded fore and aft
in the mud the far end of it has an unpleasant
habit, when you tread with all your weight on
the near end, of rising up and grievously smit-
ing you as you pitch forward on your face.
Likewise when you are in a hurry it dearly
loves to teeter and slip and slosh round. How-
ever, to date no substitute for it has been
found. Probably enough duck boards are in
use on all the Fronts, in trenches and out of
them, to make a board walk clear across our
own continent. Beyond Ypres, where the
British and Belgians are, I saw miles and miles
of them the other day.

Here in Eastern France we sometimes footed
it along these duck boards, but more often we
dragged our feet in mud — sticky, clinging, af-
fectionate yellowish-grey mud — which came up
to the latchets of our boots and made each
rod of progress a succession of violent struggles.
It was through this muck, along the narrow

[44]

"ALL AMURIKIN — OUT TO THEM WIRES"

twistywise passage, that food and munitions
must be carried up to the front lines and the
wounded must be carried back. Traversing
it, men, as we saw, speedily became mired to
the hair roots, and wearied beyond descrip-
tion. Now then, magnify and multiply by ten
the conditions as we found them on this day
after nearly a week of fair weather and you
begin to have a faint and shadowy conception
of trench conditions in the height of the rainy
season in midwinter, when strong men grow
so tired that they drop down and drown in the
serailiquid streams.

The duck board is hard on human shins and
human patience but it saves life and it saves
time, which in war very frequently is more
valuable than lives. It was the duck board,
as much as the rifle and the big gun, which en-
abled the Canadians to win at Passchendaele
last November. With its aid they laid a wooden
pathway to victory across one of the most
hideous loblollies in the flooded quagmires of
Flanders. Somebody will yet write a tribute
to the duck board, which now gets only curses
and abuse.

We had come almost to the cross trench,
meeting few soldiers on the way, when a sud-
den commotion overhead made us squat low and
crane our necks. Almost above us a boche
aeroplane was circling about droning like all the
bees in the world. As we looked the anti-
aircraft guns, concealed all about us, began
[45]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

firing at it. Downy dainty pompons of smoke
burst out in the heavens below it and above it
and all about it.

As it fled back, seemingly uninjured, out of
the danger zone I was reminded of the last
time before this when I had seen such a sight
from just such a vantage place. But then the
scene had been the plateau before Laon in the
fall of 1914, and then the sky spy had been a
Frenchman and then the guns which chased
him away had been German guns and for com-
panion I had a German Staff-officer.

We went on, and round the next turn en-
countered half a dozen youngsters in khaki,
faced with mud stripings, who barely had
paused in whatever they were doing to watch
the brief aerial bombardment. New as they
were to this game they already were accus-
tomed to the sight of air fighting. Half a dozen
times a day or oftener merely by turning their
faces upward they might see the hostile raider
being harried back to its hangar by defending
cannon or by French planes or by both at once.
Later that same day we were to see a German
plane stricken in its flight by a well-placed shot
from an American battery. We saw how on the
instant, like a duck shot on the wing, it changed
from a living, sentient, perfectly controlled
mechanism into a dishevelled, wounded thing,
and how it. went swirling in crazy disorganised
spirals down inside its own lines.

For the trip through the cross trenches which
[46]

marked the forward angle of our defences we
were joined by a second chaperon in the person
of an infantry captain — a man of German birth
and German name, born in Cologne and
brought to America as a child, who at the age
of forty-three had given up a paying business
and left a family to volunteer for this business,
and who in all respects was just as good an
American as you or I, reader, can ever hope
to be. It was his company that held the
trenches for the time, and he volunteered tc
let us see what they were doing.

The physical things he showed us are by
now old stories to Americans. Reading de-
scriptions of them would be stale business for
people at home who read magazines — the little
dirt burrows roofed with withes and leaves,
where machine guns' crews squatted behind
guns whose muzzles aimed out across the de-
batable territory; the observation posts, where
the lads on duty grumbled at the narrow range
of vision provided by the periscopes and much
preferred to risk their lives peeping over the
parapets; the tiny rifle pits, each harbouring a
couple of youngsters; the gun steps, or scarps,
on which men squatted to do sniper work and
to try for hostile snipers across the way; the
niches in the trench sides, where hand gre-
nades— French and British models — lay in
handy reach in case of a surprise -attack; the
stacks of rifle and machine-gun cartridges in
their appointed places all along the inner sides
[47]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

of the low dirt parapets; the burrows, like the
overgrown nests of bank martins, into which
tired men might crawl to steal a bit of rest;
the panels of thickly meshed barbed wire on
light but strong metal frames so disposed that
they might with instantaneous dispatch be
thrust into place to block the way of invading
raiders following along behind retreating de-
fenders; the wire snares for the foes' feet, which
might be dropped in the narrow footway after
the retiring force had passed; and all the rest
of the paraphernalia of trench warfare which
the last three years and a half have produced.

Anyhow it was not these things that inter-
ested us; rather was it the bearing of our men,
accustoming themselves to new duties in new
surroundings; facing greater responsibilities
than any of them perhaps had ever faced before
in his days, amid an environment fraught with
acute personal peril. And studying them I
was prouder than ever of the land that bore
them and sundry millions of others like unto
them.

We halted at a spot where the trench was
broken in somewhat and where the fresh new
clods upon the dirt shelf halfway up it were all
stained a strange, poisonous green colour. The
afternoon before a shell had dropped there,
killing one American and wounding four others.
It was the fumes of the explosive which had
corroded the earth to make it bear so curious
a tint. This company then had had its first
[48]

"ALL AMURIKIN — OUT TO THEM WIRES"

fatality under fire; its men had undergone the
shock of seeing one of their comrades converted
into a mangled fragment of a man, but they
bore themselves as though they had been
veterans.

In but one thing did they betray themselves
as green hands, and this was in a common de-
sire to expose themselves unnecessarily. As
we went along their captain was constantly
chiding them for poking their tin-hatted heads
over the top, in the hope of spying out the
German sharpshooters who continually shot
in their direction from the coverts of a pine
thicket, when they might have seen just as
well through cunningly devised peepholes in
the rifle pits.

"I know you aren't afraid," he said to two
especially daring youngsters, "but the man who
gets himself killed in this war without a reason
for it is not a hero; he's just a plain damned
fool, remember that."

Passing the spot where the soft damp loam
was harried and the crumbs of it all dyed that
diabolical greenish hue, I thought of a tale I
had heard only the day before from a young
Englishman who, having won his captaincy by
two years of hard service, had then promptly
secured a tranfer to the flying corps, where,
as he innocently put it, "there was a chance o'
having a bit of real fun," and who now wore
the single wing of an observer upon the left
breast of his tunic. I had asked him what was,
[49]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

the most dramatic thing he personally had wit-
nessed in this war, thinking to hear some tales
of air craftsmanship. He considered for a mo-
ment with his brow puckered in a conscientious
effort to remember, and then he said:

"I think perhaps 'twas something that hap-
pened last spring, just before I got out of the
infantry into this bally outfit. My company
had been in the trenches two days and nights,
and had been rather knocked about. Really
the place we were in was quite a bit exposed,
you know, and after we had had rather an un-
happy time of it we got orders to pull out.
Just as the order reached us along came a
whiz-bang and burst. It killed one of my
chaps dead, and half a minute later another
shell dropped in the same place and covered
him under tons and tons of earth, all except
his right hand, which stuck out of the dirt.
Quite a decent sort he was too — a good fighter
and cheerful and all that sort of thing; very
well liked, he was. There was no time to dig
him out even if we had been able to carry his
body away with us; we had to leave him right
there. So as the first man passed by where he
was buried he bent over and took the dead
hand in his hand and shook it and said 'Good-
bye, old one!' like that. All the men followed
the example. Each one of us, officers included,
shook the dead hand and said good-bye to the
dead man; and this was the last we ever saw
*>f him, or of that rotten old trench, either."
[50]

"ALL AMURIKIN — OUT TO THEM WIRES"

As nonchalantly as though he had been a
paid postman going through a quiet street a
volunteer mail distributor came along putting
letters, papers and small mail parcels from the
States into soiled eager hands. Each man,
taking over what was given him, would prompt-
ly hunker down in some convenient cranny to
read the news from home; news which was
months old already. I saw one, a broad-faced,
pale-haired youth, reading a Slavic paper; and
another, affcorporal, reading one that was
printed in Italian. The other papers I noted
were all printed in English.

It was from a begrimed and bespattered
youngster who had got a paper printed in
English that I heard the news about Ty Cobb;
and when you appraised the character of the
boy and his comrades a mud-lined hole in the
ground in Eastern France, where a machine
gun stammered round the corner and the snipers
sniped away to the right of him and the left of
him, seemed a perfectly natural place for the
discussion of great tidings in baseball. If he
had undertaken to discourse upon war or Ger-
mans I should have felt disappointed in him,
because on his part it would not have been
natural; and if he was anything at all he was
natural.

At the end of perhaps a mile of windings

about in torturous going we, following after

our guides, turned into a shallower side trench

which debouched off the main workings. Going

[51]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

almost upon all fours for about sixty or sev-
enty yards we found ourselves in a blind ending.
Here was a tiny ambuscade roofed over with
sod and camouflaged on its one side with dead
herbage, wherein two soldiers crouched. By a
husky whisper floating back to us over the
shoulder of the captain we learned that this
was the most advanced of our listening posts.
Having told us this he extended an invitation,
which I accepted; and as he flattened back
against the earth making himself small I wrig-
gled past him and crawled into place to join
its two silent occupants.

One of them nudging me in the side raised
a finger and aimed it through a tiny peephole
in the screening of dead bough and grasses.
I looked where he pointed and this was what I
saw:

At the level of my eyes the earth ran away
at a gentle slope for a bit and then just as it
reached a thicket of scrub pines, possibly two
hundred feet away, rose sharply. Directly in
front of me was our own tangle of rusted barbed
wire. On beyond it, perhaps a hundred and
sixty feet distant, where the rise began, was
a second line of wire, and that was German wire,
as I guessed without being told. In between,
the soil was all harrowed and upturned into
great cusps as though many swine had been
rooting there for mast. A few straggly bushes
still adhered to the sides of the shell holes, and
the patches of grass upon the tortured sward

[52]

"ALL AMURIKIN — OUT TO THEM WIRES''

displayed a greenish tinge where the saps of
spring were beginning to rise from the roots.

Not far away and almost directly in front of
me one of those yellow-breasted starling birds
was trying his song with considerable success.

"How far away are they?" I inquired in
the softest possible of whispers of the nearer-
most of the hole's tenants.

"Right there in those little trees," he an-
swered. "I ain't never been able to see any of
them — they're purty smart about keepin' them-
selves out of sight — but there's times, 'specially
toward night, when we kin hear 'em plain
enough talking amongst themselves and movin'
round over there. It's quiet as a graveyard
now, but for a while this mornin' one of their
sharpshooters got busy right over there in front
of where you're lookin' now."

Involuntarily I drew my head down into my
shoulders. The youth alongside laughed a
noiseless laugh.

"Oh, you needn't worry," he said in my
ear; "there ain't a chancet for him to see us;
we're too well hid. At that, I think he must've
suspected that this here lump of dirt was a
shelter for our folks because twicet this mornin'
he took a shot this way. One of his bullets
lodged somewhere in the sods over your head
but the other one hit that bush there. See
where it cut the little twig off."

I peered where he indicated and made out
a ragged stump almost within arm's reach of

[53]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

me, where a willow sprout had been shorn
away. The sap was oozing from the top like
blood from a fresh wound. My instructor went
on:

"But after the second shot he quit. One of
our fellers back behind us a piece took a crack
at him and either he got him or else the Heinie
found things gettin' too warm for him and
pulled his freight back into them deep woods
further up the hill. So it's been nice and quiet
ever since."

The captain wormed into the burrow, filling
it until it would hold no more.

"Is this your first close-up peep at No Man's
Land?" he inquired in as small a voice as his
vocal cords could make.

Before I could answer the private put in:

" It might a-been No Man's Land oncet,
cap'n, but frum now on it's goin' to be all
Amurikin clear out to them furtherest wires
yonder."

So that was how and when I found the title
for this chapter. Everything considered I think
it makes a very good title, too. I only wish
I had the power to put as much of the manifest
spirit of our soldiers into what I have here
written as is compassed in the caption I have
borrowed.

What happened thereafter was largely per-
sonal so far as it related to my companion and
me, but highly interesting from our viewpoint.
We had emerged from the front-line trench on

[54]

AMURIKIN — OUT TO THEM WIRES"

our way back. In order to avoid a particularly
nasty bit of footing in the nearermost end of
the communication work we climbed out of the
trench and took a short cut across a stretch of
long-abandoned meadowland. We thought we
were well out of sight of the Germans, who
at that point were probably half a mile
away.

A cup of land formed a natural shield from
any eyes except eyes in an aeroplane — so we
thought — and besides there were no aeroplanes
about. Once over the edge of the trench and
down into the depression we felt quite safe;
anyway the firing that was going on seemed very
far away. We slowed up our gait. From drag-
ging our feet through the mire we were dripping
wet with sweat, so I hauled off my coat. This
necessitated a readjustment of belt and gas-
mask straps. Accordingly all three of us —
the young intelligence officer, my comrade and
I — took advantage of the halt to smoke. The
two others lit cigarettes but I preferred some-
thing stronger.

I was trying to light a practical cigar with
a property match — which is a very common
performance on the part of my countrymen in
this part of the world — when a noise like the end
of everything — a nasty, whiplike crash — sound-
ed at the right of us, and simultaneously a
German shell struck within a hundred feet
of us, right on the rim of the little hollow in
which we had stopped, throwing a yellow
[55]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

geyser of earth away up into the air and
peppering our feet and legs with bits of
gravel.

So then we came on away from there. I
chucked away my box of matches, which were
French and therefore futile, and I must have
mislaid my cigar, which was American and
therefore priceless, for I have never seen it
since. Anyway I had for the time lost the
desire for tobacco. There are times when one
cares to smoke and times when one does not
care to smoke. As we scuttled for the shelter
of the trench four more shells fell in rapid suc-
cession and burst within a short distance of
where the first one had gone off, and each time
we felt the earth shake under our feet and out
of the tails of our eyes saw the soil rising in a
column to spread out mushroom fashion and
descend in pattering showers.

So, using the trench as an avenue, we con-
tinued to go away from there; and as we went
guns continued to bay behind us. An hour
later, back at battalion headquarters, we
learned that the enemy dropped seventy shells
— five-inch shells — in the area that we had
traversed. But unless one of them destroyed
the cigar I left behind me it was all clear waste
of powder and shrapnel, as I am pleased to be
able to report.

That night just after dusk forty-five of our
boys, with twice as many Frenchmen, went
over the top at the very point we had visited,
[56]

and next morning, true enough, and for quite
a while after that, No Man's Land was "All
Amurikin clear out to them furtherest wires."

[57]

CHAPTER III
HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

Y ^HE surroundings were as French as
French could be, but the supper tasted
M of home. We sat at table, two of us
being correspondents and the rest of
us staff officers of a regiment of the Rainbow
Division; and the orderlies brought us Ham-
burger steak richly perfumed with onion, and
good hot soda biscuit, and canned tomatoes
cooked with cracker crumbs and New Orleans
molasses, and coffee, and fried potatoes; and
to end up with there were genuine old-fashioned
doughnuts — "fried holes," the Far Westerners
call them.

The mingled aromas of these rose like familiar
incense from strange altars, for the room wherein
all of us, stout and willing trenchermen, sat and
supped was the chief room of what once upon
a time, before the war came along and cracked
down upon the land, had been some prosperous
burgher's home on the main street of a drowsy
village cuddled up in a sweet and fertile valley
under the shoulders of the Vosges Mountains.

[58]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

From a niche in the corner a plaster saint,
finished off in glaring Easter-egg colours, re-
garded us with one of his painted eyes, the
other being gone. The stove had been carried
away, either by the owner when he fled, away
back in 1914, or by the invading Hun before
he retreated to his present lines a few miles
distant; but a segment of forgotten stovepipe
protruded like a waterspout gone dry, from
its hole above the mantelpiece. On the plas-
tered wall of battered, broken blue cast, behind
the seat where the colonel ruled the board,
hung a family portrait of an elderly gentleman
with placid features but fierce and indomitable
whiskers. The picture was skewed at such an
angle the whiskers appeared to be growing out
into space sidewise. Generations of feet had
worn grooves in the broad boards of the floor,
which these times was never free of mud
stains, no matter how often the orderlies might
rid up the place. So far and so much the set-
ting was French.

But stained trench coats of American work-
manship dangled from pegs set in the plaster-
ing, each limply suggestive in its bulges and its
curves of the shape of the man who wore it
through most of his waking hours. The mantel-
shelf was burdened with gas masks and sauce-
pan hats of pressed steel. A small trestle that
was shoved up under one of the two grimed
front windows bore a litter of American news-
papers and American magazines. As for the
[59]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

doughnuts, they were very crisp and spicy,
as good Yankee doughnuts should be. I had
finished my second one and was reaching for
my third one when, without warning, a very
creditable and realistic imitation of the crack
o' doom transpired. Seemingly from within fifty
yards of the building which sheltered us
Gabriel's trumpet sounded forth in an ear-
cracking, earth-racking, hair-lifting blare calcu-
lated to raise goose flesh on iron statuary. The
dishes danced upon the table; the coffee slopped
out of the cups; and the stovepipe over the
chimneypiece slobbered down a trickle of
ancient soot that was, with age, turned brown
and caky. Beneath our feet we could feel the
old house rocking.

Through the valley and across to the foothill
beyond, the obscenity of sound went ringing
and screeching, vilely profaning the calm that
had descended upon the country with the
going-down of the sun.

As its last blasphemous echoes came back to
us in a diminishing cadence one of our hosts,
a major, leaned forward with a cheerful smile
on his face and remarked as he glanced at the
dial of his wrist watch: "There she goes —
right on the minute!"

Sure enough, there she went. Right and left,
before us and behind us, from the north of us
and from the south of us, and from the east
and the west of us, big guns and small ones,
field pieces, howitzers, mortars and light bat-
[60]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

teries, both French and American but mostly
French, joined in, like the wind, the wood and
the brass of an orchestra obeying the baton of
the leader. The coffee could not stay in the
dancing cups at all. The venerable house was
beset by an ague which ran up its shaken sides
from the foundation stones to the roof rafters,
where the loosened tiles clicked together like
chattering teeth, and back down again to the
foundations.

The thing which we had travelled upward
of a hundred miles in one of Uncle Sam's auto-
mobiles to witness and afterward to write about
was starting. The overture was on; the show
would follow. And it was high time we claimed
our reserved seats in the front row.

I use the word "show" advisedly, because in
the glossary of phrases born out of this war
anything in the nature of a thrust or a blow
delivered against the enemy is a show. A
great offensive on a wide front is a big show;
a raid by night into hostile territory is a little
show; a feint by infantry, undertaken with
intent to deceive the other side at a given
point while the real attack is being launched
at a second given point, and accompanied by
much vain banging of gunpowder and much
squibbing-off of rockets and flares and star
shells is a "Chinese show" — to quote the cant
or trade name; I think the English first used the
term, but our fellows have been borrowing ever
since the first contingent came over last year.
[61]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

This particular show to which we had been
bidden as special guests was to be a foray by
night over the tops preceded by artillery prep-
aration. Now such things as these happen
every night or every day somewhere on the
Western Front; times are when they happen in
different sectors at the rate of half a dozen
within the twenty-four hours. In the dis-
patches each one means a line or so of type;
in the field it means a few prisoners, a few
fresh graves, a few yards of trench work blasted
away, a few brier patches of barbed wire to be
repatched; in the minds of most readers of the
daily papers it means nothing but the tire-
some reiteration of a phrase that is tiresome
and staled. But to us it meant something.
It was our boys who were going in and go-
. ing over; and our guns were to be partners in
the prior enterprise of blazing the way for
them.

No matter how much one may read of the
cost of war operations in dollars and in time
and in labour, I am sure one does not really
begin to appreciate the staggering expenditure
of all three that is requisite to accomplish even
the smallest of aggressive movements until one
has opportunity, as we now had, to see with
one's own eyes what necessarily had to be
done by way of preliminary.

Take for instance the present case. The raid
in hand was to be no great shakes of a raid.
Forty-five Americans and three times their
[62]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

number of Frenchmen would participate in it.
Within twenty minutes, if all went well — and it
did — they would have returned from their ex-
cursion into hostile territory, with prisoners
perhaps, or else with notes and letters taken
from the bodies of dead enemies which might
serve to give the Intelligence Department a
correct appraisal of the character and numbers
of the troops opposing us in this sector. In the
vast general scheme of the campaign now about
renewing itself it would be no more than an
inconsequential pin prick in the foe's side — a
thing to be done and mentioned briefly in the
dispatches, and then forgotten.

But mark you how great and how costly the
artillery accompaniment must be. More than
a hundred guns, ranging in calibre from a nine-
inch bore down to a three-inch bore, would
join in the preparation and in the barrage fire.
More than ten thousand rounds of ammunition
would be fired, this not taking into account
the supplies for the forty-three machine guns
and for the batteries of trench mortars which
were to cooperate. Many a great battle of our
Civil War had been fought out with the ex-
penditure on both sides of one-tenth or one-
twentieth part the gross weight of metal that
would be directed at the boche beyond the ridge.
The cost for munitions alone, excluding every
other item of a score of items, might run to a
quarter of a million dollars; might conceivably
run considerably beyond that figure. And the
[63]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

toil performed and the pains taken beforehand
to insure success — wowie!

For days past the French had been bringing
up pieces and massing them here for the pur-
pose of this one little stab at the Hun's armoured
flank. As we travelled hither we had seen the
motor-drawn guns labouring along the wide
high roads; had seen the ammunition trucks
crawling forward in long lines; had seen at
every tiny village behind the Front the gun
crews resting in bad streets named for good
saints. By the same token, on the following
day, which was Sunday, we were to see the same
thing repeated, except that then the procession
would be headed the other way — going back
to repeat the same wearisome proceeding else-
where.

Days, too, had been spent in planning the
raid; in mapping out and plotting out the
especial spot chosen for attack; in coordinating
all the arms of the service which would be
employed; in planning signals for the show and
drilling its actors. And now all this prepara-
tion requisite and essential to the carrying out
of the undertaking had been completed; and all
the guns had been planted in their appointed
places and craftily hidden ; and all the shells had
been brought up — thousands of tons of them—
and properly bestowed; and the little handful
of men who were to have a direct hand in the
performance of the main job, for which all the
rest would be purely preliminary, had been
[64]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

dibsen and sent forward to ordained stations,
tfaere to await the word. And so up we got
from table and went out across a threshold,
which? quaked like a living thing as we crossed
it, to see the spectacular side of the show.rfoiw

Inside the house the air had been churned
up and down by the detonations. Outside
literally it was being rent into fine bits. One
had the feeling that the atmosphere was all
shredded up fine, so that instead of lying in
layers upon the earth it floated in torn and
dishevelled strips; one had the feeling that the
upper ether must be full of holes and voids
and the rushing together of whipped and eddy-
ing wind currents. This may sound incoherent,
but I find in my vocabulary no better ter-
ninology to convey a,' sense of the impression
that possessed me as I stepped forth into the
open. Di-idal slodw ell ifbjs

We had known in advance that there were
guns in great number disposed about the sur-
rounding terrain. Walking about under milk
tary guidance in* ike afternoon we had seen
sundry batteries ensconced under banks, in
thickets and behind low natural parapets where
the earth ridged up; and had noted how cun-
ningly they had been concealed from aeroplanes
scouting above and from the range of field glasses
in the German workirigs ,> on1 beycind. <--'>

But we had no notion until then that there
were so many guns near by or that som£ of
them were so close to the village where we
[651

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

had stopped to eat. We must almost have
stepped on some of them without once sus-
pecting their presence. The ability of the
French so well to hide a group of five big pieces,
each with a carriage as large as a two-ton
truck and each with a snout projecting two or
three yards beyond it, and with a limber pro-
jecting out behind it, shows what advances
the gentle arts of ambuscade and camouflage
have made since this war began. Seen upon
the open road a big cannon painted as it is
from muzzle to breach with splotchings of yel-
lows and browns and ochres seems, for its
size, the most conspicuous thing in the world.
But once bedded down in its nest, with its
gullet resting upon the ring back of earth
that has been thrown up for it, and a miracle
of protective colouration instantaneously is
achieved. Its whole fabric seems to melt into
and become a part of the soil and the withered
herbage and the dirt-coloured sandbags which
encompass it abaft, alongside and before. It
is the difference between a mottled snake
crawling across a brick sidewalk and the same
snake coiled and motionless amid dried leaves
and boulders in the woods. Nature always has
protected her wild creatures thus; it took the
greatest of wars for mankind to learn a lesson
that is as old as creation is.

Standing there in the square of the wrecked
village we could sense that in all manner of
previously unsuspected coverts within the im-
[66]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

mediate vicinity guns were at work — guns
which ranged from the French seventy-fives
to big nine-inch howitzers. As yet twilight
had not sufficiently advanced for us to see the
flash of the firing, and of course nowadays
there is mighty little smoke to mark the single
discharge of a single gun; but we could tell
what went on by the testimony of a most vast
tumult.

We were ringed about by detonations; by
jars which impacted against the earth like
blows of a mighty sledge on a yet mightier
smithy; by demoniac screechings which tore
the tortured welkin into still finer bits; by
fierce clangings of metal; by thudding echoes
floating back from where the charges had
burst; by the more distant voices of certain
German guns replying to our salvo as our gun-
ners dedicated the dusk to all this unloosened
hellishness and offered up to the evening star
their sulphurous benedictions. It was Thor,
Vulcan, Tubal Cain, Bertha Krupp and the
Bethlehem Steel Works all going at full blast
together; it was a thousand Walpurgis Nights
rolled into one, with Dante's Inferno out-
Infernoed on the side. And yet by a curious
phenomenon we who stood there with this
hand-made, man-made demonism unleashed
and prevalent about us could hear plainly
enough what a man five feet away who spoke
in a fairly loud voice might be saying.

"You think this is brisk, eh?" asked our
[67]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

friend, the major. "Well, it's only the starter;
the ball has just opened."

He tucked his thumbs into the girth harness-
ings of his Sam Browne and spraddled his legs
wide apart.

"Wait," he promised; "just wait until all
the guns get into action in twenty minutes or
half an hour from now. Then you'll really
hear something. Take it from me, you will.
And in the meantime we might go along
with these fellows yonder, don't you think
so?*"

Through the deepening twilight we followed
a party of French infantrymen up a gentle
slope to the crest of a little hill behind the
shattered town, where the cemetery was. In
this light the horizon-blue uniforms took on
the colour tone of the uniforms worn by the
Confederates in our Civil War, but their painted
metal helmets looked like polished turtle
shells. They slouched along, as the poilu loves
to slouch along when not fully accoutred, their
hands in their breeches pockets and their half-
reefed putties flapping upon their shanks. We
trailed them, and some of our soldiers, officers
and enlisted men, trailed us.

Half an hour later I was to witness a curious
and yet, I think, a characteristic thing. Most
of the American privates grew tired of the
spectacle that was spread out before them and
slipped away to their billets to go to bed—
this, too, in spite of the fact that scarcely one
[68]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

of them had ever witnessed cannonading on so
extensive a scale or indeed on any scale before.
Nevertheless, the bombardment speedily be-
came to them a commonplace and rather tedi-
ous affair.

"Come on, you fellows," I heard one tall
stripling say to a couple of his mates. "Me
for the hay. If the Heinies would only slam
a few big ones back in this direction there
might be some fun, but as it is, there's nothin'
doin' round here for me."

But the Frenchmen, all intent and alert,
stayed until the show ended. Yet a thing
like this was an old story to them, for they
were veterans at the game whereat our men still
were the greenest of novices. I suppose there
was an element of theatricalism in the sight
and in the fury of sound which appealed to
the Gallic sense of drama that was in them.
Be the cause what it was, the thing occurred
just as I am telling it.

We mounted the hill and rounded the stone
wall of the burying ground. The village in the
hollow below had been quite battered out of
its original contours, but strangely enough the
cemetery, through the years of intermittent
fighting and shell firing that had waged about
it, was almost unscathed. It was a populous
place, the cemetery was, as we had noted
earlier in the day. Originally it had contained
only the graves of the inhabitants, but now
these were outnumbered twenty to one by
[69]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

mounds covering French soldiers who had fallen
in action or had died of wounds or natural
causes in this immediate vicinity. The same
is true of hundreds of other graveyards in this
country; is probably true of most of France's
cemeteries.

I have seen places where the wooden crosses
made hedge rows, line behind line for miles on
a stretch, and so thick-set were the markers
that, viewed from the distance, they conveyed
the impression of paling fences.

France has become a land of these wooden
crosses and these six-foot mounds. It is part
of the toll — a small part of the toll — she has
paid for the right of freedom and in the fight
to make this world once more a fit place for
decent beings to abide in.

On the knoll behind the cemetery we came
to a halt. Night was creeping down from the
foothills, making the earth black where before
it had faded to a common grey; but overhead
the sky still showed in the last faint traces of
the afterglow, with the blue of an unflawed
turquoise against which the stars stood out like
crumbs of pure gold. The broken and snaggled
roof lines of the clumped houses of the town
were vanishing; the mountain beyond seemed
creeping up nearer and nearer to us. More
plainly than before we could mark out the
positions of the nearmost batteries for now at
each discharge of a gun a darting jab of red
flame shot forth. Where all the guns of a
[70]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

battery were being served and fired in rapid
succession the blazes ran together like hem-
stitches, making one think of a fiery needle
plying in and out of a breadth of black velvet.
Farther away the flashes were blurred into
broader and paler flares so that on three sides
of us the horizon was circled with constantly
rising, constantly dying glows like heat light-
ning on a summer night.

The points where shells fell and burst were
marked for us with red geysers, which uprose
straight instead of slanting out at a slightly
upward tilted angle, as did the spoutings from
the mouths of the guns. As nearly as we
might tell the enemy fire was comparatively
light. Only we could see upon the far flanks
of the little mountain in front of us a distant
flickering illumination, which showed that his
counter batteries were busy. On every hand
white signal rockets rose frequently, and occa-
sionally flares hung burning halfway up the
walls of the sky.

Of a sudden all hell broke loose directly be-
hind us. I use the term without desire to be pro-
fane and in a conscientious effort to give some
notion of a physical occurrence. At any rate
it seemed to us that all hell let loose. What
really happened was that two guns of a French
battery of nine-inch heavies, from their post
directly in our rear and not more than an eighth
of a mile distant from us, had fired simultane-
ously, and their shells had travelled directly
[71]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

over our heads, aiming for an unseen objective
miles forward.

Then, and every time thereafter that one of
the nine-inchers spewed its bellyful of high ex-
plosive forth, the sound of it dominated and
overmastered all other sounds. First there was
the crash — a crash so great that our inadequate
tongue yields neither adjective nor noun fitly
to comprehend it, the trouble being that the
language has not kept step with the develop-
ments of artillery in this war. Our dictionary
is going to need an overhauling when this job
of licking Germany is finished.

Well, first off there was the crash that was
like the great granddaddy of all the crashes in
the world, making one feel that its vocal force
must have folded up the heavens like a scroll.
Then, as a part of it, would come the note of
the projectile rushing through the ripped ether
above us, and this might be likened to a long
freight train travelling on an invisible aerial
right of way at a speed a thousand times
greater than any freight train ever has or ever
will attain. Then there would float back a
tremendous banshee wail, and finally, just be-
fore the roar of the shell's explosion, a whine
as though a lost puppy of the size of ten ele-
phants were wandering through the skies, com-
plaining in a homesick key as it went — the
whole transaction taking place in an infinitesi-
mal part of the time which has here been re-
quired for me to set down my own auricular
[72]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

impressions of it, and incidentally creating an
infinitely more vivid impression than possible
can be suggested by my lame and inadequate
metaphors.

Comparatively, there was a hush in the
clamour and clangour succeeding this happen-
ing— not that the firing in any way abated,
for rather was it augmented now — but only that
it seemed so to me; and in the lull, away off
on our left, I could for the first time make out
the whirring, ripping sound of a machine gun
or a row of machine guns.

The major consulted the luminous face of his
wrist watch.

"I thought so," he vouchsafed. "It's time
for the barrage to start and for the boys to go
over the top. Now we ought to see some real
fireworks that'll make what has gone on up
to now seem puny and trifling and no ac-
count."

Which, all things considered, was an under-
estimation of what ensued hard on the heels
of his announcement. Personally I shall not
attempt to describe it; the size of the task
leaves me abashed and mortified. But if the
reader in the goodness of his heart and abun-
dance of his patience will re-read what already
I have written in an effort to tell him what I
had heard and had seen and had felt, and will
multiply it by five, adding, say, fifty per cent
of the sum total for good measure, he will
have, I trust, a measure of comprehension of
[73]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

the ensemble. But he must do the work; my
founts are dry.

Furthermore, he must inagine the augmented
hullabaloo — which should be pronounced hella-
baloo — going on for twenty-five minutes at
such rate that no longer might one distinguish
separate reports — save only when the devil's
fast freight aforementioned passed over our
heads — but all were mingled and fused into
one composite, continuous, screeching, whining,
wailing, splitting chorus.

Twenty-five minutes thus, and then a green
rocket went up from near the forward post of
command where those directly in charge of the
operation watched, and before it had descended
in a spatter of emerald sparks which dimmed
out and died as they neared the earth the firing
from our batteries began to lessen in volume
and in rapidity. Within those twenty-five min-
utes the real object of the operation had taken
place. Either the raiders had gone over the
top or they had been driven back in; either they
had accomplished their design of penetrating
the enemy's second line of defences or they had
failed. In any event the movement, all care-
fully timed and all mathematically worked out,
was as good as over. To learn better at first-
hand exactly what results had been obtained we
returned to the village and passed through it
and picking our way in the inky darkness went
along a road toward the post of command.

The road, though, was deserted, and after a
[74]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

bit we retraced the way back to the building
where we had supped and made ourselves com-
fortable in the room of the colonel of the regi-
ment holding the line at this particular point.
An orderly brought us the last of the doughnuts
to nibble on, and upon the ancient hearthstone
we took turns at cracking French hazelnuts
with a hammer while at intervals the building
jarred to the thumpings of such guns as contin-
ued to fire.

Nearly an hour passed, and then in came the
colonel and with him a French liaison officer,
both of them with tired lines about their
mouths. They had been under a strain, as their
looks showed, and they flung themselves down
on adjacent cots with little sighs of relief and
told us the news. In a way the raid had been
a success; in another way it had not. All the
men who went over the top had returned again
after penetrating up to the German secondary
trenches. Several of the Frenchmen had been
wounded, not seriously. None of the Americans
had anything worse than barbed-wire cuts and
bruised shins to show for his experience.

Returning, the raiders reported that our fire
had completely obliterated the hostile front
trench and had ripped its protecting wire jungle
into broken ends. Likewise it had completely
abolished such boches as had tarried too long
in the enemy's forward pits and posts. Of these
unfortunates only dismembered trunks had
been found, with one exception. This exception
[75]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

was a body lying in a shell hole, and not badly
mangled but completely nude. By some freak
the shell which killed the German had stripped
him stark naked down to his boots.

But the total of prisoners taken was zero,
and likewise it was cipher. Forewarned by
the preparatory volleying of the big guns play-
ing on his counter batteries, the wily German,
following his recently adopted custom, had, be-
fore the barrage began, drawn in his defending
forces from the first line, leaving behind only
a few, who fell victims to the first few direct
hits scored by our side; and therein the raid
had failed.

In the next sector on our right, where a day-
light raid had been undertaken two hours be-
fore ours got under way, the raiders had suf-
fered a few casualties but had brought back
two wounded captives; and in another sector,
on our left, yet a third raid had produced four
prisoners. I saw the unhappy four the follow-
ing day on their way back to a laager under
guard. One of them was a middle-aged, sickly-
looking man, and the remaining three were
weedy, half -grown, bewildered boys; very dif-
ferent looking, all of them, from the prime
sinewy material which formed the great armies
I had seen pouring through Belgium in the late
summer of 1914.

All four of them, moreover, were wall-eyed
with apprehension, and flinchy and altogether
most miserable looking. Not even a night of
[76]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

fair treatment and a decent breakfast had
served to cure them of a delusion that Ameri-
cans would take prisoners alive only for the
pleasure of putting them to death at leisure
afterward. What struck me as even more sig-
nificant of the change in the personnel of the
Kaiser's present army — conceding that these
specimens might be accepted as average sam-
ples of the mass — was that not one of them
wore an Iron Cross on his blouse. From per-
sonal observations in the first year of the war I
had made up my mind that the decoration of
the Iron Cross in the German Army was like
vaccination in our own country, being, as one
might say, compulsory. Here, though, was evi-
dence either that the War Lord was running
out of metal or that his system had slipped a
cog. Likewise it was to develop later that the
prisoners I saw wore paper underclothing.

But I am getting ahead of my story. The
colonel, lying back on his cot with his head on
a canvas pillow and his muddied legs crossed,
said at the conclusion of his account:

"Well, we failed to bag any live game, but
anyhow our boys behaved splendidly. They
went over the top cheering and they came back
in singing. You'd never have guessed they
were green hands at this game or that this
was the first time they had ever crossed No
Man's Land."

To the truth of a part of what he said I
could testify personally, for late that afternoon
[77]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

I had seen the squad marching forward to the
spot where they were to line up for the sally
later. They had been like schoolboys on a lark.
If any one of them was afraid he refused to
betray it; if any one of them was nervous at
the prospect before him he hid his nervousness
splendidly well. Only, from them as they passed
us, they radiated a great pride in having been
chosen for the job, and a great confidence in its
outcome, and a great joy that to them thus
early in their soldiering had come the coveted
chance to show the stuff that was in them.
And while they passed, our friend the major,
standing alongside watching them go by, had
said with all the fervency of a man uttering a
prayer:

"By Jove, aren't they bully! No officer
could ask for finer men than that for his outfit.
But they're leaving oodles of disappointment
behind them at that."

"How's that?" I asked.

"I'll tell you how," he said: "Yesterday when
the scheme for this thing was completed we
were told that forty-five men out of our regi-
ment were to be allowed to take part in to-
night's doings. That meant fifteen men out
of each battalion. So yesterday evening at
parade I broke the glad tidings to my bat-
talion and called for volunteers, first warning
the men as a matter of routine that the work
would be highly dangerous and no man need
feel called upon to offer himself. Do you want
[78]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

to know how many men out of that battalion
volunteered? Every single solitary last dog-
goned one of them, that's all! They came at
me like one man. So to save as much heart-
burning as possible I left the choice of fifteen
out of nearly a thousand to the top sergeants
of the companies. And in all your life you
never saw fifteen fellows so tickled as the fifteen
who were selected, and you never saw nine
hundred and odd so downhearted as the lot
who failed to get on the list.

"That wasn't all of it, either," he went on.
"Naturally there were some men who had been
off on detail of one sort or another and hadn't
been at parade. When they came last night
and found out what had happened in their ab-
sence— well, they simply raised merry blue
hell, that's all. They figured somehow they'd
been cheated. As a result I may say that my
rest was somewhat broken. Every few min-
utes, all night long, some boy would break into
my room, and in the doorway salute and say,
in a broken-hearted way: 'Now look here, major,
this ain't square. I got as much right to go
over the top as any feller in this regiment has,
and just because I happened to be away this
evenin' here I am chiselled out of my chance
to go along. Can't you please, sir, ask the
adjutant or somebody to let me in on this?'

"That substantially was what every one of
them said. And when I turned them down
some of 'em went away crying like babies."
[79]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

He glanced away across the blue hill. "I
guess maybe I did a little crying myself."

I thought about what the major had said
and what the colonel had said and what I
myself had '*^4lft&>1 I had climbed some
shaky stairs to be bedded down for the night
on a pallet of blankets upon the floor of a room
where several tired-out officers already snored
away, oblivious of the reverberations of the
shelling from our guns and from the enemy's,
which went on until nearly daybreak.
JI<ln the morning I got insight into another
$hase of the enlisted Yank's understanding.
We came downstairs to breakfast — to a Sun-
day morning breakfast. For the moment a
Sabbath calm hung over the wrecked town and
^6r fbW&faii&y roundabout; all was as peace-
K&'Xit ^t&ker meeting. Red, the colonel's
orderly, stood in the doorway picking his teeth.
KM' is six fe^t:iwofincih^s tall, and dispropor-
tionately narir(ft¥C ^E^fe* >& member of a regi-
ritetit^&Mitj&i T&"£feekMiddle West, but he
hails from the Panhandle of Texas, and betrays
f&r fact eve^^fQl&'>hfe'56pens his mouth. At
tii^1inbrn^4t)6f-dui' ^titti3&4fe was addressing
an unseen and presumably a sympathetic listener
foe^&fal the threshoWJfo^rk ^

"Me, I'm, plum' outdone with these here
French' ^pedpte^^I^I^W^A^rawl. *Here
^W>bm^^j^ fer goin' on

four months and they ain't learnt English yet.
You'd think they'd want to know how to talk
£80]

HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

to people in a reg'lar honest-to-God language—
but no, seem' seemin'ly not a-tall. I'd be
ashamed to be so ignorunt and show it. Course
oncet in a while you do run acrost one of 'em
that's picked up a word here and there; but
that's about all.

"Now f'rinstance you take that nice-lookin'
little woman with the black eyes and the shiny
teeth that runs that there little store in this
here last town we stayed a spell in before we
come on up here. I never could remember the
name of that there town — it was so outlandish
soundin' — but you remember the woman, don't
you? Well, there's a case in p'int. She
was bright enough lookin' but she was like all
the rest — it seemed like she jest couldn't or
jest wouldn't pick up enough reg'lar words to
help her git around. Ef I went in her place
and asked her fer sardines she'd know what
I meant right off and hand 'em over, but ef I
wanted some cheese she didn't have no idea
whut I was talkin' about. Don't it jest beat
all!"

CHAPTER IV
ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

"W "IT "^E left Paris at an early hour of
% /\ I March 25, which was the morning

y \f of the fourth day of perhaps the
greatest battle in the history of
this or any other war, and of the third day of
the bombardment of Paris by the long-range
steel monster which already had become famous
as the latest creation of the Essen workshops.

There were three of us and no more — Ray-
mond Carroll, Martin Green and I. To each
of the three the present excursion was in the
nature of a reunion. For more than six years
we held down adjoining desks in the city room
of a New York evening newspaper. Since we
parted, Carroll and I to take other berths and
Green to bide where he was, this had been the
first time we had met on the same assignment.

I counted myself lucky to be in their com-
pany, for two better newspaper men never
walked in shoe leather. Carroll among report-
ers is what Elihu Root is among corporation
lawyers. There are plenty of men in the
[82]

ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

journalistic craft who know why certain facts
pertinent to the proper telling of a tale in print
may not be secured; he, better than almost
any man I ever ran across in this business,
knows how these facts may be had, regardless
of intervening obstacles. In his own peculiar
way, which is a calm, quiet, detached way,
Green is just as effective. When it comes to
figuring where unshirted Hades is going to
break loose next and getting first upon the spot
he is a regular Nathan Bedford Forrest. His
North American sanity, which is his by birth,
and his South of Ireland wit, which is his by
inheritance, give strength and savour to what
he writes once he has assembled the details in
that card index of a mind of his.

We left Paris, heading north by east in the
direction whence came in dim reverberations
the never-ending sound of the big guns firing
in the biggest of all big engagements. Through
the courtesy of friends who are members of
the French Government we bore special passes
admitting us to the Soissons area. Later we
were to learn that we were the only individuals
not actively concerned in military operations
who at this particularly momentous time had
been thus favoured, all other such passes having
been cancelled; and by the same lucky token
we are, I believe, the only three newspaper men
of any nationality whatsoever who may lay
claim to having witnessed at first-hand any
part of the close-up fighting in the most crit-
[83]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

ical period and at one of the most critical spots
along the crest of the culminating German
offensive of this present year of grace and gun-
powder, 1918.

Indeed, so far as the available information
goes, I think we were the only practitioners of
the writing trade who actually got to the actual
Front in the first week of the push. Whether
any of our calling have got there in the succeed-
ing weeks, I doubt. These times the war
correspondent, so called, does not often enjoy
such opportunities. After the army has dug
itself in is another matter; then, within limita-
tions, he may go pretty much where he pleases
to go. But when the shove is on he stays
behind, safely at the rear with the rest of the
camp followers, and compiles his dispatches
from the official communications, fatting them
out with details out of the accounts of eye-
witnesses and occasionally of participants.

For the three of us, though, was to be vouch-
safed the chance which comes but once in the
modern newspaperman's life, and sometimes
not then. By a combination of rare luck and
yet more rare luck we not only got to the
Front but we got clear through it. As I write
these lines I figuratively pat myself on the
back at the thought of having seen what I
never expected to see when I landed on French
soil less than a month ago. At the same time
it behooves me to disclaim for the members of
our party that any special sagacity on our part

[84]

ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

figured in the transaction. Good fortune came
flitting along and perched on our shoulders,
that's all.

If our passes had shared the common fate of
those other passes in being annulled, if any one
charged with authority had seen fit to halt us,
if any one of a half dozen other things had or
had not befallen us — we never should have gone
where we did go.

Except that we three were the only passengers
on the train who did not wear French uniforms,
and except that the train ran very slowly,
nothing happened on the journey to distinguish
it from any other wartime journey on a rail-
road where always there is to be heard the dis-
tant booming of the guns mingling with the
clickety-clank of the car wheels, and where
always the sight of all manner of military
activities is to be viewed from the car windows.

In a deep cut we halted. When we had
waited there for perhaps twenty minutes a
kindly officer volunteered the information in
broken English that the station at Soissons
was being shelled and that if we intended to
enter the town it behooved us to walk in. So
we took up our traps and walked.

Through old trenches where long-abandoned
German defences once had run in zigzags
across the flanks of the hills we laboured up
to the top, to find the road along the crest
cumbered and in places almost clogged with
marching troops on their way back to rest bil-
[85]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

lets, and with civilians fleeing southward from
Soissons or from evacuated villages within the
zone of active hostilities. We seemingly were
the only civilians going in; all those we met
on that three-mile hike were coming out. To
me the spectacle was strikingly and pathetically
reminiscent of Belgium in mid-August of 1914
— old men trudging stolidly ahead with loads
upon their bent backs; women, young and old,
dragging carts or pushing shabby baby car-
riages that were piled high with their meagre
belongings; grave-faced children trotting along
at their elders' skirts; wearied soldiers falling
out of the line to add to their already heavy
burdens as they relieved some half-exhausted
member of the exodus of [an unwieldy pack.
Over the lamentable procession hung a fog of
gritty chalk particles that had been winnowed
up by the plodding feet. Viewed through the
cloaking dust the figures drifted past us like
the unreal shapes of a dream. I saw one
middle-aged sergeant, his whiskers powdered
white and his face above the whiskers masked
in a sweaty white paste like a circus clown's,
who, for all that he was in heavy marching
order, had a grimed mite of a baby snuggled
up to the breast of his stained tunic, with its
little feet dangling in the crisscross of his
leather gear and its bobbing head on his shoul-
der. He carried the baby with one hand and
with the other hand he dragged his rifle; and
he looked down smiling at the bedraggled little
[86]

ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

mother who travelled alongside him shoving
before her a barrow in which another child
sat on a pillion of bed clothes.

I saw two infantrymen slide down a steep
embankment to give aid to an old woman who
struggled with a bundle almost as large as her-
self, and then, having accomplished the job,
running with their accoutrements slapping
against their legs to catch up with their com-
pany. I saw scores of sights such as this, and
I did not hear one word of complaint uttered,
nor did I look into one face that expressed
aught save courage and patience. And seeing
these things, multiplied over and over again,
I said to myself then, as I say to myself now,
that I do not believe Almighty God in His in-
finite mercy^designed that such people as these
should ever be conquered.

Only one person spoke to us. A captain,
grinning at us as he plodded by at the head of
his company, said with a rearward flirt of his
thumb over his shoulders: "No good, no good!
much boom-boom!"

Much boom-boom was emphatically right.
Over the clustered tops of the city the hostile
shells were cracking, and frequently to our ears
there came along with the smashing notes of
the explosives the clatter of tumbling walls and
smashing tiles. Drawing nearer we divined
that the cannonading was directed mainly at
the railroad station, so skirting to the left
of the district under fire we made our way
[87]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

through almost deserted side streets to the cen-
tre of the town.

Hardly a house or a wall along our route
but bore marks of punishment. Some were
fallen into heaps of ruins; some merely were
pecked and scarred, with corners bitten out of
the walls and chimneys broken into fantastic
designs. Indeed we found out later that only
one structure in Soissons had escaped damage
in the shelling which went on intermittently
in the earlier years of the war and which the
Germans, with a sort of futile, savage fury, had
lately renewed from their lines twelve miles
away to the northward.

This sort of thing appears to be a favourite
trick with our enemies. A village or a town
may be abandoned by all save a few helpless
citizens, living, God only knows how, in the
litter of their homes; the place may be of abso-
lutely no military value to the Allies; possibly
no troops are quartered there and no batteries
or wagon trains are stationed within miles of it;
but all the same when the frenzy of their mad-
ness descends upon them the Huns will level
and loose their batteries upon the spot and
make of the hideous hash which it has become
a still more hideous hash. It is as though in
sheer wantonness they kicked a corpse.

We skirted the sides of the wonderful old
cathedral, which since 1914 has stood for the
most part in ruins, with its beautiful stained
windows — which never can be replaced, since

[88]

ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

the art of making such glass as this has been
lost — lying underfoot in broken splinters of
many colours. Just off the main square we
secured quarters in a typical French inn of
the second class, a small place with a grandilo-
quent name. Mainly the shops and houses
in the neighbourhood were closed and their
owners gone away, but the proprietor of the
little hotel and his family anJl his help still
abided under their belaboured roof. Plainly
their motto was "Business as Usual."

Their only guests were a few American Red
Cross workers, both men and women; a few
American officers of the transport service; and
a few French officers. But that day at noon,
so we were told, the whole staff turned in and
cooked and served, free of charge, a plentiful
hot meal to two hundred refugees, who stag-
gered in afoot from districts now overrun by the
advancing Germans. These poor folk were all
departed when we arrived; French camions and
American motor trucks had carried them away
to temporary asylums beyond the limit of the
shelling, and for us there was abundant accom-
modation— seats at the common dining table,
chambers on the second floor, and standing
room in the deep wine cellars down below if we
cared to occupy them when the bombardment
became heavier or when hostile aeroplanes cir-
cled over to drop down bombs. The members
of the menage, as we learned later, slept reg-
ularly down among the casks and wine bottles,
[89]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

because nearly every night for a week past
enemy airmen had been circling about doing
what hurt they could to the town and its re-
maining inhabitants.

