Chapter 16
It is fine to march in a column of men and know the current of energy that flows along it. However many miles you have marched, however tired your feet and back and arms may be, in the knowledge that you are one of a disciplined regiment there is something that strengthens you and keeps you going. For in one sense Route Step, when you may go as you please, is a fiction; we must still keep so close together that to preserve the step and the cadence is almost a necessity, and though we carry our pieces at ease, we still swing along together. And as you look along rising ground, and see the hundreds of men ahead, and know there are as many more behind, all going, going, the knowledge that you are a part of that machine, and that to fall out would be to mar it and to cut yourself off from it, keeps you still moving on your weary pins.
You see I am speaking of general things, because of particular events today there is nothing to describe. The bathing today was most shockingly public, on both sides of the bridge in this apology for a town. Whenever wheels were heard, men shouted "Cover!" and those in the water (which was very shallow) would try to get under. But I think the women folk had been warned to keep away, since none of them crossed, at least while I was there.
(_Evening._) Tonight we have had a talk from General Wood. I have not reported our conferences to you, they are so incidental, and indeed so theoretical at times. But we have had a captain from the border tell us of the coming of the green militia there at the mobilizing of the national guard, of their first helplessness under service conditions, full as every company was of new men. The work of getting this half- or quarter-trained mass ready for fighting was enormously more difficult than our Plattsburg work; and the fact that these regiments, if sent into the field at first, would have been helpless against the Mexicans, needs no explanation (disagreeable as the idea is) to every recruit here. We have at another conference been shown the detail work of supplying our camps both at the training ground and on the hike, and the immense importance of the work of the obscure quartermaster's department. Talk after talk has impressed us with the amount of work needed to drill, to equip, to work into fighting shape, even a few thousand men; and there is no Plattsburg rookie who does not fully understand, and will not in detail explain to his neighbors when he goes home, the absurdity of Mr. Bryan's army of a million men which is to spring into being at the call of the President. It would very much relieve us to be assured that the government is ready to equip them even in the least particular.
General Wood has talked to us from time to time. Back at the training camp he told us somewhat of our military history. You know our text-books feed us up on our military glories; but looked at through the cold eyes of the statistician we know now that these were achieved at the cost of enormous and unnecessary losses, all from lack of system and readiness. Moreover there are certain military disgraces which need to be called to our attention, to make us resolve that these things shall not happen again. Considering further that we have never yet had a war with a first class military power (with two at least of whom we are in controversy now) and remembering that not only has our national guard proved a failure at this crisis, but that the new enlistments in the regular army have not come to pass, so that it is many thousands below its paper strength, we are now at the point of asking ourselves what we are to do to meet the military necessity which will some day suddenly come upon us. We believe it is coming; no soldier will deny it or can more than hope against it. Therefore we must prepare--but how?
--It is time for our spread; Squad Nine has come not merely with camp delicacies, but with cakes and candies from home! So I will break off this gloomy epistle with, as usual, love from
DICK.
_P. S._ Still come the variations of the story of the clip of ball cartridges. Someone knows somebody else who found it among his cartridges one morning and slipped it into another man's belt. Thus the clip, and the story, travels.
PRIVATE GODWIN'S DAILY LETTER
Cadyville, N. Y., Oct. 4, 1916.
DEAR MOTHER:--
We were up today as usual at half past five, those who were lucky rising a little earlier for more comfortable dressing. And yet, after all, ten minutes is enough for those few observances which may be dignified with the name of our toilet. The pint and a half in the canteens allows us a scrub of the teeth, and a rinsing of the face and hands--no more, especially if we are to have anything to drink on the day's march, for the morning, with an empty water-butt, is no time to replenish the supply. Pickle, having a budding mustache, carries a pocket mirror and comb, and so can arrange his hair; but the rest are usually satisfied with a hasty smoothing with the hands--and since the hat goes on at once and stays on, why not? Because of the cold, all sleep in their stockings, which saves morning time, besides preventing bother in the lacing of the trousers. (It is at night and at the swim that stockings are changed.) Thus in the morning only the shoes and the leggings must go on; we are already in our sweaters, and so are soon prepared for the first formation. The cartridge-belt and rifle are dragged out from the straw and laid ready in case they are called for; then one can proceed with packing the squad-bag, and with striking the tent and separating the shelter-halves. Old Bann is a wise one; he always begins by securing his five tent-pins, and so leaves to me the responsibility of rummaging out the remaining five, of which one always dodges me for a while.