From the single shattered window of the
bedroom to which I was assigned I could look
out and down across the narrow roadway upon
a smaller house which had caught the full
force of a big sHell. The thing must have hap-
pened within a day or two, for the splintered
woodwork and caved-in masonry had not yet
begun to wear the weathered, crumbly look
that conies to debris after a few weeks of ex-
posure in this rainy climate, and there was a
fresh powdering of dust upon the mass of
wreckage before the door. Curiously enough
the explosive which had reduced the interior of
the building to a jumble of ruination left most
of the roof rafters intact, and to them still ad-
hered tiles in a sort of ordered pattern, with
gaps between the red squares, so that the effect
might be likened to a kind of lacy architectural
lingerie.

Any moment similar destruction might be
visited upon the hotel opposite, but, despite
the constant and the imminent danger, the
big-bodied, broad-faced proprietor and his trim
small wife were seemingly as tranquil as though
they lived where the roar of guns was never
heard. The man who looks upon the French
as an excitable race has only to come here now,
to this land, to learn his error and to realise
[90]

ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

that beneath their surface emotionalism they
have splendid reserve forces of resolution and
fortitude. By my way of reasoning, it is with
these people not merely a case of getting used
to a thing — it is something more than that,
something deeper than that. It is a pure,
clean courage cast in the matrix of a patient
heroism which buoys them up to carry on the
ordinary undertakings of life amid conditions
abnormal and disordered to the point of being
almost intolerable when endured for weeks and
months and years on end.

Having established ourselves, we set about
the task of securing the coveted transportation
up to the vicinity of the planes of contact be-
tween the Allies and the enemy. The shelling
had somewhat abated since our arrival, so we
made so bold as to trudge across town to the
railroad station, encountering but few persons
on the way. In the immediate neighbourhood
of the station the evidences of recent strafing
were thicker even than in other parts of the old
city. Where an hour before a shell had blown
two loitering French soldiers to bits, a shattered
stone gateway and a wide hole in the ground
and a great smearing of moist red stains upon
the upheaved earth spelled the tale of what had
happened plainly enough. A withered old man
was doing his feeble best to patch together the
split and sundered planks of the gate; the
bodies, what was left of them, had been re-
moved by a burial squad.
[91]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

At the railroad terminal there was pressing
need for everything that went on wheels, and
of a certainty there was nothing in the nature
of a self-propelled vehicle available for the use
of three men who came bearing no order that
would give them the right to commandeer gov-
ernment equipment. So our next hope, and
seemingly our last one, lay in the French. At
a certain place we found numbers of kindly
and sympathetic officers with staff markings on
their collars, who professed to be glad to see
us, at the same time expressing a polite surprise
that a trio of unannounced American newspaper
men should have dropped in upon them, seem-
ingly out of the shell-harassed skies above.

But when we suggested we would appreciate
the loan of an automobile and with the auto-
mobile an officer to escort us up to the battle
front they lifted eyebrows, shoulder blades and
arms toward heaven, all in the same movement
signifying chagrin and regret. What we asked
was quite impossible, considering the exigencies
and emergencies of the moment. The most
formidable engagement that ever had been or
perhaps ever would be was in midblast. Every
available bit of motive power was required;
every available man was required.

Besides, the roads, as doubtless we knew,
were blocked with reinforcements hurrying up
to support the hard-pressed British north of
the Aisne. Any other time, yes. But now —
no, and once again, no. We were quite free
[92]

ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

to stay on in Soissons if we cared for a place
temporarily so unhealthy. We might have
free access to any of the maps or records on
hand. We might visit any of the hospitals or
rest camps in the immediate vicinity. But
further than that our new friends could not go.
They added, by way of advice, that our best
course would be to return straightway to Paris
and come again when the crisis had passed and
the sector to the north had somewhat quieted.

There being nothing else to do, we took a
walk to think things over. The walk ended at
our stopping place just as the German guns
north of us beyond the river resumed their
afternoon serenade. More refugees were com-
ing into the town in a long dismal procession
from Chauny and Ham and Noyon and
scores of smaller places. Some of them had
been on the road for twenty-four hours, some
for as long as forty-eight hours. They had
rested a while in wrecked and empty villages
during the preceding night, then had risen at
daybreak and resumed their heart-breaking pil-
grimage, with no goal in sight and no destina-
tion in view, and only knowing that what
might lie ahead of them could never by any
chance be half so bad as what the Germans
were creating behind them.

At the beginning of this war, in Belgium and

again in Northern France, not many miles

from where we then were, I had seen on the

edges of the vortex of battle and destruction

[93]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

many such eddying, aimless streams of human
flotsam and jetsam of war; but to one who
knew the facts of their case the present plight
of these poor wanderers had a special appeal.
For this was the second time they had been
dispossessed from their small holdings, the
second time they had fled in huddles like
frightened sheep before the path of the grey
invader, the second time all that they owned
had been swept away and smashed up and
wasted beyond repairing.

Driven out of their homes in the first four
weeks of the war, back in 1914, at the time of
the great onslaught against Paris, they had been
kept away from these homes for more than two
years, all during the German occupation of
their territory. After the great victory of the
Allies over von Hindenburg in the Aisne coun-
try they had returned, tramping back in pairs
and groups to the sites of their homesteads,
filled with the tenacious impulse of the French
peasant and the French villager to reroot him-
self in his native soil; had returned to find that
before the Germans retreated beyond the
Chemin des Dames they, in accordance with
orders from the all-highest command, sawed
down the fruit trees in the little orchards and
burned the houses that had sheltered them, and
tore up the vines and shovelled dung into the
drinking wells.

Nevertheless, the repatriates had set to,
working like beavers to restore a sorry sem-

ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

blance of the simple frugal communal system
under which they and their fathers before them
had existed since the Napoleonic wars. And
now, just when they were beginning to patch
together the broken ends of their lives, when
with aid from the French Government and aid
from Americans they had cleared and planted
their devastated fields and had built new habi-
tations for themselves out of the ruins of the
old ones, again the enemy had come down
upon them like a ravening wolf on a fold; and
again they had run away, deserting all they
could not carry in their arms or upon their
backs, and knowing full well in the light of
past experience that the Germans either would
garner the work of their hands or else would
make an utter end of it.

At a corner just above the hotel we came upon
a mother and her family of nine. She was less
than forty years old herself; her husband was
a soldier at the Front. She wore wooden
sabots on her feet, and upon her body a tattered,
sleazy black frock. Her eldest child was fifteen
years old, her youngest less than six months.
For the ten of them to travel a distance of
twelve miles had taken the better part of two
days and two nights. The woman had contrived
a sling of an old bed sheet, which passed over
one of her shoulders and under the other; and
in this hammock contrivance she had carried
the youngest child against her bosom, with her
bodice open at the breast so the baby might
[95]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

suckle while she pushed a crippled perambu-
lator containing the two next youngest bairns.
The rest of the brood had walked all the way.
They were wearied beyond description; they
were incredibly dirty and famishing for want of
proper sustenance, but not a single one of the
small wretches who was old enough to speak
the word failed to murmur "Merci, merci"
when the neighbours brought them bowls of
hot soup and gave them sups of warm milk
and put big slices of bread smeared with jam
into their dirty, clawlike little hands.

Having wolfed down the food they squatted,
all of them, against a house front to wait for
the camion which would take them to a refuge
in a Red Cross station a dozen miles away.
They had to wait a good while, since all the
available wagons were engaged in performing
similar merciful offices for earlier arrivals. The
children curled up in little heaps like kittens
and went to sleep, but the mother sat on a
stone doorstep with her babe against her bare
flesh, over her heart, to keep it warm, and
stared ahead of her with eyes which expressed
nothing save a dumb, numbed resignation.

An old priest in a black robe came along and
he stopped, being minded, I think, to utter
some message of comfort to this wife of a
soldier of France, and in her way, I say, as
valorous a soldier as her husband could be,
did he wear twenty decorations for bravery.
But either the priest could find no words to
[96]

ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

say or the words choked in his throat. Above
her drooped head he made with his hand the
sign of the cross in the air and went away. And
as I stood looking on I did in my heart what
any man with blood in his veins would have
done had he been there in my stead — I con-
signed to the uttermost depths of perdition
the soul of the Brute of Prussia whose diseased
ambition brought to pass this thing and a mil-
lion things like unto it.

CHAPTER V
SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY

HAD we waited that night for Oppor-
tunity to knock at our door I am
inclined to think we might be wait-
ing yet. We went out and we set
a trap for Opportunity, and we caught her.
No matter how or whence, the chance we cov-
eted for a lift to the battle came to us before
the night was many hours old. But before the
design assumed shape we were to meet as
blithe a young Britisher as ever I have seen,
in the person of one Captain Pepper, a red-
cheeked Yorkshireman in his early twenties, a
fit and proper type of the men England has
sent out to officer her forces overseas.

One of our Red Cross ambulances, while
scouting out toward Noyon that afternoon,
picked him up as he trudged up the road alone,
with a fresh machine-gun wound through the
palm of his right hand and his cap on the back
of his head. His wound had been tied up at a
casualty-dressing station and he had set out
then to walk a distance of twenty-odd kilo-
[98]

SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY

metres to Soissons, where he was told he might
find a hospital to shelter him.

He dined with us, along with the ambulance
driver who brought him in; and afterward he
insisted on sitting a while with us, though he
had been fighting day and night almost con-
tinuously since the beginning of the battle and
plainly was far spent from fatigue and lack of
sleep. So far as I might judge, though, he did
not have a nerve in his body. Gesturing with
his swathed hand he told us not what he him-
self had done — somehow he managed in his
self-effacing way to steer away from the per-
sonal note in his recital — but mainly about the
stupendous tragedy in which he had played
his part. Considering him as he sat there on a
broken sofa with his long legs outstretched
before a wood fire, one could not doubt that
it had been a creditable part.

We gathered that in the second day of the
fighting, as the English fell back before over-
whelming odds but fighting for every inch, he
became separated from his company. Next
morning he found himself without a command
in the heels of the orderly retreat and had of-
fered himself for service to the first superior
officer Ke met. Thereupon he was put in charge
.of a mixed' detachment of two hundred men —
gathered up anyhow and anywhere — and with
his motley outfit had been told off to hold a
strip of woods somewhere south of Chauny.
Under him, he said, were stragglers cut off from
[99]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

half a dozen battered line regiments, and along
with these, cooks, wagon drivers, engineers,
officers' servants and stretcher bearers. In
front of the squad, beyond the woods, was a
strip of marsh, and this natural barrier gave
them an advantage which, plus pluck, enabled
them to beat off not one but several oncoming
waves of Germans.

"We had machine guns, luckily enough," he
said; "and, my word, but we gave the beggars
a proper drubbing! We piled them up in heaps
along the edges of that bally old bog. Every-
where along the Front — where we were and
everywhere else, too, from what I can hear—
they have outnumbered us four or five to one,
but I'm quite sure we've killed or wounded
ten of them for every man of ours that has
been laid out since this show started four days
ago.

"Well, that's all, except that this morning
about ten o'clock I was hit and had to quit and
come away, because you see I wouldn't be
much use with one hand out of commission and
bleeding all over the shop — would I now? I'm
sorry to have to leave the chaps — they were a
sporting lot; but since I had to stop a bullet
I'm glad I've got a nice clean cushy wound. I
shall be glad to get a taste of Blighty too; I'm
a bit fagged, as you might say."

His head nodded forward on his chest when
he got this far, and his limbs relaxed.

He protested, though, against being bundled
[100]

SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY

off to bed, saying he was quite comfortable and
that his hand scarcely pained him at all, but
the man who had brought him took him away.
As for Carroll and Green and me, we slept that
night, what sleeping we did, with our clothes
on us, ready to rise and hunt the wine cellar if
anything of a violently unpleasant nature oc-
curred over our heads. During the hours before
daylight there was a spirited spell of banging
and crashing somewhere in the town, and not
so far away either, if one might judge by the
volume of the tumult, which rattled the empty
casement frame alongside my bed and made
the ancient house to rock and creak; but when
dawn came the gables above us were still intact
and we were enjoying our beauty sleep in the
calm which succeeded the gust of shelling or of
bombing or whatever it was.

CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR

IMMEDIATELY after breakfast, in accord-
ance with a plan already formulated, we
quietly took possession of one of those
small American-made cars, the existence of
which has been responsible for the addition of
an eighth joke to the original seven jokes in
the world. We didn't know it then, but for
us the real adventure was just starting. There
were four of us in the flivver — the driver, a
young American in uniform, whose duties were
of such a nature that he travelled on a roving
commission and need necessarily report to none
concerning his daily movements; and for pas-
sengers, our own three selves. For warrant to
fare abroad we had a small American flag painted
on the glass wind shield, one extra tire, and an
order authorising us to borrow gasoline — sim-
ply these and nothing more. Very unostenta-
tiously we rode out of Soissons, steering a north-
westerly course. We might not know exactly
where we were going or when we should be
back, but we were on our way.
[102]

THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR

At the same time, be it here said, there was
method of a sort in our scheme of things, for
we were aiming, as closely as we might, at the
point where approximately the main< French
command jointed on to the right wing of the
British, we figuring that at the junction place,
where the overlapping and intermingled areas
of control met, and more especially in a con-
fused period when one army was falling back
and the other bringing up its reserves, we stood
a better chance in our credential-less and un-
accredited state of wriggling on up from the
back lines to the Front than would elsewhere
be possible.

We reckoned the prospect after this fashion:
If the French find us traversing the forbidden
lands they may take it for granted that the
British permitted us to pass. If we fall under
the eyes of British guardians of the trail they
are equally likely to assume that the French let
us through. And so it turned out; which I claim
is added proof that the standing luck of the
American newspaper reporter on a difficult as-
signment is not to be discounted.

In stock we had one trump card, and only
one, and we played it many a time during that
somewhat crowded day. All of us were in
khaki with tin helmets upon our heads and gas
masks swung over our shoulders. The heavy
trench coats in which we were bundled pre-
vented betrayal to the casual eye of the fact
that none of us wore badges denoting rank,
[103]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

upon our collars or shoulder straps. Out-
fitted thus we might have been major gener-
als or we might have been second lieuten-
ants of the American Expeditionary Forces.
Who, on a cursory scrutiny of us, was to
say?

So we decided among ourselves that ours must
be a role suggestive of great personal importance
and urgent business. Did any wayside sen-
tinel, whether British or French, move out
upon the crown of the road as though he meant
to halt us, one of us, with an authoritative arm,
would wave him clear of our path and we would
go flitting imperiously by as though the officious-
ness of underlings roused in us only a passing
annoyance. It proved a good trick. It may
never work again in this war, but I bear witness
that it has worked once.

In the very first leg of this expedition good
old Madame Bonnea venture stood our; friend.
The River Aisne skirts the city of Soissons.
At the far side of the bridge, spanning the
stream, which bridge we must cross, stood a
French noncom, charged, as we knew, with the
duty of examining the passes of those outbound.
If we disregarded his summons to halt, com-
plications of a painful nature would undoubtedly
ensue. But as the car slowed up, all of us with
our fingers figuratively crossed, he either recog-
nised the driver as one who passed him often
or was impressed by our bogusly impressive
mien, or possibly accepted the painted flag on

[104]

THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR

Tin Lizzie's weather-beaten countenance as
warrant of our authenticity.

As he waved to us to proceed and then came
to a salute, we, returning the salute in due
form, were uttering three silent but nonethe-
less vehement cheers. I think we also shook
hands. We were past the first and by long
side the most formidable barrier. The farther we
proceeded toward the battle the greater would
be our chances of proceeding, it being gen-
erally assumed that no one gets very deeply
into the district of active hostilities unless he
has a proper errand there and has proved it to
the satisfaction of the highway warders behind.

Through several villages that were reduced
by shell fire to litter heaps and tenanted only
by detachments of French soldiers we passed.
Next we skirted up the sides of a steep hill and
rounded the crest to where, spread out before
our eyes, was a glorious panorama of the ter-
rain below and beyond.

We drew in our breaths. Each one of us had
seen something of the panoply of warfare in
the making, but nothing in my own experience
since Belgium in 1914 had equalled this. All
the world appeared to have put on cartridge
belts and gone to war. As far as the eye could
reach, away off yonder to where sky line and
earth line met behind the dust screen, cavalry,
artillery, infantry, supply trains, munition
trains, and all imaginable branches of the
portable machinery of an army were in sight

[105]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

and in motion. Their masses hid the earth
with a shifting pattern as though a vast blue-
grey carpet were magically weaving itself.
Overhead, singly, in pairs and in formations,
like flights of wild fowl, the scout planes, the
observation planes and the battle planes went
winging. They were like silver gulls escorting
limitless schools of porpoise through placid
waters.

Usually there is a seemingly interminable
confusion in the vision of a great force upon
the forward go. To the lay eye it appears that
the whole movement has got itself inextricably
snarled. This line travels one course, that line
goes in exactly the opposite direction, a third
one is bisecting the first two at cross angles.
But here one great compelling influence was
sending all the units forward along a common
current. The heavy vehicles held to the roads
which threaded the plain; the infantry took
short cuts across lots, as it were; the cavalry
traversed the fields and penetrated the occa-
sional thickets; the sky craft trod the alleys of
the air — but they all headed toward the same
unseen goal. There was no doubt about it—
France was hurrying up a most splendid army
to reenforce the hard-pressed defenders of
French soil, where the Hun pushed against the
line of the inward-bending and battered but
yet unbroken British battalions.

We coasted down off the heights into the
plateau, and now as we came in among them
[106]

THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR

we had opportunity for appraising the temper
of those men hurrying on their forward march
to the killing pits. Who says France is war
wearied or that her sons are tired of fighting?
No suggestion was there here of dumb oxen
driven to slaughter. Why, these men were like
bridegrooms bound for the marriage feast.
They sang as they marched or as they rode.
Usually what they sang was a snatch of some
rollicking chanson, and through the dirt masks
they grinned into our faces as we went slithering

by.

There were hails and friendly gestures for
us. It might be a boy private with a sprig of
early spring wild flowers jauntily stuck in his
cap who waved at us. It might be a cook bal-
ancing himself on the tailboard of a travelling
field kitchen who raised a sweaty visage from
his steaming soup caldron and made friendly
circles in the air with a dripping iron instrument
that was too big for a spoon and too small for
a spade; or it might be a gunner on a bouncing
ammunition truck with enough of potential
death and disaster bestowed under his sprawled
legs to blow hun and, incidentally, us into ten
million smithereens if ever it went off.

Kilometre after kilometre we skihooted
through the press, and it was a comic thing to
see how a plodding regiment would swing over
or a battery would bounce and jolt off the
fairway into the edges of the ditch at the in-
sistent toot-toot of our penny whistle of a
[107]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

horn to let us by. It made one think of whales
making room in a narrow tideway for an im-
pudent black minnow to pass. And always
there was the drone of the questing aeroplanes
overhead and the thunderous roaring of the
guns in front. We overtook one train of supply
trucks with the markings of the U. S. A. and
manned by dusty lads in the khaki fustian of
Yankeeland — evidence that at least one arm
of our service would have a hand in the epochal
task confronting our allies. All the rest of it
was French.

For us there was no halt until we reached
Blerencourt. Now this place was a place
having a particular interest for us, since it was
at Blerencourt that the organisation known as
the American Fund for French Wounded,
which is headed by Miss Anne Morgan and
which has for its field personnel American wom-
en exclusively, had during the past nine months
centred its principal activities.

In the outskirts of the town, now evacuated
of almost all its civilian residents, stand the
massive stone gateways and the dried moat
of the magnificent chateau of Blerencourt,
which was destroyed by the peasants in the time
of the Terror and never rebuilt. What remains
constitutes one of the most picturesque physical
reminders of the French Revolution that is
to be found in the country to-day. We rode
under the arched stone portals — and lo, it was
almost as though we had come into the midst
[108]

THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR

of a smart real-estate development somewhere
on Long Island within easy communicating dis-
tance of New York City.

French francs, provided by the state, and
American dollars, donated by the folks back
home, had been used under American super-
vision to construct a model colony upon the
exact site of the ancient castle of some vanished
noble family of the old regime. There was a
model barracks, a model dormitory, a model
schoolhouse, two model cottages and an office
building that was a model among models — all
built of planking, all glistening and smart with
fresh paint, all with neat doorsteps in front of
them and trim flower plots and vegetable gar-
dens about them. There was a chicken house
and a chicken run, dotted with the shapes of
plump fowls. There was a storeroom piled
high with clothing and food sent over from
America to the A. F. F. W. for distribution
among destitute natives of the devastated dis-
tricts, of which this, until a year ago, had been
the centre.

These incongruously modern structures snug-
gled right up under the venerable walls of the
battlements. Indeed several of the buildings
were cunningly built into the ruins, so that
on one side the composite edifice would show a
withered stone face, with patches of furze
growing in the chinks of the crumbled masonry
like moles on the forehead of a withered crone,
and on the other would present a view of a
[109]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

smart cottage with a varnished shingle roof and
a painted front door which apparently had just
arrived from some planing mill in the States.
Underneath the floor was a cellar four hundred
years old, but the curtains in the window had
seemingly been cut and stitched only yesterday.
Somehow, though, the blended effect was im-
mensely effective. It made me think of Home-
dale-on-the-Sound grafted upon a background
of Louis the Grand; and for a fact that was
exactly what it was.

This creation, representing as it did nine
months of hard work on the part of devoted
American women, had been closed only the
day before. It stayed in operation until it
seemed probable that the German legions might
penetrate this far south in their effort to ford
the River Oise. The little pupils of the kinder-
garten had been sent away in trucks, the main
dormitory had been turned into a temporary
resting place for refugees, and the American
ranges in the kitchen had done valiant service
in the cooking of hot meals for exhausted women
and children tramping in from the north and
west. Before the managers and teachers left
at dusk of the preceding evening two crippled
French soldiers, specially detailed for work
here by the government, had been assigned to
place vessels of kerosene in each building, with
instructions to fire the oil at the first signs of
approaching Germans.

The cans of inflammables were still in their
[110]

THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR

places when we arrived and the maimed watch-
men, one of them a one-armed man and the
other a one-legged, had camped all night on
the premises ready on warning to apply the
torch and destroy this frontier outpost of Amer-
ican charity and American efficiency. But in
the forenoon word was come that the enemy
had been brought to bay seven miles away and
that he might not break through the British-
French line. He did break through, but that is
another story. So Mrs. Dike, of New York,
and Miss Blagden, of Philadelphia, two of Miss
Morgan's assistants, had motored in from be-
low, filled with thanksgiving that the patient
work of their hands and their hearts would
almost certainly be spared.

While Mrs. Dike, with tears in her eyes, was
telling us of the things that had been accom-
plished here and while the troopers poured in
unceasing streams along the main road beyond
the gateway, a handful of belated refugees
crept in under the weathered armorial bearings
on the keystone of the archway, to be fed and
cared for and then sent along in the first empty
truck that came by going toward Soissons.

In this group of newcomers was an elderly
little man in a worn high hat and a long frock
coat with facings of white dust upon its shiny
seams, who looked as though he might be the
mayor of some inconsequential village. He
carried two bulging valises and a huge um-
brella. With him was his wife, and she had in
[ill]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

one hand a cage housing two frightened canaries
and under the other arm a fat grey tabby cat
which blinked its slitted eyes contentedly.

The most pitiable figure of them all to my
way of thinking was an old woman — yes, a
very old woman — she must have been all of
eighty. Alongside one of the buildings I came
upon her sitting in a huddle of her most treas-
ured possessions. She was bent forward, with
her gnarled hands folded in the lap of her dress,
which was silk and shiny, for naturally when
she fled from her home she had put on her back
the best that she owned. Under the cope of a
queer little old black bonnet with faded purple
cloth flowers upon it her scanty hair lay in
thin neat folds, as white and as soft as silk floss.
Her feet in stiff, new, black shoes showed be-
neath her broad skirts. Her face, caving in
about the mouth where her teeth were gone and
all crosshatched with wrinkles, was a sweet,
kindly, most gentle old face — the kind of face
that we like to think our dead-and-gone grand-
mothers must have had.

She sat there ever so patiently in the soft
sunlight, waiting for the truck which would
carry her away to some strange place among
stranger folk. When I drew near to her, wishing
with all my heart that I knew enough of her
tongue to express to her some of the thoughts
I was thinking, she looked up at me and smiled
a friendly little smile, and then raising her
hands in a gesture of resignation dropped them
[112]

THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR

again in her lap. But it was only with her lips
that she smiled, for all the time her chin was
quivering and her faded old blue eyes were brim-
ming with a sorrow that was past telling in
words.

She still sat there as we got into our ear and
drove off toward the battle. Looking back, the
last thing I saw before we rounded the corner
of the wall was her small black shape vivid in
the sunshine. And I told myself that if I were
an artist seeking to put upon canvas an image
that would typify and sum up the spirit of
embattled France to-day I would not paint a
picture of a wounded boy soldier; nor yet one
of a winged angel form bearing a naked sword;
nor yet one of the full-throated cock of France,
crowing his proud defiance. I would paint a
picture of that brave little old withered woman,
with the lips that smiled and the chin that quiv-
ered the while she smiled.

[113]

CHAPTER VII
AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

WHEN the last preceding chapter of
mine ended I had reached a point
in the narrative where our little
party of four, travelling in our
own little tin flivverette, were just leaving
Blerincourt, being bound still farther west and
aiming, if our abiding luck held out, to reach
the front of the Front — which, I may add, we
did.

To be exact we were leaving not one Blerin-
court but three. First, Blerincourt, the town,
with its huddle of villagers' homes, housing at
this moment only French troopers and ex-
hausted refugees ; second, Blerincourt, the castle,
a mouldering relic of a great house, testifying
by its massive empty walls and its tottering
ruin of a gateway to the fury which laid hold
on the peasants of these parts in the days of
the Terror; and, third, Blerincourt, the model
colony of model cottages, which for us held the
most personal interest, since it was here the
American women of the American Fund for

[114]

AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

French Wounded had during the previous nine
months centred their activities relating to the
repopulating of districts in the Aisne country,
now for the second time evacuated and given
over again to the savage malice of the boche.

Behind us as we swung into the main high-
way lay this grouped composition of the
wrecked chateau, the tiny old houses of weath-
ered grey stone and the little frame domiciles,
smart and glistening with fresh paint and fresh
varnishing. Before us, within a space of time
and distance to be spanned by not more than
half an hour of steady riding, was somewhere
the problematical doorway through which we
hoped to pass into the forward lines of that
battle which the historians of the future, I dare
say, will call merely the Great Battle, knowing
their readers require no added phraseology to
distinguish it from the lesser engagements of
this war — or in fact of any war.

We did not ask our way of any whom we
met, either of those going ahead of us or those
coming back in counter streams. To begin
with, we deemed it inexpedient to halt long
enough to give to any person in authority a
chance for questioning the validity of our
present mission, since, as I already have ex-
plained, we carried no passes qualifying us to
traverse this area; and besides there was no
need to ask. The route was marked for us by
signs and sounds without number, plainer than
any mileposts could have been : By the columns

[115]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

of Frenchmen hurrying up to reenforce the
decimated British who until now, at odds of
one to five, had borne the buffets of the tre-
mendous German onslaught; by the never-
ending, never-slackening roar of the heavy
guns; by the cloud of dust and powder, forming
a wall against two sides of the horizon, which
mounted upward to mingle its hazes with the
hazes of the soft spring afternoon; by the thin
trickling lines of light casualty cases, "walking
wounded," in the vernacular of the Medical
Corps — meaning by that men who, having had
first-aid bandages applied to their hurts at for-
ward casualty stations, were tramping rearward
to find accommodations for themselves at field
hospitals miles away.

At once we were in a maze of traffic to be
likened to the conditions commonly prevalent
on lower Fifth Avenue in the height of the
Christmas-shopping season, but with two dis-
tinctions: Here on this chalk-white highroad
the movement, nearly all of it, was in one direc-
tion; and instead of omnibuses, delivery vans,
carriages and private automobiles, this vast
caravansary was made up of soldiers afoot, sol-
diers mounted and soldiers riding; of batteries,
horse drawn and motor drawn; of pontoon
bridges in segments; of wagon trains, baggage
trains, provision trains and munition trains;
of field telephone, field telegraph and field wire-
less outfits upon wheels; of all the transportable
impedimenta and all the myriad items of mov-
[116]

AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

able machinery pertaining to the largest army
that has crossed a corner of France since the
days of the first great invasion more than three
and a half years before.

There were ambulances past counting; there
were big covered camions in numbers sufficient
to fit out a thousand circuses; there were horses
and donkeys and mules of all the known sizes
and colours; there were so many human shapes
in uniforms of horizon blue that the eye grew
weary and the brain rebelled at the task of
trying, even approximately, to compute esti-
mates of the total strength of the man power
here focussed.

Through all this, weaving in and out, our
impudent little black bug of a car scuttled
along, with its puny horn honking a constant
and insolent demand for clear passage. At a
faster gait than anything in sight except the
cruising aeroplanes above, we progressed upon
our way, with none to halt us and none to
turn us back. Where the dust hung especially
thick at a crossroads set in the midst of the
wide plain we almost struck three pedestrians
who seemingly did not heed our hooted warning
or take notice of it until we were right upon
them. As they jumped nimbly for the ditch
we could see that all these had staff markings
at their throats, and that one, the eldest of the
three, a stoutish gentleman with a short grizzled
beard, wore three stars in a triangle upon his
collar. Tin Lizzie had almost achieved the dis-
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

tinction for herself of having run down a major
general of France.

We did not stop, though, to offer apologies or
explanations. With rare sagacity our driver
threw her wide open and darted into the fog,
to take temporary shelter behind a huge supply
wagon, which vehicle we followed for a while
after the fashion of a new-foaled colt trailing
its dam.

Proofs began to multiply that we were near-
ing the zone of live combat. Until now the
only British soldiers we had seen were slightly
wounded men bound afoot for the rear. All at
once we found ourselves passing half a company
of khaki-clad Britishers who travelled across a
field over a course parallel to the one we were
taking and who disappeared in a hazel copse
beyond. Rifle firing could be heard somewhere
on the far side of the thicket. At a barked
command from an officer who clattered up on
horseback a battery of those doughty little
seventy-fives, which the French cherish so
highly, and with such just cause, was leaving
the road and taking station in a green meadow
where the timid little wild flowers of a mild
March showed purple and yellow in the rutted
and trampled grass.

With marvellous haste the thing was accom-
plished almost instantly. The first gun of the
five squatted in the field with its nozzle slanting
toward the northwest, and behind it its four
companions stood, all with their short noses
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AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

pointing at precisely the same angle, like bird
dogs on a back stand. Suddenly they did what
well-broken bird dogs never do — they barked,
one after the other. Almost before the whining
whistle of the shells had died away the gunners
were moving their pieces to a point closer up
behind a screen of poplars and sending a
second yelping salvo of shots toward an unseen
target.

We became aware that the component units
of the army were now quitting the roadway to
take positions in the back lines. Indeed those
back lines formed themselves while we watched.
One battery after another swung off to the right
or to the left and came into alignment, so that
soon we rode between double rows of halted
guns. With our canes we could have touched
the artillerymen piling heaps of projectiles in
convenient hollows in the earth close up to the
edges of the road. Big covered wains dis-
charged dusty infantrymen, who, pausing only
long enough to unbuckle their packs from their
shoulders and throw them under the hoods of
the wagons, went at a shambling half-trot
through the meadow. Cavalrymen, not dis-
mounted, as they had mainly been during these
dragging winter months of warfare that was
stationary and static, but with their booted
feet once more in their stirrups, cantered off,
bound presumably for the thin woodlands
which rimmed the plateau where the terrain
broke away to the banks of the River Oise.

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Here again at last was war in the open, as
different from battle in the trenches as football
is from trap shooting. The action of it was
spread out before one's eyes, not masked in
mud ambuscades. Each instant our eyes be-
held some new and stirring picture, standing
out by reason of its swift vigour from the
vaster panorama of which it was a part. What
I had seen of battle formations in the preceding
three weeks had made me think mainly of sub-
Way diggin's or of construction work for a
new railroad or of engineering operations in
connection with a dam, say, or a dike. What
I saw now most vividly suggested old-time
battle pictures by Meissonier or Detaille. War,
for the moment at least, had gone back to the
aspect which marked it before both sides dug
themselves in to play the game of counter-
blasting with artillery and nibbling the foe's
toes with raids and small forays.

Of another thing we were likewise aware, and
the realisation of the fact cheered us mightily.
Among the blue uniforms of the French the
greenish buff of the British showed in patches
of contrasting colour that steadily increased in
size and frequency. By rare good luck we had
entered the advanced positions at the identical
place for which, blindly, we had been seeking —
the place where the most westerly sector of the
French left wing touched the most easterly
sector of the British right wing; and better
than that, the place where the French strength
[120]

AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

hurrying up to reenforce and if need be replace
decimated divisions of their allies was joined
on to and fused in with the retiring British
Army, which, during the preceding three days,
had sustained the main force of the German
offensive. It was here if anywhere that we
could count with the best prospects of success
upon boring straight through to the Front, the
reason being that the French might assume the
British had given us passage and the British
might assume the French had let us by.

There were perhaps three more miles of brisk
travelling for us, during which I am sure that
I saw more than ever I have seen in any three
miles that ever I traversed in my life; and at
the end of that stretch we could tell that we
had well-nigh outrun the forward crest of the
French ground swell and had come into the
narrower backwash of the British retreat. A
retreat of sorts it may have been, but a rout
it most assuredly was not. We saw companies
reduced to the strength of ten or twelve or
twenty men under command of noncommis-
sioned officers or possibly of a single lieutenant.
We saw individual privates and we saw privates
in squads of two or three or half a dozen men,
who in the terrific fighting had become sepa-
rated from a command, which possibly had been
scattered but which it was more likely had been
practically wiped out. Such men were not
stragglers, nor were they malingerers; they
were survivors, atoms flung backward out of

[121]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

the raging inferno which had swallowed up
whole regiments and whole brigades.

And we took note that every single man of
these broken and decimated detachments was in
good humour, though dog tired; and that every
single one of them had kept his accoutrements
and his rifle; and that every single one of
them, whether moving under orders or acting
upon his own initiative, was intent upon just
two things and two things only — to get back into
the maelstrom from which temporarily he had
been spewed forth, and pump more lead into the
living tidal wave of grey coats. Some that we
overtook were singing, and singing lustily too.
Than this no man could ask to see a finer
spectacle of fortitude, of pluck and of discipline,
and I am sure that in his heart each one of us,
while having no doubt of the outcome of the
fiery test, prayed that our own soldiers, when
their time of trial by battle came, might under
reverses and under punishment acquit them-
selves as well as had these British veterans,
Yorkshire and Bedfordshire and Canada, who
came trudging along behind us, swallowing our
dust. What impressed us as most significant
of all was that only once that day did we see a
scrap of personal equipment that had been cast
aside. This was a cartridge belt of English
make, with its pouches empty and its tough
leather torn almost in two, lying like a broken-
backed brown snake in a ditch.

Already from wounded English soldiers and

[122]

AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

from exhausted English hospital workers whom
we had seen back in Soissons we comprehended
a measure of appreciation of what these bat-
tered fragments of the forces had been called
upon to endure during four days and five
nights. We knew as surely as though we had
stopped to take down the story of each one of
the wearied, cheerful, resolute chaps, that they
had their fill of killing the enemy and of seeing
their mates about them blown to bits by high
explosives or mowed down by rifle fire. I re-
called what a bedraggled young surgeon, a
Highlander by his accent, had said the night
before:

"I crave never to pass through this experi-
ence again. I have seen so much of death since
this battle started that I have in me now con-
tempt not only for death but for life too. I
thought last year on the Somme I saw real
fighting. Man, it was but child's play to what
I saw the day before yesterday!

"From the casualty dressing post where I
was on duty I could see the fighting spread out
before me like a cinema show. For our shelter
—we were in a concrete dugout — was in the
side of a hill with a wide sweep of lowland
below and beyond us, and it was here in this
valley that the Germans came at our people.
Between jobs in the operating theatre — and
God knows we had enough of them — I would
slip out for a breath of air, and then I could
watch through my glasses what went on.
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

"In wave after wave the Germans came on,
marching close together in numbers incredible.
They were like ants; they were like flies; like
swarming grasshoppers. At first they tried a
frontal attack against our trenches, but even
the Germans, driven on as they must have
been like cattle to the slaughter, couldn't stand
what they got there. Within two hours they
charged three times! Each time they fell back
again, and each time they left their dead lying
so thickly behind that finally the ground
seemed as though it were covered with a grey
carpet.

"That happened in the first day of their
drive against our part of the line, which was
the third line back, the two front lines having
already been taken by them. So on the next
day, which was the day before yesterday, they
worked their way round to the south a bit and
tried a flanking advance. Then it was I saw
this, just as I'm telling it to you. I saw them
caught by our machine-gun fire and piled up,
heap on heap, until there was a windrow of
them before the British trenches that must have
been six feet high.

"They went back, but they came again and
again, and they kept on coming. They climbed
right over that wall of their own dead — I my-
self watched them scrambling up among the
bodies — and they slid down on the other side
and ran right into the wire entanglements,
where those of them that were killed hung in

[124]

AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

the wires like garments drying on a line. They
died there in such numbers that they fairly
clogged the wires. And still they kept on
coming.

"When our line began to bend in, farther
away to the west, we got orders to evacuate
the station; and the men in the trenches where
I had seen the fighting got orders — what were
left of them — to fall back too. They were
Scotchmen, these laddies, and they were fairly
mad with the fighting. They didn't want to go,
and they refused to go. I'm told by reliable
witnesses that their officers had almost to use
force against them — not to make them keep on
fighting but to make them quit fighting."

He looked into the coals of the wood fire and
shivered.

"Man, it's not war any more; it's just plain
slaughter. Mark my word — there'll never be
another war such as this one has been or an-
other battle such as the one that still goes on
yonder. 'Tis not in flesh and blood to endure
its repetition once the hate has been cooled by
a taste of peace."

The men about us for the most part must
have taken part as actors in scenes such as the
young surgeon had described as an onlooker.
But about them there was no sign of reluctance
or of surcease. We realised as thoroughly as
though we had been eyewitnesses to their con-
duct that they had carried on like brave men;
and without being told we realised, too, that

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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

they were made of the stuff which keeps carry-
ing on as long as there is life left in it. They
were of the breed of the bulldog, and clean
strain, at that.

Frenchmen grew fewer in number along the
route we travelled; Britishers became more
and more numerous. Where byways crossed
the highroad and in wrecked villages the British
already had posted military policemen to guide
the traffic and point out the proper directions
to bodies of men passing through. Those men
stood in midroad giving their orders as calmly
and as crisply as though they had been bobbies
on the Strand. Even in this emergency John
Bull's military system did not disintegrate. As
long as the organism lasted the organisation
would last too. Nowhere was there any sug-
gestion of confusion or conflict of will. I am
prone to think that in the years to come the
chief outstanding fact about the great spring
offensive of 1918 will be not the way the Ger-
mans came forward but the way in which the
British fell back.

Until now we had seen only British foot
soldiers, and once or twice officers in motor
cars or on horseback; but soon we came upon
a battery of British light artillery. It was
jolting across muddy pasture among the stumps
of apple trees which the Germans with malig-
nant thoroughness had felled before their big
retreat of twelve months before. The place
had been an orchard once. Now it was merely
[126]

AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

so much waste land, dedicated to uselessness
by efficiency and kultur. The trees, as we
could see, had not been blown down by shell
fire or hewn down with axes. They had been
neatly and painstakingly sawed through, clear
down to the earth. Some of the butts meas-
ured a foot and a half across, and to have bolls
of this size, fruit trees in this country must
have attained great age.

The battery took position and went into
immediate action behind a covert of willows
and scrub at the far side of the ruined orchard.
At the moment we did not know that the
thicket was a screen along the southern bank
of the Oise. At the left of where the guns were
speaking was a group of empty and shattered
cottages stretching along a single narrow street
that ran almost due north and south. Coming
opposite the foot of this street we glimpsed at
the other end of it a glint of running water, and
in the same instant, perhaps two or three miles
away farther on across the river, we made out
the twin spires of the cathedral of Noyon, for
which, as we know, the contending armies had
striven for forty-eight hours, and which the
evening before had fallen into the enemy's
hands. Literally we were at the front of the
Front.

East of the clustered houses of the city a

green hill rose above the tree tops. Across the

flanks of this hill we saw grey-blue clumps

moving. At that distance the sight was sug-

[127]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

gestive of a crawling mass of larvae. Over it
puffs of smoke, white for shrapnel and black
for explosives, were bursting. We were too far
away to observe the effect of this shelling, but
knew that the crawling grey blanket meant
Germans advancing in force down into the val-
ley of the river, and we knew, too, that they
were being punished by Allied guns as they
came on to take up their new position.

[ 128 ]

CHAPTER VIII
A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE

CURIOUSLY enough there was at this
moment and at this place no return fire
from the enemy. From this we de-
duced that the infantry in their im-
petuous onrush had so far outtravelled the
heavy and more cumbersome arms of their
service that the artillery had not caught up
yet. However, a little later projectiles from
hostile field pieces began to drop on our side
of the stream.

Halfway of the length of the street our car
halted. It did not seem the part of wisdom
for the four of us to go ahead in a group, so I
walked the rest of the way to spy out the
land.

Behind the shattered stone and plaster houses
French soldiers were squatted or lying. In the
hope of finding some one who could speak the
only language I knew I continued on until I
came to the last two houses in the row. They
overhung the riverbank. Beyond them were
two bridges spanning the little river, one an
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

old steel bridge with a concrete roadbed, and
the other a sagging wooden structure, evidently
built by soldier hands.

The mouth of the military bridge was
stopped with a makeshift barricade thrown to-
gether any which way. The backbone of the
barrier was formed of two tree trunks, but
they were half hidden from sight beneath a
miscellaneous riffle of upturned motor lorries,
wheelbarrows and clustered household furni-
ture, including many mattresses that plainly
had been filched from the villagers' abandoned
homes. Midway of the main bridge a handful
of French engineers were pottering away,
rather leisurely, I thought, at some job or
other. Two Tommies were standing behind one
of the farthermost buildings of the hamlet — a
building which hi happier days had been a cafe.
Now it was a broken shell, foul inside with a
litter of wreckage. The men wore the insignia
of the Royal Lancers.

As I approached them they saluted, evidently
mistaking me, in my trench coat and uniform
cap, for an American officer. That an Ameri-
can officer should be in this place, so far away
from any American troops, did not seem to
surprise them in the least.

"What town is this?" was my first question.

"It's called Pontoise, sir," answered one of
them, giving to the name a literal rendition
very different from the French fashion of pro-
nouncing this word.

[ISO]

A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE

"What's going on out yonder on the bridge?"
I inquired next.

"The Frenchmen is minin' it to blow it up,
sir. They mined it once already but the
charge didn't explode, sir. Now they're goin'
to give it another try. They'll be letting off
the charge pretty soon, sir, I think — as soon
as a few of their men and a few of ours who're
over on the other bank in them bushes 'ave
fallen back to this side 'ere."

"How close are the Germans?" I asked.

I figured they must be uncomfortably close.
They were.

"Come along with me, sir, if you don't mind,"
quoth my informant.

Quite in the most casual way he led me out
from behind the shelter of the ruined cafe.
As we quitted its protection I could see over a
broken garden wall the British battery down
below at the left, firing as fast as the gunners
could serve the pieces. Of all the men in sight
these shirt-sleeved artillerymen were the only
ones who seemed to have any urgent business
in hand.

Together we advanced to the barricade,
which at the spot where we halted came up to
our middles. Across the top of it my guide
extended a soiled hand.

"The beggars are right there, sir, in them

bushes; about a 'undred and fifty yards away,

sir, or two 'undred at the most," he said with

the manner of a hired guide. "You carn't see

[131]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

them now, sir, but a bit ago I 'ad a peep at a
couple of 'em movin' about. The reason they
ain't firm' over 'ere is because they don't
want us to locate 'em, I think, sir."

"Oh!" I said, like that. "Oh!"

By mutual but unspoken consent we then
retired to our former position. The imper-
turbable Tommy fell back in good order, but
I think possibly I may have hurried somewhat.
I always was a fairly brisk walker, anyhow.

Inside the breached building my companions
joined me, and while the shells from the bat-
tery and from the other batteries farther away
went racketing over us toward Noyon we held
a consultation of war. Any desire on the part
of any one to stay and see what might happen
after the bridge had been blown up was ef-
fectually squelched by the sudden appearance
of two British officers coming through the
village toward us. Did they choose to interro-
gate us regarding our mission in this parlous
vicinity there might be embarrassment in the
situation for us. So we went away from there.

As we departed from the place a certain
thing impressed itself upon my consciousness.
The men about me — the two Tommies cer-
tainly, the two officers presumably, and prob-
ably the Frenchmen — had but newly emerged
from hard fighting. Of a surety they would
very shortly be engaged in more hard fighting,
striving to prevent the on-moving Germans
from crossing the river. Over their head shells

[132]

A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE

from their own guns were racking the air.
Shells from hostile batteries were beginning to
splatter down just beyond. This then was mere-
ly an interval, an interlude between acts of a
most dire and tremendous tragedy.

And yet so firmly had the chance of death
and the habit of war; become a part of their
daily and their hourly existence that in this
brief resting spell they behaved exactly as men
engaged in some wearing but peaceful labour
might behave during a nooning in a harvest
field. No one in sight was crouching in a pos-
ture of defence, with his rifle gripped in nervous
hands and his face set and intent. Here were
being exemplified none of the histrionic prin-
ciples of applied heroics as we see them on the
stage.

The Frenchmen were sprawled at ease be-
hind the walls, their limbs relaxed, their faces
betokening only a great weariness. One or two
actually were asleep with their heads pillowed
on their arms. Those who spoke did so in
level, unexcited tones. They might have been
discussing the veriest commonplaces of life.
For all I knew to the contrary, they were dis-
cussing commonplaces. The two British pri-
vates leaned upon their rifles, with their tired
legs sagging under them and with cigarette
ends in their mouths. One of the officers was
lighting a pipe as we drove past him. One of
the Frenchmen was gnawing at a knuckle of
bread.

[133]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Indeed there was nothing about the scene,
except a knowledge of the immediate proximity
of German skirmishers, which would serve to
invest it with one-tenth of the drama that
marked a hundred other sights we had that day
witnessed. Later, though, we learned we had
blundered by chance upon the very spot where
the hinge of the greatest battle of history next
day turned.

It was south of Noyon at tfre Pontoise ford
and at other fords above and below Pontoise
that the Germans designed to cross the river
in their onslaught southward against the de-
fences of Paris. But there they failed, thanks
be to British desperation and French determi-
nation; and it was then, according to what
students of strategy among the Allies say, that
the hosts of the War Lord altered the plan of
their campaign and faced about to the west-
ward in their effort to take Amiens and sunder
the line of communication between Paris and
Calais — an effort which still is being made as
I sit here in Paris writing these pages for the
mail.

The day's journey was not over by any man-
ner of means, but so far as I personally was
concerned its culminating moment passed when
I walked out on the bridge timbers with that
matter-of-fact young Royal Lancer. What fol-
lowed thereafter was in the nature of a series
of anticlimaxes, and yet we saw a bookful be-
fore we rode back to Soissons for a second night

[134]

A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE

under bombardment in that sorely beset and
beleaguered old city. Before heading back we
cruised for ten kilometres beyond Noyon, going
west by south toward Compiegne.

On this side jaunt we mostly skirted the
river, which on our bank was comparatively
calm but which upon the farther bank was
being contended for: at the bayonet's point by
British and French against Germans. The
sound of the cannonading never ceased for a
moment, and as dusk came on the northern
horizon was lit up with flickering waves of a
sullen dull red radiance. The nearer we came
to Compiegne the more numerous were the
British, not in squads and detachments and
bits of companies but in regiments and brigades
which preserved their formations even though
some of them had been reduced to skeletons of
their former proportions. In the fields along-
side the way the artillerymen were throwing up
earthen banks for the guns; the infantrymen
were making low sod walls behind which they
would sleep that night and fight on the morrow.
From every hand came the smell of brewing
tea, for, battle or no battle, the Tommy would
have his national beverage. The troop horses
were being properly bestowed in the shaggly
thickets, and camp fires threw off pungent
smells of wood burning. For the first time in a
long time the campaign was outdoors, under
the skies.

I saw one fagged trooper squatting at the
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

roadside, with a minute scrap of looking-glass
balanced before him in the twigs of a bare
bush, while he painfully but painstakingly was
shaving himself in cold ditch water. He had
fought or marched all day, I imagine; his
chances of being sent to eternity in piecemeal
before another sunset were exceedingly good;
but he would go, tidied and with scraped jowls,
to whatever fate might await him. And that,
except for one other small thing, was the most
typically English thing I witnessed in the shank
of this memorable evening.

The other incident occurred after we had
faced about for our return. In a maze of by-
roads we got off our course. A lone soldier of
the Bedfordshires — a man near forty, I should
say at an offhand guess — was tramping along.
Our driver halted our car and hailed him. He
straightened his weary back and came smartly
to a salute.

"We've lost our way," explained one of us.

He smiled at us whimsically.

"I'm afraid I can't help you, sirs," he said
in the tones of an educated man. "I've lost
my own way no less than six times to-day. I
may add that I'm rather a stranger in these
parts myself."

When we got to Blerincourt with an hour of
daylight and another hour of twilight yet ahead
of us we turned north toward Chauny, which
the Germans now held and which the Allies
were bombarding furiously. We had come to a
[136]

A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE

crossroads just back of a small village, when
with a low spiteful hiss of escaping air one of
our rear tires went flat. We stopped to replace
the damaged tube with a better one. Behind us,
a quarter of a mile or so away, a British bag-
gage train was making bivouac for the night.
Just in front of us a British battery was firing
over the housetops of the empty village toward
Chauny.

We had the car jacked up and the old tire
off the rim and the new one half on when —
bang! the heavens and the world seemed to
come together all about us. What happened
was that a big shell of high explosives, fired
from an enemy mortar miles away, had dropped
within seventy, sixty yards of us in a field;
what seemed to happen was that a great plug
was pulled out of the air with a smiting and a
crashing and a rending. The earth quivered
as though it had taken a death wound. Our
wind shield cracked across under the force of
the concussion. Gravel and bits of clay de-
scended about us in a pattering shower.

Speaking for myself, I may say that one of
the most noticeable physical effects of having
a nine shell exploding in one's immediate
vicinity is a curious sinking sensation at the
pit of the stomach, complicated with a dryness
of the mouth and sudden chill in the feet.

Two more shells dropped within a hundred
yards of us before we got that tire pumped up
and departed. Even so, I believe the world's
[137]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

^ \

record for pumping up tires was broken on this
occasion. I am in position to speak with author-
ity on this detail, because I was doing the
pumping.

1 138 ]

CHAPTER IX
ACES UP!

INSIDE the German lines at the start of
the war I met Ingold, then the first ace
of the German aerial outfit; only the Ger-
mans did not call them aces in those days
of the beginnings of things. The party to
which I was attached spent the better part
of a day as guests of Herr Hauptmann Ingold
and his mates. Later we heard of his death
in action aloft.

Coming over for this present excursion I
crossed on the same steamer with Bishop
of Canada — a major of His Britannic Maj-
esty's forces at twenty-two, and at twenty-
three the bearer of the Victoria Cross and of
every other honour almost that King George
bestows for valour and distinguished service,
which means dangerous service. I have for-
gotten how many boche machines this young
man had, to date, accounted for. Whether
the number was forty-seven or fifty-seven I
am not sure. I doubt if Bishop himself knew
the exact figure.

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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

At Paris, after my arrival, and at various
places along the Front I have swapped talk
and smoking tobacco with sundry more or less
well-known members of the Lafayette Esca-
drille and with unattached aviators of repute
and proved ability. From each of these men
and from all of them — Belgians, Italians, Amer-
icans, Britishers and Frenchmen — I brought
away an impression of the light-hearted gal-
lantry, the modesty and the exceeding great
competency which appear to be the outstand-
ing characteristics of those who do their fight-
ing— and, in a great many instances, their
dying — in the air. It was almost as though the
souls of these men had been made cleaner and
as though their spirits had been made to burn
with a whiter flame by reason of the purer
element in which they carried on the bulk of
their appointed share in this war business. You
somehow felt that when they left the earth
they shook off from their feet a good part of the
dirt of the earth. I do not mean to imply that
they had become superhuman, but that they
had acquired, along with their training for a
special and particularised calling, some touch
of the romanticism that attached to the an-
cient and dutiful profession of knight-errantry.

Nor is this hard to understand. For a fact
the flying men are to-day the knights-errant
of the armies. To them are destined oppor-
tunities for individual achievement and for
individual initiative and very often for indi-
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ACES UP !

vidual sacrifice such as are denied the masses
of performers in this war, which in so many
respects is a clandestine war and which in nearly
all respects is an anonymous war. I think
sometimes that, more even than the abject
stupidity of the enterprise, it is the entire
taking-away of the drama — the colour of theat-
ricalism, the pomp and the circumstance, the
fuss and the feathers — that will make war an
exceedingly unpopular institution for future
generations, as it has been an exceedingly un-
profitable if a highly necessary one for this
present generation. When the planet has been
purged of militarism, the parent sin of the
whole sinful and monstrous thing, I am con-
vinced that the sordid, physically filthy drab-
ness that now envelops the machinery of it
will be as potent an agency as the spreading
of the doctrine of democracy in curing civilised
mankind of any desire to make war for war's
sake rather than for freedom and justice.

One has only to see it at first hand in this
fourth year of conflict to realise how com-
pletely war has been translated out of its former
elements. It is no longer an exciting outdoor
sport for fox-chasing gentlemen in bright-red
coats; no longer a seasonal diversion for cross-
country riders in buckskin breeches. It is a
trade for expert accountants, for civil-engi-
neering sharps, for rule of thumb, for pick and
shovel and the land surveyor's instruments.
As the outward romance of it has vanished
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

away, in the same proportion the amount of
manual labour necessary to accomplish any de-
sired object has increased until it is nearly all
work and mighty little play — a combination
which makes Jack a dull boy and makes war
a far duller game than it used to be. Of course
the chances for heroic achievements, for the
development and the^ exercise of the traits of
courage and steadfastness and disciplined en-
ergy, are as frequent as ever they were, but
generally speaking the picturesqueness with
which mankind always has loved to invest its
more heroic virtues has been obliterated — flat-
tened under the steam roller.

To the average soldier is denied the prospect
of ever meeting face to face the foe with whom
he contends. For every man who with set jaw
climbs the top to sink his teeth, figuratively or
actually, in the embodied enemy, there are a
dozen who toil and moil far back behind in
manual labours of the most exacting and ex-
hausting forms imaginable. A night raid is a
variety of sublimated burglary, better adapted
to the temperament of the prowler and the
poacher than to the upstanding soldier man's
instincts. If there be fear of gas he adds to the
verisimilitude of the imitation by hiding his
face behind a mask as though he were a foot-
pad. If a battle be a massacre, which generally
it is, then intermittent fighting is merely or-
ganised and systematised assassination.

By stealth, by trick and device, by artificial
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expedients smacking of the allied schools of
the housebreaker and the highwayman, things
are accomplished that once upon a bygone
time eventuated from brawn, plus powder, plus
chilled steel. Trench work means setting a
man to dig in the mud a hole that may become
his grave, and frequently does. He spends his
days in a shallow crevice in the earth and his
nights in a somewhat deeper one, called a dug-
out. He combines in his customary life the
habits of the boring grub and the habits of the
blind worm, with a touch of the mine mule
thrown in.

Once in a while he stings like a puff-adder,
but not often. The infantryman plies a spade
a week for every hour that he pumps a rifle.
The cavalryman is more apt to be driving a
truck or tramping long roads than riding a horse.
The artilleryman sets up his pieces miles be-
hind the line and fires at the indirect target of
an invisible foe, without the poor satisfaction
of being able to tell, with his eyes, whether he
scored a hit or a miss. A sum in arithmetic is
his guide and a telephone operator is his men-
tor. Mayhap some day a hostile shell descends
out of a clear sky upon his battery; and then
the men are mess and the guns are scrap and
that is all there is to that small chapter of the
great tale of the war.

The bomber who spends months learning
how to cast the grenade may never get a
chance to cast one except in practice. A man

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THE GLORY OF THE COMI'NG

fights for his flag but doesn't see it when the
action starts, for then it is furled. The regi-
mental band plays him off to church service
but not into the battle. When the battle be-
gins the bandmen have exchanged their horns
for the handles of a litter, becoming stretcher
bearers. The general wears no epaulets. He
wears a worried look brought on by dealing o'
nights with strategic problems out of a book.
The modern thin red line is a thing done in
bookkeeper's ink on a ruled form. So it goes.
The bubble reputation is won, not at the can-
non's mouth, but across a desk top in a shell-
proof fox den far from where the cannon are.
The gallant six hundred do not ride into the
jaws of death. Numbering many times six
hundred, they advance afoot, creeping at a
pallbearer's pace behind a barrage fire. So it
keeps on going.

In only one wing of the service, and that the
newest of all the wings, is there to be found a
likeness to the chivalry and the showiness of
these other times. The aviator is the one ex-
ception to a common rule. To him falls the
great adventure. He goes jousting in the blue
lists of the sky, helmeted and corseleted like a
crusader of old. His lance is a spitting machine
gun. His steed is a twentieth-century Pegasus,
with wings of fine linen and guts of tried steel.
Thousands of envying eyes follow him as he
steers his single course to wage his single com-
bat, and if he takes his death up there it is a

ACES UP !

clean, quick, merciful death high above the
muck and more and jets of noxious laboratory
fumes where the rest take theirs.

Even the surroundings of the birdman's nest
are physically nore attractive than the habitat
of his brother at arms who bides below. I can
think of nothing homelier in outline or colour
than the shelters — sometimes of planking, some-
times of corrugated iron, sometimes of earth —
in which the soldiers hide here in France. The
field hospital is apt to be a distressingly plain
structure of unpainted boards with sandbags
banked against it.

I have seen a general's headquarters in an
underground tunnel that was like an over-
grown badger's nest, with nothing outwardly
to distinguish it from a similar row of tunnels
except that it had a lettered sign over its damp
and dripping mouth.

Tents, which have a certain picturesque
quality when grouped, are rarely seen here in
this closely settled Europe, where nearly al-
ways there are enough roofed and walled build-
ings to provide billets for the troops, however
numerous. Instead of tents there are occa-
sionally jumbles of makeshift barracks, and
more often haphazard colonies of sheds serving
as garages or as supply depots or as offices or
as what not. War, which in itself is so ugly
a thing, seems to possess the facility of making
ugly its accessories before and after the fact.

But the quarters of the flying machines,
,[145]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

through their vastness and isolation, acquire a
certain quality of catching the eye that is en-
tirely lacking for the rest of the picture — the
big hangars in the background, suggesting by
their shape and number the pitched encamp-
ment of a three-ring circus; the flappy canvas
shields at the open side of the dromes, which,
being streaked and daubed with paint camou-
flage, enhance the carnival suggestion by look-
ing, at a distance, like side-show banners; the
caravans of trucks drawn up in lines; and in
fine weather the flying craft resting in the land-
ing field, all slick and groomed and polished,
like a landed proprietor's blooded stock, giving
off flashes from aluminum and varnish and
steel and deft cabinetwork in answer to the
caresses of the sunshine.

Right here I am reminded that the tem-
peramental differences of the Allied nations are
shown most aptly, I think, in the fashion in
which the aviators decorate their gorgeous pets.

Upon its planes, of course, each bears the
distinguishing mark of the country to which it
belongs, but the bodies are the property, so to
speak, of the individual flyers, to be treated
according to the fancy of the individual.

Thus it befalls that an Italian machine gen-
erally carries a picture of a flower upon its sides.
It is characteristic of the race that a French
machine usually wears either a valorous, so-
norous name or the name of a woman — perhaps
the name of the aviator's sweetheart, or that
[1*6]

ACES UP !

of his mother or his sister possibly. But your
average British airman is apt to christen his
machine Old Bill or Gaby or Our Little Nipper
or The Walloping Window Blind — I have seen
all of these cheery titles emblazoned upon
splendid big aircraft in a British hangar — and
just let it go at that.

I reckon the German, taking his morning
hate along with his morning chicory, never
will understand how it is the Britisher and
the Yankee can make war and make jokes
about it and be good sportsmen all at the
same time. The German is very sentimental
—I myself have heard him with tears in his
voice singing his songs of the home place and
the Christmas tree and the Rhine maiden as
he marched past a burning orphan asylum in
Belgium; but his sense of humour, if ever he
really owned such a thing, was long ago smoth-
ered to death by the poisoned chemical processes
of his own military machine. The man who was
so bad that he was scared of himself must
have been the original exemplar of the fright-
fulness doctrine. Anyhow he was born in
Prussia — I'm sure of that much anyway.

But I am getting away from my subject-
have been getting away from it for quite a
spell, I fear; because in the first place I started
out to tell about a meeting and a trip and a
dinner and a song and divers other things.
The affair dated from a certain spring noon-
time when two of us, writers by trade, were
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

temporarily marooned for the day at the press
headquarters of the American Expeditionary
Force because we couldn't anywhere get hold
of an automobile to take us for a scouting
jaunt along the American sector. All of a
sudden a big biplane came sailing into sight,
glittering like a silver flying fish. It landed in
a meadow behind the town and two persons,
muffled in greatcoats, decanted themselves out
of it and tramped across the half-flooded field
toward us. When they drew near we perceived
them to be two very young, very ruddy gentle-
men, and both unmistakably English. My
companion, it seemed, knew one of them, so
there were introductions.

"What brings you over this way?" inquired
my friend.

"Well, you see," said his acquaintance, "we
were a bit thirsty — Bert and I — and we heard
you had very good beer at the French officers'
club here. So we just ran over for half an hour
or so to get a drop of drink and then toddle
along back again. Not a bad idea, eh, what?"

The speaker, I noted, wore the twin crowns
of a captain on the shoulder straps of his over-
coat. His age I should have put at twenty-one
or thereabout, and his complexion was the com-
plexion of a very new, very healthy cherub.

We showed the way toward beer and lunch,
the latter being table d'hdte but good. En
route my confrere was moved to ask more ques-
tions.

[148]

ACES UP !

"Anything new happening at the squadron
since I was over that way?" he inquired.

"Quiet enough to be a bore — weather hasn't
suited for our sort these last few evenings,"
stated the taller one. "We got fed up on
doin* nothin' at all, so night before last a
squad started across the border to give Fritzie
a taste of life. But just after we started the
squadron commander decided the weather was
too thickish and he signed us back — all but the
Young-un, who claims he didn't see the flare
and kept on goin' all by his little self." He
favoured us with a tremendous wink.

"It seemed a rotten shame, really it did, to
waste the whole evenin'." This was the
Young-un, he of the pink cheeks, speaking.
"So I just jogged across the jolly old Rhine
until I come to a town, and I dropped my pills
there and came back. Nice quiet trip it was —
lonely rather, and not a bit excitin'."

Upon me a light dawned. I had heard of
these bombing squadrons of the British outfits
of young but seasoned flying men, who, now
thatk reprisal in kind had been forced upon
England and France by the continued German
policy of aerial attacks on unprotected and un-
armed cities, made journeys from French soil
by sky line to enemy districts, there to spatter
down retaliatory bombs upon such towns as
Mainz, Stuttgart, Coblenz, Mannheim, Treves
and Metz.

The which sounded simple enough in the
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

bald telling, but entailed for each separate pair
of flyers on each separate excursion enough of
thrill, suspense and danger to last the average
man through all his various reincarnations
upon this earth. It meant a flight by darkness
at sixty or seventy miles an hour, the pilot at
the wheel and the observer at the guardian
machine gun, above the tangled skeins of
friendly trenches; and a little farther on above
and past the hostile lines, beset for every rod
of the way, both going and coming, by peril of
attack from antiaircraft gun and from speedier,
more agile German flyers, since the bombing
airship is heavier and slower than scout planes
commonly are. It meant finding the objective
point of attack and loosing the explosive shells
hanging like ripe plums from lever hooks in
the frame of the engine body; and this done
it meant winging back again — provided they
got back — in time for late dinner at the home
hangars.

Personally I craved to see more of men en-
gaged upon such employment. Through lunch
I studied the two present specimens of a new
and special type of human being. Except that
Bert was big and the Young-un was short, and
except that the Young-un spoke of dropping
pills when he meant to tell of spilling potential
destruction upon the supply depots and railroad
terminals of Germany, whereas Bert affection-
ately referred to his machine as The Red Hen
and called the same process laying an egg or
[150]

ACES UP !

two, there was no great distinction to be drawn
between them. Both made mention of the
most incredibly daring things in the most
commonplace and casual way imaginable; both
had the inquisitive nose and the incurious eye
of their breed; both professed a tremendous
interest in things not one-thousandth part so
interesting as what they themselves did; and
both used the word "extraordinary" to express
their convictions upon subjects not in the least
extraordinary, but failed to use it when the
topic dealt with their own duties and deserved
to excess the adjectival treatment. In short,
they were just two well-bred English boys.

[151]

CHAPTER X
HAPPY LANDINGS

OUT of the luncheon sprang an invita-
tion, and out of the invitation was born
a trip. On a day when the atmosphere
was better fitted for automobiling in
closed cars than for bombings we headed away
from our billets, travelling in what I shall call
a general direction, there being four of us be-
sides the sergeant who drove. Things were
stirring along the Front. Miles away we could
hear the battery heavies thundering and drum-
ming, and once in a lull we detected the ham-
mering staccato of a machine gun tacking down
the loose edges of a fight that will never be re-
corded in history, with the earnestness and
briskness of a man laying a carpet in a hurry.
The Romans taught the French how to plan
highroads, and the French never forgot the
lesson. The particular road we travelled ran
kilometre on kilometre straight as a lance up
the hills and down again across the valleys, and
only turned out to round the shoulders of a
little mountain or when it flanked the shore line

[152]

HAPPY LANDINGS

of one of the small brawling French rivers.
The tall poplars in pairs, always in pairs, which
edged it were like lean old gossips bending in
toward the centre the better to exchange whis-
pered scandal about the neighbours. Mainly
the road pierced through fields, with infrequent
villages to be passed and once a canal to be
skirted; but also there were forests where wild
boar were reputed to reside and where, as we
know, the pheasant throve in numbers un-
dreamed of in the ante-bellum days before all
the powder in Europe was needed to kill off
men, and while yet some of it might be spared
for killing off birds.

Regarding the mountains a rule was preva-
lent. If one flank of a mountain was wooded
we might be reasonably sure that the farther
side would present a patchwork pattern of tiny
farms, square sometimes, but more often oblong
in shape, each plastered against the steep con-
formation and each so nearly perpendicular
that we wondered how anybody except a re-
tired £aper hanger ever dared try to cultivate
it. Let a husbandman's foot slip up there and
he would be committing trespass in the plot
of the next man below.

I shall not tell how far we rode, or whither,
but dusk found us in a place which, atmospher-
ically speaking, was very far removed from the
French foothills, but geographically perhaps
not so far. So far as its local colour was con-
cerned the place in point more nearly than any-

[153]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

thing else I call to mind resembled the interior
of a Greek-letter society's chapter house set
amid somewhat primitive surroundings. In
the centre of the low wide common room,
mounted on a concrete box, was a big openwork
basket of wrought iron. In this brazier burned
fagots of wood, and the smoke went up a metal
pipe which widened out to funnel shape at the
bottom, four feet above the floor.

Such a device has three advantages over the
ordinary fireplace: Folks may sit upon four
sides of it, toasting their shins by direct contact
with the heat, instead of upon only one, as is
the case when your chimney goes up through
the wall of your house. There were illustrations
cut from papers upon the walls; there were
sporting prints and London dailies on the
chairs and trestles; there was a phonograph,
which performed wheezily, as though it had
asthma, and a piano, which by authority was
mute until after dinner; there were sundry
guitars and mandolins disposed in corners; there
were sofa pillows upon the settees, plainly the
handiwork of some fellow's best girl; there were
clumsy, schoolboy decorative touches all about;
there were glasses and bottles on tables; there
were English non-coms, who in their gravity
and promptness might have been club servants,
bringing in more bottles and fresh glasses; and
there were frolicking, boisterous groups and
knots and clusters of youths who, except that
they wore the khaki of junior officers of His

[154]

HAPPY LANDINGS

Majesty's service instead of the ramping pat-
terns affected by your average undergraduates,
were for all the world just such a collection of
resident inmates as you would find playing
the goat and the colt and the skylark in any
college fraternity hall on any pleasant evening
anywhere among the English-speaking peoples.

For guests of honour there were our four,
and for hosts there were sixty or seventy mem-
bers 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 *yei 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 intro-
duced 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

[155]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 gener-
ally 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
[156]

HAPPY LANDINGS

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 tele-
phone from the headquarters of a sister squad-
ron 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 air-
craft, 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

[157]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 ma-
chines 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 along-
side the piano he climbed gravely up on top
of it and perched there above our heads, with
his legs dangling down below the keys. Touch-
ing 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

[158]

HAPPY LANDINGS

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 su-
blyme, 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 cap-
tain, 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 av-
erage English gentleman is apt to be when he
speaks in the hated terms of shop talk of his
[159]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

own share in any dangerous or unusual enter-
prise. 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 squad-
ron 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
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HAPPY LANDINGS

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 oc-
curred 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 even-
ing 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
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 toast-
ing 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
torn 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 aeroplane — 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
[162]

HAPPY LANDINGS

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!"

[163]

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 tre-
mendous high-powered exuberance which marks
them at home, in the camps and the canton-
ments, 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 volun-
teers, 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 dis-
[164]

TRENCH ESSENCE

embarking. The Canadians behaved like school-
boys on a holiday.

It was not what the most consistent de-
fender 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 Ca-
nadians were not to be daunted by the inhos-
pitable attitude of the elements.

One in three of them, about, carried a pen-
nant 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 trav-
ersed 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 West-
ern division, largely made up, as to officers and
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

as to men, of national guardsmen from the
states of Colorado, Wyoming and Washington.
They were cow-punchers, ranch hands, lumber-
men, fruit growers, miners — outdoor men gen-
erally. 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 cele-
brations 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 put-
ting 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
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TRENCH ESSENCE

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 dan-
gling 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 bil-
lets and at training barracks, for the battle
fronts beyond the channel.

As between the Canadian and the United
States soldiers I interpreted this striking dif-
ference 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 in-
heritors with native Englishmen of the glory
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

that is England's. The men they would pres-
ently 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 exhibi-
tion 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.

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TRENCH ESSENCE

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 re-
sponsibility intrusted to them as armed repre-
sentatives 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 trav-
elled, 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
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 im-
pudent 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 trag-
edies for a background.

I wouldn't call it exactly a new type of hu-
mour, 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
[170]

TRENCH ESSENCE

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 serio-
comic 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 at-
mosphere 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 prac-
tically 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 sol-
dier 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 some-
[171]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

thing 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 individual-
ity, 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 com-
pany 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 aimin5 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!"
[172]

TRENCH ESSENCE

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 ad-
vance, being quartered in the headquarters mess
of his particular regiment and permitted to ac-
company its columns as it moved forward to-
ward the Picardy Front. That is to say, he
was permitted to accompany its columns, but
it devolved upon him to furnish his own mo-
tive 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 in-
fantry 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
[173]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

bedding roll and my haversack; these a kindly
disposed ambulance driver smuggled into his
wagon, rules and regulations to the contrary
notwithstanding.

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,
I 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 res-
[174]

TRENCH ESSENCE

taurant 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 polite-
ness 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 inflec-
tion, 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 con-
vinced, it was a most enjoyable journey and a
highly instructive one besides.

Along toward sunset we ambled with the
utmost possible deliberation into our destina-
tion. 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 an-
other 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
[175]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 chil-
dren 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 cen-
turies.

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 Caesar had founded it and named
it — and certain of the ruins of the original bat-
tlement 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, inconse-
quential as it had become in these latter times,
gave to France and to the world a great chron-
icler, 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

[176]

TRENCH ESSENCE

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 "Mulli-
gan"— for supper this night.

Under a moss-hung wall against which, ac-
cording 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 Headquar-
ters," and "Hospital," and "Intelligence Of-
fices"— 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.

[177]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Up the twisting and hilly street toiled a
company belonging to my particular regiment,
and as they came into the billeting place and
knew the march was over, the wearied and bur-
dened 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 ex-
tent of the first verse runs like this:

Here come the doughboys

With 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 doughboys
In 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 sen-
timental 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 gossongs

And the jolly old mong peres —
Well, they wont furgit the doughboys

For at least a hundred years!
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TRENCH ESSENCE

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, en-
gaged 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 pri-
vates keep war diaries— except when they for-
get 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 hun-
dreds 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 com-
[179]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

panion 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, any-
way ? 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 oth-
ers. 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'!" In-
[180]

TRENCH ESSENCE

spiration 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 lieuten-
ant 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 po-
licing 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."

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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

"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 Chi-
cago 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.

[182]

TRENCH ESSENCE

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 under-
estimation 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
[183]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 roy-
alty; 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

[184]

TRENCH ESSENCE

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 Presi-
dent 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

[185]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 ser-
geant 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
[186]

TRENCH ESSENCE

and visit being described elsewhere in these
writings. The results more than repaid us for
the time and trouble. One of the main com-
pensations was First Class Private Cooksey,
who, because he used to be an elevator at-
tendant 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 sin-
cerity, "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 de-
serter. Jest put it in de books as 'absent with-
out 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 bombard-
ment?" pressed the colonel. "What do you
think you and the rest of the boys will do then? "
[187]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

"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 ad-
vance 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 cap-
tain 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
yarn that may or may not be true — it sounds
almost too good to be true — that is being re-
lated at the Front. The version most fre-
quently told has it that a half company of a
regiment in the Rainbow Division going for-
ward 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 bur-
dened with his rifle, his extra rounds of ammu-
nition, his trenching tool, his pair of wire cut-
ters, his steel helmet, his gas mask, his emer-
[188]

TRENCH ESSENCE

gency 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 communi-
cation 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 porta-
ble 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
[189]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 state-
ment: "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 inspira-
tion.

The others stared at him blankly. It was
[190]

TRENCH ESSENCE

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 fore-
thought, 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 touch-
ing on the humorous proclivities of — guess
who! — the commander of a German sub-
marine, no less; a person who operated last
[191]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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.

One day shortly before Kelly's U-boat
disappeared altogether a commander of an
American destroyer was sending by radio to a
French port a message giving what he believed
to be the probable location of the pestiferous
but cheerful foe. It must have been that the
subject of his communication was listening in
on the air waves and that he knew the code
which the American was that day employing.
For all at once he broke in with his own wireless,
and this was what the astonished operator at
the receiving station on shore got:

"Your longitude is fine, your latitude is rotten.
This place is getting too warm for me. I'm going
to beat it. Good-bye. Kelly."

Shortly after the first division of our new
National Army reached France a group of
fifty men were sent from it as replacements in
the ranks of an old National Guard regiment
which had been over for some time and which
had suffered casualties and losses. When the
squad went forward to their new assignment
[192]

TRENCH ESSENCE

the general commanding the brigade from which
the chosen fifty had been drawn sent to the
commander of the regiment for which they were
bound a letter reading somewhat after this
style :

"There are not better men in our Army
anywhere than the fifty I am giving you, in
accordance with an order received by me from
General Headquarters. Please see to it that
no one in your regiment, whether officer or
private, refers by word, look, deed or gesture to
the circumstances under which these fifty men
entered the service. Drafted men, regulars and
volunteers are all on the same footing, and
merely because my men came in with the draft
and yours to a large extent came in a little
earlier is no reason why any discrimination
should be permitted in any quarter."

A few weeks after the transfer had been
accomplished the brigadier met the colonel, and
recalling to the latter the sense of the letter he
had written inquired whether there had been
any suggestion of superiority on the part of the
former National Guardsmen toward the new
arrivals.

"General," broke out the colonel, "do you
know what those infernal cheeky scoundrels of
yours have been doing ever since they joined?
Well, I'm going to tell you. They've been walk-
ing to and fro in my regiment with their noses
stuck up in the air, calling my boys 'draft-
dodgers !"'

1193]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

It's the essence of the trenches. And it's
that — plus the courage they bring and the
enthusiasm they have — which is winning this
war sooner than some of the croakers at home
expect it to be won.

CHAPTER XII
BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

A I GO to and fro in the land I some-
times wonder why the Germans keep
a-picking on me. As heaven is my
judge I tried to tell the truth about
them and their armies when I was with them;
but then, maybe that's the reason. At any rate
I am here to testify that whenever I stop at a
place in England or France either a battery of
long-range guns shells it or else a hostile aero-
plane happens along and bombs the town. The
thing is more than a coincidence. It is getting
to be a habit, an unhealthy habit at that.
There must be method in it. And yet I have
tried to bear myself in a modest and unostenta-
tious way during this present trip. If in the
reader's judgment the personal pronoun has
occurred and recurred with considerable fre-
quency in my writings I would say: Under the
seemingly quaint but necessary rules of the
censorship as conducted in these parts the only
individual of American extraction at present
connected in any way with war activities over
[195]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

here whom I may mention in my writings other
than General Pershing is myself. Since the
general to date has not figured to any extent
in my personal experiences I am perforce driven
to doing pieces largely about what I have seen
and heard and felt.

Particularly is this true of these bombings
and shellings. I repeat that I cannot imagine
why the boche should single out a quiet, simple,
private citizen for such attentions. It does not
seem fair that I should ever be their target while
shining marks move about the landscape with
the utmost impunity. The German has a name
for being efficient too. More than once in my
readings I have seen his name coupled with the
word efficiency. Take brigadier generals for
example. Almost any colonel of our Expedi-
tionary Forces in France, and particularly a
senior colonel whose name is well up in the list,
will tell you in confidence there are a number of
brigadiers over here who could easily be spared
and who would never be missed. Yet a brigadier
general may move about from place to place in
his automobile in comparative safety. But just
let me go to the railroad station to buy a ticket
for somewhere and immediately the news is
transmitted by a mysterious occult influence to
the Kaiser and he tells the Crown Prince and
the Crown Prince calls up von Hindenburg or
somebody, and inside of fifteen minutes the
hands, August and Heinie, are either load-
ing up the long-rangers or getting the most
[196]

BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

dependable bombing Gotha out of the
sheds.

For nearly four weeks the raiders stayed
away from London. I arrived in London sick
with bronchitis and went to bed in a hotel. That
night the Huns flew over the Channel and
spattered down inflammables and explosives
to their heart's content. One chunk of a shell
fell in the street within a few yards of my bed-
room window, gouging a hole in the roadway.
A bomb made a mighty noise and did some
superficial damage in a park close by. It was
my first experience at being bombed from on
high, and any other time I should have taken a
lively interest in the proceedings; but I was too
sick to get up and dress and too dopy from the
potions I had taken to awaken thoroughly.

But the next night, when I was convalescent,
and the following night, when I was well along
the road toward recovery and able, in fact, to
sit up in bed and dodge, back came Mister Boche
and repeated the original performance with
variations.

In order to get away from the London fogs,
which weren't doing my still tender throat any
good, I ran down to a certain peaceful little
seaside resort on the east coast of England,
reaching there in the gloaming. What did the
enemy do but sprinkle bombs all about the
neighbourhood within an hour after I got there?
He went away at ten the same night, I the
following morning at six-forty-five.
[197]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

A delayed train was all that kept me from
reaching Paris coincidentally with the first
raiders who had attacked Paris in a period of
months. The raiders covered up their disap-
pointment by murdering a few helpless non-
belligerents and departed, to return the next
evening when I was present. I was domiciled
in Paris on that memorable Saturday when the
great long-distance gun began its bombard-
ment of the city from the forest of Saint-Gobain
nearly seventy miles distant. The first shell
descended within two hundred yards of where
I stood at a window and I saw the smoke of its
explosion and saw the cloud of dust and pulver-
ized debris that rose; the jar of the crash shook
the building. Throughout the following day,
which was Palm Sunday — only we called it
Bomb Sunday — the shelling continued. I was
there, naturally.

On Monday morning I started for Soissons.
So the gunners of the long-distance gun playing
on Paris took a vacation, which lasted until the
day after my party returned from the north.
We got into the Gare du Nord late one night;
the big gun opened up again early the next
morning. I am not exaggerating; merely
reciting a sequence of facts.

For nearly two years the Germans had left
poor battered Soissons pretty much alone,
though it was within easy reach of their how-
itzers; moreover, one of their speedy flying
machines could reach Soissons from the German
[198] ,

BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

lines south of Laon within five minutes. But,
as I say, they rather left it alone. Perhaps in
their kindly sentimental way they were satisfied
with their previous handiwork there. They
had pretty well destroyed the magnificent old
cathedral. It was not quite so utter a ruin as
the cathedral at Arras is, or the cathedral at
Rheims, or the Cloth Hall at Ypres, or the Uni-
versity at Louvain; nevertheless, I assume that
from the Prussian point of view the job was a
fairly complete one.

The wonderful, venerable glass windows,
which can never be replaced, had been shattered
to the last one, and the lines of the splendid
dome might now only be traced like the curves
of tottering arches, swinging up and out like
the ribs of a cadaver, and by a lacework of
roofage where thousands of bickering ravens,
those black devil birds of i desolation, now
fluttered and cawed, and befouled with their
droppings the profaned sanctuary below.
Altogether it was one of the most satisfactory
monuments to Kultur to be found anywhere in
Europe to-day.

Nor had the community at large been slighted.
Everybody knows how thorough are the armies
of the anointed War Lord. Relics which
dated back to the days of Clovis had been
battered out of all hope of restoration; things
of antiquity and of inestimable historic value
lay shattered in wreckage. Furthermore, from
time to time, in 1914 and 1915 and even in
[199]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

1916, when no military advantage was to be
derived from visiting renewed affliction upon
the vicinity and when no victims, save old men
and women and innocent children, were likely
to be added to the grand total of the grander
tally which Satan, as chief bookkeeper, is
keeping for the Kaiser, the guns had blasted
away at the ancient city, leveling a homestead
here and decimating a family there;

However, since the early part of 1916 they
had somehow rather spared Soissons. But the
train bearing us was halted within three miles
of the station because, after keeping the peace
for nearly two years, the enemy had picked
upon that particular hour of that particular
afternoon to renew his most insalubrious at-
tentions per nine-inch mortars. Therefore we
entered afoot, bearing our luggage, to the accom-
paniment of whistling projectiles and clattering
chimney-pots and smashing walls.

In Soissons we spent two nights. Both
nights the Germans shelled the town and on
the second night, in addition, bombed it from
aeroplanes. It may have been fancy, but as
we came away in a car borrowed from a kindly
French staff officer it seemed to us that the
firing behind us was lessening.

From press headquarters near G. H. Q. of
the Amex Forces we motored one day to Nancy
for a good dinner at a locally famous cafe.
Simultaneously with our advent the foe's air-
men showed up and the alerte was sounded
[200]

BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

for a gas attack. As between the prospect of
spending the evening in an abri and staying
out in the open air upon the road we chose the
latter, and so we turned tail and ran back to
the comparative quiet of the front lines. A
little later a cross-country journey necessitated
our changing cars at Bar-le-Duc. The connect-
ing train was hours behind its appointed min-
ute, as is usual in these days of disordered time
cards, and while we waited hostile airships ap-
peared flying so high they looked like bright
iridescent midges flitting in the sunshine. As
they swung lower, to sow bombs about the
place, antiaircraft guns opened on them and
they departed.

That same night our train, travelling with
darkened carriages, was held up outside of
Chalons, while enemy aircraft spewed bombs
at the tracks ahead of us and at a troop convoy
passing through. The wreckage was afire when
we crawled by on a snail's schedule an hour
or so later.

Two of us went to pay a visit to a regimental
mess in a sector held by our troops. The
colonel's headquarters were in a small wrecked
village close up to the frontier. This village
had been pretty well smashed up in 1914 and
in 1915, but during the trench warfare that
succeeded in this district no German shells had
scored a direct hit within the communal con-
fines. Yet the enemy that night, without prior
warning and without known provocation, elect-
[201]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

ed to break the tacit agreement for localised
immunity. The bombardment began with a
shock and a jar of impact shortly after we had
retired to bed on pallets upon the floor in the
top story of what once, upon a happier time,
had been the home of a prominent citizen. It
continued for three hours, and I will state that
our rest was more or less interrupted. It slack-
ened and ceased, though, as we departed in
the morning after breakfast, and thereafter
for a period of weeks during which we remained
away all was tranquil and unconcussive there
in that cluster of shattered stone cottages.

Another time we made a two-day expedition
to the zone round Verdun. The great spring
offensive, off and away to the westward, was
then in its second week and the Verdun area
enjoyed comparative peace. Nevertheless, and
to the contrary notwithstanding, seven big
vociferous shells came pelting down upon an
obscure hamlet well back behind the main de-
fences within twenty minutes after we had
stopped there. One burst in a courtyard out-
side a house where an American general was
domiciled with his staff, and when we came in
to pay our respects his aids still were gathering
up fragments of the shell casing for souvenirs.
The general said he couldn't imagine why the
Hun should have decided all of a sudden to
pay him this compliment; but we knew why,
or thought we knew: It was all a part of the
German scheme to give us chronic cold feet.
[202 ]

BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

At least, we so diagnosed the thing privately.

As a result of this sort of experience, con-
tinuing through a period of months, I feel that
I have become an adept of sorts at figuring the
sensations of a bombee. I flatter myself also
that I have acquired some slight facility at
appraising the psychology of towns and cities
persistently and frequently under shell or aerial
attack. In the main I believe it may be taken
as an accepted fact that the inhabitants of a
small place behave after rather a different
fashion from the way in which the inhabitants
of a great city may be counted upon to bear
themselves. For example, there is a difference
plainly to be distinguished; I think, between
the people of London and the people of Paris;
and a difference likewise between the people of
Paris and the people of Nancy. Certainly I have
witnessed a great number of sights that were
humorous with the grim and perilous humour
of wartimes, and by the same token I have
witnessed a manifold number of others that
were fraught with the very essence of trag-
edy.

All France to-day is one vast heart-breaking
tragedy that is compounded of a million lesser
tragedies. You note that the door-opener at
your favourite cafe in Paris uses his left hand
only, and then you see that his right arm, with
the hand cased in a tight glove, swings in stiff
uselessness from his shoulder. It is an artificial
arm; the real one was shot away. The barber
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

who shaves you, the waiter who serves you,
the chauffeur who drives you about in his taxi-
cab moves with a limping awkward gait that'
betrays the fact of a false leg harnessed to a
mutilated stump.

In a sufficiently wide passage a couple coming
toward you — a woman in nurse's garb and a
splendid young boy soldier with decorations
on his breast — bump into you, almost, it would
seem, by intent. As mentally you start to
execrate the careless pair for their inexcusable
disregard of the common rights of pedestrians
you see there is a deep, newly healed scar in
the youth's temple and that his eyes stare
straight ahead of him with an unwinking
emptiness of expression, and that his fine young
face is beginning to wear that look of blank,
bleak resignation which is the mark of one who
will walk for all the rest of his days on this
earth in the black and utter void of blindness.

Behind the battle lines you often see long
lines of men whose ages are anywhere between
forty and fifty — tired, dirty, bewhiskered men
worn frazzle-thin by what they have under-
gone; men who should be at home with their
wives and bairns instead of toiling through
wet and cold and misery for endless leagues
over sodden roads.

Their backs are bent beneath great unwieldy

burdens; their hands where they grip their

rifles are blue from the chill; their sore and

weary feet falter as they drag them, booted in

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BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

stiff leather and bolstered with mud, from one
cheerless billet to another. But they go on,
uncomplainingly, as they have been going on
uncomplainingly since the second year of this
war, doing the thankless and unheroic labour
at the back that the ranks at the front may be
kept filled with those whom France has left of
a suitable age for fighting.

You see that the highways are kept in repair
by boys of twelve or thirteen and by grandsires
in their seventies and their eighties, and by
crippled soldiers, who work from daylight until
dusk upon the rock piles and the earth heaps;
that the fields are being tilled — and how well
they are being tilled! — by young women and
old women; that the shops in the smaller towns
are minded by children, whose heads some-
times scarcely come above the counters.

You see where the tall shade trees along the
roads and the small trees in the thickets are
being shorn away in order that the furnaces and
the hearthstones may not be altogether fireless,
since the enemy holds most of the coal mines.
I have come in one of the fine state forests
upon a squad of American lumberjacks, big
huskies from the logging camps of Northern
Michigan, with their portable planing mill
whining and their axes flashing, making the
sawdust and the chips fly, in what once not
long ago was a grove of splendid timber, where
beeches and chestnuts, hundreds of years old,
stood in close ranks; but which now is being
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

turned into a wilderness of raw stumps and
trodden earth and stacks of ugly planking.

You see an old woman, as fleshless as a
fagot, helping a dog to drag a heavy cart up a
rocky street, the two of them together strain-
ing and panting against the leather breast
yokes. For every kilometre that the foe ad-
vances you see the refugees fleeing from their
desolated steadings; indeed, you may very
accurately gauge the rate of his progress by
their number.

In one lonely little town in a territory as yet
undefiled by actual hostilities I went one morn-
ing not long ago into a quaint thirteenth-cen-
tury church. It was one of three churches in
the place; and in point of membership, I think,
the smallest of the three. But in the nave,
upon a stone pillar, gnawed by time with fur-
rows and runnels, I found a little framed placard
containing the names, written in fine script, of
those communicants who had died in service
for their country in this war. The list plainly
was incomplete. It included only those who
had fallen up to the beginning of last year; the
toll for 1917 and for 1918 was yet to be added;
and yet of the names of the dead out of this one
small obscure interior parish there were an
even one hundred. I dare say the poll of the
whole commune would have shown at least
three times as many. France has shown the
world how to fight. Now it shows the world
how to die.

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BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

But of all the tragedies that multiply them-
selves so abundantly here in this bloodied land
it sometimes seems to me there is none greater
than the look of things that is implanted upon
an unfortified town that has been subjected to
frequent bombings. It is not so much the shat-
tered, ragged ruins where bombs have scored
direct downward hits that drive home the lesson
of what this mode of reprisal, this type of pun-
ishment means; rather it is the echoing empty
street, as yet undamaged, whence the dwellers
all have fled — long stretches of streets, with the
windows shuttered up and the shops locked and
barred and the rank grass sprouting between the
cobblestones, and the starveling tabby cats
foraging like the gaunt ghosts of cats among
forgotten ash barrels. And rather more than
this it is the expression of those who through
necessity or choice have stayed on.

I am thinking particularly of Nancy — Nancy
which for environment, setting and architecture
is one of the most beautiful little cities in the
world; a city whose ancient walls and massy
gateways still stand; whose squares and parks
were famous; and whose people once led pros-
perous, contented and peaceful lives. Its
Place Stanislaus, on a miniature scale, is, I
think, as lovely as any plaza in Europe. Since
it is so lovely one is moved to wonder why the
Germans have so far spared it from the ruina-
tion they shower down without abatement
upon the devoted city. It is well-nigh deserted
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

now, along with all the other parts of the town.
Those who could conveniently get away have
gone; the state in the early part of this year
transported thousands of women and children
on special trains to safer territory in the south
of France. Those who remain have in their eyes
the haunting terror of a persistent and an un-
ceasing fearsomeness.

To be in Nancy these times is to be in a
stilled, half-deserted place of flinching and of
danger, and of the death that comes by night,
borne on whirring motors. I walked through
its streets on a day following one of the fre-
quent air raids and I had a conception of how
these Old-World cities must have looked in the
time of the plague. The citizens I passed were
like people who dwelt beneath the shadow of
an abiding pestilence, as indeed they did.

To them a clear still night with the placid
stars showing in the heavens meant a terrible
threat. It meant that they would lie quaking
in their houses for the signal that would send
them to the cellars and the dugouts, while high
explosives and gas bombs and inflammable
bombs came raining down. They knew full
well what it meant to stay above ground during
the dread passover of the Huns' planes, when
hospitals had been turned into shambles and
supply depots into craters of raging fire. Yet
there remained traces of the racial tempera-
ment that has upbuoyed the French and helped
them to endure what was unendurable.
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BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

A little waitress in a cafe said to three of us,
with a smile: "Ah, but you should be in Nancy
on a rainy night, for then the sound of snoring
fills the place. We can sleep then — and how
we do sleep!"

In Nancy they pray before the high altars
for bad weather and yet more bad weather.
And so do they in many another town in
France that is within easy striking distance of
the enemy's batteries and airdromes.

[209]

CHAPTER XIII
LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT

OF all city dwellers I am sure the Lon-
doner is the most orderly and the most
capable of self-government, as he like-
wise is the most phlegmatic. Because
of these common traits among the masses of the
populace an air raid over London, considering
its potential possibilities for destruction, is
comparatively an unexciting episode every-
where in the metropolis, save and except only
in those districts of the East End where the
bulk of the foreign-born live. There, on the
first wail of the shrieking sirens, before the
warning "maroon" bombs go up or the barrage
fire starts from protecting batteries in the sub-
urbs and along the Thames, these frightened
aliens, carrying their wives and children, flock
pell-mell into the stations of the Underground.
They spread out bedclothes on the platforms
and camp in the Tube, which is the English
name for what Americans call a subway, and
sometimes refuse to budge until long after the
danger has passed. At the height of the bom-
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LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT

bardment they pray and sliriek, and the women
often beat their breasts and tear, at their hair
in a very frenzy.

But this is true only of the emotional Rus-
sians and Rumanians. The native Londoners
proceed in the most leisurely fashion to the
subterranean shelters. Indeed, the chief task
of the police is to keep them from exposing
themselves in the open in efforts to get a sight
of the enemy. People who live on the lower
floors of stoutly built houses mainly bide where
they are, their argument — and a very sane one
it is — being that since the chances of a man's
being killed in his home at such a time are no
greater than of his roof being pierced by light-
ning during a thunderstorm he is almost as
safe and very much more comfortable staying
in his bed than he would be squatting for hours
in a damp cellar.

No matter how intense the bombardment
the busses keep on running, though they have
few enough passengers. From one's window
one may see the big double-deckers lumbering
by like frightened elephants, empty of all but
the drivers and the plucky women conductors,
who invariably stick to their posts and carry on.
The London bobby promenades at his usual
deliberate pace no matter how thick the shrapnel
from the defender guns may splash down about
him in the darkened street; and the night
postman calmly goes his rounds too.

One night in London after the alarm had

[211]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

been sounded I invaded the series of walled
caverns and wine vaults known as the Adelphi
Arches, which are just off the Strand, near
Charing Cross. Several hundred men, women
and children had already taken refuge there.
Near one of the entrances a young mother was
singing her baby to sleep; a little farther on a
group of Australian soldiers were trying, rather
unsuccessfully, to open beer bottles with their
finger nails; and at the mouth of a side base-
ment opening off a layer cave half a dozen
typical Londoner civilians, of the sort who wear
flat caps instead of hats and woollen necker-
chiefs instead of collars, were warmly dis-
cussing politics in high nasal notes. Nowhere
was there evident any concern or distress, or
even any considerable amount of irritation at
our enforced inconvenience.

Still, any man who figures that the English-
man is not stimulated to stouter resistance by
these visitations from the German would be
mistaken. Beneath the surface of his apparent
indifference there is produced at each recur-
rent attack an enhanced current of hate for
the government that first inaugurated this
system of barbaric warfare against unfortified
communities. There is something so radically
wrong in the Prussian propaganda it is in-
conceivable that any mind save a Prussian's
mind could have conceived it. His imagination
is on backward and he thinks hind part before.
In the folly of his besetting madness he figures

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LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT

that he can subjugate a man by mangling that
man's wife and baby to bits — the one thing
that has always been potent to make a valiant
fighter out of the veriest coward that lives.

They may not waste their rage in vain and
vulgar mou things — that would be the German,
not the English way — but one may be sure that
the people of London will never forgive the
Kaiser for the hideous things his agents, in
accordance with his policy of frightfulness,
have wrought among innocent noncombatants
in their city and in their island. They are
entering up the balance in the ledgers of their
righteous indignation against the day of final
reckoning.

After I had seen personally some of the
results of one of the nocturnal onslaughts I
too could share in the feelings of those more
directly affected, for I could realise that, given
an opportunity now denied him by the mercy
of distance and much intervening salt water,
the Hun would be doing unto American cities
what he had done to this English city; and I
could picture the same unspeakable atrocities
perpetrated upon New Haven or Asbury Park
or Charleston as have been perpetrated upon
London and Dover and Margate.

There was an old clergyman of the Estab-
lished Church who lived in a rectory not far
from Covent Garden, a man near seventy,
who probably had never wittingly done an
evil thing or a cruel thing in all his correct
[213]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

and godly life. He came to have the name of
the Raid Preacher, because at every aerial
attack he went forth fearlessly from his home,
making the tour of all the shelters in the neigh-
bourhood. At each place he would cheer and
quiet the crowds there assembled, telling them
there was no real danger, reading to them
comforting passages of the Scriptures and en-
couraging them to sing homely and familiar
songs. He had been doing this from the time
when the Zeppelins first invaded the London
district. He had held funeral services over
the bodies of hundreds of raid victims, so they
told me. Regardless of the religious affilia-
tions of the dead, or the lack of church ties,
their families almost invariably asked him to
conduct the burials.

One night in the present year — I am for-
bidden to give the exact date or the exact
place, though neither of them matters now—
the raiders came. The old clergyman hurried
to a cellar under a near-by business establish-
ment, where a swarm of tenement dwellers of
the quarter had congregated for safety. He
was standing in their midst in the darkened
place, bidding them to be of good and tranquil
faith, when a two-hundred pound bomb of
high explosives, sped from a Gotha eight
thousand feet above and aimed by chance,
came through the building, bringing the roof
and the upper floors with it.

A great many persons were killed or wounded.
[214]

LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT

When the rescuers came almost the first body
they brought out of the burning ruins was
that of the Raid Preacher. They had found
him, with torn flesh and broken bones, but
with his face unmarred, lying on the floor.
His thumbed leather Bible was under him,
open at a certain page, and there was blood
upon its leaves.

Men who saw his funeral cortege told me of
it with tears in their eyes. They said that
people of all faiths walked in the rain behind
the hearse, and that the biggest of all the
funeral wreaths was a gift from a little colony
of poor Jewish folk in the district, and that
one whole section of the sorrowful procession
was made up of cripples and convalescents —
pale, lame, halt men and women and children
who limped on crutches or marched with
bandaged heads or with twisted trunks; and
these were the injured survivors of previous
raids, to whom the dead man had ministered
in their time of suffering.

In a hospital I saw a little girl who had been
most terribly maimed by the same missile
that killed the old rector. I am not going to
dwell on the state of this child. When I
think of her I have not the words to express
the feelings that I have. But one of her hands
was gone at the wrist, and the other hand was
badly shattered; so she was just a wan little
brutally abbreviated fragment of humanity,
a living fraction, most grievously afflicted.
[215]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Her wounds had ceased to pain her, the head
nurse told me before we entered, and for the
rest of the time she was a good patient, one
of the best in the ward.

She was lying, when I saw her, with her head
propped upon a pillow that was no whiter than
her face was, and there was the pitiable wraith
of a smile on her poor little pinched common-
place face, and to her breast, with the bandaged
stump of one arm and with her remaining hand
that was swarthed in a clump of wrapping, she
cuddled up a painted china doll which some-
body had brought her; and she was singing
to it. The sight, I take it, would have been
very gracious in the eyes of His Imperial
Majesty of Prussia — except, of course, that
the little girl still lived; that naturally would
be a drawback to his complete enjoyment of
the spectacle.

[216]

CHAPTER XIV
THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

THERE was mingled comedy and woe in
the scenes at Paris on the memorable
day when the great long-distance gun—
which the Parisians promptly christened
"Big Bertha" in tribute to the titular mistress
of the Krupp works where it was produced—
first opened upon the city from seventy-odd
miles away and thereby established, among
other records, a precedent for distance and
scope in artillery bombardments. Paris was
in a fit mood for emotion. The people were on
edge; their nerves tensed, for there had been
an alarm the evening before. The raiding
planes had been turned back at the suburbs
and driven off by the barrage fire, but the
populace mainly had flocked into the abris
and the underground stations of the Metro-
politain.