The second call sounds, to be followed by the first sergeant's whistle. "Corporals, get your men out! Belts and rifles!" There is snatching up and buckling, then there is scientific delay over packing, with eye and ear to the exhortations of sergeants and squad leaders; but at last even the slowest are on their way to the head of the street to take their places. The corporals are calling the numbers of their squads, "Six!" "Nine!" "Twelve!" and with anxious eyes are watching for their belated men. The line forms: there is a gap here for a smoking fire, and other gaps that mean absentees. Rear-rank men step forward to fill the places of their file-leaders, and as the assembly sounds the front-rank men are glad to slip, unobserved, into the vacant spaces in the rear. "Report!"--"First squad, present." "Second squad, private Smith absent." Smith, hurrying up, curses under his breath. "Police duty today," he knows, and makes a grimace at private Brown, who has found his place in the fourth squad just in time.
Once the reports are in, the first sergeant orders "Inspection--Harms!" With a rattle the guns are tossed up and opened; with another rattle, at the next command, they are closed and snapped. The sergeant salutes the waiting lieutenant, whose commonest proceeding, now on the hike, is to warn us of an early start. Then perhaps he orders "Stack arms!" and we grumble. A nuisance to have, in the company street, a line of stacks through which we may not pass. Then, dismissed, we return to our packing, always with an eye to the forming of a line at the cook tent. For no one wants to be late in that line, yet all wish to get forward with the packing. There is, on these cold mornings, another consideration: it is pleasantest to eat breakfast in sweaters, which we know must be discarded for the march. If the officers or sergeants come with "Hurry up those blanket-rolls!" off the sweaters must come, and the rolls are made. Otherwise, at the mess-call utensils are snatched up, and the men hurry to the head of the company street, to form the double line, and to be glad of the extra comfort that the sweaters give.
The meal disposed of and the meat-cans washed (or rather rinsed) the remaining packing is quickly finished. The rolls are made, the squad-bags are stuffed full, and both are carried to the trucks. The packs are made, and the belts, heavy with the fresh ammunition that has just been handed out, are hooked to them. A swing, a boost, a hitch or two, and our pappooses, our constant companions, are with us till we make camp, seven hours or more later. Then the whole company street is policed, and the hay piled in big cocks on which, in the early sun, the men loll during the last few minutes before the bugle calls.
Our second battalion was first in ranks this morning, drawn close together to hear the words of the major. There was to be, he presumed, a rencounter, or meeting engagement; he merely had sealed orders, to be opened at a certain spot on the route. Our battalion was to start first; he advised all officers to study the terrain as we passed along. And then we were off, while the first battalion was decorating its hats with white, and jeering at us as future enemies.
The trucks were a mile ahead of us; we saw the dotted line of their khaki tops marking the road that led out of the high basin in which lay the camp. As we too climbed the steady slope to the southeast we were willing to leave the dreariness of its unkept farms and get among the woods. Lyon Mountain, on the west, slowly drew its colored bulk behind the shoulder of a nearer hill while we came closer and closer among the maples. The shallow notch over which we passed was high and open; nothing overhung us, but the tawny tapestry of the woods ran up gentle slopes to the right and left, and the few evidences of farming, save for the all-present wire fences, faded quite away. The slope grew stiffer, but there was no slackening of pace. Heads bent low, chests began to labor, and the sweat rolled down. A welcome rest relieved us; then up we started and went on again, at each change of grade looking for the downward turn, and each time disappointed till--ah, there was a corner, and on the slope beyond we saw the column descending amid dust. Then we too turned the corner, and faced the view.
It was not wide, for the woods by the roadside (brilliant in the sun on the right, subdued in the, shade on the left) limited it to a V. Below was the valley, and beyond and above it, piling ridge on ridge, rose the hills, climbing to the shaded blue peak that loomed in the very middle. It was a picture, striking and complete.
In vain I looked for the lake, which in all our earlier landscapes showed between us and the hills. Then a reference to the sun showed that I was still looking in a southerly direction. Further, this great hill, so high and clear, was both taller and nearer than the Green Mountains could be. Someone behind me said "Whiteface," and I knew that I was looking straight toward the heart of the Adirondacks.
Again we made a turn, and the view broadened out. To the east the whole landscape sloped toward the sun, against whose rays the brilliance of the woods faded, though still amid the green one could see, to north or to south, the yellow, the orange, or the dotted scarlet of the flaming maples. The easterly view was less distinct; in the distant blue the hills flattened to a fairly low horizon.
But while, still marching, I idly gazed, my eye was caught by an odd trick of the sun which, now at nine o'clock well on its upward way, yet seemed to illuminate the bottom of a cloud that hung near the sky line. It was a sunset effect impossible by day, but there was the distinctly gleaming band. And then I knew--Champlain! It was the lake, turning faintly silver further north or further south. What I had thought to be a cloud was distant haze. And above it hung, at first unnoticed, the faint blue silhouettes of Mansfield and its neighbor peaks.