At ten o'clock that night, after the danger
was over, a funny thing occurred: The crew
of a motor-drawn fire engine had fuddled them-
selves with wine, and for upward of half an
[217]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

hour the driver drove his red wagon at top
speed up and down the Rue de Rivoli, past the
Tuileries Gardens. With him he had four of
his confreres in blue uniforms and brass helmets.
These rode two on a side behind him, their
helmets shining in the bright moonlight like
pots of gold turned upside down; and as they
rode the two on one side sounded the alerte
signal on sirens, and the two on the other side
sounded the "all clear" on bugles; and between
blasts all four rocked in their places with joy
over their little joke.

In London the thing would have constituted
a public scandal; in New York there would
have been a newspaper hullabaloo over it. It
was typical of Paris, I think, that the street
crowds became infected with the spirit which
filled the roistering firemen and cheered them
as they went merrily racketing back and forth.
Nor, so far as I could ascertain, were the fire-
men disciplined; at least there was no mention
in print of the incident, though a great many
persons, the writer included, witnessed it.

At seven o'clock the following morning I was
standing at the window of my bedchamber
when something of a very violent and a highly
startling nature went off just beyond the line
of housetops and tree tops which hedged my
horizon view to the northward. Another
booming detonation, and yet another, followed
in close succession. I figured to my own satis-
faction that one of the enemy planes which
[218]

THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

were chased away the night before had taken
advantage of the cloaking mists of the new day
to slip back and pay his outrageous compliments
to an unsuspecting municipality. Anyhow a
fellow becomes accustomed to the sounds of
loud noises in wartimes, and after a while ceases
to concern himself greatly about their causes
or even their effects unless the disturbances
transpire in his immediate proximity. Life in
wartime in a country where the war is consists
largely in getting used to things that are ab-
normal and unusual. One takes as a matter
of course occurrences that in peace would
throw his entire scheme of existence out of
gear. He is living, so to speak, in a world that
is turned upside down, amid a jumble of acute
and violent contradictions, both physical and
metaphysical.

With two companions I set out for a certain
large hotel which had the reputation of being
able to produce genuine North American break-
fasts for North American appetites. In the
main grillroom we had just finished compiling
an order, which included fried whiting, ham
and eggs, country style, and fried potatoes,
when a fire-department truck went shrieking
through the street outside, its whistle blasting
away as though it had a scared banshee locked
up in its brazen throat.

There were not many persons in the room —
to your average Frenchman his dinner is a
holy rite, but his breakfast is a trifling inci-
[219]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

dent — but most of these persons rose from their
tables and straightway departed. The woman
cashier hurried off with her hat on sidewise,
which among women the world over is a thing
betokening agitation.

The head waiter approached us with our bill
in his tremulous hand, and bowing, wished to
know whether messieurs would be so good as
to settle the account now. By his manner he
sought to indicate that such was the custom
of the house. We told him firmly that we
would pay after we had eaten and not a minute
sooner. He gave a despairing gesture and van-
ished, leaving the slip upon the tablecloth.
Somebody hastily deposited within our reach
the food we had ordered and withdrew.

Before we were half through eating a very
short, very frightened-looking boy in buttons
appeared at our elbows, pleading to know
whether we were ready for our hats and canes.
Since he appeared to be in some haste about
it and since he was so small a small boy and so
uneasy, we told him to bring them along. He
did bring them along, practically instantane-
ously, in fact, and promptly was begone with-
out waiting for a tip — an omission which up
until this time had never marred the traditional
ethics of hat-check boys either in France or
anywhere else.

Presently it dawned upon us that as far as
appearances went we were entirely alone in
the heart of a great city. So when we were
[220]

THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

through eating we left the amount of the
breakfast bill upon a plate and ourselves de-
parted from there. The lobby of the hotel
and the office and the main hallway were en-
tirely deserted, there being neither guests nor
functionaries in sight. But through a grating
in the floor came up a gush of hot air, licking
our legs as we passed. This may have been
the flow from a unit of the heating plant, or
then again it may have been the hot and fever-
ish breathing of the habitues of that hotel,
'scaping upward through a vent in the sub-
cellar's roof.

Outside, in the streets, the shopkeepers had
put up their iron shutters. At intervals the
plug-plug-blooie! of fresh explosions punctuated
the hooting of fire engines racing with the
alarm in adjacent quarters. Overhead, ranging
and quartering the upper reaches of the sky,
like pointer dogs in a sedge field, were scores
of French aeroplanes searching, and searching
vainly, for the unseen foeman.

The thing was uncanny; it was daunting and
smacked of witchcraft. Here were the pro-
jectiles dropping down, apparently from di-
rectly above, and they were bursting in various
sections, to the accompaniments of clattering
debris and shattering glass; and yet there was
neither sight nor sound of the agencies respon-
sible for the attack. All sorts of rumours
spread, each to find hundreds of earnest advo-
cates and as many more vociferous purveyors.
[221]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

One theory, often advanced and generally
retailed, was that the Germans had produced
a new type of aeroplane, with a noiseless motor,
and capable of soaring at a height where it was
invisible to the naked eye. Another possible
solution for the enigma was that with the aid of
spies and traitors the Germans had set up a
gun fired by air compression upon a housetop
in the environs and were bombarding the city
from beneath the protection of a false roof. In
the doorway of every abri the credulous and
the incredulous held heated arguments, dodging
back under shelter, like prairie dogs into their
holes, at each recurring crash.

Presently it dawned upon the hearkening
groups that the missiles were falling at stated
and ordained periods. Twenty minutes regu-
larly intervened between smashes. Apprecia-
tion of this circumstance injected a new ele-
ment of surmise into a terrific and most pro-
foundly puzzling affair. This was a mystery
that grew momentarily more mysterious.

Business for the time being was pretty much
suspended; anyhow nearly everybody appeared
to be taking part in the debates. However,
the taxicabs were still plying. A Parisian cabby
may be trusted to take a chance on his life
if there is a fare in sight and the prospect of a
pourboire to follow. Two of us engaged a
weather-beaten individual who apparently had
no interest in the controversies raging about
him or in the shelling either; and in his rig we
[222 ]

THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

drove to the scene of the first explosion, arriv-
ing there within a few minutes after the devilish
cylinder fell.

There had been loss of life here — no great
amount as loss of life is measured these times
in this country^ but attended by conditions
that made the disaster hideous and distressing.
The blood of victims still trickled in runlets
between the paving stones where we walked,
and there were mangled bodies stretched on
the floor of an improvised morgue across the
way— mainly bodies of poor working women,
and one, I heard, the body of a widow with
half a dozen children, who now would be doubly
orphaned, since their father was dead at the
Front.

Back again at my hotel after a forenoon
packed with curious experiences, I found in
my quarters a very badly scared chambermaid,
trying to tidy a room with fingers that shook.
In my best French, which I may state is the
worst possible French, I was trying to explain
to her that the bombardment had probably
ended — and for a fact there had been a forty-
minute lull in the new frightfulness — when one
of the shells struck and went off among the
trees and flowerbeds of a public breathing place
not a hundred and fifty yards away. With a
shriek the maid fell on her knees and buried
her head, ostrich fashion, in a nest of sofa
pillows.

I stepped through my bedroom window upon
[223]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

a little balcony in time to see the dust cloud
rise in a column and to follow with my eyes
the frenzied whirlings of a great flock of wood
pigeons flighting high into the air from their
roosting perches in the park plot. The next
instant I felt a violent tugging at the back
breadth of the leather harness that I wore.
Unwittingly, in her panic the maid had struck
upon the only possible use to which a Sam
Browne belt may be put — other than the orna-
mental, and that is a moot point among fanciers
of the purely decorative in the matter of mili-
tary gearing for the human form. By accident
she had divined its one utilitarian purpose.
She had risen and with both hands had laid
hold upon the crosspiece of my main surcingle
and was striving to drag me inside. I rather
gathered from the tenor of her contemporaneous
remarks, which she uttered at the top of her
voice and into which she interjected the names
of several saints, that she feared the sight of
me in plain view on that stone ledge might
incite the invisible marauder to added excesses.
But I was the larger and stronger of the two,
and my buckles held, and I had the advantage
of an iron railing to cling to. After a short
struggle my would-be rescuer lost. She turned
loose of my kicking straps and breech bands,
and making hurried reference to various names
in the calendar of the canonised she fled from
my presence. I heard her falling down the stairs
to the floor below. The next day I had a new
[224]

THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

chambermaid; this one had tendered her res-
ignation.

Not until the middle of the afternoon was
the proper explanation for the phenomenon
forthcoming. It came then from the Min-
istry of War, in the bald and unembroidered
laconics of a formal communique. At the first
time of hearing it the announcement seemed
so inconceivable, so manifestly impossible that
official sanction was needed to make men believe
Teuton ingenuity had found a way to upset
all the previously accepted principles touching
on gravity and friction; on arcs and orbits;
on aims and directions; on projectiles and
projectives; on the resisting tensility of steel
bores and on the carrying power of gun charges
—by producing a cannon with a ranging scope
of somewhere between sixty and ninety miles.

Days of bombardment followed — days which
culminated on that never-to-be-forgotten Good
Friday when malignant chance sped a shell
to wreck one of the oldest churches in Paris
and to kill seventy-five and wound ninety
worshippers gathered beneath its roof.

After the first flurry of uncertainty the
populace for the most part grew tranquil;
now that they knew the origin of the far-flung
punishment there was measurably less dread
of the consequences among the masses of the
people. On days when the shells exploded
futilely the daily press and the comedians in
the music halls made jokes at the expense of
[225]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Big Bertha; as, for example, on a day when a
fragment of shell took the razor out of the hand
of a man who was shaving himself, without
doing him the slightest injury; and again
when a whole shell wrecked a butcher shop
and strewed the neighbourhood with kidneys
and livers and rib ends of beef, but spared the
butcher and his family. On days when the
colossal piece scored a murderous coup for
its masters and took innocent life, the papers
printed the true death lists without attempt
at concealment of the ravages of the monster.
And on all the bombardment days, women
went shopping in the Rue de la Paix; children
played in the parks; the flower women of the
Madeleine sold their wares to customers with
the reverberations of the explosions booming
in their ears ; the crowds that sat sipping coloured
drinks at small tables in front of the boulevard
cafes on fair afternoons were almost as numerous
as they had been before the persistent thing
started; and unless the sound was very loud
indeed the average promenader barely lifted
his or her head at each recurring report. In
America we look upon the French as an excit-
able race, but here they offered to the world a
pattern for the practice of fortitude.

A good many people departed from Paris
to the southward. However, there was calm-
ness under constant danger. Our own people,
who were in Paris in numbers mounting up
into the thousands, likewise set a fine example
[226]

THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

of sang-froid. On the evening of the opening
day of the bombarding, when any one might
have been pardoned for being a bit jumpy, an
audience of enlisted men which packed the
American Soldiers and Sailors' Club in the
Rue Royale was gathered to hear a jazz band
play Yankee tunes and afterward to hear an
amateur speaker make an address. The can-
non had suspended its annoying performances
with the going down of the sun, but just as the
speaker stood up by the piano the alerte for
an air attack — which, by the way, proved to
be a false alarm, after all — was heard outside.

There was a little pause, and a rustling of
bodies.

Then the man, who was on his feet, spoke
up. "I'll stay as long as any one else does,"
he said. "Anyhow, I don't know which is
likely to be the worse of two evils — my poor
attempts at entertaining you inside or the
boche's threatened performances outside."

A great yell of approval went up and not
a single person left the building until after
the chairman announced that the programme
for the evening had reached its conclusion. I
know this to be a fact because I was among
those present.

To be sure, the strain of the harassment
got upon the nerves of some; that would be
inevitable, human nature being what it is.
Attendance at the theatres, especially for the
matinees, fell off appreciably; this, though,
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

being attributable, I think, more to fear of
panic inside the buildings than to fear of what
the missiles might do to the buildings them-
selves. And there was no record of any in-
dividual, whether man or woman, quitting a
post of responsibility because of the personal
peril to which all alike were exposed.

Likewise on those days when the great gun
functioned promptly at twenty-minute inter-
vals one would see men sitting in drinking
places with their eyes glued to the faces of their
wrist watches while they waited for the next
crash. For those whose nerves lay close to
their skins this damnable regularity of it was
the worst phase of the thing.

There was something so characteristically and
atrociously German, something so hellishly
methodical in the tormenting certainty that
each hour would be divided into three equal
parts by three descending steel tubes of potential
destruction.

Big Bertha operated on a perfect schedule.
She opened up daily at seven A. M. sharp; she
quit at six-twenty p. M. It was as though the
crew that tended her carried union cards.
They were never tardy. Neither did they work
overtime. But if the Prussians counted upon
bedeviling the people into panic and distracting
the industrial and social economies of Paris
they missed their guess. They made some
people desperately unhappy, no doubt, and
they frightened some; but the true organism
[228 ]

THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

of the community remained serene and un-
impaired.

Some share of this, I figure might be attrib-
uted to the facts that in a city as great as
Paris the chances of any one individual being
killed were so greatly reduced that the very
size of the town served to envelop its inhabi-
tants with a sense of comparative immunity;
the number of buildings, and their massiveness
inspired a feeling of partial security. I know I
felt safer than I have felt out in the open when
the enemy's playful batteries were searching
out the terrain round about. In a smaller city
this condition probably would not have been
manifest to the same degree. There almost
everybody would be likely to know personally
the latest victim or to be familiar with the
latest scene of damage and this would serve
doubtlessly to bring the apprehensive home to
all households. Howsoever, be the underlying
cause what it might, Paris weathered the
brunt of the ordeal with splendid fortitude and
an admirable coolness.

Being frequently in Paris between visits to
one or another sector of the front, I was able
to keep a fairly accurate score in the ravages of
the bombardment and to get a fairly average
appraisal of the effects upon the Parisian
temper. Likewise by reading translated ex-
tracts out of German newspapers I got impres-
sions of another phase of the tragedy which
almost was as vivid as though I had been an
[229]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

eye witness to events which I knew of only at
second-hand from the published descriptions
of them.

I had 'the small advantage though on my side
of being able to vizualise the setting in the
Forest of St. Gobain, to the west of Laon for
I was there once in German company. I
could conjure up a presentiment of the scene
there enacted on the day when Big Bertha's
makers and masters sprang their well-guarded
surprise, which so carefully and so secretly
had been evolved during months of planning
and constructing and experimentations. Behold
then the vision: It is a fine spring morning.
There is dew on the grass and there is song
in the throats of the birds and young foliage
is upon the trees. The great grey gun — it is
nearly ninety feet long and according to in-
spired Teutonic chronicles resembles a vast
metal crone — squats its misshapen mass upon
a prepared concrete base in the edge of the
woods, just on the timbered shoulder of a hill.
Its long muzzle protrudes at an angle from the
interlacing boughs of the thicket where it hides ;
at a very steep angle, too, since the charge it
will fire must ascend twenty miles into the
air in order to reach its objective. Behind
it is a stenciling of white birches and slender
poplars flung up against the sky line; in front
of it is a disused meadow where the newly
minted coinage of a prodigal springtime-
dandelions that are like gold coins and wild

[230]

THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

marguerites that are like silver ones — spangle
the grass as though the profligate season had
strewn its treasures broadcast there. The gun-
ners make ready the monster for its dedication.
They open its great navel and slide into its
belly a steel shell nine inches thick and three
feet long nearly and girthed with beltings of
spun brass. The supreme moment is at hand.

From a group of staff officers advances a
small man, grown old beyond his time; this
man wears the field uniform of a Prussian
field marshal. He has a sword at his side
and spurs on his booted feet and a spiked hel-
met upon his head. He has a withered arm
which dangles abortively, foreshortened out
of its proper length. His hair is almost snow-
white and his moustache with its fiercely up-
turned and tufted ends is white. From between
slitted lids imbedded in his skull behind un-
healthy dropical pouches of flesh his brooding,
morbid eyes show as two blue dots, like touches
of pale light glinting on twin disks of shallow
polished agate. He bears himself with a mien
that either is imperial or imperious, depending
upon one's point of view.

While all about him bow almost in the manner
of priests making obeisance before a shrine,
he touches with one sacred finger the button
of an electrical controller. The air is blasted
and the earth rocks then to the loudest crash
that ever issued from the mouth of a gun;
for all its bulk and weight the cannon recoils
[231]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

on its carriage and shakes itself; the tree tops
quiver in a palsy. The young grass is flattened
as though by a sudden high wind blowing
along the ground; the frightened birds flutter
about and are mute.

The bellowing echoes die away in a fainter
and yet fainter cadence. The-Anointed-of-
God turns up his good wrist to consider the
face of the watch strapped thereon; his staff
follow his royal example. One minute passes
in a sort of sacerdotal silence. There is drama
in the pause; a fine theatricalism in the inter-
lude. Two minutes, two minutes and a half
pass. This is one part of the picture; there is
another part of it:

Seventy miles away in a spot where a busy
street opens out into a paved plaza all manner
of common, ordinary work-a-day persons are
busied about their puny affairs. In addition
to being common and ordinary these folks do
not believe in the divine right of kings; truly
a high crime and misdemeanour. Moreover,
they persist in the heretical practice of repub-
licanism; they believe actually that all men
were born free and equal; that all men have
the grace and the authority within them to
choose their own rulers; that all men have the
right to live their own lives free from foreign
dictation and alien despotism. But at this
particular moment they are not concerned in
the least with politics or policies. Their simple
day is starting. A woman in a sidewalk
[232]

THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

kiosk is ranging morning papers on her narrow
shelf. A half-grown girl in a small booth set
in the middle of the square where the tracks
of the tramway end, is selling street car tickets
to working men in blouses and baggy corduroy
trousers. Hucksters and barrow-men have es-
tablished a small market along the curbing of
the pavement. A waiter is mopping the metal
tops of a row of little round tables under the
glass markee of a cafe. Wains and wagons
are passing with a rumble of wheels. Here
there is no drama except the simple homely
drama of applied industry.

Three minutes pass: Far away to the north,
where the woods are quiet again and the
birds have mustered up courage to sing once
more, The Regal One drops his arm and looks
about him at his officers, nodding and smiling.
Smiling, they nod back in chorus, like well-
trained automatons. There is a murmur of
interchanged congratulations. The effort upon
which so much invaluable time and so much
scientific thought have been expended, stands
unique and accomplished. Unless all calcu-
lations have failed the nine-inch shell has
reached its mark, has scored its bull's eye, has
done its predestined job.

It has; those calculations could not go
wrong. Out of the kindly and smiling heavens,
with no warning except the shriek of its clear-
ing passage through the skies, the bolt descends
in the busy square. The glass awning over the
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

cafe front becomes a darting rain of sharp-edged
javelins; the paving stones rise and spread in
hurtling fragments from a smoking crater in
the roadway. There are a few minutes of mad
frenzy among those people assembled there.
Then a measure of quiet succeeds to the
tumult. The work of rescue starts. The
woman who vended papers is a crushed mass
under the wreckage of her kiosk; the girl who
sold car tickets is dead and mangled beneath
her flattened booth; the waiter who wiped the
table-tops off lies among his tables now, the
whole crown of his head sliced away by slivers
of glass; here and there in the square are scat-
tered small motionless clumps that resemble
heaps of bloodied and torn rags. Wounded
men and women are being carried away,
groaning and screaming as they go. But in
the edge of the woods at St. Gobain the Kaiser
is climbing into his car to ride to his head-
quarters. It is his breakfast-time and past it
and he has a fine appetite this morning. The
picture is complete. The campaign for Kultur
in the world has scored another triumph, the
said score standing: Seven dead; fifteen in-
jured.

[234]

CHAPTER XV
WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

"^IHERE was a transportload of newly
made officers coining over for service
here in France. There was on board
one gentleman in uniform who bore
himself, as the saying goes, with an air. By
reason of that air and by reason of a certain
intangible atmospheric something about him
difficult to define in words he seemed intent
upon establishing himself upon a plane far re-
mote from and inaccessible to these fellow
voyagers of his who were crossing the sea to
serve in the line, or to act as interpreters, or
to go on staffs, or to work with the Red Cross
or the Y. M. C. A. or the K. of C. or what not.
He had what is called the superior manner, if
you get what I mean — and you should get
what I mean, reader, if ever you had lived, as
I have, for a period of years hard by and ad-
jacent to that particular stretch of the eastern
seaboard of North America where, as nowhere
else along the Atlantic Ocean or in the in-
terior, are to be found in numbers those fa-

[235]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

voured beings who acquire merit unutterable
by belonging to, or by being distantly related
to, or by being socially acquainted with, the
families that have nothing but.

Nevertheless, and to the contrary notwith-
standing, divers of his brother travellers failed
to keep their distance. Toward this distin-
guished gentleman they deported themselves
with a familiarity and an offhandedness that
must have been acutely distasteful to one un-
accustomed to moving in a mixed and miscella-
neous company.

Accordingly he took steps on the second day
out to put them in their proper places. A
list was being circulated to get up a subscrip-
tion for something or other, and almost the
very first person to whom this list came in its
rounds of the first cabin was the person in
question. He took out a gold-mounted foun-
tain pen from his pocket and in a fair round hand
inscribed himself thus:

"BEJONES OF TUXEDO"

There were no initials — royalty hath not
need for initials — but just the family name and
the name of the town so fortunate as to number
among its residents this notable — which names
for good reasons I have purposely changed.
Otherwise the impressive incident occurred as
here narrated.

But those others just naturally refused to be
either abashed or abated. They must have been

[236]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

an irreverent, sacrilegious lot, by all accounts.
The next man to whom the subscription was car-
ried took note of the new fashion in signatures
and then gravely wrote himself down as " Spirits
of Niter"; and the next man called himself
"Henri of Navarre"; and the third, it devel-
oped, was no other than "Cream of Tartar";
and the next was "Timon of Athens"; and the
next "Mother of Vinegar" — and so on and so
forth, while waves of ribald and raucous laugh-
ter shook the good ship from stem to stern.

However, the derisive ones reckoned without
their host. For them the superior mortal had
a yet more formidable shot in the locker. On
the following day he approached three of the
least impressed of his temporary associates as
they stood upon the promenade deck, and
apropos of nothing that was being said or done
at the moment he, speaking in a clear voice,
delivered himself of the, following crushing re-
mark:

"When I was born there were only two
houses in the city of New York that had porte-
cocheres, and I — I was born in one of them."

Inconceivable though it may appear, the fact
is to be recorded that even this disclosure
failed to silence the tongues of ridicule aboard
that packet boat. Rather did it enhance them,
seeming but to spur the misguided vulgarians
on and on to further evidences of disrespect.
There are reasons for believing that Be j ones of
Tuxedo, who had been born in the drafty semi-
[237]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

publicity of a porte-cochere, left the vessel
upon its arrival with some passing sense of re-
lief, though it should be stated that up until
the moment of his debarkation he continued
ever, while under the eye of the plebes and com-
moners about him, to bear himself after a
mode and a port befitting the station to which
Nature had called him. He vanished into the
hinterland of France and was gone to take up
his duties; but he left behind him, among those
who had travelled hither in his company, a
recollection which neither time nor vicissitude
can efface. Presumably he is still in the serv-
ice, unless it be that ere now the service has
found out what was the matter with it.

I have taken the little story concerning him
as a text for this article, not because Bejones
of Tuxedo is in any way typical of any group
or subgroup of men in our new Army — indeed
I am sure that he, like the blooming of the
century plant, is a thing which happens only
once in a hundred years, and not then unless all
the conditions are salubrious. I have chosen
the little tale to keynote my narrative for the
reason that I believe it may serve in illustration
of a situation that has arisen in Europe, and
especially in France, these last few months — a
condition that does not affect our Army so
much as it affects sundry side issues connected
more or less indirectly with the presence on
European soil of an army from the United
States.

[238]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

Like most of the nations having representa-
tive forms of government that have gone into
this war, we went in as an amateur nation so
far as knowledge of the actual business of mod-
ern warfare was concerned. Like them, we
have had to learn the same hard lessons that
they learned, in the same hard school of experi-
ence. Our national amateurishness beforehand
was not altogether to our discredit; neither was
it altogether to our credit. Nobody now denies
that we should have been better prepared
for eventualities than we were. On the other
hand it was hardly to be expected that a peace-
ful commercial country such as ours — which
until lately had been politically remote as it
was geographically aloof upon its own hemi-
sphere from the political storm-centres of the
Old World, and in which there was no taint of
the militarism that has been Germany's curse,
and will yet be her undoing — should in times
of peace greatly concern itself with any save
the broad general details of the game of war,
except as a heart-moving spectacle enacted
upon the stage of another continent and viewed
by us with sympathetic and sorrowing eyes
across three or four thousand miles of salt
water. Prior to our advent into it the war
had no great appeal upon the popular con-
science of the United States. Out of the fulness
of our hearts and out of the abundance of our
prosperity we gave our dollars, and gave and
gave and kept on giving them for the succour

[239]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

of the victims of the world catastrophe; but a
sense of the impending peril for our own insti-
tutions came home to but few among us.
Here and there were individuals who scented
the danger; but they were as prophets crying
in the wilderness; the masses either could not
or would not see it. They would not make
ready against the evil days ahead.

So we went into this most highly specialised
industry, which war has become, as amateurs
mainly. Our Navy was no amateur navy, as
very speedily developed, and before this year's
fighting is over our enemy is going to realise
that our Army is not an amateur army. We
may have been greenhorns at the trade wherein
Germans were experts by training and educa-
tion; still we fancy ourselves as a reasonably
adaptable breed. But if the truth is to be
told it must be confessed that in certain of the
Allied branches of the business we are yet
behaving like amateurs. After more than a
year of actual and potential participation in
the conflict we even now are doing things and
suffering things to be done which would make
us the laughingstock of our allies if they had
time or temper for laughing. I am not speaking
of the conduct of our operations in the field
or in the camps or on the high seas. I am
speaking with particular reference to what
might be called some of the by-products.

None of us is apt to forget, or cease to remem-
ber with pride, the flood of patriotic sacrifice
[ 240 ]>

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

that swept our country in the spring of 1917.
No other self-governing people ever adopted a
universal draft before their shores had been
invaded and before any of their manhood had
fallen in battle. No other self-governing people
ever accepted the restrictions of a food-ration-
ing scheme before any of the actual provisions
concerning that food-rationing scheme had
been embodied into the written laws. Other
countries did it under compulsion, after their
resources showed signs of exhaustion. We did
it voluntarily; and it was all the more wonder-
ful that we should have done it voluntarily
when all about us was human provender in
a prodigal fullness.. There was plenty for our
own tables.

By self-imposed regulations we cut down our
supplies so that our allies might be fed with
the surplus thus made available. Outside of
a few sorry creatures there was scarcely to be
found in America an individual, great or small,
who did not give, and give freely, of the work of
his or her heart and hands to this or that
phase of the mighty undertaking upon which
our Government had embarked and to which
our President, speaking for us all, had solemnly
dedicated all that we were or had been or ever
should be.

All sorts of commissions, some useful and

important beyond telling, some unutterably

unuseful and incredibly unimportant, sprang

into being. And to and fro in the land, in

[241]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

numbers amounting to a vast multitude, went
the woman who wanted to do her part, with-
out having the least idea of what that part
would be or how she would go about doing it.
She knew nothing of nursing; kitchen work, a
vulgar thing, was abhorrent to her nature and
to her manicured nails; she could not cook,
neither could she sew or sweep — but she must
do her part.

She was not satisfied to stay on at home
and by hard endeavour to fit herself for help-
ing in the task confronting every rational
and willing being between the two oceans.
No, sir-ree, that would be too prosaic, too
commonplace an employment for her. Be-
sides, the working classes could attend to that
job. She must do her part abroad — either in
France within sound of the guns or in racked
and desolated Belgium. Of course her inten-
tions were good. The intentions of such per-
sons are nearly always good, because they
change them before they have a chance to go
stale.

I think the average woman of this type
had a mental conception of herself wearing a
wimple and a coif of purest white, in a frock
that was all crisp blue linen and big pearl
buttons, with one red cross blazing upon her
sleeve and another on her cap, sitting at the
side of a spotless bed in a model hospital that
was fragrant with flowers, and ministering
daintily to a splendid wounded hero with the
[242]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

face of a demigod and the figure of a model for
an underwear ad. Preferably this youth would
be a gallant aviator, and his wound would be
in the head so that from time to time she might
adjust the spotless bandage about his brow.

I used to wish sometimes when I met such
a lady that I might have drawn for her the
picture of reality as I had seen it more times
than once — tired, earnest, competent women
who slept, what sleep they got, in lousy billets
that were barren of the simplest comforts,
sleeping with gas masks under their pillows, and
who for ten or twelve or fifteen or eighteen
hours on a stretch performed the most nau-
seating and the most necessary offices for poor
suffering befouled men lying on blankets upon
straw pallets in wrecked dirty houses or in
half-ruined stables from which the dung had
hurriedly been shoveled out in order to make
room for suffering soldiers — stables that reeked
with the smells of carbolic and iodoform and
with much worse smells. It is an extreme
case that I am describing, but then the picture
is a true picture, whereas the idealistic fancy
painted by the lady who just must do her
part at the Front had no existence except in
the movies or in her own imagination.

It never occurred to her that there would
be slop jars to be emptied or filthy bodies, alive
with crawling vermin, to be cleansed. It never
occurred to her that she would take up room
aboard ship that might better be filled with
[243]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

horse collars or hardtack or insect powder; nor
that while over here she would consume food
that otherwise would stay the stomach of a
fighting man or a working woman; nor that
if ever she reached the battle zone she would
encounter living conditions appallingly bare
and primitive beyond anything she could con-
ceive; nor that she could not care for herself,
and was fitted neither by training nor instinct
to help care for any one else.

When I left America last winter a great
flow of national sanity had already begun to
rise above the remaining scourings of national
hysteria; and the lady whose portrait I have
tried in the foregoing paragraphs to sketch
was not quite so numerous or so vociferous
as she had been in those first few exalted
weeks and months following our entrance into
the war as a full partner in the greatest of
enterprises. My surprise was all the greater
therefore to find that she had beaten me across
the water. She had pretty well disappeared
at home.

One typical example of this strange species
crossed in the same ship with me. Heaven
alone knows what political or social influence
had availed to secure her passport for her.
But she had it, and with it credentials from an
organisation that should have known better.
She was a woman of independent wealth
seemingly, and her motives undoubtedly were
of the best; but as somebody might have

[244]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

said: Good motives butter no parsnips, and
hell is paved with buttered parsnips. Her
notion was to drive a car at the Front — an
ambulance or a motor truck or a general's
automobile or something. She had owned
cars, but she had never driven one, as she
confessed; but that was a mere detail. She
would learn how, some day after she got to
Europe, and then somebody or other would
provide her with a car and she would start
driving it; such was her intention. Unaided
she could no more have wrested a busted tire
off of a rusted rim than she could have mar-
celled her own back hair; and so far as her
knowledge of practical mechanics went, I am
sure no reasonably prudent person would have
trusted her with a nutpick; but she had the
serene confidence of an inspired and magnificent
ignorance.

She had her uniform too. She had brought
it with her and she wore it constantly. She
said she designed it herself, but I think she
fibbed there. No one but a Fifth Avenue
mantuamaker of the sex which used to be the
gentler sex before it got the vote could have
thought up a vestment so ornate, so swagger
and so complicated.

It was replete with shoulder straps and
abounding in pleats and gores and gussets
and things. Just one touch was needed to
make it a finished confection: By rights it
should have buttoned up the back.

[245]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

The woman who had the cabin next to hers
in confidence told a group of us that she had
it from the stewardess that it took the lady a
full hour each day to get herself properly
harnessed into her caparisons. Still I must
say the effect, visually speaking, was worthy
of the effort; and besides, the woman who
told us may have been exaggerating. She was
a registered and qualified nurse who knew her
trade and wore matter-of-fact garments and
flat-heeled, broad-soled shoes. She was not
very exciting to look at, but she radiated
efficiency. She knew exactly what she would do
when she got over here and exactly how she
would do it. We agreed among ourselves that
if we were in quest of the ornamental we
would search out the lady who meant to drive
the car — provided there was any car; but that
if anything serious ailed any of us we would
rather have the services of one of the plain
nursing sisterhood than a whole skating-rinkful
of the other kind round.

In the latter part of 1917 there landed in
France a young woman hailing from a Far
Western city whose family is well known on
the Pacific Slope. She brought with her letters
of introduction signed by imposing names and
a comfortable sum of money, which had been
subscribed partly out of her own pocket and
partly out of the pockets of well-meaning
persons in her home state whom she had suc-
ceeded in interesting in her particular scheme

[246]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

of wartime endeavour. She was very fair to
see and her uniform, by all accounts, was very
sweet to look upon, it being a horizon-blue in
colour with much braiding upon the sleeves
and collar. It has been my observation since
coming over that when in doubt regarding
their vocations and their intentions these
unattached lady zealots go in very strongly
for striking effects in the matter of habili-
ments. Along the boulevards and in the tea-
rooms I have encountered a considerable num-
ber who appeared to have nothing to do except
to wear their uniforms.

However, this young person had no doubt
whatever concerning her motives and her
purposes. The whole thing was all mapped out
in her head, as developed when she called upon
a high official of our Expeditionary Forces at
his headquarters in the southern part of France.
She told him she had come hither for the express
purpose of feeding our starving aviators. He
might have told her that so long as there con-
tinued to be served fried potato chips free
at the Crillon bar there was but little danger
of any airman going hungry, in Paris at least.
What he did tell her when he had rallied some-
what from the shock was that he saw no way
to gratify her in her benevolent desire unless
he could catch a few aviators and lock them up
and starve them for two or three days, and he
rather feared the young men might object to
such treatment. As a matter of fact, I under-
[247]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

stand he so forgot himself as to laugh at the
young woman.

At any rate his attitude was so unsym-
pathetic that he practically spoiled the whole
war for her, and she gave him a piece of her
mind and went away. She had departed out
of the country before I arrived in it, and I
learned of her and her uniform and her mission
and her disappointment at its unfulfillment by
hearsay only; but I have no doubt, in view of
some of the things I have myself seen, that the
account which reached me was substantially
correct. Along this line I am now prepared to
believe almost anything.

Here, on the other hand, is a case of which I
have direct and first-hand knowledge. I en-
countered a group of young women attached
to one of the larger American organisations
engaged in systematised charities and mercies
on this side of the water. Now, plainly these
young women were inspired by the very highest
ideals; that there was no discounting. They
were full of the spirit of service and sacrifice.
Mainly they were college graduates. Without
exception they were well bred; almost without
exception they were well educated.

The particular tasks for which they had
been detailed were to care for pauperised
repatriates returning to France through Switzer-
land from areas of their country occupied by
the enemy, and to aid these poor folks in re-
establishing their home life and to give them
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WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

lessons in domestic science. To the success of
their ministrations there was just one draw-
back: They were dealing with peasants mostly
— furtive, shy, secretive folks who under ordi-
nary circumstances would be bitterly resentful of
any outside interference by aliens with their
mode of life, and who in these cases had been
rendered doubly suspicious by reason of the
misfortunes they had endured vhile under
the thumb of the Germans.

To understand them, to plumb diplomatically
the underlying reasons for their prejudices, to
get upon a basis of helpful sympathy with
them, it was highly essential that those dealing
with them not only should have infinite tact and
finesse but should be able to fathom the mean-
ing of a nod or a gesture, a sidelong glance of the
eyes or the inflection 'of a muttered word.
And yet of those zealous young women who
had been assigned to this delicate task there
was scarcely one in six who spoke any French
at all. It inevitably followed that the bulk
of their patient labours should go for naught;
moreover, while they continued in this employ-
ment they were merely occupying space in an
already crowded country and consuming food
in an already needy country; the both of which
— space and food — were needed for people who
could accomplish effective things.

An American woman who is reputed to be a
dietetic specialist came over not long ago,
backed by funds donated in the States. Her
[249]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

instructions were to establish cafeterias at some
of the larger French munition works. Probably
her chagrin was equalled only by her astonish-
ment when she learned that for reasons which
seemed to it good and sufficient — and which no
doubt were — the French Government did not
want any American-plan cafeterias established
at any of its munition works. Apparently it
had not seemed feasible and proper to the spon-
sors of the diet specialist to find out before
dispatching her overseas whether the plan
would be agreeable to the authorities here; or
whether there already were eating places suit-
able to the desires of the working people at
these munition plants; or how long it would
take, given the most favourable conditions,
to cure the workers of their tenacious instinct
for eating the kind of midday meal they have
been eating for some hundreds of years and
accustom them and their palates and their
stomachs to the Yankee quick lunch with its
baked pork and beans, its buckwheat cakes
with maple sirup and its four kinds of pie. In
their zeal the promoters, it would seem, had
entirely overlooked those essential details. It is
just such omissions as this one that the fine
frenzy of helping out in wartime appears to
develop in a nation that is given to boasting
of its business efficiency and that vaunts itself
that it knows how to give generously without
wasting foolishly.

The field manager of an organisation that
[ 250 ]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

is doing a great deal for the comfort of our
soldiers and the soldiers of our allies told
me of one of his experiences. He had a sense
of humour and he could laugh over it, but I
think I noted a suggestion of resentment behind
the laughter. He said that some months before
he set up and assumed charge of a plant well
up toward the trenches in a sector that had
been taken over by the American troops. It
was a large and elaborate concern, as these
concerns are rated in the field. The men
were pleased with its accommodations and
facilities, and the field manager was proud of it.

One day there appeared a businesslike young
woman who introduced herself as belonging to
a kindred organisation that was charged with
the work of decorating the interiors of such
establishments as the one over which he pre-
sided. Somewhat puzzled, he showed her,
first of all, his canteen. It was as most such
places are: There were boxes of edibles upon
counters, in open boxes, so that the soldier
customers might appraise the wares before
investing; upon the shelves there were soft
drinks and smoking materials and all manner
of small articles of wearing apparel; likewise
baseballs and safety razors and soap, toilet
kits and the rest of it. Altogether the manager
and his two assistants were rather pleased with
the arrangement.

The newly arrived young woman swept the
scene with a cold professional eye.

[251]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

"On the whole this will do fairly well," she
said with a certain briskness in her tone.
"Yes, I may say it will do very well indeed —
with certain changes, certain touches."

"As for example, what, please?" inquired
the superintendent.

"Well," she said, "for one thing we must
put up some bright curtains at the windows;
and to lighten up the background I think we'll
run a stenciled pattern in some cheerful colour
round the walls at the top. "

It was not for the manager to inquire how
the decorator meant to get her curtains and
her stencils and her wall paints up over a
road that was being alternately gassed and
shelled at nights and on which the traffic
capacity was already taxed to the utmost by
the business of bringing up supplies, munitions
and rations from the base some fifteen miles in
the rear. He merely bowed and awaited the
lady's further commands. "And now," she
said, "where is the rest room?"

"The rest room, did you say?"

"Certainly, the rest room — the recreation
hall, the place where these poor men may go
for privacy and innocent amusement?"

"Well, you see, thus close up near the Front
we haven't been able to make provision for a
regular rest room," explained the manager.
"Besides, in case of a withdrawal or an attack
we might have to pull out in a hurry and leave
behind everything that is not readily portable
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WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

on wagons or trucks. The nearest approach
that we have to a rest room is here at the rear. "

He led the way to a room at the back. It
contained such plenishings as one generally
finds in improvised quarters in the field — that
is to say, it contained a curious equipment
made up partly of crude bits of furniture col-
lected on the spot out of villagers' abandoned
homes and partly of makeshift stools and tables
coopered together from barrels and boxes and
stray bits of planking. Also it contained at this
time as many soldiers as could crowd into it.
A phonograph was grinding out popular airs,
and divers games of checkers and cards were in
progress, each with its fringe of interested
onlookers ringing in the players.

"Oh, but this will never do — never!" stated
the inspecting lady. "It is too bare, too cheer-
less! It lacks atmosphere. It lacks coziness;
it lacks any appeal to the senses — in short it
lacks everything! We must have some imme-
diate improvements here by all means."

The man was beginning to lose his temper.
By an effort he retained it.

"The men seem fairly well satisfied; at least
I have heard no complaint," he said. "What
would you suggest in the way of changes?"

As she answered, the visitor ticked off the
items of her mental inventory of essentials on
her fingers.

"Well, to begin with we must clear all this
litter out of here," she said. "Then we must

[253]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

install some really comfortable chairs and at
least two or three roomy sofas and some simple
couches where the men may lie down. I should
also like to see a piano here. That, with the
addition of some curtains at the windows and
some simple treatment of the walls and a few
appropriate pictures properly spaced and prop-
erly hung, will be different, I think."

"Yes," demurred the manager, "but ad-
mitting that we could get the things you
have enumerated up here, another problem
would arise: This room, which, as you see, is
not large, would be so crowded with the furnish-
ings that there would be room in it for very
many less men than usually come here. There
are probably fifty men in it now. If it were
filled up with sofas and couches and a piano
I doubt whether we could crowd twenty men
inside of it. "

"Very well, then," stated the lady deco-
rator calmly, "you must admit only twenty
men at a time. "

"Quite so; but how," he demanded — "how
am I going to select the twenty?"

The young woman considered the question
for a moment. Then a solution came to her.

"I should select the twenty neatest ones,"
she said.

Whereupon the manager excused himself and

went out to frame a dispatch to headquarters

embodying an ultimatum, which ultimatum was

that the lady decorator went away from there

[254]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

forthwith or his resignation must take effect,
coincident with his immediate departure from
his present post. The home office must have
called the lady off, because when I saw him he
was still in harness, and swinging a man-size
job in a competent way.

I would not have the reader believe that I am
casting discredit upon either the patriotic im-
pulses or the honest motives of the bulk of the
lay workers who have journeyed to Europe,
paying their own way and their own living
expenses. Often they arrive, many of them, to
strike hands with the military authorities in the
task which faces our nation on Continental soil.
There is room and a welcome in France, in
Italy, in England and in Flanders for every
civilian recruit who really knows how to do
something helpful and who has the strength,
the self-reliance and the hardihood to perform
that particular function under difficult and com-
plicated conditions, which nearly always are
physically uncomfortable and which may be-
come physically dangerous.

Nor would I wish any one to assume that I am
deprecating by inference or by frontal attack
the very fine things that are being accomplished
every day by fine American women and girls
who answered the first call for trained helpers,
to serve in hospitals or canteens or huts, in
settlement work or at telephone exchanges. It
will make any American thrill with pride to
enter a ward where the American Red Cross is
J255]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

in charge, or where a medical unit from one of
the great hospitals or one of our great univer-
sities back home has control. The French and
the British are quick enough to speak in terms
of highest praise of the achievements of Ameri-
can surgeons, American nurses and American
ambulance drivers. They say, and with good
reason for saying it, that our people have pluck
and that they have skill and that they above
all are amazingly resourceful.

Personally I know of no smarter exhibition
of native wit and courage that the war has
produced than was shown by that group of
Smith College girls who had been organising
and directing colonisation work among the peas-
ants in the reclaimed districts of Northern
France and who were driven out by the great
spring advance of the Germans. I met some
of those young women. They were modest
enough in describing their adventure. It was
by gathering a shred of a story there and a scrap
of an anecdote here that I was able to piece to-
gether a fairly accurate estimate of the self-
imposed discipline, the clean-strained grit and
the initiative which marked their conduct
through three trying weeks.

Perhaps it was a mistake in their instance, as
in the instances of divers similar organisations,
that the work of resettling the wasted lands
above the Aisne and the Oise should have been
undertaken at points that would be menaced
in the event of a quick onslaught by the Prussian
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WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

high command. The British, I understand,
privately objected to the undertakings on the
ground that the presence of American women
in villages which might fall again into the foe's
hands — and which as it turned out did fall
again into his hands — entailed an added burden
and an added responsibility upon the fighting
forces. The British were right. Practically all
of the repatriated peasants had to flee for the
second time, abandoning their rebuilt homes
and their newly sowed fields.

On the heels of these, improvements which
represented many thousands of American dollars
and many months of painstaking labour on the
part of devoted American women went up in
flames. The torch was applied rather than that
the little model houses and the tons of donated
supplies on hand should go into hostile hands.

Those Smith College girls did not run away,
though, until the Germans were almost upon
them. Up to the very last minute they stayed
at their posts, feeding and housing not only
refugees but many exhausted soldiers, British
and French, who staggered in, spent and sped
after alternately fighting and retreating through
a period of days and nights. When finally they
did come away each one of them came driving
her own truck and bearing in it a load of worn-
out and helpless natives. One girl brought out
a troop of frightened dwarfs from a stranded
travelling caravan. Another ministered day and
night to a blind woman nearly ninety years old
1*57,]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

and a family of orphaned babies. The passen-
gers of a third were four inmates of a little com-
munal blind asylum that happened to be in
the invader's path.

On the way, in addition to tending their
special charges, they cooked and served hun-
dreds of meals for hungry soldiers and hungry
civilians. They spent the nights in towns
under shell fire, and when at length the German
drive had been checked they assembled their
forces in Beauvais. Thus and with charac-
teristic adaptability some became drivers of
ambulances and supply trucks plying along the
lines of communication, and some opened a
kitchen for the benefit of passing soldiers at
the local railway station. If the faculty and
the students and the alumnae of Smith College
did not hold a celebration when the true story
of what happened in March and April reached
them they were lacking in appreciation — that's
all I have to say about it.

Right here seems a good-enough place for me
to slip in a few words of approbation for the work
which another "organisation has accomplished
in France since we put our men into the field.
Nobody asked me to speak in its favour because
so far as I can find out it has no publicity de-
partment. I am referring to the Salvation Army
• — may it live forever for the service which, with-
out price and without any boasting on the part
of its personnel, it is rendering to our boys in
France!

[258]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

A good many of us who hadn't enough
religion, and a good many more of us who may-
hap had too much religion, look rather contemp-
tuously upon the methods of the Salvationists.
Some have gone so far as to intimate that the
Salvation Army was vulgar in its methods and
lacking in dignity and even in reverence. Some
have intimated that converting a sinner to the
tap of a bass drum or the tinkle of a tambourine
was an improper process altogether. Never
again, though, shall I hear the blare of the
cornet as it cuts into the chorus of hallelujah
whoops where a ring of blue-bonneted women
and blue-capped men stand exhorting on a
city street corner under the gas lights, without
recalling what some of their enrolled brethren—
and sisters — have done and are doing in Europe.

The American Salvation Army in France is
small, but, believe me, it is powerfully busy!
Its war delegation came over without any fan-
fare of the trumpets of publicity. It has no
paid press agents here and no impressive head-
quarters. There are no well-known names,
other than the names of its executive heads, on
its rosters or on its advisory boards. None of
its members is housed at an expensive hotel
and none of them has handsome automobiles
in which to travel about from place to place.
No compaigns to raise nation-wide millions of
dollars for the cost of its ministrations overseas
were ever held at home. I imagine it is the
pennies of the poor that mainly fill its war chest.
[259]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

I imagine, too, that sometimes its finances are
an uncertain quantity. Incidentally I am as-
sured that not one of its male workers here is
of draft age unless he holds exemption papers
to prove his physical unfitness for military ser-
vice. The Salvationists are taking care to
purge themselves of any suspicion that poten-
tial slackers have joined their ranks in order to
avoid the possibility of having to perform duties
in khaki.

Among officers as well as among enlisted men
one occasionally hears criticism — which may or
may not be based on a fair judgment — for
certain branches of certain activities of certain
organisations. But I have yet to meet any
soldier, whether a brigadier or a private,
who, if he spoke at all of the Salvation
Army, did not speak in terms of fervent
gratitude for the aid that the Salvationists
are rendering so unostentatiously and yet so
very effectively. Let a sizable body of troops
move from one station to another, and hard on
its heels there came a squad of men and women
of the Salvation Army. An army truck may
bring them, or it may be they have a battered
jitney to move them and their scanty outfits.
Usually they do not ask for help from any one
in reaching their destinations. They find lodg-
ment in a wrecked shell of a house or in the
corner of a barn. By main force and awkward-
ness they set up their equipment, and very
soon the word has spread among the troopers
[260]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

that at such-and-such a place the Salvation
Army is serving free hot drinks and free dough-
nuts and free pies. It specialises in doughnuts,
the Salvation Army in the field does — the real
old-fashioned homemade ones that taste of
home to a homesick soldier boy.

I did not see this, but one of my associates
did. He saw it last winter in a dismal place
on the Toul sector. A file of our troops were
finishing a long hike through rain and snow
over roads knee-deep in half -thawed icy slush.
Cold and wet and miserable, they came tramp-
ing into a cheerless, half-empty town within
sound and range of the German guns. They
found a reception committee awaiting them
there — in the person of two Salvation Army
lassies and a Salvation Army captain. The
women had a fire going in the dilapidated oven
of a vanished villager's kitchen. One of them
was rolling out the batter on a plank with an
old wine bottle for a rolling pin and using the
top of a tin can to cut the dough into circular
strips. The other woman was cooking the
doughnuts, and as fast as they were cooked the
man served them out, spitting hot, to hungry
wet boys clamouring about the door, and nobody
was asked to pay a cent.

At the risk of giving mortal affront to ultra-
doctrinal practitioners of applied theology I
am firmly committed to the belief that by the
grace of God and the grease of doughnuts
those three humble benefactors that day
[261]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

strengthened their right to a place in the
Heavenly Kingdom.

As I said a bit ago, there is in France room
and to spare and the heartiest sort of wel-
come for competent, sincere lay workers, both
men and women. But there is no room,
and if truth be known, there is no welcome for
any other sort. These people over here long
ago passed out of the experimental period in
the handling of industrial and special problems
that have grown up out of war. They have
entirely emerged from the amateur stage of
endeavour and direction. If any man doubts
the truth of this he has only to see, as I have
seen, the thousands of women who have taken
men's jobs in the cities in order that the men
might go to the colours; has only to see the
overalled women in the big munition plants;
has only to see how the peasant women of
France are labouring in the fields and how the
girls of the British auxiliary legions — the mem-
bers of the W. A. A. C. for a conspicuous
example — are carrying their share of the burden;
has only to see women of high degree and low,
each doing her part sanely, systematically and
unflinchingly — to appreciate that, though Brit-
ain and France can find employment for
every pair of willing and able hands some-
where behind the lines, they have no use
whatsoever for the unorganised applicant or for
the purely ornamental variety of volunteer or
yet for the mere notoriety seeker.
[262]

WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

I make so bold as to suggest that it is time
we were taking the same lesson to heart;
time to start the sifting process ourselves. I
have seen in Paris a considerable number of
American women who appeared to have no
business here except to air their most becoming
uniforms in public places and to tell in a vague
broad way of the things they hope to do. The
French, proverbially, are a polite race, and
the French Government will endure a great
deal of this kind of infliction rather than run
the risk of engendering friction, even to the
most minute extent, with the people or the
administration of an Allied nation. But in
wartime especially, too much patience becomes a
dubious virtue, and if practiced for overlong
may become a fault.

As yet there has been no intimation from any
official source that the French would rather our
State Department did not issue quite so many
passports to Americans who have no set and
definite purpose in making the journey to
these shores, but even a superficial knowledge
of the French language and the most casual
acquaintance with the French nature enable
one to get at what the French people are think-
ing. I am sure that had the prevalent con-
dition been reversed our papers would have
voiced the popular protest at the imposi-
tion long before now. Some of these days,
unless we apply the preventive measures on
our own side of the Atlantic, the perfectly
[263]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

justifiable resentment of the hard-pressed
French is going to find utterance; and then
quite a number of well-intentioned but utterly
inutile persons will be going back home with
their feelings all harrowed up.

[264]

CHAPTER XVI
CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION

PLEASE do not think that because I have
mainly dwelt thus far upon the women
offenders that there are no American
men in France who do not belong here,
because that would be a wrong assumption. I
merely have mentioned the women first because
by reason of their military garbing — or what
some of them fondly mistake for military
garbing — they offer rather more conspicuous
showing to the casual eye than the male civilian
dress.

The men are abundantly on hand though;
make no mistake about that! Some of them
come burdened with frock-coated dignity as
members of special commissions or special
delegations; in certain quarters there appears
to be a somewhat hazy but very lively inclina-
tion to try to run our share of this war by
commission. Some, I am sure, came for the
same reason that the young man in the limerick
went to the stranger's funeral — because they
are fond of a ride. Some I think came in the

[265]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

hope of enjoying an exciting sort of junketing
expedition, and some because they were all
dressed up and had nowhere to go.

As well as may be judged by one who has
been away from home for going on five months
now, the special-commission notion is being
rather overdone. Individuals and groups of
individuals bearing credentials from this fra-
ternal organisation or that religious organisa-
tion or the other research society reach England
on nearly every steamer that penetrates through
the U-boat zone. Almost invariably these
gentlemen carry letters of introduction testi-
fying to their personal probity and their col-
lective importance, which letters are signed by
persons sitting in high places.

It may be that the English are thereby
deceived into believing that the visitors are
entitled to special consideration — as indeed
some of them are, and indeed some of
them most distinctly are not. Or then
again it may be that the English are not
aware of a device very common among our
men of affairs for getting rid of a bore who is
intent on going somewhere to see somebody
and craves to be properly vouched for upon
his arrival. In certain circles this habit is called
passing the buck. In others it is known as
writing letters of introduction.

At any rate the English take no chances on
offending the right party, even at the risk of
favouring the wrong one. When a half dozen
[266]

CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION

Yankees appear at the Foreign Office laden with
letters addressed "To Whom it May Concern"
the Foreign Office immediately becomes con-
cerned.

How is a guileless Britisher intrenched
behind a flat-top desk to know that the August
and Imperial Order of Supreme Potentates
whose chosen emissaries are now present desirous
of having a look at the war, and afterward to
approve of it in a report to the Grand Lodge at
its next annual convention, if so be they do see
fit to approve of it — how, I repeat, is he to know
that the August and Imperial Order of Supreme
Potentates has a membership largely composed
of class-C bartenders? Not knowing, he acts
in accordance with the best dictates of his
ignorance.

The commission or the delegation or the
presentation, whatever it calls itself, is pro-
vided with White Passes all round. On the
strength of these White Passes the investi-
gators are at the public expense transferred
across the Channel and housed temporarily at
the American Visitors' Chateau. From there
they are taken in automobiles and under
escort of very bored officers on a kind of glori-
fied Cook's tour behind the British Front.
Thereafter they are turned over to the French
Mission or to the American forces for similar
treatment.

As a result they accumulate an assortment of
soft-boiled and yolkless impressions which they
[267]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

incubate into the spoken or the written word
on the way back home, after they have held a
meeting to decide whether they like the way the
war is going on or whether they do not like
the way the war is going on. Always there is
the possibility that as a result of the dissemina-
tion of underdone and undigested misinforma-
tions which they have managed to acquire these
persons, though actuated by the best intentions
in the world, may do considerable harm in
shaping public opinion in America. And like-
wise one may be very sure a lot of pestered
British and French functionaries are left to
wonder what sort of folks the masses of Ameri-
can citizenship must be if these are typical
samples of the thought-moulding class.

I am not exaggerating much when I touch on
this particular phase of the topic now engaging
me, for I have seen two delegations in Europe
of the variety I have sought briefly to describe
in the lines immediately foregoing; and we are
expecting more in on the next boat. There was
no imaginable reason why those whom I saw
should be in a country that is at war at such a
tune of crisis as this time is, but the main point
was that they were here, eating three large
rectangular meals a day apiece and taking up
the valuable time of overworked military men
who accompanied them while they week-ended
at the war. How many more such delegations
will sift through the State Department and
seep by the passport bureau and journey
[268]

CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION

hither during the latter half of 1918 unless
the Administration at Washington shuts down
on the game no man can with accuracy calculate.

Away down in the south of France I ran
into a gentleman of a clerical aspect who lost
no time in telling me about himself. He was
tall and slender like a wand, and of a willowy
suppleness of figure, and he was terribly serious
touching on his mission. He represented a
religious denomination that has several hun-
dreds of thousands of communicants in the
United States. He had been dispatched acros<%
he said, by the governing body of his church.
His purpose, he explained, was to inquire into
the bodily and spiritual well-being of his
coreligionists who were on foreign service in
the Army and the Navy, with a view subse-
quently to suggesting reforms for any existing
evil in the military and naval systems when he
reported back to the main board of his church.

To an innocent bystander it appeared that
this particular investigator had a considerable
contract upon his hands. Scattered over land
and sea on this hemisphere there must be a
good many thousands of members of his faith
who are wearing the khaki or the marine blue.
It would be practically impossible, I figured, to
recognise them in their uniforms for what,
denominationally speaking, they were; and
from what I had seen of our operations I
doubted whether any commanding officer would
be willing to suspend routine while the reverend
[269]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

tabulator went down the lines taking his census ;
besides, the latter process would invariably
consume considerable time. I calculated off-
hand that if the war lasted three years longer it
still would be over before he could complete
his rounds of all the camps and all the ships
and all the rest billets and bases and hospitals
and lines of communication, and so o;n. So I
ventured to ask him just how he meant to go
about getting his compilations of testimony
together.

He told me blandly that as yet he had not
fully worked out that detail of the task. For
the time being he would content himself with a
general survey of the situation and with securing
material for a lecture which he thought of
giving upon his return to America.

I felt a strong inclination to speak to him
after some such fashion as this:

"My dear sir, if I were you I would not
greatly concern myself regarding the physical
and the moral states of individuals composing
our Expeditionary Forces. That job is already
being competently attended to by experts.
So far as my own observations go the chaplains
are all conscientious, hard-working men. There
are a large number of excellent and experienced
chaplains over here — enough, in fact, to go
round. They are doing everything that is
humanly possible to be done to keep the men
happy and amused in their leisure hours and to
help them to continue to be decent, clean-
[270]

CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION

minded, normal human beings. Almost with-
out exception, to the best of my knowledge and
belief, the officers are practically lending their
personal influence and using the power and the
weight of discipline to accomplish the same
desirable ends.

"On the physical side our boys are in splendid
condition. We may have bogged slightly down
in some of the aspects of this undertaking, but
there is plenty of healthful and nourishing food
on hand for every American boy in foreign
service. He is comfortably clothed and com-
fortably shod — his officers see to that; and he is
housed in as comfortable a billet as it is possible
to provide, the state of the country being what
it is. While he is well and hearty he has his
fill of victuals three times a day, and if he falls
ill, is wounded or hurt he has as good medical
attendance and as good nursing and as good
hospital treatment as it is possible for our
country to provide.

"Touching on the other side of the proposition
I would say this: In England, where there are
powerfully few dry areas, and here in France,
which is a country where everybody drinks
wine, I have seen a great many thousands of
our enlisted men — soldiers, sailors and marines,
engineers and members of battalions. I have
seen them in all sorts of surroundings and under
all sorts of circumstances. I have seen perhaps
twenty who were slightly under the influence of
alcoholic stimulant. As a sinner would put it,
[271]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

they were slightly jingled — not disorderly, not
staggering, you understand, but somewhat
jingled. I have yet to see one in such a state
as the strictest police-court magistrate would
call a state of outright intoxication. That has
been my experience. I may add that it has
been the common experience of the men of my
profession who have had similar opportunities
for observing the conduct of our fellows

"It is true that the boys indulge in a good
deal of miscellaneous cussing — which is deplor-
able, of course, and highly reprehensible. Still,
in my humble opinion most of them use pro-
fanity as a matter of habit and not because
there is any real lewdness or any real viciousness
in their hearts. Mainly they cuss for the same
reason that a parrot does. Anyhow, I could
hardly blame a fellow sufferer for swearing
occasionally, considering the kind of spring
weather we have been having in these parts
lately.

"As for their morals, I am firmly committed
to the belief, as a result of what I have seen
and heard, that man for man our soldiers have
a higher moral standard than the men of any
army of any other nation engaged in this war;
and when in this connection I speak of our
soldiers I mean the soldiers of Canada as well
as the soldiers of the United States. Any man
who tells you the contrary is a liar, and the
truth is not in him. This is not an offhand
alibi; statistics compiled by our own surgeons
[272]

CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION

form the truth of it; and any man who stands
up anywhere on our continent and says that
the soldiers who have come from our side of the
Atlantic to help lick Germany are contracting
habits of drunkenness or that they are being
ruined by the spreading of sexual diseases among
them utters a deliberate and a cruel slander
against North American manhood which should
entitle him to a suit of tar-and-feather under-
wear and a free ride on a rail out of any
community.

"There is absolutely nothing the matter
with our boys except that they are average
human beings, and it is going to take a long
time to cure them of that. And please remem-
ber this — that, discipline being what it is and
military restraint being what it is, it is very
much harder for a man in the Army or the Navy
to get drunk or to misconduct himself than it
would be for him to indulge in such excesses
were he out in civil life, as a free agent. "

That in fact was what I wanted to pour into
the ear of the ecclesiastical prober. But I did
not. I saved it up to say it here, where it
would enjoy a wider circulation. I left him
engaged in generally surveying.

Officers and men alike are invariably ready
and willing to voice their gratitude and their
everlasting appreciation of the help and com-
fort provided by those who are attached to lay
organisations having for the time being a more
or less military complexion; they_are equally
[273]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

ready to score the incompetents who infre-
quently turn up in these auxiliary branches of
the service. A man who is fighting Fritz is apt
to have a short temper anyhow, and meddle-
some busybodies who want to aid without
knowing any of the rudiments make him see
red and swear blue.

A general of division told me that when he
moved in with his command to the sector
which he then was occupying he was tagged
by an undoubtedly earnest but undeniably
pestiferous person who wanted everything else
suspended until his purposes in accompanying
the expedition had been satisfied.

"I was a fairly busy person along about
then," said the general. "We were within
reach of the enemy's big guns and his aero-
planes were giving us considerable bother, and
what with getting a sufficiency of dugouts and
trench shelters provided for the troops and
attending to about a million other things of
more or less importance from a military stand-
point I had mighty little time to spare for side
issues; and my officers had less.

"But the person I am speaking of kept after
me constantly. His idea was that the men
needed recreation and needed it forthwith. He
was there to provide this recreation without
delay, and he couldn't understand why there
should be any delay in attending to his wishes.

"Finally, to get rid of him, I gave orders that
a noncommissioned officer and a squad of men
[274]

CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION

should be taken away from whatever else they
were doing and told off to aid our self-appointed
amusement director in doing whatever it was
he wanted done. It was the only way short of
putting him under arrest that would relieve me
of a common nuisance and leave my staff free
to do their jobs.

"Well, it seemed that the young man had
brought along with him a tent and a moving-
picture outfit and a supply of knockdown seats.
Under his direction the detail of men set up the
tent on an open site which he selected upon the
very top of a little hill, where it stood out against
the sky line like a target; which, in a way of
speaking, was exactly what it was. Then he
installed his moving-picture machine and ranged
his chairs in rows and announced that that
evening there would be a free show. I may add
that I knew nothing of this at the time, and
inasmuch as the recreation man was known to
be acting by my authority with a free hand no
officer felt called upon to interfere, I suppose.

"The show started promptly on time, with
a large and enthusiastic audience of enlisted
men on hand and with the tent all lit up inside.
In the midst of the darkness roundabout it
must have loomed up like a lighthouse. Natu-
rally there were immediate consequences.

"Before the first reel was halfway unrolled
a boche flying man came sailing over, with the
notion of making us unhappy in our under-
ground shelters if he could. He found a
[275] (

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

shining mark waiting for him, so dropped a
bomb at that tent. Luckily the bomb missed
the tent, but it struck alongside of it and the
concussion blew the canvas flat. The men
came out from under the flattened folds and
stampeded for the dugouts, wrecking the
moving-picture machine in their flight. And
the next day we were shy one amusement
director. He had gone away from there. "

In the Army itself there are exceedingly few
members of the Bejones of Tuxedo family, and
this, I take it, is a striking evidence of the
average high intelligence of the men who have
been chosen to officer our forces, considering
that we started at scratch to mould millions
of civilians into soldiers and considering also
how necessary it was at the outset to issue a
great number of commissions overnight, as it
were. Howsomever, now and again a curious
ornithological specimen does bob up, wearing
shoulder straps.

A party of civilians, observers, were sent to
France by a friendly power to have a look at
our troops. When they reached General Head-
quarters they were being escorted by a beard-
less youth with the bars of a second lieutenant
on his coat. He also wore two bracelets, one
of gold and one of silver, on his right wrist.
He also spoke with a fascinating lisp. He went
straight to the office of the officer commanding
the Intelligence Section.

"Colonel," he says, "I regard it as a great
[276]

CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION

mistake to send me out here with this party.
My work is really in Paris. "

"Well," said the colonel, "you let Paris
worry along without you as best it can while
you toddle along and accompany these visiting
gentlemen over such-and-such a sector. Oh,
yes, there is one other thing: Kindly close the
door behind you on your way out."

The braceleted one hid his petulance behind
a salute, his jewelry meanwhile jingling pleas-
antly, and withdrew from the presence. For
two days in an automobile he toured with his
charge, at a safe distance behind the front lines.
On the evening of the second day, when they
reached the railroad station to await the train
which would carry them back to Paris, he was
heard to remark with a heartfelt but lispy sigh
of relief: "Well, thank heaven for one thing
anyhow — I have done my bit!"

Without being in possession of the exact
facts I nevertheless hazard the guess that this
young person either has been sent or shortly
will be going back to his native land. Weeding-
out is one of the best things this Army of our
does. It would be well, in my humble judg-
ment, if folks at home followed the Army's
example in this regard, but conducted the weed-
ing-out process over there.

For men and women who can be of real
service, who can endure hardships without col-
lapsing and without complaining, who can fend
for themselves when emergencies arise, who are
[277]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

self-reliant, competent, well skilled in their
vocations, there is need here in France in the
Red Cross, in the Y. M. C. A., in the Y. M. H. A.,
in the K. of C., in the hospitals, in the telephone
exchanges, the motor service, the ambulance
service and in scores of other fields of depart-
mental and allied activity. If these persons
can speak a little French, so much the better.

But for the camouflaged malingerer, for the
potential slacker, for the patriotic but un-
qualified zealot, for the incompetent one who
mistakes enthusiasm for ability, and for the
futile commission member there is no room
whatsoever. This job of knocking the mania
out of Germania is a big job, and the closer one
gets to it the bigger it appears. We can't make
it absolutely a fool-proof war, but by a proper
discrimination exercised at home we can reduce
the number of Americans in Europe for whose
presence here there appears to be no valid
excuse whatsoever.

P. S. I hope they read these few lines in
Washington.

[278]

CHAPTER XVII
YOUNG BLACK JOE

YOU rode along a highroad that was
built wide and ran straight, miles on,
and through a birch forest that was
very dense and yet somehow very
orderly, as is the way with French highroads,
and with French forests, too, and after a while
you came to where the woods frazzled away
from close-ranked white trunks into a fringing
of lacy undergrowth, all giddy and all gaudy
with wild flowers of many a colour.

Here, in a narrow clearing that traversed
the thickets at right angles to the course you
had been following, there disclosed himself
a high-garbed North American mule, a little
bit under weight, so that his backbone stood out
sharply like the ridgepole of a roof pitched
steep, with hollows by his hip joints to catch
the rain water in. Viewing him astern or on the
quarter you discerned that his prevalent archi-
tecture, though mixed, inclined to the mansard
type. Viewing him bow-on you observed that
he wore a gas mask upon his high and narrow
[279]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

temples and that from beneath this adornment,
which would be startling elsewhere but which
at the Front is both commonplace and cus-
tomary, he contemplated the immediate fore-
ground with half-closed, indolent eyes and
altogether was as much at home as though
his chin rested upon the hickory top rider of a
snake fence in his native Ozarks instead of
resting, as it did, athwart the crosspiece of a
low signpost reading: "Danger Beyond — All
Cars Halt Here! Proceed Afoot!"

You might be sure that never did any mule
born in Missouri take his languid ease amid
surroundings more unique for a mule to be in,
inside or outside of that sovereign common-
wealth. There was, to begin with, his gas mask,
draped upon the spindled brow and ready, on
warning, to be yanked down over the muzzle
and latched fast beneath the throat; probably
as a veteran mule he was used to that. But
there were other things: High-velocity shells
from a battery of six-inches somewhere in the
woods to the west were going over his head at
regular half-minute intervals, each in its pas-
sage making a sound as though everybody on
earth in chorus had said "Whew-w-w-!" — like
that. Merely by cocking an eyelid aloft he
could have beheld, sundry thousands of feet
up, three French combat planes hunting a
German raider back to his own lines, the
French motors humming steadily like honey-
bees but the German droning to a deeper note
[280]

YOUNG BLACK JOE

with sullen heavy rift tones breaking into its
cadences, for all the world like one of those big
noisy beetles that invade your bedchamber on
a hot night. Merely by squinting straight
ahead he could have seen at the farther edge
of the little glade a triple row of white crosses,
each set off by the wooden rosette device in red,
white and blue with which the French, when
given time, mark the graves of their fallen
fighters. Merely by sniffing he could have
caught from a mile distant the faint but un-
mistakable reek that hangs over battlefields
when they are getting to be old battlefields but
are not yet very old, and that nearly always
distresses green work animals at the first time of
taking it into their nostrils. None of these
things he did though, but remained content
and motionless save for his wagging ears and
his switching tail and his uneasy lower lip.
He was just standing there, letting the hot
sunshine seep into him through all his pores.

Otherwise, however, his more adjacent set-
tings were in a manner of speaking conventional
and according to mules. For he was attached by
virtue of an improvised gear of wire ropes and
worn leather breeching to a small flat car that
bestraddled a rusty railroad track; and at his
head stood a ginger-coloured youth of twenty
years or thereabouts. In our own land you
somehow expect, when you find a mule engaged
in industry, to find an American of African
antecedents managing him. So the combina-
[281]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

tion was in keeping with the popular conception.
Only in this instance the attendant youth wore
part of a uniform and had a steel shrapnel hel-
met clamped down upon his skull.

Said youth caught a nod from a corporal of his
own race who lounged against a broken wall,
the wall being practically all that remained of
what once had been the home of a crossings
guard alongside a railroad that was a real
railroad no longer; and at that he climbed
nimbly on muleback.

He gathered up the guiding strings, and this
then was the starting signal he gave as he
showed all his teeth — he seemed to have fifty
teeth at least — in a gorgeous and friendly grin:
"All abo'd fur the Fifty-nint' Street crosstown
line!"

By that you would have known, if you
knew your New York at all, that this particular
muleteer must hail from that nook of Li'l Ole
Manhattan which since the days of the Yanko-
Spanko war, when a certain group of black
troopers did a certain valiant thing, has been
called San Juan Hill, and that away off here
where now he was, in the back edges of France,
he had in his own mind at the moment a picture
of West Fifty-ninth Street as it might look—
and probably would — on this bright warm after-
noon, stretching as a narrow band, biaswise,
of the town from the Black Belt on the West
Side with its abutting chop-suey parlours and
its fragrant barber shops and its clubrooms for
[282]

YOUNG BLACK JOE

head and side waiters, on past Columbus
Circle into the lighter coloured districts to the
eastward; and likewise that since he did have
the image in his mind he perhaps grinned his
toothful grin to hide a pang of homesickness
for the place where he belonged.

I figured that I knew these things, who had
journeyed by motor with two more for a hundred
and eighty miles across country to pay a visit to
the first sector in our front lines that had been
taken over by a regiment of negro volunteers —
now by reason of departmental classifyings
known as the Three Hundred and Somethingth
of the American Expeditionary Forces. Be-
cause New York was where I also belonged, and
this genial postilion was of a breed made familiar
to me long time ago in surroundings vastly
dissimilar to these present ones.

To the three of us word had come, no matter
how, that negro troops of ours were in the line.
No authoritative announcement to that effect
having been forthcoming, we were at the first
hearing of the news skeptical. To be sure the
big movement overseas was at last definitely
and audaciously under way; the current month's
programme called for the landing on French soil
of two hundred thousand Americans of fighting
age and fighting dispositions, which contract, I
might add, was carried out so thoroughly that
not only the promised two hundred thousand
but a good and heaping measure of nearly sixty
thousand more on top of that arrived before the
[ 283 ]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

thirtieth. It is The Glory of the Coming all
right, this great thing that has happened this
summer over here, and I am glad that mine
eyes have seen it. It is almost the finest thing
that the eye of an American of this generation
has yet seen or is likely to see before Germany
herself is invaded.

But even though the sea lanes were streaky
with the wakes of our convoys and the dis-
embarkation ports cluttered with our transports,
we doubted that coloured troops were as yet
facing the enemy across the barbed-wire boun-
daries that separate him from us. Possibly this
was because we had grown accustomed to think-
ing of our negroes as members of labour battalions
working along the lines of communication-
unloading ships and putting up warehouses and
building depots and felling trees in the forests
of France, which seem doomed to fall either
through shelling or by the axes of the timbering
crews of the Allies.

"You must be wrong," we said to him who
brought us the report. "You must have seen
an unusually big lot ofcnegroes going up to work
in the lumber camps in the woods at the north. "

"No such thing," he said. "I tell you that
we've got black soldiers on the job — at least
two regiments of them. There's a draft regi-
ment from somewhere down South, and another
regiment from one of the Eastern States — one of
the old National Guard outfits I think it is —
about fifteen miles to the east of the first lot.
[284]

YOUNG BLACK JOE

Here, I can show you about where they are —
if anybody's got a map handy. "

Everybody had a map handy. A corre-
spondent no more thinks of moving about with-
out a map than he thinks of moving about
without a gas mask and a white paper, which is a
pass. He wouldn't dare move without the
mask; he couldn't move far without the pass, and
the next to these two the map is the most
needful part of his travelling equipment.

So that was how the quest started. As we
came nearer to the somewhat indefinitely
located spot for which we sought, the signs
that we were on a true trail multiplied, in bits of
evidence offered by supply-train drivers who
told us they lately had met negro troopers on
the march in considerable number. As a
matter of fact there were then four black regi-
ments instead of two taking up sector positions
in our plan of defence. However, that fact was
to develop later through a statement put forth
with the approval of the censor at General
Headquarters.

After some seven hours of reasonably swift
travel in a high-powered car we had left behind
the more peaceful districts back of the debatable
areas and were entering into the edges of a
village that had been shot to bits in the great
offensive of 1914, which afterward had been
partially rebuilt and which lately had been
abandoned again, after the great offensive of
1918 started.

[285]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Right here from somewhere in the impending
clutter of nondescript ruination we heard many
voices singing all together. The song was a
strange enough song for these surroundings.
Once before in my life and only once I have
heard it, and that was five years ago on an
island off the coast of Georgia. I don't think
it ever had a name and the author of it had
somehow got the Crucifixion and the Discovery
of America confused in his mind.

We halted the car behind the damaged wall of
an abandoned garden, not wishing to come upon
the unseen choristers until they had finished.
Their voices rose with the true camp-meeting
quaver, giving reverence to the lines:

In Fo'teen Hunnerd an9 Ninety-one
9Twuz den my Saviour's work begun.

And next the chorus, long-drawn-out and
mournful:

Oh, dey nailed my Saviour 9pon de cross,
But he never spoke a mumblin9 word.

I was explaining to my companions, both of
them Northern-born, that mumbling in the
language of the tidewater darky means com-
plaining and not what it means with us, but
they bade me hush while we hearkened to the
next two verses, each of two lines, with the
chorus repeated after the second line:

In Fo'teen Hunnerd an9 Ninety-two
My Lawd begin his work to do!
[286]

YOUNG BLACK JOE

In Fo'teen Hunnerd an9 Ninety-three
Dey nailed my Saviour on de gallows tree.

And back to the first verse — there were only
three verses, it seemed — and through to the
third, over and over again.

An invisible choir leader broke in with a
different song and the others caught it up. But
this one we all knew — My Soul Bears Witness
to de Lawd — so we started the machine and
rode round from back of the wall. The singers,
twenty or more of them, were lying at ease on
the earth alongside a house in the bright, bak-
ing sunshine of a still young but very ardent
summer. On beyond them everywhere the
place swarmed with their fellows in khaki, some
doing nothing at all and some doing the things
that an American soldier, be he black or white,
is apt to do when off duty in billets. Almost
without exception they were big men, with
broad shoulders and necks like bullocks, and
their muscles bulged their sleeves almost to
bursting. From the fact that nine out of ten
were coal-black and from a certain intonation in
their voices never found among up-country
negroes, a man familiar with the dialects and
the types of the Far South might know them for
natives of the rice fields and the palmetto bar-
rens of the coast. Lower Georgia and South
Carolina — there was where they had come from
plainly enough, with perhaps a sprinkling among
them of Florida negroes. Our course, steered
[287]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

as it was by chance reckoning, had nevertheless
been a true one.

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 in-
ordinately 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 them-
selves 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

1 288 ]

YOUNG BLACK JOE

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'tnore 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 bom-
bardment. 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 natu-
rally 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 some-
thin'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
[289]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 water-
melons 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.
[290]

YOUNG BLACK JOE

"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
[ 291 ]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 cours-
ing 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
[292]

YOUNG BLACK JOE

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 observa-
tion 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, transconti-
nental 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 home-
grown mule for motive power; a Yankee second
lieutenant and a French liaison officer for added
passengers; and for special scenic touches along-
side the bramble-grown cut through which we
jogged, machine guns so mounted as to com-
mand aisles chopped through the thickets, and
[293]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 Hun, and at inter-
vals aerial skirmishes occurring away up over-
head— 'twas a braw and a bonny day for aerial
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

YOUNG BLACK JOE

by their attitude, a sincere and heartfelt in-
clination 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 coun-
try, 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
[295]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 super-
fluous in view of the attendant circumstances,
that he earned it.

Through the cable dispatches which my
companions straightway sent, they being corre-
spondents tfor 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 ac-
count 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
[296]

YOUNG BLACK JOE

these twain then and there offered it in abun-
dance.

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 care-
fully 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. "

[297]

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
[298]

LET'S GO !"

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 tem-
porarily occupied as a combination parlour,
boudoir, office, breakfast room and head-
quarters. "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 res-
ignations, 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 under-
[299]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

stand 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 prepara-
tion 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 front-
line 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 investi-
gation. 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
[ 300]

LET'S GO !'

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
[301]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

with the other. 'Fur Gawd's sake, suh, wake
up. The Germans is comin' — in automo-
biles!'

"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

[ 302 ]

"LET'S GO!"

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. Per-
sonally 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
[ 303]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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 excel-
lent French, the villagers openly cried; and an
elderly peasant, heavily whiskered, with the
tears of a joyous and thankful enthusiasm
[304]

LET'S GO !"

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 dern 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 un-
conscious 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 naive 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
[305 ]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

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:

"LIEUTENANT SIDNEY J. MCCLELLAND,

"Commanding Company B, , A. E. F.,

U. S. A.

"Dear Sir: I am being fired on heavily from the

left. I await your instructions.

"Trusting these few lines will find you the same,

I remain, Yours truly,

"JEFFERSON JONES."

The other thing was an extract from a
letter written by an eighteen-year-old private
to his old mother in New York, with no idea
in his head when he wrote it that any eyes
other than those of his own people would read
[306]

"LET'S GO!''

it after it had been censored and posted. The
officer to whom it came for censoring copied
from it one paragraph, and this paragraph ran
like this:

/' Mammy, these French people don't bother with
no colour-line business. They treat us so good that
the only time I ever knows I'm coloured is when I
looks in the glass."

Coming away — and we came reluctantly —
we skirted the edge of the billeting area where
the regiment of Southern negroes was quartered,
and again we heard them singing. But this
time they sang no plaintive meeting-house air.
They sang a ringing, triumphant, Glory-Glory-
Hallelujah song. For — so we learned — to them
the word had come that they were about to
move up and perhaps come to grips with the
Bush-Germans. Yes, most assuredly n-i-g-
g-e-r is going to have a different meaning when
this war ends.

[307]

CHAPTER XIX
WAR AS IT ISN'T

JT~ r^HREE of us, correspondents, had gone

up with a division of ours that was

taking over one of the Picardy sectors.

The French moved out by degrees as

we by degrees moved in. On the night when

we actually came into the front lines two of us

slept — or tried to — in a house of a village

perhaps a mile and a half behind the forward

trenches. The third man went on perhaps a

half mile nearer the trouble zone with a battalion

of an infantry regiment that on the morrow

would relieve some sorely battered poilus in the

trenches. It is with an experience of this third

man I now mean to deal.

He found lodgment in a chateau on the out-
skirts of a village the name of which does not
matter — and probably never will matter again,
seeing that it fairly was blasted out of the earth
by its foundations the next time the Germans
attempted to resume their advance toward the
Channel. As for the chateau, which likewise
must be quite gone by now, it was more of a
[308]

WAR AS IT ISN'T

chateau than some of the buildings that go
by this high-sounding title in the edges of
Normandy.

A chateau may mean a veritable castle of a
place, with towers upon it and a moat and
gardens and terraces and trout ponds round
about it. Then again on the other hand it
may mean merely a sizable private residence,
standing somewhat aloof in its own plot from
the close-huddled clustering of lesser folks'
cottages that make up the town proper. The
term is almost as elastic in its classifications
as the word estate is in America. In this
instance, though, the chateau was a structure
of some pretensions and much consequence.
Rather, it had been when its owner fled before
the great spring advance, leaving behind him all
that he owned except a few portable belongings.
The neighbours had run away, too, and for
months now the only tenants of the vicinity
had been troops.

French officers and a few American officers
were occupying the chateau. Every room and
every hallway was crowded already, but space
for the correspondent to spread down his
bedding roll was provided in an inner chamber
on the second floor. At two o'clock in the
morning, by consent of the divisional com-
mander, he was going out into the debatable
land between the trenches with a wire-mending
party. There is always a chance that a wire
party will bump into a squad of enemies on the
[309]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

prowl or surprise a raiding outfit from Fritzie's
trenches, and then there are doings to ensue.

Two o'clock was four hours off and the special
guest hoped to get a little sleep in the 'tween
times. It was a vain hope, because, to judge
by their behaviour, the Germans had found out
a relief division was on its way in. Since
nightfall they had been shelling the back areas
of the sector, and particularly the lines of
communication, with might and main — and six-
inch guns. For the most part the shells were
passing entirely over and far beyond the
chateau, but they made quite as much noise
as though they had been dropping in the court-
yard outside — more noise, as a matter of
seeming, because the screech of a big shell in its
flight overhead racks the eardrums as the
crash of the explosion rarely does unless the
explosion occurs within a few rods of one.

So for four hours or thereabouts our corre-
spondent lay on his pallet, wide-eyed, and with
every nerve in his body standing on end and
wriggling. When the French liaison officer
who had volunteered to escort him on the
adventure rapped upon his door he was quite
ready to start. He had taken off nothing
except his trench helmet and his gas mask
before turning in, anyhow.

"Walk very quietly, if you please," bade the
Frenchman, leading the way out, with a pocket
flashlight in his hand.

Obeying the request the correspondent tip-
[310]

WAR AS IT ISN'T

toed along behind his guide. To get outdoors
they passed through two other rooms and
down a flight of stairs and along a hallway
opening into the wrecked garden. In the beds
that were in the rooms and upon blankets on
the floors of the rooms and also in the hallway
French officers were stretched, exhaling the
heavy breaths of men who have worked hard
and who need the rest they are taking. Only
one man stirred, and that was downstairs as the
pair who were departing picked their way
between the double rows of sleepers. A loose
plank creaked sharply under the weight of the
American, and a man stirred in his coverlids
and opened his eyes for a moment; and then,
turning over, was off again almost instantly.

At that, understanding came to the corre-
spondent— he knew now why the thoughtful
liaison officer had cautioned him to step lightly.
To these men lying here about him the infernal
clamour of the shells had become a customary
part of their lives, whether waking or sleeping.
To their natures, accustomed as they were to it,
this hideous din was a lullaby song. But any
small unusual sound, such as the noise of a
booted foot falling upon a squeaky board,
might rouse them, and two men clumping care-
lessly past them would have brought every one
of them out of his slumbers, sitting up.

Paradoxes such as this are forever cropping
up in one's wartime experiences. Indeed, war
may be said to be made up of countless para-

[311]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

doxes, overlapping and piled one upon another.
To me the most striking of the outstanding
manifestations of war on its paradoxical side
is the fact that in this war nothing, or almost
nothing, actually turns out in accordance with
what one's idea of it had been beforehand.
Looking backward on what I myself have viewed
of its physical and metaphysical aspects I can
think of scarcely an element or a phase which
accorded with my preconceived brain image of
the thing. I do not mean by this that as a
spectacle it has been disappointing, but that
almost invariably it has been different from
what I was expecting it would be. I found this
to be true in 1914, back at the very beginning.
Take for example the fashion after which men
bear themselves as they go into battle; and,
for a more striking illustration than that, their
customary deportment after they actually are
in the battle. I figure that beforehand my
own notion of what these two demonstrations
would be like was based probably in part upon
conceptions derived from old-time pictures of
Civil War engagements, highly coloured, highly
imaginative representations such as used to
hang upon the parlour walls of every orthodox
rural home in our country; and in part upon
fiction stories with war for a background which
I had read; and finally perhaps in some lesser
part upon the moving-picture man's ideas as
worked out with more or less artistic license in
the pre-war films. I rather think the average

[312]

stay-at-home's notions in these regards must
be pretty much what mine were, because he
probably derived them from the same sources.
The utter dissimilarity of the actual thing as I
have repeatedly viewed it in three countries
of Europe astonished me at first, and in lessen-
ing degree continued to astonish me until the
real picture of it had supplanted the conjured
one in my mind.

If the reader's ideas are still fundamentally
organised as mine formerly were he thinks men
on the edge of the fight, with the prospect
before them of very shortly being at grips with
the enemy, maintain a sober and a serious front,
wearing upon them the look of men who are
upborne and inspired by a purpose to acquit
themselves steadfastly and well. By the same
process of reasoning I take it that the reader,
conceding he or she has never been brought
face to face with war, pictures men on the
march in periods of comparative immunity from
immediate peril as singing their way along, with
jokes and catchwords flitting back and forth and
a general holidaying air pervading the scene
presented by the swinging column. Now my
observation has been that the exact opposite is
commonly the case.

Men on the casual march, say, from one
billeting place to another, are apt to push ahead
stolidly and for the most part in silence. It is
hard work, marching under heavy equipment
is, and after a few hours of it the strongest
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

individual in the ranks feels the pangs of weari-
ness in his scissoring legs and along his burdened
back. So he bends forward from the hips and
he hunches his shoulders and wastes mighty
little of his breath in idle persiflage. Only
toward the end of the journey, when rest and
food are in impending prospect, do his spirits
revive to a point where he feels like singing
and guying his mates. The thud-thud-thud
of the feet upon the highroad, the grunted com-
mands of the officers, and the occasional clatter
of metal striking against metal as a man shifts
his piece are likely to be the only accom-
paniments of the hike for miles on end; and
there isn't much music really in such sounds as
these.

But suppose the same men are moving into
action and know whither they are bound. The
preliminary nervousness that possesses every
normally constituted man at the prospect of
facing the deadliest forms of danger now moves
these men to hide their true emotions under a
masking of gaiety. This gaiety, which largely
is assumed at the outset, presently becomes
their real mood. Nine men out of ten who pass
are indulging in quips and catches. Nine in
ten are ready to laugh at trivialities that
ordinarily would go unnoticed. One standing
by to watch them must diagnose the average
expression on the average face as betokening
exultation rather than exaltation. The tenth
man is quiet and of a thoughtful port. He is
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WAR AS IT ISN T

forcing himself to appraise the situation before
him in its right proportions, and so the infection
that fills his comrades passes him by. Yet it is
safe to bet on it that the sober one-tenth, in the
high hour of the grapple, will contend with just
as much gallantry as the nine-tenths can hope
to show.

Particularly is the mental slant that I have
here sought to describe true in its applica-
tion to raw troops who have yet to taste of
close-up fighting. Seasoned veterans who have
weathered the experience before now and who
know what it means, and know, too, that they
may count upon themselves and their fellows
to acquit themselves valorously, are upborne
by a certain all-pervading cheerfulness — perhaps
as a rule confidence would be a better word than
cheerfulness — but they are not quite so noisy,
not quite so enthusiastic as the greener hands.
At this moment they are not doing very much
in the cheering line, though they will yell just
as loudly as any when the order is to fix bay-
onets and charge.

Paradoxically the reaction upon men who
have come whole out of the inferno of battling
at close quarters affects these two compared
classes of soldier-men differently — at least that
has been my observation. The unseasoned
men, to whom the hell from which they have
just emerged has been for them a new kind of
hell, are as likely as not almost downcast in
their outward demeanour, irritable and peevish

[315]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

in their language. For one thing, they are dog-
tired; for another, I would say, a true apprecia-
tion of the ordeal through which they have
passed is now coming home to them; for still
another, the shock of having seen their mates
wiped out all about them surely affects the
general consciousness of the survivors; and
finally, as I appraise their sensations, the calm
following the tumult and the struggle leaves
them well-nigh numbed. Certainly it fre-
quently leaves them inarticulate almost to
dumbness. Give them twenty-four hours for
rest and mental adjustment, and the coltishness
of youth returns to them in ample measure,
especially if there is a victory to their credit.

On the contrasting hand, if you want to
witness an exhibition of good cheer at the end
of a day of fighting seek for it among the
veterans. On a certain day in May when the
second of the great German drives was in
progress I chanced to be at a spot where a
brigade of French infantry — a brigade with a
magnificent record made earlier in the war —
was thrown into action to reenforce a hard-
pressed and decimated British command. Al-
most without exception the little dusty, rusty
poilus went to the fighting in a sort of matter-
of-fact methodical silence more impressive to
me than loud outbursts could possibly have
been. Quietly, swiftly, without lost motion or
vain exclamations, but moving all like men
intent upon the performance of a difficult and an
[316]

WAR AS IT ISN'T

unpleasant but a highly necessary task, they
took up their guns, adjusted their packs of
ammunition, set their helmets over their fore-
heads, and walked with no undue haste but
only with an assured and briskened serenity
into the awfulness that was beyond the clouds
of smoke and dust, just yonder.

That same evening, by a streak of luck, I
returned to approximately the same spot at the
moment when those who were left of the
Frenchmen prepared to bivouac on the edges
of the same terrain where all the afternoon they
had fought. With the help of some skeleton
formations of British companies they had
withstood the German onslaught; more than
that, they had broken two advancing waves of
the gray coats and finally had swept the ripped
and riddled legions of the enemy back for a good
mile, so that now they held the field as victors.
Elsewhere along that fifty-mile front there might
be a different story to tell, but here in this small
corner of the great canvas of the mighty battle
a localised success that was worth while had
been achieved by these heroes. Under them
now their legs quivered from stark weariness.
Some were black like negroes; the stale sweat
and the dried dirt and the powder grit had
caked them over. Some were red like Indians,
where the crusted blood from small uncon-
sidered wounds dyed the skin on their faces
and their hands.

Now with the fog of fighting turning grey
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

upon their unwashed bodies they sprawled on
the stained and trodden meadow grass along-
side the road, looking, with their figures fore-
shortened by lying, most absurdly like exceed-
ingly dirty small boys who had been playing
at soldiering. Yet spent and worn as they were
they gibed us as we passed, and with uplifted
canteens they toasted us — presumably in the
thin Pinard; and they sang songs without
number and they uttered spicy Gallic jokes at
the expense of the mess cooks for their tardiness
in making ready the supper stews. The job of
the day was done with and ended; it was a fit
time for being merry, and these little men were
most exceedingly merry.

Such was the excess of their jollifying that
had one not known better one might have sus-
pected that they had been drinking something
stronger than the thin wine ration upon which no
Frenchman ever gets drunk. I recall one stunted
chap who reeled and staggered as he made his
way toward our halted car to ask us for news
from the eastward. He had stuck into the
sooted muzzle of his rifle a sheaf of wild flowers;
and reeling and rocking on his heels he sought
to embrace us when we offered him cigarettes.
He was tipsy all right; but not with liquor — with
emotion; the sort of emotion that temporarily
befuddles a fighting man who has fought well
and who is glad to have finished fighting for
the time being, at least. As we left him he was
propped upon his short unsteady legs at the
[318]

roadside singing the song that your poilu always
by preference sings when his mood inclines to
the blithesome; he sang the Madelon.

Right here, I think, is a good enough time
for me to say that in these times the place to
hear the Marseillaise hymn played or sung is
not France but America. In America one
hears it everywhere — the hand organs play it,
the theatre orchestras play it, the military
bands play it, pretty ladies sing it at patriotic
concerts. In France in seven months I have
heard it just twice — once in the outskirts of the
great battle on March twenty-sixth, just out-
side of Soissons, when a handful of French
soldiers hurrying up to the fight were moved
by some passing fancy, which we who heard
them could not fathom, to chant a verse or
two of the song; and again on Memorial Day,
when an American band played it in a French
burying ground at a coast town where the
graves of three hundred of our own soldiers were
decorated.

It may be that the Frenchman has grown
wearied of the sound of his national air, or it
may be — and this, I think, is the proper explana-
tion— that in this time of stress and suffering
for his land the Marseillaise hymn has for him
become a thing so high and so holy that he
holds it for sacred moments, to be rendered
then as the accompaniment for a sacrificial rite
of the spirit and of the soul. At any rate it is
true that except on the one occasion I have
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

just mentioned I have yet to hear the French
soldier in the field sing the Marseillaise hymn.
He much prefers his cheerful chansons, and
when an American band plays for him it is a
jazz tune that most surely may be counted
upon to make him cry "Encore!"

As illustrative of the difference in tempera-
ment between the veteran and the beginner at
war I should like to describe what many times
I have witnessed as an incident in the streets
of Paris. All through the past spring and the
early part of the summer the members of the
class of 1919 were holding celebrations in com-
memoration of the fact that they were about to
be called to the service. Their emblematic
colour for this year is red, and their chosen flower
is the poppy, so the youngsters call themselves
Coquelicots, which is the Frencji name for
the crimson wild poppy that grows everywhere
in France. The class of 1918, who went out
last year, were Paquerettes — white daisies;
and those of 1917 were Bluets, or cornflowers.
Every three years the fancy repeats itself in
the same sequence and the same cycle, so that
the trinity of the national colours may be pre-
served.

Almost any hour, day or night, one might
see troops of those about to be mobilised—
schoolboys of eighteen, apprentice lads, peasant
youths, cadets of military academies — parading
the avenues. They wore all manner of fantastic
garbings, with enormous red neckties and red
[320]

sashes, and battered high hats banded with
red, and with poppies stuck in their button-
holes or festooned in garlands about their necks.
And always they were singing and skylarking,
marching with fantastic jig steps in grotesque
queue formations, and playing pranks upon
the pedestrians who got in their way. The
sight made an American think of college fra-
ternities conducting outdoor initiations. The
scene gave colour and the sparkle of youthful
exuberance to a city where the sad sights are
commoner than the happy ones.

It was inevitable that in every few rods of
their progress the youngsters would encounter
soldiers on leave, and then the boys, dropping
for a moment their joyousness, would gravely
salute the veterans, and the veterans as gravely
would return the salute. Then the roisterers
would whirl off down the sidewalk waving their
exaggerated walking sticks and kicking up
their heels as is the way with youth the world
over, and the soldiers in their stained patched
tunics, and their worn leather housings, and
with their worn resolute faces — how often I have
seen this little byplay repeated! — would ex-
change swift expressive glances with one another
and smile meaning, sad little smiles, and shake
their heads in a sort of passive resignation to
the inevitable, before they went trudging on in
their heavy, run-down, shabby boots. They
knew — these war-worn elders did — what the
chosen man children of the generation just

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

emerging from the first stages of its adolescence
would very shortly be called upon to face;
and so they shook their heads in silent but
regretful affirmation of the certain prospect of
an added burden of woefulness and suffering for
the flowered youth of their stricken land. For
these men who had trod the paths of glory that
are so flinty and so hard could understand what
must lie ahead so much better than those
stripling lads to whom the road to war was as
yet a shining and a golden highway!

Have you ever seen at the movies a film
purporting to show an actual scene in the
trenches under hostile fire, wherein the men on
guard there all faced, with squinted eyes and
scowling brows, across the parapets, fingering
their weapons nervously, and rarely or never
glanced toward the camera, but seemingly were
so absorbed in their ambitions to pot the f oeman
across the way they had no thought for any-
thing except the tragic undertaking in hand?
Then again, have you ever seen another so-
called war reel with a similar setting, which
brought before you the figures of soldiers who
from behind the shelter of the piled-up sand-
bags grinned self-consciously in the direction of
the machine that was recording their forms and
their movements for back-home consumption,
and who between intervals of loading and firing
deported themselves pretty much as any group
of sheepishly pleased young men might while
under the eye of a photographing machine and

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WAR AS IT ISN T

who for the moment appeared to be more in-
spired by a perfectly normal human impulse
to show off than by any other thought?

Now I have seen both these varieties of
pictures and assuming that the reader has,
too, I put to him or her this question: Granting
that one of these films was the genuine article,
namely, a view of a section of a front-line
trench taken at risk of the operator's life; and
that the other was a manufactured thing, with
carefully rehearsed supers made up as soldiers
posing in obedience to a hired director's orders,
which one, in the reader's opinion, was the
authentic thing and which the bogus?

If I have figured the probable answer aright
the probable answer is wrong. The picture in
which the soldiers behaved in conformity with
the average civilian's notion of the way a soldier
does behave under fire — to wit, by being all
intent upon the job of shooting, with no regard
for any lesser diversions — was the imitation;
and the film in which you saw the soldiers
crowding forward in the narrow trench way in
order to be sure of getting into the focus area—
the one where you saw the soldiers grinning
toward you and winking and nudging their
fellows and generally behaving like curious and
embarrassed children — well, that was the gen-
uine article.

For the fact of the matter is that once the
novelty of his new environment has worn off —
and it does wear off with marvellous speed —

[323 ]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

the soldier in the front-line trench carries on
after identically the same patterns that would
govern him under ordinary circumstances.
The detail that he is in a place of imminent
danger becomes to him of secondary importance.
Except for the chance that any moment he may
stop a bullet his mode of habit resolves itself
back to its familiar elements. He is bored or
he is interested by exactly the same things that
would bore him or excite him anywhere else.
To him the shooting back and forth across the
top very soon becomes a more or less tedious
part of the daily routine of the trench life, but
the intrusion into his corner of a moving-picture
man with a camera is a novelty, an event very
much out of the ordinary; therefore he pays
much more attention to the taking of the
picture than to what goes on pretty steadily
during practically all of his waking hours.

For added qualities of seeming indifference
to externals in the midst of great and stirring
exertions, see the artillerymen who serve with
the heavies. Generally things are fairly lively
among those dainty, darling, death-dealing pets
that are called the 75 's. Under their camou-
flaging they look like speckled pups when they
do not look like spotted circus ponies. It is a
brisksome .and a heartening thing to see how
fast a crew of Frenchmen can serve a battery of
these little pintos, feeding the three-inch shells
into the pieces with such celerity that at a dis-
tance the reports merge together so one might

[324]

almost imagine he heard the voice of an over-
grown machine gun speaking, instead of the
intermingled voices of five separate trouble
makers. Near Compiegne one day I watched
a battery of 75 's at work on the Germans
advancing in mass formation, I keeping count
of the reports; and the average number of
shots per minute per gun was twelve.

But the heavies work more slowly, and their
crews have a sluggish look about them as
befitting men who do their fighting all at long
range and never see the foe; though I suspect
the underlying reason to be that they have
learned to combine the maximum of efficiency
and of accuracy with the minimum of apparent
effort and the minimum of apparent enthu-
siasm. Particularly is this to be said in cases
where the gunners have become expert through
long practice.

On the Montdidier Front on a gloriously
beautiful afternoon of early summer I kept
company for two hours with three French
batteries of 155's. The guns were ranged in
dirt emplacements under a bank alongside a
sunken road that meandered out from the
main street of a village that was empty except
for American and French soldiers. The Ger-
mans were four miles away, beyond a ridge of
low hills. By climbing to the crest of the
nearermost rise and lying there in the rank
grass and looking through glasses one could
make out the German lines. Without glasses

[325]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

one could mark fairly well where the shells
from our side fell. But during the time I stayed
there no single man among the artillerymen
manifested any desire whatsoever to ascertain
the visible effects of his handiwork.

Over the ground telephone an order would
come from somewhere or other, miles away.
The officer in command of one of the batteries
would sing out the order to fire so many rounds
at such and such intervals. The angles — the
deflections for charge temperature, air tempera-
ture, barometer pressure and wind — had all
been worked out earlier in the day, and a few
corrections for range were required. So all
the men had to do was to fire the guns. And
that literally was all that they did do.