As we marched down the slope my neighbors, mindful of what was to come, said "Gee! Suppose we are to climb up this again?" But apprehension was soon lost in the interest of the town we now entered, whose great buildings (in which each squad threatened to leave its most obstreperous member) had been visible for some distance. Dannemora seems to be a town whose prosperity, in this out of the way place, depends solely upon the great prison that stands in its midst. We marched along beneath the huge wall that forms one side of the main street; it rose in places fifteen feet above our heads. Dust! dust! A school was let out; its scholars came streaming uphill to watch us, and to tag along beside us even after we had turned away from the great hospital of the prison, and were once more amid farms. Other school children were waiting for us along the road. We saw very little of the buzzard in this population; they handed or threw us apples, and the boys even undertook to fill canteens--the same old trick which the officers failed to detect.
Still we tramped on amid the dust which rose around us; if Saturday's was the wet hike, this was the dusty one. As we neared a crossroad we were given the command "Attention!" So we came to the right shoulder and straightened our ranks, that we might look better as we passed the General. Another quarter mile (we were an hour beyond Dannemora now) and the familiar motorcyclist, our messenger in so many skirmishes, darted by us to reach the captain. We grunted. And then "Squads left--march, company--halt!" We found ourselves facing the wall of bushes. "Prepare to load!" Who, we wondered, would accidentally fire now? Ah, the distant pop was from the next company, and we heard its men angrily jeering their clumsy mate.
Squads-left again, and now we were starting back on the way that we had come. Uphill of course, but we feared that worse was to follow, as we remembered the ridge that we passed some little distance back, and recalled the advantages it offered for defence. To be sure, J Company was now nearest it and should secure it, if the enemy were not too close. But a burst of shooting, not very far away, apprised us that they were already at hand. And then came the expected order, "Double time!"
The pace in double time, say the regulations, is thirty-six inches long; the cadence is at the rate of one hundred and eighty steps a minute. It is not a run. I have heard the captain call back a lieutenant and his platoon: "I didn't say Run; I said Double time!"--"An easy run," says the little blue book. An easy run! With eighteen pounds on the back, and eight around the waist, and another nine in the hand--an easy run! Oh, in that dust, and up that slope, it was pound, pound, pound, till my heart thumped like the engine of a little Ford at high gear on a stiff grade, and my knees (how well the ancients knew the importance of those joints!) were like lead. The breath was failing, failing--till at last in a burst of relief I got my second wind. But poor Corder! Three times, as I watched him laboring in front of me, he flagged. Three times he visibly mustered his powers and pounded on. The fourth time he was spent. He had already stepped out of the column, to let us pass him, when I heard the welcome whistle. "Halt!" Corder had strength to take his place again, we were hustled into the ditch for cover, and I found a grateful position on the ground. There was no talk; everyone was too busy with a shortness of breath.
The firing in our front was now more systematic, and was spreading to the left. It was not long before we were ordered to the right of the road, and marching in the ditch, went forward. Then double time again, for a short distance, and the line swung out into the road as it turned to the right into a field. Suddenly there was the major, ordering us back into the ditch, and his eye met mine in the midst of one of his remonstrances. "The road is always unsafe!" Look to yourself, major, I thought, as obediently I ducked aside and left him in the position of danger. A ploughed field brought us to a walk; we climbed a stiff ascent, then found ourselves facing a nasty bit of thick wood, through which we were ordered in squad columns. Down a slope and across a gully and up again; then we went through more open country, but still among trees. Finally we aligned ourselves behind the top of a little rise, where we might comfortably sit or kneel, having plenty of cover behind logs or stones. The enemy that tried to cross the ravine below us would have a surprise.
There followed all the confusion of an attack in the woods. We heard the enemy coming, saw at length the white hat-bands, opened fire, and heard his heavy answer. The firing slackened on our front, strengthened on our right, and our platoon was again detached, to take care of this new danger. As we waited at the edge of a wood, while the major held us for orders, a half-grown robin, with speckled breast, nervously flew about us as if he wished to take refuge from the noises that distracted him. Into the underbrush we plunged again, were posted here, and fired; were sent there, and fired again; were hurried at the double to the flank, where I, coming behind the rest, was held by the captain and posted with a rear-guard, to fire upon the enemy if he appeared across a little clearing. It was evident that the enemy's intentions could not be guessed in advance. I heard very rapid firing at my back, and a burst of cheering. Then the bugle blew, and the whistles sounded everywhere through the wood. Of the enemy I had had few glimpses, and in general I realized that the confusion had been extreme.