Not all the explosions in that immediate
vicinity were caused by "departs," either.
Occasionally there were to be heard the un-
mistakable whistle and roar and the ultimate
crack of an "arrive," for the Germans' counter-
batteries did not remain silent under the
punishment the French were dealing out. But
when an arrive fell anywhere within eye range
the men barely turned their heads to see the
column of earth and dust and pulverised chalk-
rock go geysering up into the air. It was only
by chance I found out an enemy shell had fallen
that morning among a gun crew stationed near
the westerly end of the line of guns, perhaps a
quarter of a mile away, and had blown seven
men to bits and wounded as many more.
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WAR AS IT ISN'T

Still, this apathy with regard to the potential
consequences of being where an arrive bursts is
not confined to the gunners. When one has
had opportunity to see how many shells fall
without doing any damage to human beings,
and to figure out for oneself how many tons
of metal it takes to kill a man, one likewise
acquires a measure of this same apparent non-
chalance.

For sheer sang-froid it would be hard to
match those whose work I watched that day.
In intervals of activity they lounged under
the gun wheels, smoking and playing card
games; and when one battery was playing
and another temporarily was silent the members
of the idle battery paid absolutely no heed to
the work of their fellows.

In two hours just one thing and only one
thing occurred to jostle them out of their calm.
Something mysterious and very grievous befell
a half-grown dog, which, having been aban-
doned or forgotten by his owners, still lived
on in the ruins of the town and foraged for
scraps among the mess kitchens. Down the
road past the guns came the pup, ki-yiing his
troubles as he ran; and at the sound of his
poignant yelps some of the gunners quit their
posts and ran out into the road, and one of
them gathered up the poor beastie in his arms
and a dozen more clustered about offering the
consolation of pats and soothing words to the
afflicted thing. Presently under this treat-
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

ment he forgot what ailed him, and then the
men went back to their places, discussing the
affair with many gestures and copious speech.
Ten German shells plumping down near by
would not have created half so much excite-
ment as the woes of one ownerless doggie had
created. I said to myself that if the incident
was typically French, likewise it was typical of
what might be called the war temperament as
exemplified among veteran fighters,
i I should add, merely to fill out the settings
of the scene, that scarcely was there a ten-
minute interlude this day in which German
observation planes did not scout over our lines
or French observation planes did not scout
over theirs. Sometimes only a single plane
would be visible, but more often the airmen
moved in squadron formations. Each time
of course that a plane ventured aloft its coursing
flight across the heavens would be marked by
bursting pompons of downy white or black
smoke — white for shrapnel and black for
explosive bursts — where the antiaircraft guns
of one side or the other took wing shots at the
pesky intruder. One time six sky voyagers were
up simultaneously. Another time ten, and
still another no less than sixteen might be
counted at once. But to focus the attention
of any of the persons then upon the earth
below, an aerial combat between the two
groups would have been required, and even
this spectacle — which at the first time of wit-
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WAR AS IT ISN T

nessing it is almost the most stirring isolated
event that military operations have to offer —
very soon, with daily repetitions, becomes al-
most commonplace, as I myself can testify.
War itself is too big a thing for one detached
detail of it to count in the estimates that one
tries to form of the whole thing. It takes a
charge in force over the top or something
equally vivid and spectacular to whet up the
jaded mentality of the onlooker.

CHAPTER XX
THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

SEEKING for the thrills that experience
had taught me would nevertheless prob-
ably not be forthcoming anywhere in
this so-called quiet sector, I went that
same day with a young American officer to a
forward post of command, which was another
name for a screened pit dug in the scalp of a
fair-sized hillock, immediately behind our fore-
most rifle pits. Sitting here upon the tops of
our steel helmets, which the same make fairly
good perches to sit on when the ground is
muddied, we could look through periscope
glasses right into the courtyard of a wrecked
chateau held by the enemy. Upon this spot
some of the guns behind us were playing indus-
triously. We could see where the shells struck
— now in the garden, now near the shattered
outbuildings, now ripping away a slice of the
front walls or a segment of the roof of the
chateau itself; and we could see too, after the
dust of each hit had somewhat lifted, the small
gray figures of Germans scurrying about like
startled ants.

[ 330 ]

THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

A mile away, about, were those Germans,
and yet to all intents and purposes they might
have been twenty miles away; for as things
stood, and with the forces that they had at this
point, it would have taken them days or per-
haps weeks to bridge the gap between their
lines and ours, and it would have taken us as
long to get to where they were. For you see
both forces had abundance of artillery, but
each was holding its front lines with small
groups of infantry. To sit there and peer into
their defences was like looking into a distant
planet peopled by men thinking different
thoughts from ours, and swayed by different
ambitions and moved by impulses all running
counter to those of our breed.

Nevertheless, I must confess that the sensa-
tion of crouching in that hole in the ground,
spying upon the movements of those dwellers
of that other small world, while high above us
the shells passed over, shrieking their war-
whoops as they travelled from or toward our
back lines, very soon lost for me the savour
of interest, just as it had lost it a month before
when I did the same thing in front of Noyon,
or two weeks before near Verdun, or as after-
ward it was to do when I repeated the experience
near Rheims.

So after a bit my companion and I fell to

enjoying the beauties of the day. In front

of us lay a strip of gentle pasture slope not

badly marred by shell craters, and all green

[331]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

except where lovely wide slashes of a bright
yellow flower cut across it like rifts of fallen
sunshine. The lower reaches of air were filled
with the humming of bees, and every minute
the skylarks went singing up into the soft
skies as though filled with a curiosity to find
out what those wailing demons that sped criss-
crossing through the heavens might be.
Presently from a thicket behind us sounded
a bell-like bird note with a sort of melodious
cluck in it. I had never heard that note
before except when uttered by wooden clocks
of presumably Swiss manufacture, but I recog-
nised it for what it was.

"Listen," said my companion: "that's the
second time within a week I've heard it. A
French liaison officer was with me then, and
he said that for three years now the cuckoo
had been silent, and he said that the French
country people believed that since the cuckoo
had begun calling again it was a sign the war
would soon be over — that the cuckoo was
calling for peace on earth."

"I wonder if he was right," I said.

"Well, he was right so far as he personally
was concerned. This war for him was nearly
over. Night before last he was riding back to
division headquarters in a side car, and a shell
dropped on him at a crossroads and he and
the driver were killed."

We sat a minute or two longer and nothing
was said.

[332]

THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

"Well," he said at length, "if you've had
enough of this we'll be getting back. It
isn't very much of a show, once a fellow gets
used to it, and I guess the major will have
supper ready for us pretty soon. Ready to
go?"

We got up cautiously and put our helmets
on the proper ends of us and started back
through the shallow communication trench
leading to the village.

"Being where you can look right across and
down into the German lines makes a fellow
wonder," I suggested. "It makes a fellow
wonder what those men over yonder are
thinking about and \vhat their feelings toward
us are, and whether they hate us as deeply as
they hate the British."

"I guess I can figure out what one of them
thinks anyhow," he said with a quizzical side-
wise glance at me. He flirted over his shoulder
with his thumb. "I've got a brother some-
where over yonder ways — if he's alive." He
smiled at the look that must have come across
my face. "Oh, you needn't suspect me," he
went on. "I judge I'm as good an American
as you are or any man alive is, even if I
do wear a German name. You see I'm a
youngest son. I was born in the good old
U. S. A. all right enough, but two of my
brothers, older than I am, were born in Ger-
many, and they didn't come to America when
the rest of the family migrated. And one of
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

them, last time I heard from him before we
got into the mess, was a lieutenant in a Bavar-
ian field battery. Being a German subject I
suppose he figures he's only doing his duty, but
how he can go on fighting for that swine of a
Kaiser beats me. But then, I don't suppose I
can understand; I'm an American citizen.
Funny world, isn't it?

"Say, listen! That cuckoo is calling again.
I wonder if there is anything in the superstition
of the French peasants that peace will come this
year. Well, so far as I am concerned I don't
want it to come until Uncle Sam has finished up
this job in the right way. I only hope the next
time I hear the cuckoo sing it'll be in the out-
skirts of Berlin — that is, providing a cuckoo can
stand for the outskirts of Berlin."

I reminded him that the cuckoo was a bird
that stole other bird's nests — or tried to.

"That being so, I guess Berlin must be full
of 'em," said he.

The major's headquarters — he was a major
of artillery — was in the chief house of the little
town. Curiously enough this was almost the
only house in the town that had not been hit,
and two days later it was hit, and in the ruins
of it a friend of mine, another major, was
crushed; but that is a different story, not to be
detailed here. It stood — the house, I mean-
in a little square courtyard of its own, as most
village houses in this part of France do, being
flanked on one side by its stable and on the
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THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

other side by its cow barn and by its chicken
houses. There was a high wall to inclose it
along the side nearest the street, with rabbit
hutches and pigeon cots tucked up under the
wall. In the centre of the court was a midden
for manure. It had been a cosy little place
once. The dwelling was of red brick with a
gay tiled roof, and the lesser buildings and
the wall were built of stones, as is the French
way. Even the rabbit hutches were stone, and
the dovecot and the cuddy for the fowls. Now,
except for American artillerymen, it was all
empty of life. The paved yard was littered
with wreckage; the doors of the empty cubicles
stood open.

I sat with the major and his adjutant on
the doorstep of the cottage waiting for the
orderlies to call us in to eat our suppers.
Through the lolled gate in the wall an old man,
a civilian, entered. He was tall and lean like
one of the lombard trees growing in the spoiled
vegetable garden at the back of the house, and
he was dressed in a long frock coat that was all
powdered with a white dust of the roads. He
had a grave long face, and we saw that he
limped a little as he came across the close
toward us. Nearing us he took off his hat and
bowed.

"Pardon, 'sieurs, " he said in Norman French,
"but could I look through this house?"

"No civilians are permitted here now," said
the major. "How did you get here?"
[ 335 ];

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

"I was given a pass to return," he explained.
"Your pardon again, m'sieurs, but I am — I
was — the mayor of this town, and this is my
house. I mean, it was my house. The Ger-
mans came upon us so rapidly we had to leave
on but two hours' notice, taking with us very
little. Not until to-day could I secure leave
to come back. I wished to see what was left
of my home — I always had lived here before,
you know — and to gather up some of my be-
longings, if I might. "

" Where did you come from? " asked the major.

"From ." He named a town twenty-
two miles away.

"And how did you get here?"

"I walked." He lifted his shoulders in an
expressive gesture. "There was no other way.
And I must walk back to-night. There is no
shelter nearer except for soldiers."

He looked past us into the main room of
the house. Its floor of tiles was littered with
dried mud. A table and three broken chairs
that had given way beneath the weight of heavy
and careless men were its only furniture now.
The window panes had been shattered. It was,
hard to picture that this once had been a cozy,
comfortable room, clean and tidy, smartened
with pictures and ornaments upon the walls
and with curtains at the casement openings,
which now gaped so emptily.

"Not much is left, eh?" said the old man,
his face twitching. "Well c'est la guerre!"
![ 336 ]

THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

"I'm afraid your home is rather badly
wrecked," said the major. "Since I came here
my men have tried to do no more damage to it
than they could help, but Algerians were here
before us; and the Algerians, as you know, are
rough in their habits and sometimes they loot
houses. Do you wish to enter? If so, go ahead.
And if you are hungry I would be glad to have
you stay and eat with us."

The stranger hesitated a moment.

"No, no," he said; "of what use to go in?
I have seen enough. And thank you, m'sieur
but I do not wish any food. "

He bowed once more and turned away from
us; but he did not go away directly. He went
across the court to his barn and tugged at a
door that was half ajar. From within came
the grumbled protest of a Yankee gunner
lying just inside on a pile of straw, and indignant
at being roused from a nap.

The man who owned the barn backed away,
making his apologies. He picked up a hay
fork that lay upon the dungpile, and near the
gate, under the shadow of the wall, he stooped
again and picked up a broken clock that some
one had tossed out of the house. Then, after
one more glance all about the place as though
he strove to fix in his mind a picture of it, not
as now it was but as once it had been, he
stepped through the gate, and with his pitiable
salvage tucked under his bony arms he vanished
up the road.

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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

When that night I summed up my experiences
the memories of the day that stood out clearest
in my mind were not of the guns nor the
aeroplanes nor the bursting shells nor yet the
sight in the German lines, but of the mistreated
dog that howled and of the cuckoo that fluted
in the thicket and of the old man who had
trudged so far, over perilous roads, to look
with his eyes for the last time, surely, upon the
sorry ruination of his home. And I felt that I,
a man whose business it is to see interesting
things and afterward to put them down in
black and white, was acquiring in some degree
the perspective of the soldier, whose mental
viewpoint is so foreshortened by the imminent
presence of the greater phases of war that he
comes after a while to regard the inconse-
quential, and so looks on the incidental phases
of it as of more account than the complexities
of its vast, hurrying, overdriven mechanism.

For the point I have been trying, perhaps
clumsily, to make clear all along is just this:
As a general thing it may be set down that
except for those infrequent occasions when
there is a charge to be made or a charge to be
repelled, or except when some freak of war,
new to the trooper's experience, is occurring
or has just occurred, he in all essential outer
regards is exactly the same person that he was
before he went a-soldiering, with nothing about
him to distinguish him from what he was then,
barring the fact that now he wears a uniform.
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THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

Spiritually he may have been transformed;
indeed he must have been, but it is a shading
of spirituality that but rarely betrays itself in
his fashion of speech or in his physical expres-
sion or in his behaviour. Doing the most
heroic things he nevertheless does them with-
out indulging in any of the heroics with which
the fiction of books and the fiction of stagecraft
love to invest the display of the finer and the
higher emotions of mankind.

Living where death in various guises is ever
upon the stalk for him he learns to regard it
no more than in civil life he regards the com-
moner manifestations of a code of civilised
procedure that ethically is based upon a plan
to safeguard his life and his limb from mis-
chance and ill health. The habit of death
becomes to him as commonplace as the habit
of life once was. He gets used to the in-
credible and it turns commonplace. He gets
used to the extraordinary, which after it has
happened a few times becomes most ordinary.
He gets used to being bombed and is bored
thereby; gets used to gas alarms and bombard-
ments; to high explosives, spewing shrapnel, and
purring bullets; gets used to eating his meals
standing up and taking his rest in broken bits.
He gets used to all of war's programme — its im-
possibilities and its contradictions, its splendours,
its horrors and its miseries. In short he gets
used to living in a world that is turned entirely
upside down, with every normal aspect in it
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

capsised and every regular and ordained phase
of it standing upon its head.

For a fact it seems to me that in its final
analysis the essence of war is merely the knack
of getting used to war. And the instantaneous
response of the average human being to its
monstrous and preposterous aspects is a lesson
to prove the elasticity and the infinite adapt-
ability of the human mind. Because people
can and do get used to it is the reason why
they do not all go mad in the midst of it.
Getting used to it — that's the answer. After a
while one even gets used to the phenomenon
that war rarely or never looks as you would
think war should look — and that brings me by a
roundabout way back again to the main text
of my article.

Troops travelling in numbers across country
do not present the majestic panoramic effect
that one might expect. This in part, though,
is due to the common topography of France.
Generally speaking, a given district is so cut up
with roads threading the fields that the forces,
for convenience in handling, are divided into
short columns that move by routes that are
practically parallel, toward a common desti-
nation. The sight of troops going into camp at
night also is disappointing. In France, thickly
settled as it is, with villages tucked into every
convenient dip between the hills, the men are
so rapidly swallowed up in the billeting spaces
under house and barn roots that an hour or
[ 340 ]

THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

even half an hour after the march has ended
you might traverse a district where, let us say,
twenty thousand soldiers are quartered, and
unless you know the correct figures the evidence
offered to your eyes might deceive you into
assuming that not one-tenth of that number
were anywhere in the vicinity.

It is this failure of war, when considered as a
physical thing, to measure up to its traditional
impressiveness, that fills with despair the soul of
the writing man, who craves to put down on
paper an adequate conception of it in its
entirety. Finally he comes to this: That
either he must throw away the delusions he
himself nourished and content himself by
building together little mosaics with scraps
gleaned from the big, untellable, untrans-
latable enigma that it is, or for the reader's
sake must try to conjure up a counterfeit con-
ception, which will correspond with what he
knows the average reader's mental vision of
the thing to be. In one event he is honest — but
disappointing. In the other he is guilty of a
willful deceit, but probably turns out copy
that is satisfying to his audience. In either
event, in his heart he is bound to realise the
utter impossibility of depicting war as it is.

It is one of the cumulating paradoxes of
the entire paradoxical procedure that the best
place to get a reasonably clear and intelligible
idea of the swing and scope of a battle is not
upon the site of the battle itself, but in a

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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

place anywhere from ten to twenty miles behind
the battle. Directly at the front the onlooker
observes only those small segments of the
prevalent hostilities that lie directly under his
eyes. He is hedged in and hampered by
obstacles; his vision is circumscribed and con-
fined to what may be presented in his immediate
vicinity.

Of course there are exceptions to this rule.
I am speaking not of every case but of the
average case.

A fairish distance back, though, he may to an
extent grasp the immensity of the operation.
He sees the hammered troops coming out and
the fresh troops going in; beholds the move-
ments of munitions and supplies and reserves;
observes the handling of the wounded; notes
the provisions that are made for a possible
advance and the preparations that have been
made for a possible retreat. Even so, to the
uninitiated eye the scheme appears jumbled,
haphazard and altogether confused. It re-
quires a mind acquainted with more than the
rudiments of military science to discern pur-
pose in what primarily appears to be so abso-
lutely purposeless. There is nothing of the
checkerboard about it; the orderliness of a
chess game is lacking. The suggestion is more
that of a whirlpool. So it follows that the
novice watches only the maelstrom on the
surface and rarely can he fathom out the
guiding influences that ordain that each twisti-

[342]

THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

wise current moves in its proper channel without
impairment or impediment for any one of the
myriad of related activities.

Being a novice he is astonished to note that
only infrequently do wounded men act as his
fictional reading has led him to believe they
would act. To me the most astounding thing
about this has been not that wounded men
shriek and moan, but that nearly always they
are so terribly silent. At the moment of
receiving his hurt a man may cry out; often he
does. But oftener than not he comes, mute
and composed, to the dressing station. The
example of certain men who lock their lips and
refuse to murmur, no matter how great is their
pain, inspires the rest to do likewise. A man
who in civil life would make a great pother
over a trivial mishap, in service will endure an
infinitely worse one without complaint. If war
brings out all the vices in some nations it most
surely brings out the virtues in others. I
hate to think back on the number of freshly
wounded men I have seen, but when I do
think back on it I am struck by the fact that
barring a few who were delirious and some few
more who were just emerging into agonised
consciousness following the coma shock of a
bad injury, I can count upon the fingers of my
two hands the total of those who screamed or
loudly groaned. Men well along the road to
recovery frequently make more troublesome
patients than those who have just been brought
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

to the field hospitals; and a man who perhaps
has lain for hours with a great hole in his
flesh, stoically awaiting his turn under the
surgeon's hands, will sometimes, as a con-
valescent, worry and fret over the prospect of
having his hurts redressed.

Among certain races the newly stricken
trooper is more apt to be concerned by the
fear that he may be incapacitated from getting
back into the game than he is about the extent
of his wound or the possibility that he may die
of it. As an American I am proud to be able
to say, speaking as a first-hand witness, that
our own race should be notably included in this
category. The Irishman who had been shot
five times but was morally certain he would
recover and return to the war because he
thought he knew the fellow who had plugged
him has his counterpart without number among
the valorous lads from this side of the ocean
whose names have appeared on the casualty
lists.

•[344]'

CHAPTER XXI
PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES

WHILE I am on the subject of
unusual phases of modern warfare
I should like to include just one
more thing in the list — and that
thing is the suddenness with which in France,
and likewise in Belgium, one in going forward
passes out of an area of peacefulness into an
area of devastation and destruction. Almost
invariably the transition is accomplished with
a startling abruptness. It is as though a
mighty finger had scored a line across the face
of the land and said: "On this side of the line
life shall go on as it always has gone on. Here
men shall plough, and women shall weave, and
children shall play, and the ordinary affairs
of mankind shall progress with the seasons.
On that side there shall be only death and the
proofs of death and the promises of yet more
deaths. There the fields shall be given over
to the raven and the rat; the homes shall be
blasted flat, the towns shall be razed and
the earth shall be made a charnelhouse and a

[345]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

lazar pit of all that is foul and loathsome and
abominable in the sight of God and man. "

For emphasis of this sharp contrast you
have only to take a motor run up out of a
district as yet untouched by war into the
scathed zone of past or present combat. By
preference I should elect for you that the
trip be made through a British sector, because
the British have a way of stamping their racial
individuality upon an area that they take over—
they Anglicise it, so to speak. Besides, a
tour through British-held territory partakes of
the nature of a flying visit to an ethnological
congress, seeing that nearly all the peoples who
make up the empire are likely to have represen-
tatives here present, engaged in one capacity
or another — and that adds interest and colour
to the picture.

Let us start, say, from a French market
town on a market day. From far away in the
north, as we climb into our car with our soldier
driver and our officer escort, comes the faint
hollow rumble of the great guns; but that has
been going on nearly four years now, and in the
monotony of it the people who live here have
forgotten the threat that is in that distant
thundering. Pippin-cheeked women are driving
in, perched upon the high seats of two-wheeled
hooded carts and bringing with them fowls
and garden truck. In the square before the
church booths are being set up for the sale of
goods. Plump round-eyed children stand to
[346]

PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES

watch us go down the narrow street, which
runs between close rows of wattled, gable-ended
stone or plaster cottages. Most of the little
girls are minding babies; practically all of
the little boys wear black pinafores belted in
at their chubby waistlines, with soldier cap —
always soldier caps — on their heads, and they
love to stiffen to attention and salute the
occupants of a military automobile.

There are but few men in sight, and these
are old men or else they wear uniforms. The
houses are tidied and neat; the soil, every
tillable inch of it, is in a state of intensive and
painstaking cultivation. On all hands vine-
yards, orchards, pastures and grain fields are
spread in squares and parallelograms. The
road is bordered on either side by tall fine trees.
Chickens, geese and turkeys scuttle away to
safety from before the onrushing car, and at
the roadside goats and cattle and sheep and
sometimes swine are feeding. Each animal or
each group of animals has its attendant herder.
Horses are tethered outside the hedges where
they may crop the free herbage. The land-
scape is fecund with life and productivity.

It is a splendid road along which we course,
wide and smooth and well-kept, and for this
the reason is presently made plain. Steam
rollers of British manufacture, with soldiers
to steer them, constantly roll back and forth
over stretches where broken stone has been
spread by the repair gangs. These mending

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

crews may be made up of soldiers — French,
British, Portuguese or Italians; and then again
they may be drafts of German prisoners or
members of labour squads drawn from far
corners of the world where the British or the
French flag flies. Within an hour you will
pass turbaned East Indians, Chinamen, Arabs,
Nubians, Ceylonese, Senegalese, Maoris, Afri-
dis, Moroccans, Algerians. Their head-dresses
are likely to be their own; for the rest they
wear the uniforms of the nation that has en-
listed or hired them.

Despite this polyglot commingling of types
the British influence is upon everything.
Military guideposts bearing explicit directions
in English stand thick along the wayside, and
in the windows of the shops are cruder signs to
show that the French proprietors make a
specialty of catering to the wants of Britishers.
Here is one reading "Eggs and Potato Chips";
there one advertising to whom it may con-
cern, "Washing Done Here." "Post-cards
and Souvenirs" is a common legend, and on
the fronts of old wine-shops a still commoner
one is "Ale and Stout." Rows of beer bottles
stand upon the window ledges, with platters of
buns and sandwiches flanking them. A "Wet
and Dry Canteen" flies a diminutive British
flag from its peaky roof.

Evidences of British military activity multi-
ply and re-multiply themselves. Long trains
of motor-trucks lumber by like great, grey
[348]

PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES

elephants each with a dusty Tommy for its
mahout. A convoy of small, new tanks go
wallowing and bumping along bound front-
ward, and they suggest a herd of behemoths
on the move. Their drivers as likely as not
are Chinamen who presently will turn their
unwieldy charges over to soldier-crews. Officers
clatter past on horse-back looking, all of them,
as though they had just escaped from the
military outfitters; staff-cars whiz through the
slower traffic; troops bound for the baths or
for the trenches or for rest billets march stolidly
up the road or down it as the case may be.
Omnibuses from Londontown, now converted
to military usage, are thick in the press.
Military policemen are more numerous and
more set upon scrutinising your pass than they
were a few miles back. And civilians are
fewer.

Alongside the highway, settlements of wooden
or iron huts increase in number and in propor-
tions. Hospitals, headquarters of various units,
bath-houses, punishment compounds, motor
stations, supply depots, airdromes, ordnance
repair plants, munition warehouses, Y. M. C. A.
huts, gas test stations, rest barracks, gasoline
depots and all the rest of it show themselves
for what they are both by their shapes and
by the notice boards which mark them. Here
is cluttered all the infinitely complicated
machinery of the war-making industry, with
its accessories and its adjuncts, its essentials
[349]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

and its incidentals, but so far there is no
actual evidence that the rude and disturbing
hand of war has actually been laid upon the
land. Rather is it a spectacle to make you
think of a thousand circus days rolled into one,
and mixed in with all this, travelling caravans,
gypsy encampments, Wild West shows, horse-
fairs, street carnivals and what not.

Of a sudden the picture changes. There are
no civilians visible now, no prisoners and no
labour-battalions but only soldiers and not so
many soldiers either as you encountered just
behind you in the intermediate zone because as a
general thing, the nearer you come to the actual
theatre of hostilities, the fewer soldiers in mass
are you apt to see. The soldiers may be near by
but they are not to be found until you search
for them. They have taken cover in dug-outs
and in trenches and in remote billets hidden
in handy, sheltered spots in the conformation
of the rolling landscape.

Now the vista stretching before you wears a
bleak and untenanted look. You notice that
the shade trees have disappeared. Instead of
living trees there are only jagged stumps of
trees or bare, shattered trunks from which the
limbs have been sheared away by shell-fire,
and to which the bark clings in scrofulous
patches. Across the fields go winding, brown
bramble-patches of rusted barbed wire. The
earth is depressed into hollows and craters, or
up thrown into ugly mounds and hillocks. In
[ 350]

PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES

the wasted and disfigured meadows rank weeds
sprout upon the edges of the ragged shellholes.
The very earth seems to give off a sour and
rancid stink. There is a village ahead of you,
but it is a village without roofs to its houses, or
dwellers within its breached and tottering
walls. It is a jumbled nightmare of a ruin.
It is as though a tornado had blown a cluster
of brick-kilns flat, and then an earthquake had
come along and jumbled the fragments into
still greater and more utter confusion.

Protruding from the flattened rubble about it,
there uprears a crooked, spindle-like pinnacle
of tottering masonry. It may have been a
corner of the church wall or the town hall.
Now it is like a beckoning finger calling to
heaven for vengeance. Upon it is set a notice-
board to advise you that you are now in the
"Alert Zone," which means your gas-respirator
must be snuggled up under your chin ready for
use and that your steel helmet must be worn
upon your head and that you must take such
other precautions as may be required.

You ride on then at reduced speed along a
camouflaged byway for perhaps fifteen minutes.
You come to where once upon a time, before
the jack-booted, spike-headed apostles of Kul-
tur descended upon this country, was another
village standing. This village has been more
completely obliterated out of its former image —
if such a thing is possible — than its neighbour.
It is little else than a red smear in the greyish
[351]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

yellow desolation, where constant bombard-
ment has reduced the bricks of its houses to a
powder and then has churned and pestled the
powder into the harried earth. There remains
for proof of one-time occupancy only the
jagged lines of certain foundations and ugly
mounds of mingled soil and debris. Up from
beneath one of these mess-heaps, emerging
like a troglodyte, from a hole which burrows
downward to a hidden cellar, there crawls
forth a grimed soldier who warns you that
neither you nor your car may progress farther
except at your dire risk, since this is an outpost
position and once you pass from your present
dubious shelter you will be in full view and
easy target range of Brother Boche. You
have advanced to the very forward verge of the
battle-line and you didn't know it.

One rather dark night, travelling in an un-
lighted car, three of us were trying to reach an
American brigade headquarters where we ex-
pected to sleep. Our particular destination
was a hamlet in a forest just behind and
slightly east of the main defences of Verdun.

We must have taken the wrong turn at a
crossroads, for after going some distance along
a rutted cart track through the woods we came
to where a deep ditch — at least it seemed to be
a deep ditch — had been dug right across the
trail from side to side. By throwing on the
brakes the chauffeur succeeded in halting the
car before its front wheels went over and into
[352]

PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES

the cut. We climbed out to investigate, and
then we became aware of an American sentry
standing twenty feet beyond us in the aforesaid
ditch.

"We are correspondents," said a spokesman
among us, "and we are trying to get to General
So-and-So's headquarters. Can't we go any
farther along this road?"

Being an American this soldier had a sense of
humour.

"Not unless you speak German, you can't,"
he drawled. "The Heinies are dead ahead of
you, not two hundred yards from this here
trench."

Without once suspecting it we had ridden
clear through a sector held by us to the front-
line defences alongside the beleaguered city of
Verdun.

It's just one paradox after another, is the
thing we call war.

CHAPTER XXII
THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

THE deadlier end of a snake is the head
end, where the snake carries its stingers.
Since something happened in the Gar-
den of Eden this fact has been a matter
of common knowledge, giving to all mankind
for all time respect for the snake and fear of
him. But what not everybody knows is that
before a constrictor can exert his squeezing
powers to the uttermost degree he must have
a dependable grip for his tail, else those mighty
muscles of his are impotent; because a snake,
being a physical thing, is subject to the immut-
able laws of physics. There must be a ful-
crum for the lever, always; the coiled spring
that is loose at both ends becomes merely a
piece of twisted metal; and a constrictor in
action is part a living lever and part a living
spring. And another thing that not every-
body knows is that before a snake with fangs
can fling itself forward and bite it must have
a purchase for the greater part of its length
against some reasonably solid object, such as
the earth or a slab of rock.
[354]

THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

Now an army might very well be likened to
a snake, which sometimes squeezes its enemy by
an enveloping movement but more often strikes
at him with sudden blows. In the case of our
own Army I particularly like the simile of a
great snake — a rattlesnake, by preference, since
in the first place the rattlesnake is essentially
an American institution, and since once before
our ancestors fought for their own freedom,
much as we now are fighting for the freedom of
the world, under a banner that carried the
device of a rattler coiled. Moreover, the
rattlesnake, which craves only to be let alone
and which does not attack save on intrusion or
provocation, never quits fighting, once it has
started, until it is absolutely no more. You
may scotch it and you may bruise and crush and
break it, but until you have killed it exceedingly
dead and cut it to bits and buried the bits
you can never be sure that the job from your
standpoint is finished. So for the purpose of
introducing the subject in hand a rattlesnake
it is and a rattlesnake it shall be to the end of
the narrative, the reader kindly consenting —
a rattlesnake whose bite is very, very fatal
and whose vibrating tail bears a rattle for every
star in the flag.

For some months past it has been my very
good fortune to watch the rattler's head,
snouting its nose forth into the barbed wires
and licking out with the fiery tongue of its
artillery across the intervening shell holes at

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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Heinie the Hun. Now I have just finished a
trip along the body of the snake, stretching
and winding through and across France for 300
miles, more or less, to where its tail is wetted by
salt water at the coast ports in the south and
the east and the southeast. This is giving no
information to the enemy, since he knows
already that the snake which is the army must
have a head at the battleground and a neck in
the trenches, and behind the head and the neck
a body and a tail, the body being the lines of
communication and the tail the primary supply
bases.

His own army is in the likeness of a somewhat
similar snake; otherwise it could not function.
Moreover, things are happening to him, even
as these lines are written, that must impress
upon his Teutonic consciousness that our snake
is functioning from tip to tip. Unless he is
blind as well as mad he must realise that he
made a serious mistake when he disregarded the
injunction of the old Colonials: "Don't Tread
On Me."

In common with nearly every other man to
whom has been given similar opportunity I have
seen hundreds of splendid things at the Front
where our people hold for defence or move for
attack — heroism, devotion, sacrifice, an un-
quenchable cheerfulness, and a universal deter-
mination that permeates through the ranks
from the highest general to the greenest private
to put through the job that destiny has com-

[356]

THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

mitted into our keeping, after the only fashion
in which this job properly may be put through.

In the trenches and immediately behind them
I thought I had exhausted the average human
capacity for thrills of pride, but it has turned
out that I hadn't. For back of the' Front,
back of the line troops and the reserves, back
all the way to the tail of the snake, there are
things to be seen that in a less spectacular
aspect — though some of them are spectacular
enough, at that — are as finely typical of Ameri-
can resource and American courage and Ameri-
can capability as any of the sights that daily
and hourly duplicate themselves among the guns.

I am sure there still must be quite a number
of persons at home who somehow think that
once a soldier is armed and trained and set
afoot on fighting ground he thereafter becomes
a self-sustaining and self -maintaining organism;
that either he is providentially provisioned, as
the ravens of old fed the prophet, or that he
forages for himself, living on the spoils of the
country as the train bands and hired mercen-
aries used to live by loot in the same lands
where our troops are now engaged. Or pos-
sibly they hazily conceive that the provender
and the rest of it, being provided, manage to
transport themselves forward to their user. If
already we had not had too many unnecessary
delegates loose-footing it over France this year
I could wish that I might have had along with
me on this recent trip a delegation of these

[357]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

unreflecting folk, for they would have beheld, as
I did, a greater miracle than the one vouchsafed
Elijah, yet a miracle of man's encompassment,
and in some measure would have come to
understand how a vast American army, three
thousand miles from home on foreign shores,
is fed and furnished and furbished and refur-
bished, not at the expense of the dwellers of
the soil but to their abundant personal benefit.
Finally they would see in its operation the
vastest composite job of creation, organisation
and construction that has ever been put
through, in the space of one year and three
months about, by any men that ever toiled
anywhere on this footstool of Jehovah.

To me statistics are odious things, and when-
ever possible I avoid them. Besides, some of
the figures I have accumulated in this journey
are so incredibly stupendous that knowing them
to be true figures I nevertheless hesitate to set
them down. By my thinking way adjectives
are needed and not numerals to set forth in any
small measure a conception of the undertaking
that has been accomplished overseas by our
people and is still being accomplished with
every hour that passes.

Before this war came along Europeans were
given to saying that we Americans rarely
bragged of producing a beautiful thing or an
artistic thing or a thing painstakingly done, but
rather were given to advertising that here we
had erected the longest bridge and there the
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THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

tallest building and over yonder the largest rail-
way terminal and down this way the most
expensive mansion — that ever was. Perhaps
the criticism was justified in peacetimes. To-
day in the light of what we have done in France
these past few months back of the lines it not
only is justified but it is multiplied, magnified
and glorified. It no longer is a criticism; it is
a tribute. When you think of the performance
that stands to our credit you must think of it
in superlatives, and when you speak of it you
must speak in superlatives too. The words
all end invest."

On French soil within twelve months, and in
several instances within six months, we have
among other things constructed and set going
the biggest cold-storage plant, with two excep-
tions, in the world; the biggest automobile
storage depot, excluding one privately owned
American concern, in the world; the biggest
system of military -equipment warehouses in the
world; probably the biggest field bakery in the
world; the biggest strictly military seaport
base in the world; what will shortly be the
biggest military base hospital in the world; the
biggest single warehouse for stock provender in
the world; the biggest junkshop in the world;
the biggest staff training school in the world —
three months ago it had more scholars than
any university in America ever has had; the
biggest locomotive roundhouse under one roof;
the biggest gasoline-storage plant; the next to

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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

the biggest training camp for aviators, the same
being a sort of finishing school for men who
have already had a degree of instruction else-
where; the biggest acetylene-gas plant; and half
a dozen other biggest things in the world—
and we're not good and started yet!

Every week sees the plants we have already
constructed being enlarged and amplified; every
week sees some new contract getting under way.
Every month's end sees any similar period in
the building of the Panama Canal made to
seem almost a puny and inconsequential
achievement by contrast and by comparison
with what superbly and triumphantly has gone
forward during that month. In military par-
lance it is called the Service of Supplies. It
should be called the Service of the Supremely
Impossible Supremely Accomplished. When
this war is ended and tourists are permitted to
visit foreign parts Americans coming abroad
and seeing what has here been done will be
prouder of their country and their fellow
countrymen than ever they have been.

The Service of Supplies, broadly speaking and
in its bearing on operations upon the Conti-
nent, begins at tide mark and ends in the
front-line trenches, with ramifications and side
issues and annexes past counting, but all of
them more or less interrelated with the main
issues. For example the staff school can
hardly be called a part of it, though lying, so
to speak, in a whorl of the snake. It is divided
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into a Base Section, which is that part situate
nearest to the coasts; an Intermediate Section,
which is what its name implies ; and an Advance
Section, which extends as close up to the zone
of hostilities as is consistent with reasonable
safety, the term "reasonable safety" being a
relative term in these days of hostile raiding
planes. The Base Section is subdivided again
into several lesser segments, each centring
about a main port.

Broadly described it might be said that any
military equipment in its natural course is first
unloaded and stored temporarily at the bases.
Then it is moved into the Intermediate Sec-
tion, where it is housed and kept until called
for. Thereupon it goes on a third rail journey
to the Advance Section, out of the depots of
which it is requisitioned and sent ahead again
by trucks or wagons, or more commonly by
rail, to meet the day-to-day and the week-to-
week requirements of the units in the field.

While this is going on all the sundry hundreds
of thousands of men engaged on duty along the
Service of Supplies must be cared for without
impairment to the principal underlying purpose
—that of provisioning and arming the fighting
man, and providing supplies and equipment for
the hospitals and the depots and all the rest of
it, world without end. When you sit down
to figure how many times the average consign-
ment, of whatsoever nature, is loaded and
unloaded and reloaded again even after it has
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

been brought overseas, and how many times it
is handled and rehandled, checked in and
checked out, accounted for and entered up,
and eventually fed out in dribs as fodder for
the huge coiling serpent we call an army —
you begin to understand why it is that for
every 100 men brought across the ocean up-
ward of 30 must be assigned to work in some
capacity or another along the communication
ways.

For the reader to visit the various depart-
ments and sub-departments and subber sub-
departments that properly fall within the scope
of the Service of Supplies would take of his time
at least two weeks. It took that much of my
time and I had a fast touring car at my disposal
and between stops moved at a cup-racing clip.
For the writer to attempt to set down in any
comprehensive form the extent of the thing
would fill a fat book of many pages. By
reason of the limitations of space this article
can touch only briefly on the general scheme and
only sketchily upon those details that seemed to
the present observer most interesting.

For example at one port — and this not yet
the busiest one of the ports turned over to us
by our allies — we are operating an extensive
system of French docks that already were there
fcand with them an even larger system of docks
constructed by our Army and now practically
completed. Likewise we have here a great
camp, as big a camp as many a community at

[362]

THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

home that calls itself a city, where negro
labour battalions are living; two extensive rest
camps for troops newly debarked from the
transports; enormous freight yards and storage
warehouses with still another camp handily
near by for the accommodation of the yard
gangs and the warehouse gangs; a base hospital
that when completed will be the largest military
base hospital on earth ; a sizable artillery camp
where gun crews and ordnance officers take
what/ might be called a post-graduate course to
supplement the training they had in the States;
a remount station; an ordnance and aviation-
storage warehouse; and a motor reception park.

This, remember, is but one of several ports
that we practically have taken over for the
period of the war. On the land side of a second
port are grouped a rest camp, a motor-assem-
bling park, a system of docks inside a basin that
is provided with locks, a locomotive-assembling
plant, freight yards, warehouses without end,
and two base hospitals.

Taking either of these ports for a starting
point and moving inland one would probably
visit first the headquarters of the Service of
Supplies, where also is to be found our main
salvage depot for reclaiming all sorts of equip-
ment except motor and air equipment — these
go to salvage stations specially provided else-
where— and not far away an aviation training
centre. A little farther along as one travelled
up-country he would come to an artillery in-
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

struction centre located in a famous French
military school; to our engineer training centre
and our engineer replacement depots; and
thence onward to our air-service production
centre with its mammoth plant for assembling,
repairing and testing planes and with its camp
for its personnel. This would bring one well
into the Intermediate Section with its depots,
freight yards and warehouses, and with its
refrigerating plant, which is the third largest
in existence and which shortly will have a twin
sister a few miles away. There would be side
excursions to the motor supply and spare
parts depot, to the main motor repair station,
to the locomotive repair shops, to the car
shops, to the principal one of our aviation
training centres, to the main field bakery, to
the gasoline depots, the camouflaging plant
and to various lesser activities.

Finally one would land at the Advance Sec-
tion depots with their complex regulating sta-
tions for the proper distribution of the material
that has advanced hither by broken stages.
And yet when one had journeyed thus far
one would merely be at the point of the begin-
ning of the real work of getting the stuff through
to the forces without congestion, without
unnecessary wastage, without sending up too
much or too little but just exactly the proper
amounts as needed.

Now then, on top of this please remember that
each important camp, each station, each centre
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THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

has its own water system, its own electric light
system, its own police force, its own fire depart-
ment, its own sanitary squad, its own sewers,
its own walks and drives and flower beds, its
own emergency hospitals and dispensaries and
surgeries, its own Y. M. C. A., its own Red
Cross unit, generally its own K. of C. workers
and its own Salvation Army squad; as likely as
not its own newspaper and its own theatre.
Always it has its own separate communal life.

Figure that in a score of places veritable cities
have sprung up where last January the wind
whistled over stubbled fields and snow-laden
pine thickets. Figure that altogether 40,-
000,000 square feet of covered housing space
are required and that more will be required
as our expeditionary force continues to expand.
Figure that in and out and through all these
ramified activities our locomotives draw our
cars over several hundred miles of sidings and
yard trackage, which Uncle Sam has put down
by the sweat of the brow of his excellent sons,
supplemented by a copious amount of sweat
wrung from the brows of thousands of German
prisoners and thousands more of Indo-Chinese
labourers imported by the French and loaned
to us, and yet thousands more of native French
labourers past or under the military age.

Figure that while the work of construction

has been going on upon a scope unprecedented

in the scheme of human endeavour the men

charged with the responsibility for it have had

[365]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

to divide their energies and their man power
to the end that the growing Army should not
suffer for any lack of essential sustenance while
the other jobs went forward toward comple-
tion. Figure at the beginning of last winter,
nine months ago, scarcely a spadeful of earth
had been turned for the foundations anywhere.
Figure in with all of this mental pictures of the
Children of Israel building the pyramids for
old Mister Pharaoh, of Goethals at the Isthmus,
of Caesar's legions networking Europe with those
justly celebrated Romanesque roads of his, of
the coral insects making an archipelago in nine
months instead of stretching the proceeding
through millions of years, as is the habit of
these friendly little insects; figure in all these
things — and if your headache isn't by this
time too acute for additional effort without
poignant throbbings at the temples you may
begin to have a shadowy conception of what
has happened along our Service of Supplies
over here in France since we really got busy.

So much for the glittering generalities — and
Lawsie, how they do glitter with the crusted
diamond dust of endeavour and stupendous
accomplishment! Now for a few particularly
brilliant outcroppings : There is a certain port
at present in our hands. For our purposes it
is a most important port — one of the most
important of all the ports that the French
turned over to us. When our engineers set up
shop there the port facilities were very much
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THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

as they had been when the Phoenicians first laid
them out, barring some comparatively modern
improvements subsequently tacked on by the
Roman Emperors and still later by that famous
but somewhat disagreeable old lady, Anne of
Brittany. There were no steam cranes or
electric hoists on the docks, and if there had
been they would have been of little value
except for ornamental purposes, seeing that by
reason of harbourwise limitations ships of draft
or of size could not range alongside but must
be lightered of their cargoes at their mooring
chains out in midchannel anywhere from half
a mile to a mile and a half off shore. More-
over, there was but one railroad track running
down to the water's edge. Even yet there are
no steam cranes in operation; both freight and
men must be brought to land in lighters. But
mark you what man power plus brains plus
necessity has accomplished in the face of those
structural obstacles and those mechanical draw-
backs.

At the outset it was estimated by experts
among our allies that possibly we could land
20,000 troops and 6,000 tons of freight a
month at this port — if we kept nonunion hours
and hustled. In one day in the early part of
the present summer 42,000 American soldiers
were debarked and ferried ashore with their
portable equipment, and on another day of
the same week through one of the original
French-built docks — not through the whole row
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

of them, but through one of the row — our
stevedores cleared 5,000 tons of freight. Five
thousand tons in one day, when those Conti-
nental wiseacres had calculated that by strain-
ing ourselves and by employing to their utmost
all the facilities provided by all the docks in
sight we might move 6,000 tons in a month!
For this performance and for so frequent
duplication of it that now it has become com-
monplace and matter-of-fact and quite in
accordance with expectations, a great share of
the credit is due to thousands of brawny black
American stevedores drawn from the wharves of
Boston, New York and Philadelphia, Galveston,
Savannah, New Orleans and Newport News.
The victory that we are going to win will not
be an all-white victory by any manner of means.
Besides the physical limitations there were
certain others, seeming at first well-nigh insur-
mountable, which our military and civilian
executives had to meet and contend with and
overcome. I mean the Continental fashion of
doing things — a system ponderously slow and
infinitely cumbersome. When a job is done
according to native requirements over here it is
thoroughly done, as you may be quite sure,
and it will last for an age; but frequently the
preceding age is required to get it done. Euro-
peans almost without exception are thrifty and
saving beyond any conceivable standards of
ours, but they are prodigals and they are
spendthrifts when it comes down to expending
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THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

what in America we regard as the most precious
commodity of all, and that commodity is time.
Some of our masters of frenzied finance could
wreck a bank in less time than it takes to cash a
check in a French one.

Not even the exigencies and the sharp emer-
gencies of wartime conditions can cure a people,
however adaptable and sprightly they may be
in most regards, of a system of thought and a
system of habit that go back as far as they them-
selves go as a civilised race. Here is a concrete
instance serving to show how at this same port
that I have been talking about the Continental
system came into abrupt collision with the
American system and how the American system
won out:

The admiral in command of the American
naval forces centring at this place received
word that on a given day — to wit: three days
from the time the news was wirelessed to him —
a convoy would bring to harbour transports
bearing about 50,000 Yank troopers. It would
be the admiral's task to see that the ships
promptly were emptied of their passengers and
that the passengers were expeditiously and
safely put upon solid land. After this had
been done it devolved upon the brigadier in
command of the land forces to quarter them in
a rest camp until such time as they would be
dispatched up the line toward the Front.

The great movement of our soldiers over-
seas, which started in April and which proceeds
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

without noticeable abatement as I write this,
was then in midswing; and the rest camps in
the neighbourhood were already crowded to
their most stretchable limits. Nevertheless the
general must provide livable accommodations
for approximately 50,000 men somewhere in
an already overcrowded area — and he had less
than seventy-two hours in which to do it. He
got busy; the members of his staff likewise got
busy.

That same night he called into conference a
functionary of the French Government, in
liaison service and detailed to cooperate with
the Americans or with the British in just such
situations as the one that had now risen. The
official in question was zealous in the common
cause — as zealous as any man could be — but he
could not cure himself of thinking in the terms
of the pattern his nation had followed in times
of peace.

"I must have a big rest camp ready by this
time day after to-morrow," said, in effect, the
American. "So I went out this afternoon with
my adjutant and some of my other officers and
I found it. "

Briefly he described a suitable tract four or
five miles from the town. Then he went on:
"How long do you think it would take for
your engineers to furnish me with a fairly
complete working survey of that stretch, includ-
ing boundaries and the general topography with
particular regards to drainage and elevations?"
[370]

THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

The Frenchman thought a minute, making
mental calculations.

"From four to six weeks I should say," he
hazarded. "Not sooner than four weeks
surely. "

"I think I can beat that," said the American.

He turned to his desk phone and called up
another office in the same building in which
this conference was taking place — the office of
his chief engineer officer.

"Blank," he said when he had secured con-
nection, "how long will it take you to give me
the survey of that property we went over this
afternoon? You were to let me know by this
evening. "

Back came the answer:

"By working all night, sir, I can hand it to
you at noon to-morrow. "

"Are you sure I'll get it then?"

"Absolutely sure, sir."

"Good," said the general, and rang off. He
faced the Frenchman.

"The survey will be ready at noon to-
morrow," he said. "Now, then, I want
arrangements made so that construction gangs
can take possession of that land in the morning
early. They've got a good many thousand
tents to set up and some temporary shacks to
build, and I'm going to sick 'em on the job at
daylight."

"But what you ask is impossible, mon
g6n£ral," expostulated the Frenchman. "Days
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

will be required — perhaps weeks. We must
follow a regular custom, else there will be legal
complications. We must search out the owners
of the various parcels of land included in the
area and make separate terms with each of
them for the use of his land by your people. "

"And meanwhile what will those 50,000
soldiers that are due here inside of seventy-two
hours be doing?"

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders.

"Very well then," said the American. "Now
here's what we must do: I want you please to
get in touch, right away, with your Minister of
War at Paris and tell him with my compli-
ments that at daylight in the morning I am
going to take possession of that tract, and I
want the sanction of his department for my
authority in taking the step. Afterward we'll
settle with the owners of the land for the
ground rent and for the proper damages and for
all the rest of it. But now — with my compli-
ments— tell the minister we've got to have a
little action."

"But to write a letter and send it to Paris
even by special courier, and to have it read and
to get a reply back, would take three days at
the very quickest," the Frenchman replied.

"I'm not asking you to write any letters.
I'm asking you to call up the minister on the
telephone — now, this minute, from this office,
and over this telephone."

"But, my dear general, it is iiot customary to-
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THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

call a minister of the government on the
telephone to discuss anything. There is a proce-
dure for this sort of thing — a tradition, a prece-
dent if you will. "

"We'll have to make a new precedent of our
own then. Here's the telephone. Suppose
you get the minister on the wire and leave the
rest to me. I'll do the talking from this end —
and I'll take the responsibility."

"But — but, general," faltered the dum-
founded Frenchman, "have you thought of the
question of water supply? There are no run-
ning streams near your proposed site; there are
no reservoirs. Of what use for me to do as
you wish and run the risk of annoying our
Minister of War when you have no water?
And of course without water of what use is
your camp?"

"Don't let that worry you," said the Ameri-
can. "The water supply has all been arranged
for. In fact" — he glanced at his watch — "in
fact you might say that already it is being
installed."

. "But — if you will pardon me — what you say
is impossible!"

"Not at all; it's very simple. This town is
full of vintners' places and every vintner has —
or rather he did have — a lot of those big empty
wine casks on hand. Well, I sent two of my
officers out this afternoon and bought every
empty wine cask in this town. They rounded
up 600 of them, and there'll be more coming in
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

from the surrounding country to-morrow morn-
ing. I know there will be, because I've got men
out scouting for them, and at the price I'm
willing to pay I'll have every spare wine cask
in this part of France delivered here to me by
this time to-morrow. But 600 was enough to
start on. I've had 300 of them set up at handy
places over my camp site — had it done this
evening — and at this moment the other 300 are
being loaded upon army trucks — six casks to a
truck. To-morrow morning the trucks will
begin hauling water to fill the casks now on the
ground."

It was as he had said. The minister was
called up at night on the telephone, and from
huii a very willing approval of the unprece-
dented step in contemplation was secured.
The water hauling started at dawn, and so did
the tent raising start. The survey was de-
livered at noon; half an hour later American
labour battalions were digging ditches for
kitchen drains and latrines, and in accordance
with the contour of the chosen spot a makeshift
but serviceable sewerage system was being
installed. When the troops marched out to
their camp in the late afternoon of the second
day following, their camp was there waiting for
them and their supper was ready.

[374]

CHAPTER XXIII
BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

TAKE any separate project along our line
of communication. Pick it out at ran-
dom. It makes no difference which
particular spot you choose; you never-
theless are morally sure to find stationed there a
man or a group of men who have learned to
laugh at the problem of making bricks without
straw. If put to it they could make monu-
ments out of mud pies. Brought face to face
with conditions and environments that were
entirely new to their own experience, and con-
fronted as they were at the outset by the task
of providing essentials right out of the air —
essentials that were vitally and immediately
needed and that could not be forthcoming from
the States for weeks or even months — an
executive or an underlying invariably would find
a way out of the difficulty.

There was pressing need once for a receptacle

in which rubber cement could be mixed in

small quantities. Neither the local community

nor the government stores yielded such a

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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

thing and there was no time to send clear back
New York or Philadelphia for it. The man
who was charged with the responsibility of
getting that rubber cement mixed went on a
scouting tour. Somewhere he unearthed prob-
ably the only ice-cream freezer in rural France
outside of the immediate vicinity of Paris, and
he acquired it at the proprietor's valuation
and loaded it into his car and hurried back
with it to his shop, and ten minutes after he
arrived the required cement was being stirred
to the proper consistency in the ice-cream
freezer.

At the main depot of automobile supplies
they needed, right away, springs with which to
repair broken-down light cars. As yet an ade-
quate supply of spare parts had not been
received from the base, nor was there any
likelihood that a supply would be forthcoming
at once. The colonel in charge of the depot
sent men ranging through the countryside with
instructions to buy up stuff that would make
springs. They brought him in tons of pur-
chases, and most unlikely looking material it
was too — rusted chunks and strips and spirals
of metal taken from the underpinnings of
French market carts and agricultural imple-
ments; but the forces in the machine shops
sailed in and converted the lot into automobile
springs in no time at all.

This same colonel already had a plant which,
exclusive of the value of buildings specially
[376]

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

built, represents at this time a national invest-
ment of $35,000,000, and the outlay was
growing every hour. He used to be the head of
a big metal-working establishment at home.
As a specialist in his line he joined the Army
to help out. Now every month he does a
volume of buying that would have made his
average year's turnover in times of peace look
trifling in comparison. Just before he sailed
to take over his present job he ordered
$6,000,000 worth of motor parts at one fell
swoop, as it were.

Because of the rapidity with which our
forces on foreign service multiplied them-
selves there was a rush order from General
Headquarters for more buildings and yet more
buildings, at one of our warehouse depots, to
provide for storage of perishable foodstuffs in
transit from the rear to the Front. Between
seven-thirty o'clock in the morning and five
o'clock in the evening of a given day a gang
of steel riggers accomplished the impossible by
rearing and bolting together the steel frame —
posts, girders, plates, rafters and crossbeams —
for a building measuring 96 feet in width,
24 feet in height and 230 feet in length, the
same being merely one of the units of a struc-
ture that very soon thereafter was up in the
air and that measured 650 feet crosswise and
650 feet lengthwise, with railroad tracks stretch-
ing alongside and in between its various
segments.

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"When we laid out our original plans for
this project the French said it would be en-
tirely too large for our uses, no matter how
big an army we brought over," remarked to
me a young ex-civilian, now wearing a captain's
markings on his flannel shirt, who had put
through this undertaking. "Our people
thought differently and we went ahead, trying
to figure as we went along on all future con-
tingencies. The result is that already we are
enlarging upon the old specifications as rapidly
as possible. Even so the supplies are piling
up on us faster than we can store them. Look
yonder. "

He pointed to a veritable mountain of baled
hay — a regular Himalaya of hay — which covered
a corner of the field whereon we stood. It
towered high above the tops of the trees
behind it; it stretched clear to the edge of the
woodlands beyond, and it was crowned, as a
mountain peak should be, with white; only in
this instance the blanket was of canvas instead
of snow.

"There are 80,000 tons of American baled
hay in that pile," he said, "and in a month
from now if the present rate of growth keeps
up it will be bigger by a third than it is now.
It's quite some job — taking care of this man's
army. "

In the midriff of the Intermediate Section is
a project on which at this writing 10,000 men
are at work, and on an air-service field adjoining
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it 3,000 more men are engaged. Exclusive of
material for local construction purposes 500
carloads of strictly military supplies arrive
here daily, and approximately 75 carloads a
day move out. Later the ratio of outgoing
equipment will increase, but the incoming
amount is not liable to fall off very much. To
house the accumulating mass here and else-
where in the same zone, including as it does
engineers' stores, ordnance stores, fresh meats,
salt meats, medical stores, harness, guns and
quartermasters' stores, there has been provided
or will be provided 4,500,000 square feet of
roof-covered space and 10,000,000 square feet
of open storage space.

When I came that way the other day miles of
the plain had been filled pretty thoroughly with
buildings and with side tracks and wagon
roads; and, scattered over a tract measuring
roughly six miles one way and four miles the
other, between 13,000 and 14,000 men were
engaged. In January of this year, when a
man who now accompanied me had visited the
same spot, he said there was one building
standing on the area, and that two side tracks
were in use; all the rest was a barren stretch of
snowdrifts and half-frozen mud and desolation.
They were just beginning then to dig the founda-
tions of our main cold-storage plant. It is
finished and in operation to-day. Besides being
a model plant it is the third largest cold-storage
plant in the world, and yet it is to be dis-
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

tinguished from the sixty-odd buildings that
surround it only by the fact that it is taller
and longer and has more smokestacks on it
than any of the rest.

At the principal depot of the Advance Section,
where the chief regulating officer is stationed,
one of the biggest jobs is to sort out the man
provender as it flows in by rail and to fill up
each of fifty or sixty track-side warehouses with
balanced rations — so much flour, so much salt
meat, so much of salt, sugar, lard, canned
goods, pepper, vinegar, pickles, and so on, to
each building; or else to load a building with
balanced man equipment — comprising shoes,
socks, underwear, shirts, uniforms and the rest
of it down to shoe laces and buttons, the
purpose of this arrangement being that when a
warehouse is emptied the man who is in charge,
even before checking up on the loading gangs,
already knows almost to a pound or a stitch
just how many rations or how many articles of
apparel have gone forward.

In each warehouse the canned- tomatoes, the
vinegar and the stuff that contains mild acids
are stored at the two ends of the building in
crosswise barricades that extend to the roof.
This disposal was an idea of the officer in control
of the arrangement. He explained to us that
in case of fire canned stuff bearing a heavy
proportion of fluid would burn more slowly
than the other foodstuffs, so there would be a
better chance of confining the blaze to the
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building in which it originated and of preventing
its spread to adjoining or adjacent buildings,
which might be of brick or concrete or stone
or sheet metal, but which are more apt to be of
frame.

A British colonel on a visit of inspection to
our Service of Supplies visited this project
on the same day that I came. Radiating
admiration and astonishment at every step and
at every stop, he accompanied the young first
lieutenant who was in personal charge of the
warehousing scheme on a tour of his domain,
which covered miles. When the round had
been completed and the lieutenant had saluted
and taken himself away the Britisher said to
the chief regulating officer:

"I have never seen anything so perfectly
devised as your plan of operation and distribu-
tion here. I take it that the young man who
escorted me through is one of your great
American managing experts. I imagine he
must have been borrowed from one of those
marvellous mail-order houses of yours, of which
I have heard so much. One thing puzzles me
though — he must have come here fresh from
business pursuits, and yet he bears himself like
a trained soldier. "

The chief regulating officer smiled a little
smile.

"That man," he said, "is an old enlisted
man of our little antebellum Regular Army.
He didn't win his commission until he came

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over here. Before that he was a noncom on
clerical duty in the quartermaster's depart-
ment, and before that he was a plain private,
and as far as I know he never worked a day
for any concern except our own Government
since he reached the enlisting age."

In addition to doing what I should say at an
offhand guess was the work of ten reasonably
active men, the colonel who supervises our
Advance Section has found time since he
took over his present employment to organise a
brass band and a glee club among his personnel,
to map out and stage-manage special entertain-
ments for the men, to entertain visitors who
come officially and unofficially, to keep several
thousand individuals busy in their working
hours and happy in their leisure hours, and at
frequent intervals to write for the benefit of
his command special bulletins touching on the
finer sides of the soldier's duties and the soldier's
discipline. He gave me a copy of one of his
more recent pronouncements. He called it a
memorandum; I called it a classic. It ran as
follows:

" 1. The salute, in addition to being a soldier's
method of greeting, is the gauge by which he
shows to the world his proficiency in the pro-
fession, his morale and the condition of his
discipline.

"2. For me the dial of a soldier's salute has
three marks, and I read his salute more accur-
ately than he himself could tell me.
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"3. The three gradations are:

(a) I am a soldier; I know my trade or will
know it very soon, and I will be a success as a
soldier or a civilian, wherever I may be put.

(6) I do not know what I am and do not
care, I only do what I am forced to do, and
will never be much of a success at anything.

(c) I am a failure and am down and out,
sick, homesick and disgruntled. I cannot stand
the gaff.

"4. As Americans try to conceal your feelings
from our Allies.

"Remember you are just as much fighters
here as you would be carrying a pail of food
to the fighting line or actually firing a gun.

"Every extra exertion is an addition to the
firing line direct.

"Every bit of shirking is robbing the firing
line."

"BUCK UP!"

For qualities of human interest no joints in
the snake's spine, no twists in his manifold
convolutions measure up, I think, to the
salvage depots. Once upon a time, and not so
very long ago, an army in the field threw away
what it did not use or what through breakage
or stress became unserviceable. That day is
gone. In this war the wastage is practically
negligible. Our people have learned this lesson
from the nations that went into the war before
we entered it, but in all modesty I believe, from

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what I have seen, that we have added some
first-rate improvements to the plan in the few
months that have been vouchsafed us for
experiments and demonstrations. Moreover, to
the success of our plans in this regard there
have been difficulties that did not confront our
Allies to the same extent. For instance our
biggest motor-repair depot is housed in what
formerly had been a French infantry barracks —
a series of buildings that had never been
devised for the purposes to which they are
now put, and that at first offered many serious
problems, mechanical and physical.

In tall brick buildings, under sheds and under
tents and out in the open upon the old parade
ground a great chain of machine shops, car-
penter shops, paint shops, upholstery shops
and leather-working shops has been coordinated
and is cooperating to attain the maximum of
possible production with the minimum of lost
energy and lost effort. The scientist who recon-
structs a prehistoric monster from a fossilised
femur finds here his industrial prototype in
the smart American mechanics who build up an
ambulance or a motor truck from a fire-
blackened, shell-riddled car frame, minus top,
minus wheels, minus engine parts. What comes
out of one total wreck goes into another that
is not quite so totally so. And when a tool is
lacking for some intricate job the Yank turns
in and makes it himself out of a bit of scrap;
and neither he nor his fellows think he has done

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anything wonderful either. It's just part of
the day's work.

The salvage depot for human equipment and
for lighter field equipment is established at this
writing in what was, not so very long ago, a
shop where one of the French railroad lines
painted its cars. It began active operations
last January with six civilian employees under
an officer who four weeks before he landed in
France was a business man in Philadelphia.
In June it had on its pay rolls nearly 4,000
workers, mainly women and many of them
refugees.

When all the floor space available — about
200,000 square feet of it — has been taken over
the plant will have a personnel of about 5,000
hands, and it will be possible to do the reclama-
tion work in clothing, shoes, rubber boots and
slickers, harness and leather, canvas and
webbing, field ranges, mess equipments, stoves,
helmets, trenching tools, side arms, rifle slings,
picks, shovels and metal gear generally for
about 400,000 fighting men, with an estimated
saving to Uncle Sam — exclusive of the vast
sum saved in tonnage and shipping charges —
of about $1,000,000 a month.

At this time 10,000 garments and articles
of personal attire are passing through this
plant every twenty-four hours, and coming out
cleaned, mended, remade or converted to other
purposes. A man could spend a week here, I
feel certain, and not count his sight-seeing time
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

as wasted. Among the men workers he would
find invalided and crippled soldiers of at least
six nations — America, Belgium, France, Greece,
Serbia and Italy. Among the women workers,
who average in pay seven francs a day — big
wages for rural France — he would find many
women of refinement and education hailing
from evacuated districts in northern France
and Belgium, whose faces bespeak the terrors
and torments through which they have passed
in the attempted implanting of the seeds of
Kultur upon their homelands. Now they sit
all day, driving sewing machines or managing
knitting looms alongside their chattering, gossip-
ing sisters of the peasant class.

And every hour in this beehive of industry
the man who looked close would come upon
things eloquently bespeaking the tragedy or
the comedy of war's flotsam and jetsam. Now
perhaps it would be a battered German bugle
picked up by some souvenir-loving soldier, only
to be flung into the camp salvage dump when
its finder wearied of carrying it; and now it
would be a khaki blouse with a bullet hole
in the breast of it and great brown stains, stiff
and dry, in its lining. A talking machine in
fair order, the half of a tombstone and the full-
dress equipment of a captain of Prussian
Hussars were among the relics that turned up
at the salvage depot in one week.

There is no dump heap behind the con-
verted paint barn, for the very good reason

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that practically there is nothing to dump.
Everything is saved. The salvaged junk comes
in by the carload lot from the Front — filthy,
crumpled, broken, blood-crusted, verminous,
tattered, smelly and smashed. Sorters seize
upon it and separate it and classify it according
to kind and state of disrepair. Men and women
bear it in armloads to sterilisers, where live
steam kills the lice and the lice eggs; thence it
goes to the cleaning vats, after which it is sorted
again and the real job of making something
out of what seemed to be worse than nothing
at all is undertaken, with experts, mainly
Americans, to supervise each forward step in
the big contract of renovation, restoration and
utilisation.

After the body clothing has been made clean
and odourless it is assigned to one of three classes,
to wit: (a) Garments needing minor repairs
and still sightly and serviceable, which are put
in perfect order and reissued to front-line troops;
(b) garments not so sightly but still serviceable,
which are issued to S O S workers, including
stevedores, labourers, railroad engineers, fire-
men and forestry workers; (c) garments that
are not sightly but that will repay repairing.
These are dyed green and given to German
prisoners of war. Practically no new material
is used for repair. Garments that are past
salvation in their present shape are cut up to
furnish patches. Three garments out of four
are reclaimed in one form or another; the fourth
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

one becomes scrap for patchings. Shoes are
washed in an acid disinfectant that cleanses the
leather without injuring its fabric, and then
they are dried and greased before going in to
the workers. Shoes that are worth saving are
saved to the last one; those past saving are
ripped apart and the uppers are cut into shoe
strings, while the soles furnish ground-up leather
for compositions. Thanks to processes of wash-
ing, cleansing and repairing, a salvage average of
approximately ninety per cent, is attained in
slickers and rubber boots.

Last spring the high military authorities
decided to shorten the heavy overcoats worn
by our soldiers, so it befalls that the lengths of
cloth cut from the skirts of the overcoats are
now being fashioned at the salvage plants into
uppers for hospital slippers, while old campaign
hats furnish the material for the soles. The
completed article, very neat in appearance and
very comfortable to wear, is turned out here in
great numbers. Old tires are cooked down to
furnish new heels for rubber boots. Old socks
are unravelled for the sake of the wool in them.
Tin receptacles that have held gasoline or oil
are melted apart, and from their sides and
tops disks are fashioned which, being coated
with aluminum, become markers for the graves
where our dead soldier boys have been buried.
Smaller tins are smelted down into lumps and
used for a dozen purposes. The solder from
the cans is not wasted either. Even the hob-
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BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

nails of worn-down boot soles are saved for
future use.

Master of theatrical trick and device that
he is, none the less David Belasco could learn
lessons at our camouflaging plant. He prob-
ably would feel quite at home there, too, seeing
that the place has a most distinctive behind-
the-scenes atmosphere of its own; it is a sort
of overgrown combination of scenery loft,
property room, paint shop and fancy-dress
costumer's establishment, where men who gave
up sizable incomes to serve their country in
this new calling work long hours seeking to
improve upon the artifices already developed —
and succeeding — and to create brand-new ones
of their own.

As a branch of military modernism camou-
flaging is even newer than the trade of scientific
salvaging is and offers far larger opportunities
for future exploitation. After all there are
just so many things and no more that may be
done with and to a pair of worn-out rubber
boots, but in the other field the only limits are
the limits of the designer's individual ingenuity
and his individual skill.

We came, under guidance, to a big open-
fronted barracks where hundreds of French
women and French girls made screenage for
road protection and gun emplacements. The
materials they worked with were simple enough :
rolls of ordinary chicken wire, strips of burlap
sacking dyed in four colours — bright green,
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

yellowish green, tawny and brown — and wisps
of raffia with which to bind the cloth scraps
into the meshes of the wire. For summer use
the bright green is used, for early spring and
fall the lighter green and the tawny; and for
winter the brown and the tawny mingled.
For, you see, camouflage has its seasons, too,
marching in step with the swing of the year.
Viewed close up the completed article looks to'
be exactly what it is — chicken wire festooned
thickly with gaudy rags. But stretch a breadth
of it across a dip in the earth and then fling
against it a few boughs cut from trees, and at a
distance of seventy-five yards no man, however
keen-eyed, can say just where the authentic
foliage leaves off and the artificial joins on.

For roadsides in special cases there is still
another variety of camouflage, done in zebra-
like strips of light and dark rags alternating,
and this stuff being erected alongside the open
highway is very apt indeed to deceive your
hostile observer into thinking that what he
beholds is merely a play of sunlight and shade
upon a sloped flank of earth; and he must
venture very perilously near indeed to discern
that the seeming pattern of shadows really
masks the movements of troops. This deceit
has been described often enough, but the sheer
art of it takes on added interest when one
witnesses its processes and sees how mar-
vellously its effects are brought about.

In an open field used for experimenting and
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testing was a dump pile dotted thickly with all
the nondescript debris that accumulates upon
the outer slope of a dug-in defence where
soldiers have been — loose clods of earth, bits
of chalky stone, shattered stumps, empty beef
tins, broken mess gear, discarded boots, smashed
helmets, and such like. It was crowned with a
frieze of stakes projecting above the top of the
trench behind it, and on its crest stood one of
those shattered trees, limbless and ragged,
that often are to be found upon terrains where
the shelling has been brisk.

Here for our benefit a sort of game was
staged. First we stationed ourselves sixty feet
away from the mound. Immediately five heads
appeared above the parapet — heads with shrap-
nel helmets upon them, and beneath the helmet
rims sunburnt faces peering out. The eyes
looked this way and that as the heads turned
from side to side.

"Please watch closely," said the camouflage
officer accompanying us. "And as you watch,
remember this: Two of those heads are the
heads of men. The three others are dummies
mounted on sticks and manipulated from below.
Since you have been at the Front you know
the use of the dummy — the enemy sniper
shoots a hole in it and the men in the pit, by
tracing the direction of the bullet through the
pierced composition, are able to locate the spot
where Mister Sniper is hidden. Now then, try
to pick out the real heads from the fake ones. "
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

There were three of us, and we all three of us
tried. No two agreed in our guesses and not
one of us scored a perfect record; and yet we
stood very much nearer than any enemy
marksman could ever hope to get. The life-
likeness of the thing was uncanny.

"Next take in the general layout of that
spot, " said the camouflage expert, with a wave
of his hand toward the dump pile. "Looks
natural and orthodox, doesn't it? Seems to be
just the outer side of a bit of trench work,
doesn't it? Well, it isn't. Two of those stakes
are what they appear to be — ordinary common
stakes. The other two are hollow metal tubes,
inside of which trench periscopes are placed.
And the tree trunk is faked, too. It is all
hollow within — a shell of light tough steel with
a ladder inside, and behind that twisted crotch
where the limbs are broken off the observer
is stationed at this moment watching us through
a manufactured knothole. The only genuine
thing about that tree trunk is the bark on it — we
stripped that off of a beech over in the woods.

"The dump heap isn't on the level either,
as you possibly know, since you may have seen
such dump piles concealing the sites of obser-
vation pits up at the Front. Inside it is all
dug out into galleries and on the side facing
us it is full of peepholes — seventeen peepholes
in all, I think there are. Let's go within fifteen
feet of it and see how many of them you can
detect."

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At a fifteen-foot range it was hard enough for
us to make out five of the seventeen peep
places. Yet beforehand we understood that
each tin can, each curled-up boot, each sizable
tuft of withered grass, each swirl of the tree
stump — masked a craftily hidden opening
shielded with fine netting, through which a
man crouching in safety beneath the surface
of the earth might study the land in front of
him. That innocent-appearing, made-to-order
dump pile had the eyes of a spider; but even
so, the uniformed invader might have climbed
up and across it without once suspecting the
truth.

For a final touch the camouflage crew put
on their best stunt of all. Five men encased
themselves in camouflage suits of greenish-
brown canvas which covered them head, feet,
body and limbs, and which being decorated
with quantities of dried, grasslike stuff sewed
on in patches, made them look very much as
Fred Stone used to look when he played the
Scarecrow Man in "The Wizard of Oz" years
ago. Each man carried a rifle, likewise camou-
flaged. Then we turned our backs while they
took position upon a half-bare, half-greened
hillock less than a hundred feet from us.

This being done we faced about, and each
knowing that five armed men were snuggled
there against the bank tried to pick them out
from their background. It was hard sledding,
so completely had the motionless figures melted
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

into the herbage and the chalky soil. Finally
we united in the opinion that we had located
three of the five. But we were wrong again.
We really had picked out only one of the five.
The two other suspected clumps were not men
but what they seemed to be — small protrusions
in the ragged and irregular turf. Yes, I am
sure Mr. Belasco could have spent a fruitful
half hour or so there with us.

Thanks to yet another crafty and deceitful
artifice of the camouflage outfit it is possible to
make the enemy think he is being attacked by
raiders advancing in force when as a matter of
fact what he beholds approaching him are not
files of men but harmless dummies operated
by a mechanism that is as simple as simplicity
itself. The attack will come from elsewhere
while his attention is focused upon the make-
believe feint, but just at present there are
military reasons why he should not know any
of the particulars. It would take the edge of
his surprise, even though he is not likely to live
to appreciate the surprise once the trick has
been pulled.

These details of the whole vast undertaking
that I have touched upon here are merely bits
that stand out with especial vividness from the
recent recollections of a trip every rod of
which was freighted with the most compelling
interest for any one, and for an American with
enduring and constant pride in the achievements
of his own countrymen.

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There are still other impressions, many of
them, big and little, that are going always to
stick in my brain — the smell of the crisp brown
crusty loaves, mingling with the smell of the
wood fires at the bakery where half a million
bread rations are cooked and shipped every day,
seven days a week; the sight at the motor recep-
tion park, where a big proportion of the 60,000
motor vehicles of all sorts that are called for in
our programme, as it stands now, can be stored at
one time; the miles upon miles of canned goods
through which I have passed, with the boxes
towering in walls upon either side of me;
the cold-storage chamber as big as a cathedral,
where a supply of 5,000 tons of fresh meat is
kept on hand and ready for use; a cemetery for
our people, only a few months old, but lovely
already with flowers and grass and neat gravel
paths between the mounds; a blacksmith rivet-
ing about the left wrists of Chinese labourers
their steel identification markers so that there
may always be a positive and certain way of
knowing just who is who in the gang, since to
stupid occidental eyes all Chinamen look alike
and except for these little bangles made fast
upon the arms of the wearers there would
be complications and there might be wilful
falsifications in the pay rolls; a spectacled
underofficer hailing us in perfect but plaintive
English from a group of prisoners mending
roads, to say in tones of deep lament that he
used to be a dentist in Baltimore but made the
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

mistake of going back to Germany for a visit
to his old home just before the war broke out;
a Catholic chaplain superintending the beauti-
fying of a row of graves of Mohammedans who
had died in our service, and who had been laid
away according to the ritual of their own faith
in a corner of a burying ground where Chris-
tians and Jews are sleeping together; a maimed
Belgian soldier with three medals for valour
on his shirt front, cobbling shoe soles in the
salvage plant; a French waiter boy in a head-
quarters mess learning to pick out the chords
of Dixie Land on an American negro's home-
made guitar; a room in the staff school where a
former member of the Cabinet of the United
States, an ex-Congressman, an ex-police com-
missioner of New York City and one of the
richest men in America, all four of them volun-
teer officers, sat at their lessons with their
spines fish-hooked and their brows knotted; a
nineteen-year-old Yankee apprentice flyer doing
such heart-stopping stunts in a practice plane
as I never expect to see equalled by any veteran
airman; the funeral, on the same day and at
the same time, of one of his mates, who had
been killed by a fall upon the field over which
this daring youth now cavorted, with the
coffin in an ambulance and a flag over the
coffin, and behind the ambulance the firing
squad, the Red Cross nurses from the local
hospital and a company of his fellow cadets
marching.

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And seeing all these sights and a thousand
more like unto them I found myself as I finished
my tour along the winding lengths of the
great snake we call the Service of Supplies,
wondering just who, of all the thousands among
the men that labour behind the men behind the
guns, deserve of their countrymen the greatest
meed of credit — the high salaried executives
out of civilian life who dropped careers and
comforts and hope of preferment in their
professions at home, to give of the genius of
their brains to this cause; or the officers of our
little old peacetime Army who here serve so
gladly and so efficiently upon the poor pay
that we give our officers, without hope ever of
getting a proper measure of national apprecia-
tion for their efforts, since this war is so nearly
an anonymous war, where the performances of
the individual are swallowed up in the united
efforts of the mass; or the skilled railway train-
men volunteering to work on privates' wages
for the period of the war; or the plain enlisted
man cheerfully, eagerly, enthusiastically toiling
here, so far back of the Front, when in his
heart he must long to be up there with his
fellows where the big guns boom.

[397]

CHAPTER XXIV
FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

BLOWS with a hammer may numb one,
but it is the bee-sting that quickens the
sensibilities to a realisation of what is
afoot. That is why, I suppose, the
mighty thing called war is for me always sum-
med up in small, incidental but outstanding
phases of it. In its complete aspect it is too
vast to be comprehended by any one mind or
any thousand minds; but by piecing together
the lesser things, one after a while begins in a
dim groping fashion to get a concept of the en-
tirety.

When I went up to Ypres, it was not the un-
utterable desolation and hideousness of what
had been once one of the fairest spots on earth
that especially impressed me: possibly because
Ypres to-day is a horror too terrible and a
tragedy too utter for human contemplation
save at the risk of losing one's belief in the ulti-
mate wisdom of the cosmic scheme of things.
Nor was it the wreck of the great Cloth Hall
which even now, with its overthrown walls and
[398]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

its broken lines and its one remaining spindle of
ruined tower, manages to retain a suggestion of
the matchless beauty which forevermore is gone.
Nor yet was it the cemetery, whereon for sheer,
degenerate malignity the Germans targeted
their heavy guns until they had broached near-
ly every grave, heaving up the dead to sprawl
upon the displaced clods. One becomes, in
time, accustomed to the sight of dead soldiers
lying where they have fallen, because a soldier
accepts the chances of being killed and of being
left untombed after he is killed. The dread
spectacle he presented is part and parcel of the
picture of war. But these men and women and
babes that the shells dispossessed from their
narrow tenements of mould had died peacefully
in their beds away back yonder — and how long
ago it seems now! — when the world itself was
at peace. They had been shrouded in their
funeral vestments; they had been laid away
with cross and candle, with Book and prayer;
over them slabs of the everlasting granite had
been set, and flowers had been planted above
them and memorials set up; and they had been
left there beneath the kindly loam, cradled for
all eternity till Gabriel's Trump should blow.

But when I came there and saw what Kul-
tur had wrought amongst them — how with ex-
quisite irony the blasts had shattered grave
after grave whose stones bore the carved words
Held in Perpetuity and how grandmothers and
grandsires and the pitiable small bones of little

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

children had been flung forth out of the gaping
holes and left to moulder in the rags of their
cerements where all who passed that way might
see them — why, it was a blasphemy and an in-
decency and a sacrilege which no man, behold-
ing it, could ever, so long as he lived, hope to
forget.

And yet, as I just said, it was not the defile-
ment of the cemetery of Ypres which impressed
me most when I went up to Ypres. It was the
lamp-posts.

Ypres had been studded thick with lamp-
posts; ornamental and decorative standards of
wrought iron they were, spaced at intervals of
forty yards or so for the length of every street
and on both sides of every street. And every
single lamp-post in Ypres, as I took the pains
to see for myself, had been struck by shells or
by flying fragments of shells. Some had been
hit once or twice, some had been quite hewn
down, some had been twisted into shapeless
sworls of tortured metal; not one but was
scathed after one mutilating fashion or an-
other.

In other words, during these four years of
bombardment so many German shells had de-
scended upon Ypres that no object in it of the
thickness of six inches at its base and say, two
inches at its top, had escaped being struck.
Or putting it another way, had all these shells
been fired through a space of hours instead of
through a space of years, they would have
[400]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

rained down on the empty town with the thick-
ness and the frequency of drops in a heavy
thunder-shower.

Never was the Hun quite so thorough as when
he was punishing some helpless thing that could
not fight back.

Riding along through France on a Sunday,
these times, one is reasonably certain to meet
many little girls wearing their white commun-
ion frocks, and many Chinamen under umbrel-
las.

The latter mostly hail from Indo-China. The
French imported them in thousands for service
in the labour battalions behind the lines. Dur-
ing the week, dressed in nondescript mixtures
of native garb and cast-off uniforms, they work
at road-mending or at ditch-digging or on truck-
loading jobs. On Sundays they dress them-
selves up in their best clothes and stroll about
the country-side. And rain or shine, each one
brings along with him his treasured umbrella
and carries it unfurled above his proud head.
It never is a Chinese umbrella, either, but in-
variably a cheap. black affair of local manufac-
ture. Go into one of the barracks where these
yellow men are housed and at the head of each
bunk there hangs a black umbrella, which the
owner guards as his most darling possession.
If he dies I suppose it is buried with him.

Nobody knows here why every Sunday-
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Chinaman sports an umbrella, unless it be that
in his Oriental mind he has decided that pos-
session of such a thing stamps him as a person
of travel and culture who, like any true cosmo-
politan, is desirous of conforming to the cus-
toms of the country to which he has been trans-
ported. But a Frenchman, if careless, some-
times leaves his umbrella behind when he goes
forth for a promenade; a Chinaman in France,
never.

When a ship-load of these chaps lands they
are first taken to a blacksmith shop and upon
the left wrist of each is securely and perma-
nently fastened a slender steel circlet bearing a
token on which is stamped the wearer's name
and his number. So long as he is in the em-
ploy of the State this little band must stay on
his arm. It is the one sure means of identify-
ing him and of preventing payroll duplications.

With the marker dangling at his sleeve-end
he makes straightway for a shop and buys him-
self a black cotton umbrella and from that time
forward, wherever he goes, his steel bangle and
his umbrella go with him. He cannot part
from one and not for worlds would he part
from the other.

One Sunday afternoon in a village in the
south of France I saw that rarest of sights — a
drunken Chinaman. He wiggled and waggled
as he walked, and once he sat down very hard,
smiling foolishly the while, but he never lost
his hold on the handle of his umbrella and
[402]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

when he had picked himself up, the black bulge
of it was bobbing tipsily above his tipsy head
as he went weaving down the road behind a
mile-long procession of his fellows, all march-
ing double file beneath their raised umbrellas.

Whisper — there is current a scandalous ru-
mour touching on these little moon-faced allies
of ours. It is said that among them every
fourth man, about, isn't a man at all. He's a
woman wearing a man's garb and drawing a
man's pay; or rather she is, if we are going to
keep the genders on straight. But since the
women work just as hard as the men do no-
body seems to bother about the deceit. They
may not have equal suffrage over in Indo-
China but the two sexes there seem to have a
way of adjusting the industrial problems of the
day on a mutually satisfactory basis of under-
standing.

* * * * *

"Piccadilly Circus. This way to Swan and
Edgar's."

The sign-board was the top of a jam box.
The upright to which it was nailed was the
shell-riddled trunk of a plane tree with one
sprig of dried mistletoe clinging in a crotch
where limbs had been, like a tuft of dead beard
on a mummy's chin. Piccadilly Circus was a
roughly-rounded spot at a cross-road where
the grey and sticky mud — greyer than any mud
you stay-at-homes ever saw; stickier than any
mud you ever saw — made a little sea which
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

quaked and shimmered greasily like a quick-
sand. The way to Swan and Edgar's was
down a communication trench with shored sides
to it, so that the semi-liquid walls could not
cave in, and with duck boards set in it upon
spiles for footing, so that men passing through
would not be engulfed and drowned in the
quagmire beneath.

So much for the immediate setting. The ad-
jacent surroundings were of a pattern to match
the chosen sample. All about on every side for
miles on end, was a hell of grey mud, here up-
reared into ridges and there depressed into
holes; and the ridges heaved up to meet a sky-
line of the same sad colour as themselves, and
the holes were like the stale dead craters of a
stale dead moon.

Elsewhere in the land, spring had come weeks
before, but here the only green was the green
of the skum on the grey water in the bottoms
of the shell-fissures; the only living things were
the ravens that cawed over the wasted land-
scape, and the great, fat, torpid rats with mud
glued in their whiskers and their scaled tails
caked with mud, that scuttled in and out
of the long-abandoned German pill-boxes or
through holes in the rusted iron sides of three
dismantled British tanks. For lines of trees
there were up-ended wrecks of motor trucks
and ambulances; for the hum of bees, was the
hum of an occasional sniper's bullet; for the
tap of the wood-pecker, was the rat-tat of ma-
[ 404 ]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

chine guns marking time for a skirmish miles
away; for growing crops, in these once fecund
and prolific stretches of the Flanders flat-lands,
there were eighty-thousand unburied dead, all
encysted in the mud except where the gouging
shells had uprooted them out of the loblolly.
And from far up on the rise toward Passchen-
daele came the dull regurgitations of the big
guns, as though the war had sickened of its
own horrors and was retching in its nausea.

What now was here must, in a measure, al-
ways be here. For surely no husbandman
would dare ever to drive his ploughshare
through a field which had become a stinking
corruption; where in every furrow he would in-
evitably turn up mortal awfulness, and where
any moment his steel might strike against one
of the countless unexploded shells which fill the
earth like horrid plums in a yet more horrid
pudding.

You couldn't give this desolation a name;
our language yields no word to fit it, no ad-
jective to cap it. Yet right here in the stark
and rotten middle of it a British Tommy had
stopped to have his little joke. Was he down-
hearted? No! And so to prove he wasn't,—
that his spirits were high and that his racial
gift of humour was unimpaired, he stuck up a
sign of sprawled lettering and it said:

"Piccadilly Circus. This way to Swan and
Edgar's."

Mister Kaiser, you might have known, if
[405]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

your mental processes hadn't been stuck on
skew-wise, forty ways for Sunday, that you
could never break through an army of good
sports who make jokes at death and coin gibes
at what might well drive less hardy souls to
madness.

Mighty few men outwardly conform to the
roles they actually fill in life. I am not speak-
ing of drum-majors in bands or tattooed men
in side-shows or floor-walkers in department
stores. Such parties* are picked for their jobs
because, physically, they live up to the popu-
lar conception; perhaps I should say the popu-
lar demand. I am speaking of the run of the
species. A successful poet is very apt to look
like an unsuccessful paper-hanger and I have
known a paper-hanger who was the spittin'
image of a free versifier.

I think, though, of two men I have met over
here who were designed by nature and by en-
vironment to typify exactly what they are.
One is Haig and the other is Pershing. Either
would make the perfect model for a statue to
portray the common notion of a field-marshal.
General Sir Douglas Haig is a picture, drawn to
scale, of the kind of British general that the
novelists love to describe; in mannerism, in fig-
ure, in size, in bearing, in colouring and expres-
sion, he is all of that. And by the same tokens
Pershing in every imaginable particular is the
[406]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

typical American fighting-man. Incidentally I
might add that these two men are two of the
handsomest and most splendid martial figures
I have ever met. They say Haig is the best-
dressed officer in the British army and that is
saying a good deal, considering that the officers
of the British army are the best dressed officers
of any army.

Pershing has the poise and port of a West
Point cadet; has a cadet's waist-line and shoul-
der-lines, too. A man may keep a youthful
face but in the curves of his back is where
nearly always he betrays his age. Look at Per-
shing's back without knowing who he was and
you would put him down as an athlete in his
early twenties.

I have taken lunch with General Sir Douglas
Haig, and his staff, including his Presbyterian
chaplain who is an inevitable member of the
commander's official family, and I have dined
with General Pershing and his staff, as Persh-
ing's guest. When you break bread with a
man at his table you get a better chance to
appraise him than you would be likely to get
did you casually meet him elsewhere. From
each headquarters I brought away the settled
conviction that I had been in the company of
one of the staunchest, most dependable, most
capable personalities to whom authority and
power were ever entrusted. Different as they
were in speech and in gesture, from each there
radiated a certain thing which the other like-
[407]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

wise possessed and expressed without knowing
that he expressed it — a sense of a stupendous,
unremitting responsibility, gladly accepted and
well discharged; an appreciation of having in
his hands a job to do, the tools for the doing of
which are human beings, and in the doing of
which, should he make a mistake, the error will
be charged up against him in figures of human
life.

Always I shall remember one outstanding
sentence which Haig uttered and one which
Pershing uttered. Curiously enough, each was
addressing himself to the same subject, to wit:
the American soldier. Haig said:

"The spirit of the American soldier as I have
seen him over here since your country entered
the war, is splendid. When he first came I
was struck by his good humour, his unfailing
cheerfulness, his modesty, and most of all by
his eager, earnest desire to learn the business of
war as speedily and as thoroughly as possible.
Now as a British commander, I am very, very
glad of the opportunity to fight alongside of
him — so glad, that I do not find the words off-
hand, to express the depth of my confidence in
the steadfastness and the intelligence and the
courage he is every day displaying."

Pershing said:

"When I think, as I do constantly think, of
the behaviour of our men fighting here in a for-
eign land; of the disciplined cheerfulness with
which they have faced discomforts, of the con-
[408]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

slant determination with which they have con-
fronted difficulties, and of the splendid dash
with which they have met the enemy in bat-
tle, I cannot speak what is in my mind because
my emotions of gratitude are so great they
keep me from speaking of these things."

At a French railway station any day one
sees weeping women but they do not weep un-
til after the trains which carry their men-folk
back to the trenches have gone. To this rule I
have never seen an exception.

A soldier who has finished his leave — a per-
missionaire the French call him — comes to the
station, returning to his duties at the Front.
It may be he is a staff officer gorgeous in gold
lace. It may be he is a recruit of this year's
class with the fleece of adolescence still upon
his cheeks but with the grave assurance of a
veteran in his gait. Or it may be that he is a
grizzled territorial bent forward by one of those
enormous packs which his sort always tote
about with them; and to me this last one of
the three presents the most heart-moving spec-
tacle of any. Nearly always he looks so tired
and his uniform is so stained and so worn and
so wrinkled! I mean to make no cheap gibe at
the expense of a nation which has fine-tooth-
combed her land for man power to stand the
drain of four years of war when I say that ac-
cording to my observations the back-line re-
[409]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

serves of France in 1918 are a million middle-
aged men whose feet hurt them.

Be he staff officer though, or beardless youth
or fifty-year-old rear-guard it is certain that his
women-folk will accompany him to the station
to tell him farewell. He has had his week at
home. By to-night he will be back again at
the Front, in the mud and the filth and the cold
and the wet. By to-morrow he may be dead.
But there is never a tear shed at parting. He
kisses his wife or his mother or his sister or all
of them; he hugs to his breast his babies, if he
has babies. Then he climbs aboard a car
which already is crowded with others like him,
and as the train draws away the women run
down the platform alongside the train, smiling
and blowing kisses at him and waving their
hands and shouting good-byes and bidding him
to do this or that or the other thing.

And then, when the train has disappeared
they drop down where they are and cry their
hearts out. I have witnessed this spectacle a
thousand times, I am sure, and always the
sight of it renews my admiration for the women
of what I veritably believe to be the most pa-
tient and the most steadfast race of beings on
the face of the globe.

In early June, I went up to where the first
division of ours to be sent into the British lines
for its seasoning under fire was bedded down in

[410]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

billets hard by the Flanders border; and there
I saw a curious thing. There were Canadians
near at hand, and Australians and New Zea-
landers and one might naturally suppose the
Yankee lads would by preference fraternise
with these soldiers from the Dominions and the
Colonies who in speech, in mode of life and in
habit of thought were really their brothers un-
der the skin.

Not at all. In many cases, if not in a major-
ity of cases, that came under my notice I found
Americans chumming with London Cockneys,
trading tobacco for cheese; prunes for jam,
cigarettes for captured souvenirs; guying the
Londoners because they drank tea in the after-
noons and being guyed because they themselves
wanted coffee in the mornings.

The phenomenon I figured out to my own
satisfaction according to this process of deduc-
tion: First, that the American and the Cock-
ney had discovered that jointly they shared
the same gorgeous sense of humour, albeit ex-
pressed in dissimilar ways; second, that each
had found out the other was full of sporting in-
stincts, which made another tie between them;
and third and perhaps most cogent reason of
all, that whatever the Yankee might say, using
his own slang to say it, sounded unutterably
funny in the Cockney's ear, and what the
Cockney said on any subject, in his dialect,
was as good as a vaudeville show to the Yan-
kee.

[411]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Personally I do not believe it was the Anglo-
Saxon strain calling to the Anglo-Saxon strain,
because the American was as likely to be of
Italian or Irish or Jewish or Teutonic or Slavic
antecedents as he was to be of pure English
ancestry. I am sure it was not the common
use by both of tne same language — with varia-
tions on the part of either. But I am sure that
it was the joyous prospect of getting free and
unlimited entertainment out of the conversa-
tions of a new pal.

Anyway our soldiers are cementing us to-
gether with a cement that will bind the Eng-
lish-speaking races in a union which can never
be sundered, I am sure of that much.

The madness which descended upon our ene-
mies when they started this war would appear
to have taken a turn where it commonly mani-
fests itself in acts of stark degeneracy. Every
day I am hearing tales which prove the truth
of this. If there was only one such story com-
ing to light now and then we might figure the
terrible thing as proof of the nastiness of an in-
dividual pervert manifesting itself; but where
the evidence piles up in a constantly accumu-
lating mass it makes out a case so complete
one is bound to conclude that a demoniacal
rottenness is running through their ranks, af-
fecting officer and men alike. For the sake of
the good name of mankind in general one

[412]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

strives not to accept all these tales but the
bulk of them must be true.

A young tank-officer of ours whom I knew
before the war in New York, where he was a
rising lawyer, and whom I knew to be truthful,
tells me that an honest appearing British non-
com in turn, told him that a week or two ago
the Britishers having cleaned up a nest of en-
emy machine guns, sent a detail out to bury
the dead. The squad had buried two Germans,
then they came upon the body of one of their
own men who had fallen in the fighting two
days earlier when the Britishers made their
first attack upon the Germans only to be forced
back and then to come again with better suc-
cess. The sergeant who stood sponsor for the
narrative declared that as he bent over the
dead Englishman to unfasten the identification
tag from the wrist, he saw that something was
fastened to the dead man's arm and that this
something was partly hidden beneath the body.
Becoming instantly suspicious, he warned the
other men to stand back and then kneeling
down and feeling about cautiously, he found a
bomb so devised that a slight jar would set it
off. Before they fell back, the surviving Ger-
mans had attached this devilish thing to a
corpse with the benevolent intent of blowing
to bits the first man among the victors who
should undertake to move the poor clay with
intent to give it decent burial.

Our men have been warned against gathering

[413]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

up German helmets and German rifles in places
from which the enemy has retired, because such
souvenirs have a way of blowing up in the find-
ers' hands by reason of the explosive grenades
that have been attached to them and hidden
beneath them with the cap so arranged that a
tug at the wired-on connection will set off the
charge; but this crowning atrocity shows they
are making improvements in their system.
From sawing down fruit trees, from shoveling
filth in the drinking wells, from wantonly de-
stroying the villages which for years have shel-
tered them, from laying waste the lands which
they are being forced now to surrender back
into the hands of their rightful proprietors, the
ingenious Hun has progressed in his military
education to where he makes dead men serve
his purposes. Personally, I have heard of but
one act to match this one. An American troop-
er entered a half -wrecked hamlet which the re-
treating Germans had just evacuated, and on
going into a villager's house, saw a china doll
lying upon a cupboard shelf, and saw that,
hitched to the doll, was one of these touchy
hand-bombs. Now, it is only reasonable to
assume the German who planned this surprise
went upon the assumption that the doll would
be the prized possession of some French child
and that when the family who owned the house
found their way back to it, the child would run
first of all to recover her treasured dollie and
picking it up would be killed or mangled, there-

[414]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

by scoring one more triumph, if a small one,
for Vaterland and Kaiser.

To a dressing station behind our front lines
up beyond St. Mihiel — so I am reliably in-
formed— our stretcher-bearers brought two
wounded prisoners and laid them down. One
of the pair was a Prussian captain with a hole
in his breast; the other a weedy boy-private
with a shattered leg. There were two surgeons
at work here — a Frenchman and an American.

As the Frenchman bent over the captain, in
the joy of service forgetting for the moment
that the man lying before him was his enemy
and filled only with a desire to save life and re-
lieve human agony, the Prussian who seeming-
ly had been unconscious, opened his eyes in
recognition. Thereupon the surgeon, making
ready to strip away the first-aid dressings from
the punctured chest, spoke to his patient in
French saying he trusted the captain did not
suffer great pain. The reply was Prussianesque.
The wounded man cleared his throat and spat
full in the Frenchman's face.

I hope I am not blood-thirsty, but I am
happy to be able to relate a satisfactory se-
quel. The Frenchman, who must have been a
gentleman as well as a soldier, stood true to
the creed of an honourable and merciful call-
ing. He merely put up his hand and without a
word wiped the spittle from his face which had
[415]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

grown white as death under the strain of en-
during the insult. But an American stretcher-
bearer who had witnessed the act, snatched up
a rifle from a heap of captured accoutrements
near the door of the dugout and brought the
butt of it down, full force, across the hateful,
gloating mouth of the Prussian.

For contrast, mark the behaviour of the boy-
soldier who also had just been borne in. It was
the American surgeon who took the private's
case in hand. Now this American surgeon was
of pure German descent and bore a German
name and he spoke well the tongue of his an-
cestors. So naturally he addressed the groan-
ing lad in German.

Between gasps of pain, the lad told his in-
terrogator that he was a Saxon, that his age
was eighteen and that he had been in service
at the Front for nearly a year. Even in the
midst of his suffering he showed pleasure at
finding among his captors a man who knew
and could use the only language which he him-
self knew. Noting this, the surgeon continued
to address the youngster as he made ready to do
to the mangled limb what was needful to be done.

As his skilled fingers touched the wound,
some sub-conscious instinct quickened perhaps
by the fact that he had just employed the
mother-speech of his parents set him to whis-
tling between his teeth a song he had known as
a child. And that song was Die Wacht am Rhein.

Under his ministering hands the young Saxon
[416]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

twitched and jerked. Perhaps he thought the
surgeon meant to gloat over him, captured and
maimed for life as he was; perhaps it was an-
other emotion which prompted him to cry out
in a half -strangled shriek:

"Don't whistle that song— don't!"

"I am sorry," said the American, "I did not
mean to hurt your feelings. I thought you
might like to hear it — that it might soothe
you."

"Like to hear it? Never!" panted the lad.
"I hate it— I hate it— I hate it!"

"Surely though you love your country and
your Emperor, don't you?" pressed the Ameri-
can, anxious to fathom the psychology of the
prisoner's nature.

"I love my country — yes," answered the boy,
"but as to the Kaiser, to him I would do
this — ." And he drew a finger across his throat
with a quick, sharp stroke.

I am putting down this scrap of narrative in
a room in a hotel that is two hundred years old,
in the heart of a wonderful old Norman city
and while I am writing it, twenty miles away,
in front of Montdidier, they are giving my
friend the kind of funeral he asked for.

I call him my friend, although I never saw

him until four weeks ago. He was a man you

would want for your friend. Physically and

every other way, he was the sort of man that

[417]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

Richard Harding Davis used to love to describe
in his stories about soldiers of fortune. He
seemed to have stepped right out of the pages
of one of Davis 's books — he was tall and
straight and slender, as handsome a man as
ever I looked at and a soldier in every inch of
him. The other officers of the regiment ad-
mired him but his men, as I have reason to
know, worshipped him — and that, in the final
appraisals, is the test of an officer and a gentle-
man in any army.

I met him on the day when I rode up into
Picardy to attach myself bag and baggage-
one bag and not much baggage — to a foot-regi-
ment of our old regular army, then moving into
the battle-lines to take over a sector from the
French. He had a Danish name and his fa-
ther, I believe, was a Dane; but he was born in
a Western state nearly forty years ago. In the
Spanish war he was a kid private; saw service
as a non-com in the Philippine mess; tried civil
life afterwards and couldn't endure it; went to
Central America and took a hand in some tin-
pot revolution or other; came home again and
was in business for a year or so, which was as
long as his adventurous soul could stand a
stand-still life; then moved across the line into
the Canadian Northwest and got a job in the
Royal Mounted Police. In 1914, when the war
broke, he volunteered in a Canadian battalion
as a private. On our entrance into the con-
flict he was a major of the Dominion Forces.

[418]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

He resigned this commission forthwith, hurried
back to the States and joined up at the first re-
cruiting office he saw after he reached New
York. And now when I met him, he had his
majority in an American regiment which has a
long and a most honourable record behind it.