As I plodded through underbrush to rejoin my company, I came across some white-banded fellows who, with fixed bayonets and heavy breathing, had evidently just been charging. Meeting presently a member of our company, I asked him what had taken place in this part of the encounter. "Oh, those fellows? You never saw anything so foolish. They wandered out from the woods and fixed bayonets in the open, and we fired at them for five minutes, at a hundred and fifty yards, before they began their charge. Of course they stopped at fifty yards from us, the rule, you know. Then our lieutenant asked theirs what his men wore to make them bullet-proof, and we hoped there would be some back talk, for the other fellow was mad. Pendleton's tongue does cut. But an umpire came and ruled them out, and we're sure of them, anyway."
Well, fighting in the woods is "impossible," as the major explained to us later at conference. Apparently if it must be, it must, but there can be very little science in it. At the conference our officers explained what had happened at different parts of our line, and we were all sure that we had won. But I noticed that the two battalions held their conferences separately, and concluded that the same consoling deduction was being made at the other discussion. Yet one idea must have fixed itself in the mind of every thinking man there: we were too green, and some of our platoon-leaders were too green, for effective work under such circumstances. Once or twice on our skirmishes we have known that we did well, and after the wet fight toward Cherubusco our captain ventured the statement that he could make us soldiers in six months; but today I think he would have doubled the period, for it was plain that a veteran enemy determined to push his lines forward would have made short work of us in our confusion.
One thing I learned which I shall remember to my private advantage. The next time I find myself firing from behind a snake fence I shall not crowd forward into one of the corners. For that brings one's ears even with the muzzles of the rifles to the right and left, and the result is deafening.
We had delighted the foot-loose population of Dannemora, and perhaps had tantalized the poor fellows behind the bars; certainly we gave profitable employment to a score of professional buzzards, who turned up with their bags to search the woods where we had been firing. As for ourselves, we were soon on the road again and hiking in the dust, through country which was still too deserted and unkempt, with its brush pastures and scattered log houses, for the taste of a New Englander. At dips and turns of the road we saw the drab column winding before us; we passed through straggling Cadyville and came at last to the unwelcome macadam. Our feet, used to the gravel roads, found this unyielding surface tire us more in a mile than the other could do in five. I admit that I was thoroughly glad when at last we saw the camping ground, turned aside into the green grass, and pitched our tents. Some strap of the pack having slipped, the weight had irked me more in the last hour than it had done in all the nine days of the hike, and it was with great relief that I swung it from my shoulders.
Another proof of the mathematical formula that Food Indulgence equals Indigestion. A gormandizer from a neighboring squad has lately been very savage on account of dyspepsia. Yesterday he crawled out of bed with the sourest expression and would scarcely respond to greetings, spoke of his stomach, and intimated that he would ask to ride with the baggage. Yet he marched with us, preserving so gloomy a silence that Corder, experimenting, hailed him four times before he would answer. Then he vouchsafed, "Every step I take my stomach hurts me," and so he stalked on, alone amid the jollity of the marching column. We had reached camp, and were pitching tents, when I heard his bunkie demanding his whereabouts. He had disappeared, leaving his mate to do his work. But before long I heard his voice, entirely bright and happy, say "Sixty cents!" and there he stood in the midst of his squad, triumphantly holding up a big mince pie.
Today the poor man was down again, wrapped in gloom. Again he threatened to ask to ride, but again he managed to subdue his pains. Said I, "I suppose that pie is paying you back." He answered, "You don't understand. I have to buy those things because they give us so little sweet in our diet." One has to respect misery, however caused, and I bothered him no more.
But David has managed to subdue Pickle, who goes no longer to the buzzards' counters, and though he complains that the struggle is hard, he admits that the results pay. No more pains for him. So yesterday, though at the sight of the crisp pie Pickle's eye wandered toward the pastry booth outside the gate, when he caught David's warning glance he controlled himself and went on with his work.
It was here at Cadyville that, for the first time since leaving Plattsburg, we were able to have a real swim, or rather (since the water was like ice) we found depth enough and room enough for all. Over a meadow and down a bluff a path led from camp to a big paper mill which stood above a gorge of the Saranac River. The huge pile of pulp, at which men were picking and prying with pickaxe and canthook, ought to be a gold mine in these days of high prices of paper. Beyond was the dam, higher than a house on its clear side and (so we were told) of equal depth on the other. Along the sides of the big basin there was room for the whole regiment; and the dive from the dam--how the men yelled when their heads came out, and how they swam to get ashore again!