During this past month I saw a good deal of
him. So far as I could judge, he had one, and
just one, bit of affectation about him — if you
could call it that. He wore always the British
trench helmet that he had worn in the Cana-
dian forces and he liked to finger the gap in its
brim where a bit of shrapnel chipped it as
he climbed up Vimy Ridge, and he liked to tell
about that day of Vimy so glorious and so
tragic for the valorous whelps of the British
lion who hail from our own side of the blue
water. He had another small vanity too, as I
now understand — a vanity which to-day is be-
ing gratified.

Six days ago I left the regiment to spend a
day and a night with a battery of five-inch
guns just west of Montdidier. As I was start-
ing off he hailed me and we made an engage-
ment for a dinner together here in this town
where the food is very, very good, said dinner
to take place "sometime soon." He was stand-
ing in the road as I rode away and when I
looked back out of the car he waved his hand
at me.

The village where I stayed for that night
and the following day, formed a hinge in the
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THE GLORY OF THE COMING

line that our forward forces had taken over. It
was within two miles of the German trenches
and within three or four miles of some of their
heavy batteries. Through the night I slept at
battalion headquarters, in the only house in
the town which up until then had escaped seri-
ous damage from German gunfire.

Coming back again to my regiment — as I
shall call it — on the second day following, I
learned that almost immediately after my de-
parture the batteries I left in and near this vil-
lage had been ordered to take up a prepared
position in a patch of woods a mile farther in
the rear and that my friend's battalion had
gone up to hold the town and to act as a re-
serve unit there until its turn should come to
relieve part of another infantry regiment in the
trenches proper. So I knew that in all proba-
bility he now was domiciled in the cottage
where I had slept the night previous. As it
turned out my guess was right — that was
where he was. Three days ago I borrowed a
side-car and ran on down here where I could
get in touch with the divisional censor and file
some of the copy I have been grinding out
lately.

Yesterday afternoon in the main square 1
bumped into the adjutant of my regiment and
with him, one of the French liaison officers at-
tached to the regiment.

"Hello," I said, "what brings you two down
here?"

I 420 ]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

"We came to get some flowers for the funeral
to-morrow," the adjutant told me.

"Whose funeral?" I asked.

When they told me whose funeral, I was
stunned for a moment. From them I learned
when my friend died and how. And this, then,
is the story of it:

Night before last he and his battalion liaison
officer, a Frenchman of course, and his battalion
adjutant were eating supper in that same small
red brick house which had sheltered me for a
night. The Germans had been punishing the
place at long distance; now there was a lull in
the bombardment, but just as the three of them
finished their meal, the enemy reopened fire.
Almost at once a shell fell in the courtyard be-
fore the house and another demolished a stone
stable in the orchard behind it. All three hur-
ried down into an improvised bomb-proof shel-
ter in the cellar.

"You fellows stay here," said the major
when they had reached the foot of the stairs.
"I left my cigars and a couple of letters from
home upstairs in the kitchen. I'll go up and
get them and be back again with you in a min-
ute."

Thirty seconds later, to the accompaniment
of a great rending crash, the building caved in.
Wreckage cascaded down the cellar stairs but
the floor rafters above their heads stood the
jar and the two who were below got off with
bruises and scratches. They made their way up

[421]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

through the debris. A six-inch shell had come
through the roof, blowing down two sides of
the kitchen, and under the shattered walls the
Major was lying, helpless and crushed.

They hauled him out. He was conscious but
badly hurt, as they could tell. The adjutant
ran to a dug-out on the other side of the village
and brought back with him the regimental sur-
geon. It didn't take the surgeon long to make
his examination.

To the others he whispered that there was
no hope — the Major's spine was broken. But
because he dreaded to break the word to the
victim he essayed a bit of excusable deceit.

"Major," he said, bending over the figure
stretched out upon the floor, "you've got it
pretty badly, but I guess we'll pull you through.
Only you'd better let me give you a little jab
of dope in your arm — you may begin to suffer
as soon as the numbness of the shock wears off."

My friend, so they told me, looked up in the
surgeon's face with a whimsical grin.

"Doc," he said, "your intentions are good;
but there comes a time when you mustn't try
to fool a pal. And you can't fool me — I know.
I know I've got mine and I know I can't last
much longer. I'm dead from the hips down al-
ready. And never mind about giving me any
dope. There are several things I want to say
and I want my head clear while I'm saying
them."

He told them the names and addresses of his

[422]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

nearest relatives — a brother and a sister, and
he gave directions for the disposal of his kit
and of his belongings. He didn't have very
much to leave — professional soldiers rarely do
have very much to leave.

After a bit he said: "I've only one regret.
I'm passing out with the uniform of an Ameri-
can soldier on my back and that's the way I
always hoped 'twould be with me, but I'm
sorry I didn't get mine as I went over the top
with these boys of ours behind me.~ Still, a
man can't have everything — can he? — and I've
had my share of the good things of this world."

He began to sink and once they thought he
was gone; but he opened his eyes and spoke
again:

"Boys," he said, "take a tip from me who
knows: this thing of dying is nothing to worry
about. There's no pain and there's no fear.
Why, dying is the easiest thing I've ever done
in all my life. You'll find that out for your-
selves when your time comes. So cheer up
and don't look so glum because I just happen
to be the one that's leaving first."

The end came within five minutes after this.
Just before he passed, the liaison officer who
was kneeling on the floor holding one of the
dying man's hands between his two hands, felt
a pressure from the cold fingers that he clasped
and saw a flicker of desire in the eyes that were
beginning to glaze over with a film. He bent
his head close down and in the ghost of a ghost
[423]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

of a whisper, the farewell message of his friend
and mine came to him between gasps.

"Listen," the Major whispered, "Old
Blank," — naming the regimental chaplain—
"has pulled off a lot of slouchy funerals in this
outfit. Tell him, for me, to give me a good
swell one, won't you?"

He went then, with the smile of his little con-
ceit still upon his lips.

That was why the two men whom I met here
yesterday rode in to get flowers and wreaths.
They told me the Colonel was going to have
the regimental band out for the services to-day
too, and that a brigadier-general and a major-
general of our army would be present with
their staffs and that a French general would be
present with his staff. So I judge they are giv-
ing my friend what he wanted — a good swell
one.

The France to which tourists will come after
the war will not be the France which peace-
time visitors knew. I am not speaking so much
of the ruined cities and the razed towns, each a
mute witness now to thoroughness as exempli-
fied according to the orthodox tenets of Kul-
tur. For the most part these never can be re-
stored to their former semblances — Hunnish ef-
ficiency did its damned work too well for the
evil badness of it ever to be undone. Indeed I
was told no longer ago than last week, when I
[424]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

went through Arras, dodging for shelter from
ruin-heap to ruin-heap between gusts of shell-
ing from the German batteries, that it is the
intention of the French government to leave
untouched and untidied certain areas of wan-
ton devastation, so future generations of men
looking upon these hell's quarter-sections, will
have before their eyes fit samples of the finished
handicraft of the Hun. I am sure this must be
true of Arras because in the vicinity of the ca-
thedral— I mean the place where the cathedral
was once — signs are stuck up in rubble-piles or
fastened to upstanding bits of splintered walls
forbidding visitors to remove souvenirs or to
alter the present appearance of things in any
way whatsoever. I sincerely trust the French
do carry out this purpose. Then in the years
to come, when Americans come here and behold
this spot, once one of the most beautiful in all
Europe and now one of the foulest and most
hideous, they may be cured of any lingering in-
clination to trust a people in whose veins there
may linger a single trace of the taints of Kai-
serism and militarism. However, I dare say
that by then our present enemies will have
been purged clean of the blight that now is in
their blood.

When I say that the France of the future
will never be the France which once was a
shrine for lovers of beauty to worship at — which
was all one great altar dedicated to loveliness
— I am thinking particularly of the rural dis-

[425]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

tricts and not of the communities. I base my
belief upon the very reasonable supposition
that after the armies are withdrawn or disband-
ed— or, as in the case of our foes, killed off or
captured or driven back, — the peasants in their
task of making the devastated regions fit once
more for human habitation, will turn to the
material most plentifully at hand and that of
which the quickest use can be made. This
means then, that instead of rebuilding with
masonry and cement and plaster after the an-
cient modes, they will employ the salvage of
military constructions. And by that same sign
it means that ugly characterless wooden build-
ings with roofs of corrugated iron, and all slab-
sided and angular and hopelessly plain, will re-
place the quaint gabled houses that are gone
—and gone forever; and that where the pic-
turesque stone fences ran zig-zagging across
the faces of the meadows, and likewise where
the centuries-old, plastered walls rose about
byre and midden and stable-yard, will instead
be stretched lines of barbed wire, nailed to
wooden posts.

The stuff will be there — in incredible quan-
tities— and it will be cheap and it will be avail-
able for immediate use, once the forces of the
Allies have scattered. It is only natural to as-
sume therefore that the thrifty country-folk
and the citizens of the villages will take it over.
For a fact in certain instances they are already
doing so. Just the other day, up near the
[426]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

Flanders border in the British-held territory, 1
saw a half grown boy wriggling through a maze
of rusted wire along an abandoned defence line,
like Brer Rabbit through the historic brier-
patch; and when I drew nearer, curious to know
what sort of game he played all alone here in a
land where every game except the great game
of war is out of fashion, I saw that he was tear-
ing down the strands of the wire, and through
the interpreter he told me he was going to en-
close his mother's garden with the stuff. Think
of a French garden fenced in after the style of
a Nebraska ranch yard. Also I have taken
note that the peasants are removing the plank
shorings from the sides of old, disused trenches
and with the boards thus secured are knocking
up barns and chicken-sheds and even make-
shift dwellings.

Assuredly it will never be the old France,
physically. But spiritually, the new France,
wearing the scars of her sacrifice as the Re-
deemer of Mankind wore the nail-marks of His
crucifixion, will be a vision of glory before the
eyes of men forevermore. I like this simile as
I set it down in my note-book. And I mean no
irreverence as I liken the barbed wire to the
Crown of Thorns and think of two cross-pieces
of ugly wood out of a barrack or a rest-billet as
being erected into the shape of The Cross.

When the military policemen first came upon

[427]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

him in the Gare du Nord he made a picture
worth looking at. For he stood above six-feet-
two in his soleless and broken brogans, and he
was as black as a coal-hole at twelve o'clock at
night during a total eclipse of the moon and he
was as broad across between the shoulders as
the back of a hack. He wore a khaki shirt, a
pair of ragged, blue overalls and an ancient
campaign hat. He didn't appear to be going
anywhere in particular; he was just standing
there.

Now the M. P.s have a little scheme for
trapping deserters and malingerers. They edge
close up behind a suspect and then one of them
snaps out "Shun!" in the tones of a drill-offi-
cer. If the fellow really is a truant from ser-
vice, force of habit and the shock of surprise
together make him come to attention and then
he's a gone gosling, marching off the calaboose
with steel jewelry on both his wrists.

But when this pair slipped nearer and near-
er until they could touch the big darky, and
one of them barked the command right in his
ear, he merely turned his head and without
straightening his languid form inquired polite-

ly=

"Speakin' to me, Boss?"

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, one of
them asked for his papers.

"Whut kinder papers?"

"Your military papers — your pass — some-
thing to identify you by."
[428]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

"W'y, Boss," he asked, "does you need pa-
pers to go round wid yere in Sant Nazare?"

"This ain't St. Nazare," they told him.
"This is Paris."

"Paris? My Lawd! Den dat 'splains it."

"Explains what?" They were getting cross
with him.

" 'Splains w'y I couldn't fine all dem niggers
dey tole me wuz'in Sant Nazare. Here I been
in Paris all dis time — ever since early dis maw-
nin' — an' I didn't know it. No wonner I
couldn't locate dem big wharf-boats an' dem
niggers."

"Never mind that now — I just asked you
where're your papers?"

"Papers? Me? Huh, Boss, I ain't got no
more papers 'n a ha'nt. Effen you needs pa-
pers to git about on, you gen'elmen better tek
me an' lock me up right now, 'ka'se I tells you,
p'intedly, I ain't got nary paper to my name."

"That's precisely what we aim to do. Come
on, you."

They took him to number ten Rue St. Anne
where our provost-marshal in Paris has his
headquarters and there the tale came out. I
got it first hand from the captain of the Intel-
ligence Department who examined him and I
know I got it straight, because the captain was
a monologist on the Big Time before he signed
up for the war, and he has both the knack of
narrative and the gift of dialects. Then later
I myself saw the central figure in the comedy

[429]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

and interviewed him. In a way of speaking, I
think his adventure was the most remarkable
of any I have heard of on this side of the ocean
— and I have heard my share. How a big lub-
berly American negro with absolutely nothing
on his person to vouch for him or his purposes,
could travel half way across a country where no
one else may stir a mile without a pocket full of
passes and vises and credentials; and how, lack-
ing any knowledge of the language, he man-
aged to do what he did do — but I am antici-
pating.

It was at ten Rue St. Anne that my friend
the ex-vaudevillian took him in hand with the
intention of conferring the third degree. For
quite a spell the interrogator couldn't make up
his mind whether he dealt with the most guile-
less human being on French soil or with a
shrewd black fugitive hiding his real self be-
hind a mask of innocence. After he had made
sure the prisoner was what he seemed to be,
the intelligence officer kept on at him for the
fun of the thing.

Batting his eyes as the questions pelted at
him, the giant made straightforward answers.
His name was Watterson Towers; his age was
summers 'round twenty-fo' or twenty-five, he
didn't perzactly 'member w'ich; he was born
and fotched up in Bowlin' Green, Kintucky,
and at the time of his coming to France he re-
sided at number thirty-fo', East Pittsburgh.

"Number thirty-four what?" asked the in-
quisitor.

[430]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

"Naw suh, not no thirty-fo' nothin' — jes*
plain thirty-fo'."

"But what street is it on?"

"'Tain't on no street, Boss."

"What do you mean — no street?"

"Boss, wuz you ever in East Pittsburgh?
Well suh, den does you 'member dat string of
little houses dat stands in a row right 'longside
de railroad tracks ez you comes into town f'um
de fur side? 'Taint no street, it's jes' only
houses. Well suh, I lives in de thirty-fo'th
one."

"I see. How did you get here?"

"Me? I rid, mostly."

"Rode on what?"

"Rid part de time on a ship an* part de time
on de steam-cyars but fust an' last I done a
mighty heap of walkin', also."

Further questioning elicited from Watterson
Towers these salient facts: He had taken a
job which carried him from East Pittsburgh to
New York and left him stranded there. He
had heard about the draft. He knew that
sooner or later the draft would catch him and
send him off to France where he would be ex-
pected to fight Germans, so he decided that
before this could happen, he would visit France
on his own hook, and as a civilian bystander, a
private observer, so to speak, would view some
of the operation of war at first-hand, with a
view to deciding whether he cared enough for
it as a sport, to take a hand in it voluntarily.

[431]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

He had smuggled himself aboard a transport —
Heaven alone knew how! — and fortified with a
bag of ginger-snaps he had remained hidden
away in a cargo-hold until the ship sailed. Two
days out from land a new and very painful sick-
ness overcame the stowaway and he made his
way up on deck for air. There he had been
caught and had been sent to the galley to
work his passage across. When he had prog-
ressed thus far, his cross-examiner broke in.
"What was the name of the ship?"
"Boss, I plum' disremembers, but it muster
been de bigges' ship dey is. W'y suh, dey wuz
'most six-hund'ed folks on dat ship, an' I had
to wash up after ever' las' one of 'em. W'ite
folks suttinly teks a lot of dishes w'en dey
eats— I'll tell de world dat."

"Well, where did the ship land? — do you
know that much?"

"Boss, hit wuz some place wid a outlandish
name an' dat's all I kin tell you. I never wuz
no hand fur 'memberin' reg'lar names let alone
dese yere jabber kind of words lak dese yere
French folks talks wid."

"What happened when you came ashore?"
"W'y, suh, dey let me off de ship an' a w'ite
man on de wharf-boat he tells me I'se landed
right spang in France an' he axes me does I
want a job of wuk an' I tells him 'Naw suh,
not yit.' I tells him I'se aimin' to travel round
an' see de country an' de war 'fore I settles
down to anythin'. Den 'nother w'ite man dat's
[432]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

standin' dere he tells me dey's a lot of my col-
our in a place called Sant Nazare an' I 'cides
I'll go dere an' 'sociate aw'ile wid dem niggers.
So I changed my money an' I "

"I thought you said you didn't have any
money when you started?"

"I didn't, Boss, but de w'ite folks on de ship
dey taken up a c'lection fur me, account of me
washin' all dem dishes so nice an' clean. It
come to twenty dollahs. So I changes it into
dese yere francs. De man give me twenty
francs fur my twenty dollahs — didn't charge
me no interes' a-tall, but jes' traded even; an'
den I sets out to find dis yere Sant Nazare
place. Dat wuz two days ago an' I been mov-
in' stiddy ever sense."

"How did you know what train to take?"

"I didn't. I jes' went to de depot an' I
clim' abo'd de fus' train I sees dat look lak she
might be fixin' to go sommers. An' after Vile
one of dese Frenchies come 'round to me whar
I wuz settin' an' he jabber somethin' at me an'
I tell him plain ez I kin, whar I wants to go
an' is dis de right train? An' den he jabber
some mo' an' I keep on tellin' him an' after
'w'ile he jes th'ow up both hands, lak dis, an'
go on off an' leave me be in peace. Wich dat
very same thing happen to me ever' time I git
on a train an' I done been on three or fo' 'fore
I gits to dis place, dis mawnin'.

"My way wuz to stay by de train t'well she
stop an' don't start no mo' an! den I'd git off
[433]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

an' walk round lookin' for de big wharf-boats
where de w'ite man tole me dem niggers would
be wukkin', but not no place I went did I see
ary wharf-boats, so I jes' kept a-movin' t'well I
got yere, lak I'm tellin' it to you, an' I says to
myself den, 'Dis sutt'inly must be Sant Nazare
— it's shore big enough to be, anyway.' But I
walked 'bout ten miles an' I couldn't find no
wharf -boats an' no niggers neither, scusin' some
Frenchified niggers all dressed up lak Misty
Shriners, an' dey couldn't talk our way of talk-
in'. I seen plenty of our soldiers but I wuz'n*
aimin' to be pesterin 'round wid no soldiers 'till
I'd done seen de war. So finally I sees a big
place dat look lak it mout be 'nother depot, an'
I went on in there an' wuz fixin' to tek de
next train out, w'en dem two soldier-men of
your'n wid de bands on dere arms dey
come up to me an' dey run me in. An' yere I

is."

It was explained to Watterson Towers that,
to avoid complications he had better enter the
army forthwith and very promptly he agreed.
Travel, seemingly, was beginning to pall on
him. Then to spin out his gorgeous humour of
the interview, the intelligence officer put one
more question and when he told me the an-
swer I agreed with him the reward had been
worth the effort.

"Now, Watterson," he said, "what kind of a
regiment would you prefer to join — an all-white
regiment or an all-black regiment or a mixed
[434]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

regiment, part black and part white? You can
take your choice — so speak up. "

"Boss," said Watterson, "it don't make no
dif'ence a-tall to me w'ich kind of a regiment
'tis — jes' so it's got a band!"

One's war-time experiences is crowded with
constant surprises. For five months, off and
on, I have been living on the fourth floor of
one of the largest and most noted of Paris ho-
tels, and not until to-day did I find out that
two floors of the building have all along been
in possession of the government for hospital
purposes. The patients, mainly wounded men
who have been invalided back from the trench-
es are brought by night and carried in through
a rear entrance, which opens on a barred and
guarded alley-way. The guests never see
them and they never come in contact with the
guests.

Under my feet all these weeks hundreds of
disabled fighting-men have been getting better
or getting worse, recovering or dying, and I
would never have guessed their presence had it
not been for the chance remark of a govern-
ment official who is connected with one of the
bureaus having charge of the bless6s.

I learn now that the same thing is true of
several other prominent hotels, but so careful-
ly is the business carried on and so skillfully do
the authorities hide their secret that I am sure
[435]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

not one guest in a thousand ever stumbles upon
the fact.

When I was writing a tale about one visit of
several which I paid to the old Luneville sec-
tors where our buddies, in the spring of this
year, first left their tooth-marks on the Heinies,
I forgot to tell of an incident that occurred on
the last day of our stay up there as the guests
of a regiment of the Rainbows.

Martin Green and I had just returned from
a four-hour tramp through some of our trench-
es. It was long after the hour for the mid-day
meal when we got back, weary and mud-coat-
ed, to regimental headquarters in a knocked-
about village. But the colonel's cook obliging-
ly dished up some provender for us and for
the young intelligence officer who had been our
guide that day. Just as we were finishing the
last round of flap- jacks with molasses, the Ger-
mans began shelling the battered town so we
adjourned to the nearest dug-out, which was
the next door cellar, that had been thickened
as to its roof with sand-bags and loose earth
and strips of railroad iron. Down there we
came upon several others who had taken shel-
ter, including one of the majors.

"When were you fellows figuring on starting
back to your own billet?" he inquired. "Some-
time this afternoon, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Green, "we had counted on leav-
[436]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

ing here about three o'clock. But I guess we'll
be delayed, if the Germans keep up their straf-
ing. Neither of us fancies trying to make a
break out of here while the bombardment is
going on, and I don't suppose our chauffeur
would be so very enthusiastic over the pros-
pect, either. I only hope the Germans let up
on the fireworks display before dark. It's forty-
odd miles to where we're going and the thought
of riding that distance after nightfall over these
torn-up roads with no lights burning on our
car and the road full of supply trains coming
up to the front, does not strike me as a particu-
larly alluring prospect. "

"Don't worry," said the Major with a grin
which proved he was holding back something.
"You can get away from here in — well, let's
see — . "He glanced at the watch on his wrist.
"In just one hour and three-quarters, or to be
exact, in one hour and forty-six minutes from
now, you can be on your way. It's now 2:15.
At precisely one minute past four you can climb
into your car and beat it from here and if you
hurry you'll be home in ample time for din-
ner."

"You talk as though you were in the confi-
dence of these Germans," quoth Green.

"In a way of speaking, I am," said the Ma-
jor. "I've been here for eight days now, and
every day since I arrived, promptly at 2 p. M.
those batteries over yonder open up on this
place and all hands go underground. The shell-
[437]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

ing continues — in the ratio of one shell every
two minutes — until four o'clock sharp. Then
it stops, and until two o'clock the next day,
things around here are nice and quiet and
healthy. So don't get chesty and think this
show was put on especially on your account,
because it wasn't: it's in accordance with the
regular programme. Therefore, judging to-day's
matinee by past performances, I would say that
at one minute past four you chaps can be on
your way with absolutely nothing to worry
about except the chances of a puncture."

"Funny birds — these Germans," exclaimed
one of us, still half in doubt as to whether the
Major joked.

"Funny birds is right," he said, "and then
some. We've got it doped out after this fash-
ion: The officer in command of the German
battery just over the hill from where you were
to-day probably has instructions to shoot so
many rounds a day into us. So in order to sim-
plify the matter he, being a true German, starts
at two and quits at four, when he has used up
his supply of ammunition for the day. Now
that we're wise to his routine we don't take
any chances, but withdraw ourselves from so-
ciety during the two hours of the day when he
is enjoying his customary afternoon hate. Old
George J. Methodical we call him. You fel-
lows still don't quite believe me, eh? Well,
wait and see whether I'm right."

We waited and we saw, and he was right.
[438]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

Somewhere over our heads a charge of shrap-
nel or of high explosive exploded every two
minutes until precisely four o'clock. Sharp on
the hour the shells quit falling and before the
dust had settled after the farewell blast we
were gathering up our dunnage for the depart-
ure. As we sped out of the huddle of shattered
cottages and struck the open road there was a
half-mile stretch ahead of us and while we
traversed it we were within easy range and
plain view of the Germans. But no one took
a wing shot at us as we whizzed across the open
space.

After we slid down over the crest into the
protection of the wooded valley below, I re-
membered an old story — the story of the ped-
dler who invaded a ten-floor office building in
New York and made his way to the top floor
before one of the hall attendants found him.
The attendant kicked the peddler down one
flight of stairs to the ninth floor and there an-
other man fell upon him and kicked him down
another flight to the eighth floor where a third
man took him in hand and kicked him a flight
and so he progressed until he had been kicked
down ten flights by ten different men and had
landed upon the sidewalk a bruised and bat-
tered wreck, with the fragments of his wares
scattered about him. He sat up on the pave-
ment then and in tones of deep admiration re-
marked: "Mein Gott, vot a perfect system!"

In the original version of the tale the ped-

[439]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

dler was Yiddish. But I'm certain now that he
was German and that he went back to the
Vaterland after the war broke out and became
the commander of a battery of five-inch guns
on the old Luneville front.

On the day before Decoration Day of this
year of 1917 I was in a sea-port town on the
northeastern coast of France which our people
had taken over as a supply base. The general
in command of our local forces said to me as
we sat in his headquarters at dinner that even-
ing:

"I wish you'd get up early in the morning
and go for a little ride with me out to the cem-
etery. You'll be going back there later in the
day, of course, for the services but I want you
to see something that you probably won't be
able to see after nine or ten o'clock."

"What is it?" I asked.

"Never mind now," he answered. "To tell
you in advance doesn't suit my purposes. But
will you be ready to go with me in my car at
seven o'clock?"

"Yes, sir. I will."

I should say ? it was about half -past seven
when we rode in at the gates of the cemetery
and made for the section which, by consent of
the French, had been set apart as a burial place
for our people. For considerably more than a
year now, dating from the time I write this
[440]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

down, a good many thousands of Americans
have been stationed in or near this port, and
many, many times that number have passed
through it. So quite naturally, though it is
hundreds of miles from any of the past or pres-
ent battle fronts, we have had numerous deaths
there from accident or from disease or from
other causes.

We rounded a turn in the winding road and
there before us stretched the graves of our
dead boys, soldiers and sailor's, marines and
members of labor battalions; whites and blacks
and yellow men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics,
Protestants and Mohammedans — for there were
four followers of the faith of Islam taking their
last sleep here in this consecrated ground — row
upon row of them, each marked, except in the
case of the Mohammedans, by a plain white
cross bearing in black letters the name, the age,
the rank and the date of death of him who
slept there at the foot of tjie cross.

Just beyond the topmost line of crosses stood
the temporary wooden platform dressed with
bunting and flags, where an American admiral
and an American brigadier, a group of French
officers headed by a major-general, a distin-
guished French civic official, and three chap-
lains representing three creeds were to unite at
noon in an hour of devotion and tribute to the
memories of these three-hundred-and-odd men
of ours who had made the greatest of all hu-
man sacrifices.

[441]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

But it was not the sight of the rows of graves
and the lines of crosses nor the peculiar devices
uprearing slantwise at head and foot of the
graves of the four Musselmans nor yet the 'brave
play of tri-coloured bunting upon the sides and
front of the platform yonder which caught my
attention. For at that hour the whole place
was alive with the shapes of French people —
mostly of women in black but with a fair sprin-
kling of shapes of old men and of children
among them. All these figures were busy at a
certain task — and that task was the decorating
of the graves of Americans.

As we left the car to walk through the plot I
found myself taking off my cap and I kept it
off all the while I was there. For even before
I had been told the full story of what went on
there I knew I stood in the presence of a most
high and holy thing and so I went bare-headed
as I would in any sanctuary.

We walked all through this God's acre of
ours, the general and I. Some of the women
who laboured therein were old and bent, some
were young but all of them wore black gowns.
Some plainly had been recruited from the well-
to-do and the wealthy elements of the resident
population; more though, were poor folk and
many evidently were peasants who, one guess-
ed, lived in villages or on farms near to the
city. Here would be a grave that was heaped
high with those designs of stiff, bright-hued im-
mortelles which the French put upon the graves
[442]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

of their own dead. Here would be a grave that
was marked with wreaths of simple field flow-
ers or with the great lovely white and pink
roses which grow so luxuriantly on this coast.
Here would be merely great sheaves of loose
blossoms; there a grave upon which the flowers
had been scattered broadcast, until the whole
mound was covered with the fragrant dewy of-
ferings; and there, again, I saw where fingers
patently unaccustomed to such employment
had fashioned the long-stemmed roses into
wreaths and crosses and even into forms of
shields.

Grass grew rich and lush upon all the graves.
White sea-shells marked the sides of them and
edged the narrow gravelled walks. We came
to where there were two newly made graves;
their occupants had been buried there only a
day or so before as one might tell by the marks
in the trodden turf, but a carpeting of sods cut
from a lawn somewhere had been so skillfully
pieced together upon the mounds that the raw
clods of clay beneath were quite covered up
and hidden from sight, so that only the seams
in the green coverlids distinguished these two
graves from graves which were older than they
by weeks or months.

Alongside every grave, nearly, knelt a wom-
an alone, or else a woman with children aiding
her as she disposed her showing of flowers and
wreaths to the best advantage. The old men
were putting the paths in order, raking the
[443 ]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

gravel down smoothly and straightening the
borderings of shells. There were no soldiers
among the men; all were civilians, and for the
most part humble-appearing civilians, clad in
shabby garments. But I marked two old gen-
tlemen wearing the great black neckerchiefs
and the flowing broadcloth coats of ceremonial
days, who seemed as deeply intent as any in
what to them must have been an unusual la-
bour. Coming to each individual worker or
each group of workers the general would halt
and formally salute in answer to the gently
murmured greetings which constantly marked
our passage through the bury ing-ground. When
we had made the rounds we sat down upon the
edge of the flag-dressed platform and he pro-
ceeded to explain what I already had begun to
reason out for myself. Only, of course I did
not know, until he told me, how it all had
started.

"It has been a good many months now," he
said, "since we dug the first grave here. But
on the day of the funeral a delegation of the
most influential residents came to me to say
the people of the town desired to adopt our
dead. I asked just what exactly was meant by
this and then the spokesman explained.

"'General,' he said to me, 'there is scarcely
a family in this place that has not given one or
more of its members to die for France. In most
cases these dead of ours sleep on battlefields
far away from us, perhaps in unmarked, un-

[444]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

known graves. This is true of all the parts of
our country but particularly is it true of this
town, which is so remote from the scenes of
actual fighting. So in the case of this brave
American who is to-day to be buried here among
us, we ask that a French family be permitted
formally to undertake the care of his grave,
exactly as though it were the grave of their own
flesh-and-blood who fell as this American has
fallen, for France and for freedom. In the case
of each American who may hereafter be buried
here we crave the same privilege. We promise
you that for so long as these Americans shall
rest here in our land, their graves will be as our
graves and will be tended as we would tend the
graves of our own sons.

"We desire that the name of each family
thus adopting a grave may be registered, so
that should the adults die, the children of the
next generation as a sacred charge, may carry
on the obligation which is now to be laid upon
their parents and which is to be transmitted
down as a legacy to all who bear their name.
We would make sure that no matter how long
your fallen braves rest in the soil of France,
their graves will not be neglected or forgotten.

"We wish to do this thing for more reasons
than one: We wish to do it because thereby
we may express in our own poor way the grati-
tude we feel for America. We wish to do it
because of the thought that some stricken
mother across the seas in America will perhaps

[445]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

feel a measure of consolation in knowing that
the grave of her boy will always be made beau-
tiful by the hands of a Frenchwoman whose
home, also, has been desolated. And finally we
wish to do it because we know it will bring
peace to the hearts of our French women to
feel they have a right to put French flowers
upon the graves of your dead since they can
never hope, most of them, to be able to per-
form that same office for their heroic dead."1

The general stopped and cleared his voice
which had grown a bit husky. Then he re-
sumed:

"So that was how the thing came about, and
that explains what you see here now. You see,
the French have no day which exactly corre-
sponds in its spiritual significance to our Deco-
ration Day and our Memorial Day. All Souls'
Day, which is religious, rather than patriotic in
its purport, is their nearest approach to it. But
weeks ago, before the services contemplated for
to-day were even announced, the word some-
how spread among the townspeople. To my
own knowledge some of these poor women have
been denying themselves the actual necessities
of life in order to be able to make as fine a
showing for the graves which they have adopt-
ed as any of the wealthier sponsors could make.

"Don't think, though, that these graves are
not well kept at all times. Any day, at any
hour, you can come here and you will find any-
where from ten to fifty women down on their

[446]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

knees smoothing the turf and freshening the
flowers which they constantly keep upon the
graves. But I knew that at daylight this morn-
ing all or nearly all of them would be here do-
ing their work before the crowds began to ar-
rive for the services, and I wanted you to see
them at it, in the hope that you might write
something about the sight for our people at
home to read. If it helps them better to under-
stand what is in the hearts of the French you
and I may both count our time as having been
well spent."

He stood up looking across the cemetery, all
bathed and burnished as it was in the soft rich
sunshine.

"God," he said under his breath, "how I am
learning to love these people!"

So I have here set down the tale and to it I
have to add a sequel. Decoration Day was
months ago and now I learn that the custom
which originated in this coast town is spread-
ing through the country; that in many villages
and towns where Americans are buried, French
women whose sons or husbands or fathers or
brothers have been killed, are taking over the
care of the graves of the Americans, bestowing
upon them the same loving offices which they
would visit, if they could, upon the graves of
their own men-folk.

It was one of those days which will live al-

[447]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

ways in my memory — my feet wouldn't let me
forget it even if my brain wanted to — when I
had to walk to keep up. The available forces
offered by Pershing to the French and British
at the time of the great spring push of the Ger-
mans were moving up across Picardy. I, as
one of the correspondents assigned each to a
separate regiment, had set out at dawn to foot
it for fifteen miles across country at the tail of
the headquarters company. This happened to
be a day, of which there were several, when
neither a side-car, a riding-horse, or a seat in
an ambulance or a baggage-wagon was avail-
able, and when the colonel's automobile was so
crowded with the colonel and his driver and his
adjutant and his French liaison officer and all
their baggage, there was no room in it for me.
That painful period of my martial adventures
has elsewhere in these writings been described
at greater or less length.

I was hoofing it over the flinty highway, try-
ing to favour my blisters, when I heard a hail
behind me. I turned around and there was an
angel from Heaven, temporarily disguised as a
Y. M. C. A. worker, sitting at the wheel of a
big auto-truck with the sign of the red triangle
on its sides.

"Could you use a little ride?" he inquired,
grinning through the dust clouds as he drew up
alongside and halted.

Could I use a little ride! For fear he might
change his mind or something, I boarded him
[448]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

over a front wheel before I began expressing
my eternal gratitude.

This ceremony being over, he told me who
he was, and I told him who I was, and after
that we became friends for life. He was a
minister from a city in southern California but
he didn't look it now, what with a four-days'
growth of stubbly red whiskers on his weather-
beaten chops and grease spots on his service
uniform. He had given up a good salary and
he had left behind him a wife and three chil-
dren— I am sure about the wife and I'm pretty
sure there were three children, or two anyhow
—to come over here and at the age of forty-
four or thereabouts to run a perambulating
canteen for the boys. There are a lot more like
him in France, serving with the "Y" or the
K. of C.'s or the Salvation Army or the Red
Cross and as a rule they assay about nineteen-
hundred and ninety-nine pounds of true gold to
the ton.

"Willing to earn your passage, ain't you?"
he inquired when the introductions were con-
cluded. "Well then, climb into the back of
my bus and stand by to get busy, heaving out
the cargo."

I looked then and saw his truck was loaded
to the gunwales with boxes of California
oranges.

"What the ?" I began, in surprise.

"Go on and say it," he urged. "Don't hang
back just because I'm a parson by trade.
[449]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

around with this man's army, Fm
used to hi»iSi^ cuss words. Quite a jag of
freight, isn't ft? Some good fellow out in my

with the request that they be distributed among
the boys, free gratis for nothing, and it's my
present job to catch up with this division and
give part of the stuff away. I fit out from
Paris before daylight this morning and here I
am. But I can't steer this wagon and pass out
the truck at the same time so if you'll go aft
and do the Walter Johnson, IH play Bobby
Waltour here at this end and between us we
cam spread the fight and keep right on moving
at the same time."

about three o'clock in the
rolled into the village where the

comoanv and the colonel and. his ^raff flp^» m—
odentaDy I — were to be billeted for the night,
I had a sore arm to keep company with my

up behind a «nlom» of matching
pal, the red-haired dominie,
"Who wants a nice, juicy
and then as we rolled on by
out the fruit, trying to make sure
lan got one orange «»H that no

to men afoot, to men on
and to men^petched upon ambu-

[450]

FROM MY OVERSEAS XOTE-BOOK

lances and wagons. My throwing was faulty
but the catching approximated perfection. An
arm would fly up and the flying orange would
find a home in the deftly cupped palm of the
hand at the far end of the arm. The
travelled ahead of us, somehow, and whole
panics would be lined up as we arrived, to get
their share.

A few minutes before the finish of the trip
came, we caught up with a couple of French
^Neither of us remembered

French word for orange, but that made no dif-
ference. His whoop of announcement and my
first fling in the direction of a trudging Poftu,
were as signals to all the rest and up went their
paws. Their intentions were good, but I don't
thfnlc I ever in all my life witnessed such a dis-
play of miscellaneous muffing, and I used to see
some pretty raw fielding back at Paducah in
the days of the old Kitty League. As the scor-
ers would say, there was an error for nearly
every chance. Among the Americans, not **M»
orange in ten had been dropped; among the
Frenchmen not one in ten was safely held.

"Get the answer, don't you?" inquired the
preacher-driver as we left the trudging French-
men behind and hurried ahead to connect with
a khaki-dad outfit just defiling out of a cross-
way into the main road a quarter of a mile
ahead of us.

"Sure," I answered, "the Yanks make traps
of their paws but the Frenchmen

[451]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

of theirs. The orange stays in the trap but it
rolls out of a butter-fingered basket."

"Yes/' he said, "but the real cause goes
deeper down than that. Baseball — that's the
answer. Probably every American in France
played baseball when he was a kid, or else he
still plays it. No Frenchman ever knew any-
thing about baseball until we came over here
last year and introduced it into the country.
The average Frenchman looks on a sporting
event as a spectacle, but the average American,
at some time or other in his life, has been an
active participant in his national sport and the
lessons we learn as children we never entirely
forget even though lack of practice may make
us rusty."

Which, of course, was quite true. Likewise,
I think it is the underlying reason for the fact
that our boys are the best hand-grenade tossers
among the Allies.

We certainly are creatures of habit. Be-
cause somebody, a century or so behind us,
speaking with that air of authority which usu-
ally accompanies the voicing of a perfectly
wrong premise, stated that all Irishmen were
natural wits and that no Englishman could see
a joke, the world accepted the assertion as a
verity. Never was a greater libel perpetrated
upon either race. It has been my observation
that the Irish at heart are a melancholy breed.
[452]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

Certain it is that no people have produced more
first-rate humourists and more first-rate come-
dians than the English. Witness the British
output of humour in this war; witness Bairns-
father and those satirical verses on war topics
that have been running in Punch lately. I'm
mostly Celt myself — North of Scotland and
South of Ireland, with some Welsh and a little
English mixed up in my strain — and I feel my-
self qualified to speak on these matters.

Another common delusion among outsiders
and particularly among Americans is that Eng-
lishmen are stolid unimaginative creatures who
fail to show their feelings in moments of stress
because they haven't any great flow of feelings
to show. Now, as a general proposition, I think
it may be figured that a Frenchman on becom-
ing sentimental will give free vent to the
thoughts that are in his heart; that an Ameri-
can will try to hide his emotions under a mask
of levity and that an Englishman, expressing
after a somewhat different pattern the racial
embarrassment which he shares with the Amer-
ican, will seek to appear outwardly indifferent,
incidentally becoming more or less inarticulate.
The Frenchman takes no shame to himself that
he weeps or sings in public; the Yankee is apt
to laugh very loudly; the Englishman will be
mute and will exhibit slight confusion which by
some might be mistaken for mental awkward-
ness. But there are exceptions to all rules. In
so far as the rule pertains to the Britisher, I
[453]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

am thinking of two exceptions. To one of
these instances I was an eye-witness; the other
incident was told to me by a man who had
been present when it occurred. He said he was
passing through Charing Cross station one
night when he saw two Canadian subalterns
emerging from one of the refreshment booths.
Both of them had been wounded. One had his
right arm in a sling and limped as he walked.
The other was that most pitiable spectacle
which this war can offer — a young man blinded.
Across his eyes was drawn a white cloth band
and he moved with the uncertain fumbling gait
of one upon whom this affliction has newly
come. With his uninjured arm the lame youth
was steering his companion. The two boys—
for they were only boys, my informant said-
halted in an arched exitway to put on their
top-coats before stepping out into the drizzle.
The crippled officer released his hold upon his
friend's elbow to shrug his own garment up
upon his shoulders. The second bless& was
making a sorry job at finding the armholes of
his coat, when an elderly officer with the badges
of a major-general upon his shoulders and a
breast loaded with decorations, stepped up and
with the words, "Let me help you, please,"
held the coat in the proper position while deft-
ly he guided the blind boy's limbs into the
sleeve openings.

All in a second the unexpected denouement
came. The youngster reached in his pocket,

[454]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

then felt for the hand of his volunteer who had
come to his assistance. "Thank you very
much," he said. And there in the palm of the
astonished general lay a shilling.

The other lieutenant hobbled to his com-
rade's side. He may have meant to whisper,
but in his distress he fairly shouted it out:
"You've just handed a tip to a major-general!"

Horrified, the blind boy spun about on his
heels to apologise.

"I'm so sorry, sir," he gasped. "I — I
thought it was a porter, of course. I beg your
pardon, a thousand times, sir. I hope you'll for-
give me — you know, I can't see any more,
sir." And with that he held out his hand to
take back the miserable coin.

The splendid-looking old man put both his
hands upon the lad's shoulders. His ruddy
face was quivering and the tears were running
down his cheeks.

"Please don't, please don't," he gulped, al-
most incoherently. "I want to keep your shil-
ling, if you don't mind. Why God bless you,
my boy, I want to keep it always. I wouldn't
take a thousand pounds for it."

And then falling back one pace he saluted
the lad with all the reverence he would have
accorded his commander-in-chief or his king.

Here is the other thing, the one of which I

speak as having first-hand knowledge. Three

of us, returning by automobile from a visit to

the Verdun massif, took a detour in order to

[455]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

call upon our friends the blithe young British-
ers who made up Night Bombing Squadron No.

. They were a great outfit, representing

as they did, every corner of the Empire; but
the pick of the lot, to my way of thinking, were
Big Bill and the Young-'Un, both captains and
both seasoned pilots of big Handley-Page bomb-
ing planes. As I think I have remarked some-
where else in these pages, the average age of
this crowd was somewhere around twenty-two.

This fine spring night we arrived at their
headquarters opportunely for there was to be a
raiding expedition to the Rhine Valley. First
though, there was a good dinner at which we
were unexpected but nonetheless welcome
guests. Catch a lot of English lads letting a
little thing like the prospect of a four hundred
mile air jaunt into Germany and back inter-
fere with their dinner.

Just before the long, lazy twilight greyed
away, to be succeeded by the silver radiance of
the moonlight, all hands started for the han-
gars a mile or two away across on the other
side of the patch of woods which surrounded
the camp. Upon the running-boards of our car
we carried an overflow of six or eight airmen;
the rest walked. Clinging alongside me where
I rode in the front seat, was a tall, slender boy
— a captain for all his youth — whom I shall call
Wilkins, which wasn't his name but is near
enough to it. He was the minstrel of the squad-
ron; could play on half a dozen instruments, in-
[456]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

eluding the piano, and sing Cockney ballads
with a lovely nasal whine.

At the field our added passengers dropped off
and each ran to superintend the soldier crews
as they went over the planes, tuning them up.
After a little while the signal for departure
came. One after another thirteen machines got
away, each bearing its pilot and its gunner-ob-
server and with its freight of great bombs dan-
gling from its undersides as it rose and went
soaring away toward the northeast, making a
wonderful picture, if in rising, it chanced to
cut across the white white disk of a splendid
full moon which had just pushed itself clear of
the wooded mountainside.

Next day about noon-time our route again
brought us within ten miles of the squadron's
camp and we decided to turn aside that way
for an hour or so and learn the results of the
raid. Sprawled about the big living-room of
their community house in the birch forest, we
found a score or more of our late hosts.

"Well, what sort of a show did you put on
last night?" one of us inquired as we entered.

"Oh, a priceless show," came the answer
from one. "We gave the dear old Boche a
sultry evenin' and make no ruddy error about
it. Spilt our little pills all over Mannheim and
Treves. Scored a lot of direct hits too, as well
as one might judge while comin' away in more
or less of a hurry."

"It was rippin' fun while it lasted," put in
[457]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

another. "We didn't get back though until
nearly four o'clock this mornin'. It left me feel-
in' rather seedy — I must have my beauty sleep
or I'm no good for the whole day." Behind his
hand he yawned.

Now ordinarily, the next question would
have been framed with a view to finding out
whether all the bombers had safely returned;
but the airman's code of ethics forbade. It
was perfectly proper to inquire regarding the
effects of a raid into hostile territory but the
outsider must refrain from seeking information
regarding any losses on the part of the raiders
until one of them volunteered the news of his
own accord.

But there was no rule against our silently
counting noses and this we did, industriously.
As nearly as I could make out there were, of
those whom we knew had participated in the
expedition, five or six missing from the assem-
bled company; but then of course the absentees
might be asleep in their quarters.

It struck the three of us, and in my own
case I know the impression deepened as the
minutes passed, that for all their kindly hospi-
tality and all their solicitude that we should
feel at home, there was a common depression
prevalent among them. Some, we thought be-
trayed their feelings by a silence not habitual
among these high-spirited youths. Some
seemed abstracted and some just a trifle irri-
table. And when this one or that described the

[458]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

bombing of the enemy towns which had been
their particular targets I was sure I detected
something forced about the enthusiasm he out
into his speech.

Presently there befell one of those awkward
little silences which inevitably occur in any
gathering where the spirit of things is a bit
forced and strained. It was broken by a lanky
twenty-year-old flyer.

"Hm— - ' he began, clearing his throat and
striving to make his tone casual, "you know,
Wilkins and his observer didn't get back."

That was all — no details of how his two
mates had gone rocketing down somewhere be-
hind the German lines probably to instant
death. In these few words he stated the bald
fact of it and then he looked away, suddenly
and unduly interested in the movements of
somebody passing by one of the open win-
dows.

On my right hand sat that winning little
chap whom his mates called the Young-'Un.
The Young-'Un was lighting a pipe.

"Beastly annoyia'," he grunted between
puffs at the stem of his briar-root, "losin' Wil-
kins. As a matter of fact he was the only de-
cent pianist we had. Rotten luck and all that
sort of thing to lose our pianist, eh what?"

Coming from the Young-'Un, with his gentle
smile and his soft whimsical drawl, the last re-
mark seemed so utterly unsympathetic, so cal-
lous, so cold-blooded, that the shock of what

[459]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

he said left me mute. It left my two compan-
ions mute, too.

I turned in my chair and looked at the
Young-'Un. He seemed to have trouble getting
his pipe going. His two hands were cupped
over the bowl, making a mask for his face. By
reason of his hands I could not see much of his
face but I could see this much — that his chin
was trembling, that the big muscles in his
throat were twitching and jumping and that
though he winked his eyes as fast as he could,
he couldn't wink fast enough to keep the big
tears from leaking out and running down his
cheeks.

Because he was an experienced airman it was a
part of his professional code to make no pother
over the loss of a fellow-flier by the hazard of
chance which every one of them dared as a
part of his daily life. Because he was an Eng-
lishman, he felt shame that he should show any
emotion. But because his heart was broken he
cried behind the cover of his hands.

Shells and bombs are forever doing freakish
things. The effects of their tantrums set one
to thinking of the conduct of cyclones and
earthquakes. For example:

In Bar-le-Duc, which most Americans used

to think of, not as a city but as a kind of jelly,

I saw when we passed through there the other

day, where a bomb dropped by a German air-

[460]

FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

raider did a curious bit of damage. I reckon
people who believe in omens and portents would
call it significant. Just off the railroad station
in a little paved square stands a monument
put up by popular subscription to the men of
this town who died for their country in 4870-
71. Upon one face of the granite shaft, being
the one which looks inward toward the town,
are two bronze figures of heroic size. The low-
ermost figure is that of a dying boy-soldier,
with one hand pressed to his breast and the
other holding fast to his musket. The other
figure — that of a winged angel typifying the
spirit of France — is hovering above him with
aj| palm branch extended over his drooping
head.

The bomb, descending from on high, must
have grazed the face of the monument. A
great hole in the pavement shows where it ex-
ploded. One flying fragment sheared away the
fingers and thumbs of the dying soldier's hand
so that the bronze musket was torn out of his
grasp and flung upon the earth. Some one
picked up the musket and laid it at the base of
the marble but the hand sticks out into space
empty and mutilated.

I dare say a German might interpret this as
meaning France would be left crippled, dis-
armed and mangled. But to me I read it as a
sign to show that France, the conqueror, and
not the conquered, will be one of the nations
that are to take the lead in bringing about uni-
[461]

THE GLORY OF THE COMING

versal peace and universal disarmament, once
Germany has been cu*ed of what ails her.

I saw them when they first landed at Camp
Upton — furtive, frightened, slew-footed, slack-
shouldered, underfed, apprehensive — a huddle
of unhappy aliens speaking in alien tongues;
knowing little of the cause for which they must
fight and possibly caring less.

I saw them again three months later when
the snow of the dreadful winter of 1917-18 was
piling high about their wooden barracks down
there on wind-swept Long Island. The stoop
was beginning to come out of their spines, the
shamble out of their gait. They had learned to
hold their heads up, had learned to look every
man in the eye and tell him to go elsewhere
with a capital H. They knew now that disci-
pline was not punishment and that the salute
was not a mark of servility but an evidence of
mutual self-respect as between officer and man.
They wore their uniforms with pride. The flag
meant something to them and the war meant
something to them. Three short hard months
of training had transformed them from a rab-
ble into soldier-stuff; from a street-mob into
the makings of an armv; from strangers into
Americans.

After nine months I have seen them once
more in France. For swagger, for snap, for
smartness in the drill and for cockiness in the
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FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

billet; for good humour on the march and for
dash and spunk and deviltry in the fighting
into which just now they have been sent, our
army can show no better soldiers and no more
gallant spirits than the lads who mainly make
up the rank and file of this particular division.

They are the foreign-born Jews and Italians
and Slavs of New York's East Side, that were
called up for service in the first draft.

No wonder the mother who didn't raise her
boy to be a soldier has become an extinct spe-
cies back home.

'[463]

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

Cobb, Irvin Shrewsbury

The glory of the coming
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